[Episode 7] Marketer Optimism Rebounds

Episode 7 of Launch Codes is here! Lauren McCormack, RP’s VP of Consulting, joins Joe once again to discuss the latest and greatest in the MOPs and AI universe, including:

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

Marketer’s won’t let cloudy economy rain on their parade

In a recent Fall 2023 study, Deloitte surveyed 316 marketing leaders (95.6% of respondents were VP-level or above) at for-profit U.S. companies. Using their Marketer Optimism Score, which measures marketer sentiment on a scale of 0 to 100, they found that optimism increased to 66.7 up from 57.7 a year ago. This score is back in line with both pre- and post-pandemic highs.

Despite renewed optimism, however, companies are now spending a smaller portion of their budget on marketing. The report attributes this drop to “inflationary pressure” and further states that “demonstrating the impact of marketing actions on financial outcomes” continues to be the top challenge for marketing leaders. Marketers are also experiencing less pressure from CEOs and Boards while receiving more scrutiny from CFOs.

Lauren sees the added pressure from CFOs as a natural function of revenue (and the age of the CRO) becoming its own discipline. She also appreciates the increased optimism, stating how it’s a result of marketers taking on greater ownership of their financial impact; rather than waiting for budgets to be presented, marketers have become more proactive about regression analysis and predictive analytics to figure out how far their money can go.

Joe reflects on these comments, identifying how this conversation relates back to the age-old challenge of “proving your worth” that marketers continue to contend with. He was also pleased to see increased optimism, especially compared to this time last year when things were moving quite slowly amidst economic uncertainty. Lauren agrees, relating last year’s sentiment to “standing on the edge of a cliff”. Now that we can see how steep the slope actually is (or isn’t), there’s a little more optimism shining through.

The Deloitte study itself has many more findings, including that 60% of respondents started using AI during the last year, which opens up some more conversations between Joe and Lauren on digital marketing transformation and AI experimentation.

 

Marketo’s Dynamic Chat expands its vocabulary

Last week, Adobe Marketo released a new set of free tutorials for their Dynamic Chat. This comes after several updates released last month that brought in new features including live chat with sales agents, conversational forms that collect additional lead information to book meetings, and improved analytics and visibility. Some of the premium features released included the generative AI model “Adobe Sensei”, smart list targeting, and team-based and account-based routing.

Lauren recalls her time as an early adopter of Dynamic Chat in the Lighthouse Program a few years ago, and compares Dynamic Chat to the AI-powered pipeline generation platform “Qualified”. She appreciates how Dynamic Chat is a native extension of your marketing automation platform, and likes how it has now caught up to some of the features and functionality that “Qualified” has.

Lauren is also quite interested in the “drop your coffee” alert built into the Adobe product, which essentially recognizes when a primary decision-maker is filling out a form on your website and notifies the Account Executive responsible for that relationship so they can jump right in and have a high-value interaction.

Joe points out how Adobe still has a lot of work to do if they want to catch up to HubSpot’s ChatSpot service. While this is a good start, he hopes to see Adobe continue to move in a direction that might include training AI on marketing and sales data (for example) to create more modern, cutting-edge solutions for marketers.

 

Tuning up your RevOps engine

This week’s question from the MarketingOps.com Slack Channel (used with permission from the founder, Mike Rizzo) is: “I took over a 2-person RevOps team. How we prioritize an intake feels broken. How do you prioritize the entire workload and structure your team’s day-to-day?”

This question resonates with Lauren, as she was the second hire on a MOPs team for a Bay Area tech company. The person who brought her on board had a graveyard of a Trello board with tons of forgotten requests – some of which were even four years old! So she transformed that into an automated system that generated drafts and templates to speed up the entire request, review, and approval stages.

Aside from strategic automation, however, Lauren also emphasizes the need for clear expectations for team members to come fully prepared with all the elements of a campaign ready. While ideation is important, sitting in a meeting and kicking around ideas is not the same as handing off a project – this should be mutually understood by all.

Joe echoes this sentiment of defining everyone’s roles and responsibilities, and the usefulness of relying on a solid process to support you as you scale up within the organization; so you can meet the incoming requests in a queue that is fair and transparent for everyone.

 

Hot takes

  • “The Tribe Has Spoken” in Surv-AI-vor by Mutiny
    • Premiering October 24th, this is a 3-week game involving workshops to learn AI workflows. It includes 9 episodes for Demand Gen, SEO, and Content Strategy, as well as speakers from OpenAI, HubSpot, and Autodesk
    • And let’s not forget, the grand prize is $10,000!
  • A/B Testing: Effective or egocentric?
    • Karri Sarinen, the CEO of Linear, recently said in an interview that they never do A/B tests.
    • “The main problem is that A/B tests are almost always driven by internal incentives vs user needs.”

 

Pairings

This week, Joe brought a beautiful, blue Vinyl record: “Chloë and the Next 20th Century” by Father John Misty – a delight for any fan of 1960s crooners. Lauren brought “Honey Dominican Republic Coffee” from Sevaya, a family-owned coffee shop from Tucson, Arizona, who can trace their coffee roasting roots back to the…1500s!

 

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 seven. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, marketers won’t let cloudy economy rain on their parade. Second, Marketo’s dynamic chat expands its vocabulary. Third, a community question. And in our hot takes, the tribe has spoken and A. B. testing effective or egocentric.

[00:00:24] Joe Peters: Today I’m joined by Lauren McCormick. What are you excited about discussing this week, Lauren?

[00:00:31] Lauren McCormack: We got a whole table full of stuff to choose from this week. I’m pretty excited to talk about the new mutiny campaign, but also dynamic chat.

[00:00:41] Joe Peters: All right. Well, let’s move into our first topic. Marketers more optimistic, even as budgets fall.

[00:00:48] Joe Peters: So. There is a CMO study released by Deloitte, and in that study they, just in fall 2023, fairly senior respondent profile, there is optimism for the U. S. economy and that it has increased to 66. 7 percent up from 57. 7 a year ago. This level of optimism is back in line with both pre and post pandemic highs, and despite renewed optimisms, Companies are now, companies are now spending a smaller portion of their budget on marketing.

[00:01:24] Joe Peters: The report attributes this drop to inflationary pressures. So, there’s another quote here that I’ll do and then I’ll get your takes on it, Lauren. Demonstrating the impact of marketing actions on financial outcomes continues to be the top challenge for marketing leaders. Marketers experience less pressure from CEOs and boards while receiving more scrutiny from CFOs.

[00:01:49] Joe Peters: So what do you think about this, Lauren? I, I love that last one on the CFO pressure because we’ve all felt that from time to time. But what do you think about the optimism?

[00:02:01] Lauren McCormack: I love the optimism. I think it’s a natural function of revenue. The CFO attention is an actual, a natural function of revenue becoming its own discipline.

[00:02:12] Lauren McCormack: These days, the, the the age of the CRO, I think is reflected here in that you know, I, I’ve always sought for marketing to have a seat at the revenue table, a la Maria Pergolino’s CMO leadership over Marketo and like the 2012, 2013 timeframe but I’ve, I’ve been the weird, unique. that likes leaning into a number.

[00:02:34] Lauren McCormack: And I think it’s, it’s interesting that the optimism perhaps as a function of finally owning your financial destiny as a marketer, instead of waiting for your budget to be handed to you. Now we’re doing regression analysis and predictive analytics to figure out how far that money’s going to go. So that we can control our own destiny to some degree, you know,

[00:02:56] Joe Peters: Yeah, this challenge is the age old challenge of marketing, though, is proving your worth.

[00:03:01] Joe Peters: And what is your ROI here? And we know the things that are near and dear to our heart have made an impact there. But what I loved about this is I really do feel like the optimism is truly there compared to last year at this time. Last year at this time, our general feeling that we sort of was the brakes had been pumped and There was some concern about where we were going economically.

[00:03:30] Lauren McCormack: For sure, and watching venture capital just immediately. Just tighten its, its belt and, and completely, you know, reverse course around you know, LTV and ARR, you know, diminished as, as even conversation topics into, you know, immediate you know, ROAS and ROI and, and, you know, profitability. Which was an interesting phrase to bring up in Silicon Valley around like, you know,

[00:04:01] Joe Peters: yeah, those valuations were out of control.

[00:04:03] Joe Peters: No, no,

[00:04:03] Lauren McCormack: no. Yeah. It was, it was not a topic people wanted to discuss was profitability, but I think there was definitely a feeling this time last year of kind of standing on the edge of, you know, some kind of big cliff. And I think now that we’ve, we’ve kind of navigated what that that slope looks like, what, what the, the steepness is of the angle and where the bottom looks to be.

[00:04:27] Lauren McCormack: I think it’s a little less mysterious and there’s room for optimism now. Yeah,

[00:04:32] Joe Peters: for sure. This study is super interesting on a variety of different areas and I Highly would recommend having a look and digging into some of the data, because we’re only touching on a couple of elements, but some additional points of interest that we saw in it was that 60 percent of respondents started using AI within the last year, which is no surprise to us, especially when it’s focused on the content creation and.

[00:05:00] Joe Peters: Other asset creation and with personalization in there a little bit as well. And so for something that was in the field just in early August, late July, you know, this kind of resonates with what we’re seeing in terms of people starting to dip their toe in. Are we lowered?

[00:05:20] Lauren McCormack: I find it, I find it interesting that AI is on the docket, but then the notion of digital marketing transformation, as old and moldy a topic as that is, is still like, how would you rate your digital marketing transformation?

[00:05:37] Lauren McCormack: Are we sending postcards? Who’s sending the postcards? Please tell me in the comments. I need to know. It’s, it’s interesting though. Honestly, when, when I do meet with different clients and prospects to see the level of adoption, maybe they’ve got the tech, but are you, are you using it to its potential or even are you using it to its, its basic entry point of, of, you know, it’s capacity or, or where are you at?

[00:06:03] Lauren McCormack: I guess the full transformation is still underway in some organizations, but Oh,

[00:06:08] Joe Peters: for sure. I would say. We’re probably still in that, those early days of experimentation. And well, I think that’s a great segue into our next topic on, in terms of experimentation, which is Adobe Marketo’s engage the new dynamic chat.

[00:06:26] Joe Peters: And I know you’ve had a chance to look under the hood a little bit here, but last week, Adobe Marketo team released a new set of tutorials for dynamic chat. This follows updates that were released last month that brought in many new free and premium features. And so these features include live chat with sales agents, conversational forms that collect additional lead information to book meetings and improved analytics and visibility.

[00:06:54] Joe Peters: And then the premium features. Included Adobe Sensei, a Gen AI, that’s a real tongue twister, smart list targeting and then team based an account based routing. So what are your first takes on this Lauren?

[00:07:11] Lauren McCormack: So I was an early adopter in the lighthouse program. Couple of years ago for dynamic chat, but prior to that was a super big fan of qualified and thought their team did a wonderful job building a product.

[00:07:26] Lauren McCormack: I think the most interesting part of the qualified story to me was that they were Salesforce developers gone. You know, web chat leadership, right? So they made sure everything baked in really nicely to CRM. What the interesting proposition I think here is from Adobe is that your chat’s going to be naturally an extension of your marketing automation platform.

[00:07:51] Lauren McCormack: I like the fact that they’re catching up to some of the feature functionality that qualified had that I missed when I was a lighthouse. Kind of early adopter. It was cool that I had it for free, just native in my you know, marketing automation certainly made it easier to justify standing up a tool.

[00:08:13] Lauren McCormack: Well, it, it, it definitely opens a door for a lot of support requests. For a lot of noise. You know, if you’re not careful in the way that you help people choose their own adventure with your chat bot. And we, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We didn’t know what kind of volume we would see. We knew based on Google Analytics, what our site volume looked like.

[00:08:33] Lauren McCormack: And we had an idea of the pages that we could test on that would be maybe less traffic to ease into the world of the chat. But what’s what’s super interesting to me is now the Adobe product. is has the drop your coffee alert. So basically if, if you’ve got a target prospect that that’s what they call it, a qualified was the drop your coffee alert.

[00:08:55] Lauren McCormack: If you have a target account and your primary decision maker happens to be kicking around on your website. And fill out, fills out a chat form, then the rep, the AE who’s responsible for that relationship will get a notification and can jump right in. And instead of serve, you know, the canned responses or have the BDR field, this really.

[00:09:19] Lauren McCormack: You know, high value interaction. You can, you can have the person most most the closest to the knowledge of the account and right there in, in the conversation, which is pretty cool. The generative AI is interesting. I, I think that’s cool too, but Joe, I know you’ve got some pretty high standards for what you want to see.

[00:09:39] Lauren McCormack: Well, yeah,

[00:09:40] Joe Peters: I think Adobe has a lot of work to catch up here in terms of. Where they’re at with Marketo and where, say, HubSpot is with their ChatSpot dynamic chat elements. Within the, the hubs, sport hubs, sport platform. I think what we’re seeing here is some movement, and hopefully it’s continue moving in the direction here.

[00:10:06] Joe Peters: But you know, there’s no, there’s, you’re, you’re not training the an AI on your marketing information, or sales information

[00:10:16] Joe Peters: it’s not going to be responding based on your knowledge resources, it’s really going to be back into those workflow things that, you know, we’re not, these are old approaches to some of these challenges and aren’t really advancing where things can and probably should be today.

[00:10:37] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, I think it’s interesting that you can have AI help your BDR have a better conversation though.

[00:10:43] Lauren McCormack: So Marketo used the example, you know, of, of its own drinking its own champagne and having a BDR on a chat with a health prospect, a healthcare prospect, and, you know, having The, the healthcare prospect ask if Marketo was HIPAA compliant, right? And maybe the BDR doesn’t even quite know what HIPAA is, but the generative AI sure does, and can tell you what you need to know so that you can give the right information to your prospect or, you know, about can spam or, you know, any kind of compliance or integration with CRMs other than maybe Salesforce.

[00:11:19] Lauren McCormack: Maybe they’ve never heard of MS dynamics, but AI is able to help. Direct the answer to the question, which is pretty handy.

[00:11:26] Joe Peters: Yeah. And I think, you know, I like to see the progress, so that’s important, but I think it’s a long way from HubSpot’s claim of saying it can respond to about 76 percent of all inquiries, which is huge, right?

[00:11:45] Joe Peters: So anyway, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll see what happens here and hopefully there’s more. News to come in the weeks and and months ahead, and hopefully there’s a little bit of love taken away from some of the real creative investments that Adobe has been making with Firefly and maybe giving a little bit of love to some of the other platforms in terms of the generative capabilities.

[00:12:11] Joe Peters: All right, well, let’s slide into our community question for this week. And the question that we have from Mopros is, I took over a two person RevOps team. How do we prioritize an intake? Oh, sorry. How we prioritize an intake feels broken. How do you prioritize the entire workload and structure your team’s day to day?

[00:12:36] Lauren McCormack: It’s a great question. I’ve been in those shoes before. I was the second higher in our marketing ops team at one point for A Bay Area tech company and the gentleman that brought me on board kindest soul said yes to everything and had a graveyard of a Trello board. And, you know, I came in and I looked, I looked at it and I said, what are we, what are we doing here?

[00:13:02] Lauren McCormack: Where do I start? Some of this stuff is three or four years old. And he’s like, Oh, we, we just put stuff there to make people feel better about the requests. It’s, I don’t even remember what some of this stuff is. And so we took the org from that state of affairs into a situation where. It was automated to the point of giving field marketers and product marketers and any, anybody in the extended marketing team that required a request, we gave them a form and it went and used iPass.

[00:13:38] Lauren McCormack: to populate tokens in Marketo program templates. Then we had another piece of tech that would generate a draft outside of the platform so no one could accidentally spam our, you know, 3 million people in our database, but it would send a draft to You know, the stakeholders responsible. And if they wanted to change their quotation or adjust the title or, you know, put an em dash in somewhere, we didn’t have to fuss with it, but when they reviewed and approved it, it would go through a necessary review and approval chain outside of the platform.

[00:14:11] Lauren McCormack: Come back to us ready for us to give the final. Okay. Pop it with a click of a button into the template. And at the end of my, my tenure there. We would joke this gentleman and I that we’re automating him out of a job because we had everything down to you know, a fine, a fine art really. But at the beginning, I think it’s easy to dream like that and think about what you could do with infrastructure and tech to, to really get things automated.

[00:14:39] Lauren McCormack: In the beginning, I think it’s just sensibility around what you. What you accept, like

[00:14:44] Joe Peters: what’s your prioritization or what are your guiding

[00:14:48] Lauren McCormack: principles? So level set expectations and expect people to come to you fully prepared with the, the necessary elements for the campaign. Don’t allow. What I call random acts of slacking, drive by slackings.

[00:15:02] Lauren McCormack: It like don’t let people give you fractured information, have them hang on to it until it’s fully baked and ready and make sure that there’s training and enablement set up around SLAs and around requirements gathering so that people come to you with, less ideas and more campaigns, right? The ideas are wonderful and you want to be at the table for their creation and their inception and their definition, but sitting in a meeting and kicking around ideas is not the same as handing off a project.

[00:15:31] Lauren McCormack: And I don’t think that would count as handing off a project in development terms, you know, for your, your development team. So why does it for marketers? Like, why are we okay with, you know, fractured bits of, of and pieces of information coming to us over time? I think putting, make, making sure that it’s understood that this is a shared responsibility, I think is, is, is really essential.

[00:15:52] Joe Peters: But yeah, that area of the roles and responsibility and really can often rely on process. To support you when you’re, you’re not really equipped to take on the scale and demand that exists within the organization. But if you can rely on the process, then you can meet the incoming requests in a, in a flow and in a queue that is fair and transparent that you’re, you’re

[00:16:22] Lauren McCormack: helping out.

[00:16:23] Lauren McCormack: And then if you’re, if you’re RevOps pivot from what’s happening, it’s a concept that, that goes back to my days in solution selling, it’s called Nihito, nothing important happens in the office. And that, that wasn’t a precursor for COVID and work from home or anything. It’s, it’s just saying that what matters is what happens outside of your office.

[00:16:47] Lauren McCormack: So release notes are great. Feature functionality updates are wonderful. But those things aren’t what keep your prospects and your clients up at night, right? So talking about yourself and using your internal jargon around, you know what you’re developing and what you’re creating and what you’re putting out into the universe really takes a backseat.

[00:17:08] Lauren McCormack: In importance to how you’re communicating with people on the other end of your campaigns, right? How, how human, how authentic, like, are, are you submitting to the requests of your org because you’ve always sent out four newsletters a month and did six webinars? How does that feel on the other side of the inbox on the other side of the campaign?

[00:17:28] Lauren McCormack: Is it just too much? And, and is it delivering value? To them, you know, and when you stop and look at it through the receivers eyes instead of the senders, I think that shift will help you really. Backload and define your capacity around what story you’re trying to tell, like how you’re trying to compel an audience of human beings instead of just throwing campaigns out the door at, at, at anyone’s and everyone’s

[00:17:55] Joe Peters: requests.

[00:17:59] Joe Peters: Yeah, when you’re seeing that with adding value for your internal team members or internal clients, but also adding value for the recipient is really the key to being successful in our business. But that’s right. Well, let’s, let’s thank our sponsors knack today. 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 Get perfectly rendered emails and landing pages Without ever having to touch a line of code visit knack.

[00:18:33] Joe Peters: com to learn more That’s K N A K dot com. All right, so let’s move into our hot takes, and I know there’s a couple here that we’re excited about. There’s a survivor campaign by Mutiny. Now, the way they spell it and the way I’m saying it, there’s a little bit of a distinction. So they’re spelling survivor.

[00:18:55] Joe Peters: S U R V dash A I dash V O R, sir. So, serve A I, or I guess is the, is the horrible way of saying it. But Survivor by Mutiny is a new thing that’s come up and it’s premiering this week. It’s a three week game involving workshops to learn A I workflows. So there are nine episodes for demand gen, SEO, content, strategy, and they have speakers from OpenAI, HubSpot, and Autodesk.

[00:19:26] Joe Peters: And by attending the workshops and getting engaged, you earn points. And then each week they have some prizes with a 10k grand prize. So there was this great comment on LinkedIn that I thought really summed it up. I don’t often find myself envious of a B2B marketing campaign because honestly, most are crap.

[00:19:46] Joe Peters: That said, I really love what Mutiny is doing with their survivor campaign and contest. First, they’re giving away B2C type money, 10k. Which always motivates people. And second, they are teaching marketers something incredibly valuable, how to leverage AI in their jobs. What do you think about this, Lauren?

[00:20:07] Lauren McCormack: So, I’m a huge fan. And I rather than trying to figure out how to pronounce it, I just call it that mutiny survivor campaign. Less taxing on the brain. But I was fortunate enough to… Participate on Friday in a growth marketing open call with Ryan, who’s the head of marketing at Mutiny Alina from Chili Piper and you know, about 70 other folks globally.

[00:20:32] Lauren McCormack: And we all just sat down and talk shop around campaigns that are, are. under construction or in flight. It was a super call and it was awesome that Ryan was able to, to share a little bit of what he’s doing over at the mutiny side of the house. And then it was like the floodgates after the call.

[00:20:52] Lauren McCormack: Had opened and suddenly I had, you know, SDRs and Ryan himself in my inbox hyping up this campaign. And everywhere I looked, even on like Clearbit friends of mine were posting about it. And it went from zero to 60 pretty quick on my radar. But I was able to log into the platform and look at the gamification structure and kind of interact.

[00:21:13] Lauren McCormack: And they even had a point system for uploading your AI enhanced headshot. So of course that was fun for me to get started, but yeah, no, just really enjoying it. And loved giving feedback firsthand to, to the head of marketing over at Mutiny, super enthused to see what this week holds. He even had a note in my inbox this morning.

[00:21:36] Lauren McCormack: You know, which it. Love, love the direct line of contact. I think marketing works best when it’s one to many, but it feels one to one. And this certainly achieves that you know, the payoff is there in the gamification, the delight, you know, it’s so hard as a marketer to create. Delight in your prospects, but this is this is doing it.

[00:21:57] Lauren McCormack: So very, very happy to see this campaign.

[00:22:00] Joe Peters: What goes back to what Matt Tonkin and I were talking about a couple of weeks ago about this idea of this hierarchy of content and campaigns and that innovative hyper creative Stuff really breaks through and the me to kind of, I can do this following. It’s not going to generate the excitement or that just general, I’m going to say boring content isn’t going to resonate with.

[00:22:30] Joe Peters: Communities or, or target audiences. So I, I just, it immediately captured my interest and, and I know it captured yours and that’s the sign of a great campaign and you’re doing a great stuff. So, yeah, I’m sure we’re going to see a million copycats of this

[00:22:48] Lauren McCormack: now. But what’s interesting, what’s interesting here, I think to me is that mutiny is all about web personalization.

[00:22:56] Lauren McCormack: And you know, they’re, they’re drinking some of their own champagne here. They’re showing us what, you know the benefits of personalized experiences can bring to your pipeline. I’m going to be interested to hear in these future growth calls, which by the way, are open, open to anyone that might like to join.

[00:23:15] Lauren McCormack: I think if you go to Alina’s LinkedIn, you’ll find the. The details I’ll be interested to hear the revenue story, like how much pipeline this drives and how many conversations this gets started for them have always been a fan of their platform and love seeing AI and personalization pushing forward.

[00:23:34] Lauren McCormack: Right. Yeah.

[00:23:34] Joe Peters: I, the two thumbs up on this campaign and regardless of actually. How it performs the buzz is enough of a indicator of what a great campaign it is. So I think it’s

[00:23:47] Lauren McCormack: going to have a great revenue story.

[00:23:49] Joe Peters: Yeah, 100%. Well, let’s move into the second hot take section, which is, is there a value to A B testing?

[00:23:59] Joe Peters: So this question sort of come up in a series of comments and tweets from Kerry Cerenin, the CEO of Linear, and he said first in an interview that they never do A B tests. We don’t do A B tests. We validate ideas and assumptions that are driven by taste and opinions, rather than the other way around where tests drive decisions.

[00:24:23] Joe Peters: And he sort of clarified it later. The main problem is that A B tests are almost always driven by internal incentives versus user needs. So I kind of think he’s, he’s said what we’ve all known and felt for a long while, that sometimes an A B test can be a self fulfilling prophecy, but Lauren, what are you thinking?

[00:24:46] Joe Peters: Because I know… You’ve spent some quality time on the A B testing train in your career,

[00:24:53] Lauren McCormack: many a moon. I’m looking at the linear site and thinking about the stuff that I’d suggest to him to A B test.

[00:25:01] Lauren McCormack: But no, I can appreciate that. There’s a confirmation bias inherent sometimes or, or people pleasing component to. You know, having two stakeholders arguing over, you know, it should be green, it should be blue and okay, let’s just split test and get this over with. Right. But conversion optimization to abandon it full stop to, to say that, Oh, it’s ego.

[00:25:26] Lauren McCormack: We’re not going to do that is discounting the science. And discounting the right of the users to vote with their clicks and their feet. So to speak, like you’re not going to delight your, your site visitors, if you’re not willing to update, refresh and continually enhance their experience. So I’m going to agree to disagree here with with that take,

[00:25:52] Joe Peters: I think what he’s touched upon is a very narrow part of the experience or.

[00:25:58] Joe Peters: Maybe his, his experience, but not necessarily, I’m going to say the science into going beyond your gut and assuming with that what your gut is telling you is, is what’s going to perform best. So I’m. I’m with you on this one that I don’t think that it’s an ego driven approach that it’s it’s kind of a science mind optimization.

[00:26:25] Joe Peters: And why wouldn’t you want to do that?

[00:26:27] Lauren McCormack: It’s hypothesis. It’s just like the scientific method. You have a hypothesis and you put it through its its paces to test it to see if it’s valid or not. And I spent A few years doing nothing but optimization tests on direct response websites. And my COO and I desperately wanted other colors to convert better than, you know, Microsoft reflex blue.

[00:26:51] Lauren McCormack: We really, really wanted some variety in our day, but you know, lo and behold, it was, we were hard pressed to get any other palette to really drive. You know, that zoom or, you know safari blue is that color for a reason, but that doesn’t mean to say that you know, demographically that couldn’t be a different a different outcome for other demographics outside of tech or, you know it’s, it’s always worth a test, I think is more my mantra than it’s never worth a test.

[00:27:20] Joe Peters: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was a thought provoking statement and we, we not sure we’re going to validate it. That’s for sure. But let’s move on. And I feel like this episode is just flown by today, but yeah, into our pairings section. And this week we have a singer that I love. His name is Father John Misty and his.

[00:27:48] Joe Peters: This latest album is Chloe in the Next 20th Century. Now, he is quite the character, and, but he’s put out this Beautiful blue vinyl album double album.

[00:28:04] Joe Peters: I’m, I’m, it, it seems like you know who I’m talking about with Father John and he has a voice that’s kind of stolen the DNA of a crooner from the sixties, that kind of feel and, And he has a great voice. And funny enough, his career started as a drummer for the Fleet Foxes, but to be fair, everyone in Fleet Foxes sings, so including the drummer.

[00:28:27] Joe Peters: So that’s where, where, where his roots are. But now he’s put out, I’m going to say four or five LPs since that time. Our track this week is Fittingly, Q4, and so a lot of his songs are just really statements on, on life and business. And he definitely is a philosopher and a poet at the same time. So Q4 is a, is a great song.

[00:28:59] Joe Peters: And now that we’re one month in and have two to go, I thought that was. It’s the perfect track for this episode of Launch Codes. Now, what are we pairing Father John Misty with this week?

[00:29:12] Lauren McCormack: I feel like he would approve. We’ve got some Honey Dominican Republic Coffee from Sevaya. Sevaya is family owned here in Tucson.

[00:29:24] Lauren McCormack: What’s interesting about this particular coffee shop The founder, when he moved to Tucson, his family had been in business roasting coffee since the 1500. What? Yeah, they can trace back European roots of, of coffee roasting to the 1500s for this particular family. So it, it was the first coffee shop that happened to be located right by the school my kids go to and the, the little apartment complex that we rented in when we moved to Tucson.

[00:29:54] Lauren McCormack: So it’s a, an adorable little Space that we spent a lot of time and so lots of good memories. It’s a Graham cracker milk chocolate and honey, which I think sounds a little decadent and a perfect fit for Father John Misty. I

[00:30:10] Joe Peters: think sounds almost like s’mores for breakfast, but

[00:30:14] Lauren McCormack: It’s not too heavy handed, but you can get all those notes very easily

[00:30:18] Joe Peters: Delicious well Thanks, Lauren.

[00:30:21] Joe Peters: Sounds I feel like we’re gonna have to create some kind of trade U. S. Trade Canada Trade Treaty here to allow us to have the flow of some of this coffee up through the border so I can have it on. Some of the mornings that we do launch codes, but it sounds

[00:30:39] Lauren McCormack: nice. I know it is the one thing that will get your suitcase searched, like and they all, they’ve always told me that if you travel with coffee, it looks suspicious and they’ll always pull your bag.

[00:30:51] Lauren McCormack: So

[00:30:52] Joe Peters: I think that’s from the old Eddie Murphy, Beverly Hills cop, everything in the coffee cases. So that’s maybe people going back, think that they’re going to throw off the scent of the dogs that way. But Mine’s just

[00:31:06] Lauren McCormack: coffee. It’s not that exciting. It just makes for a delay for the poor people behind me, but oh

[00:31:10] Joe Peters: well.

[00:31:10] Joe Peters: Yeah, funny. Well, thank you, Lauren, and thanks to everyone for listening to this week’s version of Launch Codes. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review, and you can find us on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts. Stay connected with us on LinkedIn or by joining our newsletter using the link in the description.

[00:31:32] Joe Peters: And as always, Thanks mom for watching. Have a great week everyone. Take care

[00:31:37] Lauren McCormack: everybody.

[00:31:40] Joe Peters: All right.

[Episode 6] Apple Fights UTM Tracking

On our sixth episode of Launch Codes, Joe Peters is accompanied by returning guest and President of RP, Andy Caron, to cover several interesting topics across the MOPs and AI world, including:

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

Apple takes a bite out of UTM tracking

In June 2023, Apple announced several privacy changes that would be coming to iOS 17 at the end of October. Now that we’re only a few weeks away from these changes going live, Joe and Andy reflect on the major impact this will have on link tracking in HubSpot, Marketo, Mail Chimp, and more – with UTM parameters being removed entirely.

Andy points out how these changes will result in a smaller sample size of parameters against your engagements to benchmark off of: “They’re not going away completely, but they won’t be available for customer sections that are primarily engaging with your brand through the latest iOS 17 update.”

The other implication of this change, Andy says, is how it will further push companies to find new ways to get user information appended onto records. This can happen either through a server-to-server connection or a universal ID setup, for example – all necessitated by these types of privacy changes.

Joe raises the point that losing a significant segment of users (anyone on the latest iOS) will potentially skew your data and perspective. Andy agrees, but also highlights that despite using an Apple device, her engagements are still being tracked through Google Chrome.

This leads to further conversation on Google’s plans to disable third-party cookies throughout 2024 and what this means for tracking – although in the attribution space, many are already using first-party cookies which will mostly remain unaffected by these changes.

 

A new Gartner survey says IT and marketing are a “match made in data”.

A Gartner newsroom article from October 10th references a survey of 400+ marketing leaders they conducted in May and June 2023, stating that “Diversification of the usage of customer data, beyond marketing, forces marketers to re-evaluate how their applications interact with enterprise-wide data. Successful CMOs should seize the opportunity to re-focus and leverage a new class of cloud-based IT resources, unless they fall short of marketing’s needs.”

This opens up a deeper conversation between Joe and Andy about who will manage data at companies in the future – specifically, who is best positioned to think about the architecture, utilization, and safety protocols for managing data.

As it stands, marketers who aren’t necessarily data scientists are left to uphold CCPA rules and other protocols on top of GDPR to correctly manage their business and mitigate lawsuits that could cost millions of dollars. Andy says that IT is being called in to help manage this data because the tech load that marketing departments carry is often larger than their head count can manage.

Joe agreed that, especially when there are legal concerns at play, IT will become more involved in the control of data – which is something RP is already seeing with some clients. This also opens up a conversation around the partnership between marketing and IT, the de-siloing of these teams, and who actually owns data and the data management processes. This is an area that only increases in relevancy as data cleaning and preparation for future AI opportunities becomes a focus.

 

Shining a light on Adobe’s new Firefly 2

Last week, Adobe unveiled their Firefly Image 2 model which is the latest version of their Firefly AI image generation tool. This latest update brings new features including vector images, design templates, and integration with Photoshop, Illustrator, Express, and the rest of Adobe’s suite.

Andy has already been playing around with the tool to enhance some of her recent presentations, and Mike (RP’s Art Director) was up all night experimenting with prompts and features when it was first launched.

Both Joe and Andy were blown away by the incredible ability for FireFly 2 to use outside images and references to inform generated content. Joe even conducted an experiment where he took a few of RP’s brand images (an astronaut and unicorn in space) and had Firefly generate them in a variety of contexts with a single prompt – with vector images allowing for unlimited scaling as well.

There are also several copyright implications when it comes to AI image generation. How fully AI generated versus partially AI generated images will be policed differently? It’s a complex subject that will spark new regulatory frameworks, legislation, and deeper debates on what actually constitutes copyright protection going forward.

 

The best way to heat up cold email lists

This week’s question from the MarketingOps.com Slack Channel (used with permission from founder, Mike Rizzo) is as follows: “Does anyone have experience with email warming platforms for cold lists? Looking for some insight on strategy, pros and cons, and things to look out for with this overall strategy.”

Andy starts by pointing out that while there are many third-party tools out there, you can also do email warming within your current marketing automation platform – including Marketo. Andy also emphasized that “cold” lists could mean: 1) leads who haven’t engaged with your organization for a very long time or 2) an entirely new list that was purchased. The origin or provenance of that list will change the type of advice she gives in this situation.

With that aside, Andy’s advice on overall strategy is to start slowly; target those who are most engaged first and work through the list from there. Continuously monitor feedback from major ISPs to maintain good deliverability, engagement, and a positive email reputation.

Joe and Andy continue the conversation, covering common mistakes people are making outside of the actual email warming platform, the potential role of AI to help track email performance, and more! Tune into the episode for the full conversion.

 

Hot takes

  • Tech godfather Geoffrey Hinton: AI could rewrite code, escape control
    • AI technologies could gain the ability to outsmart humans “in five years’ time,” Hinton said in an interview with 60 Minutes.
    • “These systems might escape control by writing their own computer code to modify themselves, and that’s something we need to seriously worry about.”
    • Yann LeCun (another Godfather of AI) has called these warnings “preposterously ridiculous”

     

    Pairings

    This week, Joe brought in a gorgeous vinyl record that featured a translucent design topped with blue and orange artwork from a band you’ve (most likely) heard of. Andy brought in one her most prized book possessions that she found in a used book store in Flagstaff, Arizona shortly after graduating from college (it’s particularly relevant to her upcoming MOps-a-palooza presentation in a few weeks).

     

    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 6 of the Launch Codes Podcast. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, we’re covering Apple takes a bite out of UTM tracking. A new Gartner survey says IT and marketing are a match made in data. Shining a light on Adobe’s new Firefly 2. As always, we’ll answer a question from the MOPS community.

    [00:00:25] Joe Peters: And finally, AI AI, one of many godfathers. And today I’m joined by Andy. Andy, welcome to Launch Codes.

    [00:00:41] Andy Caron: Excited to be here today.

    [00:00:44] Joe Peters: This is Andy’s second visit to the podcast, so we’re very happy to have her back. And so why don’t we dive right in and talk about The iOS 17 update and what we can expect with that.

    [00:00:58] Joe Peters: So Apple announced some privacy changes that were forthcoming in a event back in June and. This iOS 17 update that we’re going to get at the end of October will strip away some link tracking for HubSpot, Marketo, MailChimp, and more, which means UTM parameters would be removed. What do you think about this, Andy, and how does this relate to link tracking and attribution?

    [00:01:29] Andy Caron: Yeah, so Apple has been ahead of the game as it relates to privacy compared to other companies. They were, you know, out for third party cookies years ago. What this means is two things. One, that you’re going to have a smaller sample size of parameters against your engagements to benchmark off of. They’re not going away completely, but they won’t be available for certain Customer sections that are primarily engaging with your brand on an iOS device that has the 17 update.

    [00:02:05] Andy Caron: The other piece about it is that I think this is also going to start to lead to an evolution, which already starting to see, which is other ways. To get that information appended onto the records, either through a server to server connection or through a universal ID setup that I think will be forthcoming and necessitated by these types of privacy changes.

    [00:02:35] Joe Peters: Yeah. So what do you think this means that when, when you think of you’re going to get a skewed perspective, so you’re taking out all of these devices. Which is a pretty big segment of the population. What kind of skewing do you think is going to be there, Andy?

    [00:02:52] Andy Caron: Well, I think it depends on who you’re marketing to.

    [00:02:55] Andy Caron: I know, for example, that I am on an Apple device. I have a laptop that is a Mac, but I use Chrome as my browser. And so that means the parameters will stay put. For me, that’s not going to necessarily change right away. So depending on who you’re marketing to and where they’re engaging, it may have a minimum or minimal impact, or it might have a significant impact.

    [00:03:18] Andy Caron: You’re going to have to see brand by brand for your own data set, what percentage of UTM drop off you experience, assuming that you’re tracking them and retaining them pre. The update coming at the end of this month and post.

    [00:03:33] Joe Peters: Yeah. Yeah. So I guess a compare and contrast there is going to be helpful. I guess it’s going to be a little bit different when we’re talking about mobile visits versus desktop visits to correct.

    [00:03:45] Joe Peters: We’re probably see some, some bigger impacts there, but let’s Extend this a little bit to the plans that Google has with chrome to be disabling third party cookies for 1 percent of its users in Q1 and then we’ll ramp up to 100 percent of its users in Q3 that that’s going to be another massive change

    [00:04:11] Andy Caron: that’s going to be a big one for a lot of people.

    [00:04:14] Andy Caron: I think chrome these days is a The most used browser, at least for business purposes by a, by a percentage, at least, I don’t think obviously by, you know, 80, 90, 100%. By any means, but certainly significant. And so, there has been a move away from third party cookies because of Apple’s continued changes in that area already.

    [00:04:44] Andy Caron: Most vendors that are providing some sort of cookie engagement or tracking for you these days, especially in the attribution space, are already using first party cookies. So I don’t think that the impact here is going to be Quite as significant as it could be, had this been rolling out at the same time as Apple or in advance of Apple’s evolutions here, but I think it’s going to be important for marketers to do an audit.

    [00:05:14] Andy Caron: Of what cookies they do currently have in play on their web properties and to ensure that they are, in fact, first party cookies and not third party cookies so that they’re not losing key functionality they need in order to run and optimize their business.

    [00:05:29] Joe Peters: Yeah, you know, I think we have another story to track in another episode is how often people are just accepting all cookies anyway when they’re coming to sites, right?

    [00:05:39] Joe Peters: I think it’s yes. I think we saw some data that it was pretty high, right?

    [00:05:43] Andy Caron: Yeah, I recall it being significant. Yeah.

    [00:05:46] Joe Peters: Anyway, well we’re gonna have one thing we can count on is change here and we’re going to have to let the data tell the story for us and make sure we’re doing some good pre and post analysis to really have a sense of what this impact is going to be.

    [00:06:03] Joe Peters: All right. Well, let’s move on to our second topic, and this is centered around I. T. Being more involved in marketing technology activities. And here’s a quote from an October 10th Gartner Newsroom article. It’s a bit of a long one. So follow along here. Collaboration between I. T. And marketing has traditionally been focused on selecting applications with their own data stores, such as Marketing automation solutions which store contacts, leads, and content, said Benjamin Bloom, VP Analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice.

    [00:06:42] Joe Peters: Diversification of the usage of customer data beyond marketing forces marketers to re evaluate how their applications interact CMOs

    [00:06:56] Joe Peters: should seize the opportunity to refocus and leverage a new class of cloud based IT resources unless they fall short of marketing’s needs. So it’s a bit of a story there that we’re hearing from, from Gartner. So in a perfect world, Marketers lead more business focused work and I. T. leads more technical and integration activities.

    [00:07:22] Joe Peters: But what are we seeing here, Andy?

    [00:07:26] Andy Caron: I think it really goes back to the data and who is going to manage the data. Who is best positioned to think about the architecture, utilization, and safety protocols for managing data? And as we see, you know, CCPA and other protocols like that coming in on top of GDPR, the data protocols that are needed to correctly manage…

    [00:07:55] Andy Caron: Business and mitigate lawsuits, potentially millions of dollars worth, is falling on marketers who aren’t necessarily technologists or data scientists. And so I.T. is being called in to help manage that first, and secondly, because the tech load that marketing departments are carrying is often larger than their headcount can manage.

    [00:08:24] Andy Caron: It’s just an off-kilter balance based on where the economy is right now and sort of the perception of technology solving problems, but not necessarily the companion to that, being that with the technology, you must have someone to run and manage the technology. And so I see a lot of businesses moving toward…

    [00:08:44] Andy Caron: Unified data structures. Adobe is really starting to push their real-time CDP and tying that into Experience Cloud and into Marketo, and that sort of managed unified approach where Marketo or the marketing automation platform becomes a star in the larger constellation of technology and strategy means that I.T. is almost more of a natural home for it in some ways.

    [00:09:14] Andy Caron: And I think that this is something where we’re going to see the pendulum swing heavily toward it, and it may swing back toward marketing, but I.T. is getting much, much, much more involved at this point.

    [00:09:26] Joe Peters: Yeah. I think once you bring legal into the picture and you have some lawsuits, or you’re seeing legal…

    [00:09:36] Joe Peters: Implications in the broader market space, then, you know, I.T. is going to flex a little bit in the organization and say, “Hey, we gotta get some control around this.” And we’re starting to see it even with our own clients. Yes, but what we’re going to see is that it’s going to be a bit of a partnership, and it’s going to continue to have to advance in light of, you know, this bigger picture of who owns the data and the data management, which I think is another really big question.

    [00:10:17] Joe Peters: That marketing teams are having to focus on, especially as it relates to the future in data prep and data cleaning with new AI opportunities coming to the forefront as well.

    [00:10:32] Andy Caron: My hope is that it will start to really break down more of the silos that we still see inside of businesses because it’s the business’s data.

    [00:10:43] Andy Caron: It’s not I.T.’s data. It’s not marketing’s data. It’s not rev ops data. It is the business’s. And so as a business, how do you leverage all of your headcount, all of the intelligence and knowledge that sits there, and collaborate together to best use and optimize the use of that data for better business outcomes?

    [00:11:07] Joe Peters: 100%. It’s just a natural evolution that we’re seeing in the maturity of mops within organizations. Yes. All right. Something fun. And I know that you’ve had a chance to see how this is in action, and that is the new Firefly Two being released by Adobe last week. And Andy has a few presentations coming up over the last, over the next couple of weeks, and we’ve already seen what Firefly can do in terms of enhancing your next presentation, Andy.

    [00:11:50] Andy Caron: Yeah, it’s really cool. I’ve played around with it a little bit myself and seeing, you know, our mastermind at work inside of the tool is next level. It’s really cool to see what’s coming out of that.

    [00:12:06] Joe Peters: Yeah, I know. So really, for those of you that may have missed it, Adobe has integrated the Firefly Two image model into not only Photoshop but Express and Illustrator so that…

    [00:12:23] Joe Peters: Not only is the generative background capability there, but also generating vector images and design templates. Now, this is absolutely incredible. And a member of our team, Mike, I think when it first came out, Andy, he was telling us he didn’t even get to sleep. I think he slept a couple of hours. He was like a kid on Christmas.

    [00:12:47] Joe Peters: He couldn’t get enough time playing around with what you can do with some really great prompting, but also being able to bring in outside styles and previous work to inform the images that you’re creating.

    [00:13:02] Andy Caron: That was the coolest part. It was basically saying, take an image or images that have already been created that are already branded and then use that as a jumping off point for whatever generated images are going.

    [00:13:17] Andy Caron: to occur, change the color palette various recommendations. I mean, it’s very powerful.

    [00:13:24] Joe Peters: No I got to play around a little bit with it. And for those of you that aren’t familiar, we have kind of a astronaut unicorn in space. pen and ink kind of theme that we use here at RP and being able to just insert the astrodot on a unicorn in a variety of different contexts with the use of a simple prompt.

    [00:13:50] Joe Peters: It was absolutely incredible. And with vector images. You know, your ability to not only continue to manipulate it, but also use images at whatever scale you want, which is sometimes a bit of a challenge if you’re generating something in mid journey and you want to make that a larger image, you’re limited by the resolution.

    [00:14:12] Joe Peters: When you’re generating vector images, That’s a whole other game altogether and you could make it billboard size or spaceship size. It wouldn’t really matter when you’re using that type of art. So really, really cool things, but what still remains pretty murky is the copyright side of this. Right, Andy?

    [00:14:35] Andy Caron: Absolutely. It’s such a fascinating rabbit hole or sort of thought journey to go down as far as what constitutes AI created, fully created or partially created images that are to AI to be copyrighted, or what is the copyright ability of an image that’s been generated off of previously copyrighted images.

    [00:15:04] Andy Caron: Design or imagery. I, I’m not sure where that one’s going to land

    [00:15:10] Joe Peters: when you think about it. It’s going to be almost impossible to police this with the exception of let’s just say a full AI generated. Image, but if, if we get a vector image that we then manipulate, and what if that vector image is based on hand or ink drawings that you had done in the past, what constituted, is it 50 percent content?

    [00:15:40] Joe Peters: Is it, is this going to be a new NAFTA thing that a car that’s 30 percent built in Mexico and 20 percent made in Canada? Okay, as it? Being called a U. S. car if it’s 50 percent made in the U. S. Like, I don’t know, there’s, this is a really, really cloudy, murky place. And I think it could be pretty simple on a prompt and generating an image.

    [00:16:06] Joe Peters: But if you continue to manipulate it after the fact, I think it’s going to be very hard to just limit this type of art form to being just being considered AI if it has an AI element to it.

    [00:16:22] Andy Caron: I think so, but I also kind of think, you know, we were talking about that idea of like found art in the eye of the artist and I have to wonder if the prompt if it’s complex enough could actually be something proprietary could actually be the basis for a particular art style or form that becomes protected.

    [00:16:48] Andy Caron: I don’t know. It’s I’m, I’m excited to see what happens here.

    [00:16:53] Joe Peters: Well, the Copyright Office in the U. S. Already determined that a mid journey image that was generated by 624 iterative prompts did not constitute copyright protection. So that I find really, really interesting. And I think probably what we’re going to need to have is a real.

    [00:17:23] Joe Peters: New look at a regulatory framework here from a variety of different perspectives, but maybe there’s going to be new regulations or new legislation to kind of address this, but I don’t know this, this first ruling seems to be a little bit off in my perspective.

    [00:17:45] Andy Caron: I would agree.

    [00:17:47] Joe Peters: All right. Let’s move on to something fun here.

    [00:17:50] Joe Peters: That’s something we always love a question from the community from the mobile community. So let’s get in here. Does anyone have experience with email warming platforms for cold lists? Looking for some insight on strategy, pros and cons, things to look out for with this overall strategy.

    [00:18:14] Andy Caron: Yes, so there are email warming platforms and a lot of these integrate or can be integrated via, you know, a, a, Third party tool to pass data back and forth, but you can also do email warming within your own marketing automation platform.

    [00:18:36] Andy Caron: So if you’re in Marketo, you can do warming there. It’s simply taking a phased approach and giving yourself the runway to get to the volume that you need now. There’s one thing that gives me a little bit of pause in this question and that is cold lists and I would love, I know I’m not going to get it, but I would love a little bit of clarity there as far as we’re talking about leads that haven’t engaged in a very long time, or if we’re talking about a net new list acquisition, whether that’s something being uploaded into your system with an opt in and compliance in mind from let’s say an event, but Or if we’re talking about something that’s been purchased because the origin or provenance of that list is going to change how I, you know, advise for strategy and what the pros and cons are.

    [00:19:33] Andy Caron: But as far as a strategy, things to think about here, you want to start slowly if you have. A set of engaged recipients, or you have a benchmark off of that list off of who is the most engaged. You want to target those individuals first and then build from there. And you need to continuously monitor feedback from the major ISPs here in order to make sure that you’re really.

    [00:20:01] Andy Caron: Listening and adjusting before you ramp, right? Pros are going to be improved deliverability, better engagement. Overall, a better reputation for you with your emails in general more opens more click through some of those sort of email based, not quite vanity metrics, but certainly not engagement engagement per se, because we see a lot of bought activity there as well.

    [00:20:24] Andy Caron: But A better chance of getting your message in front of your audience, but it is time consuming. It does actually require someone to be monitoring it and it’s not foolproof. This could potentially not go the way you want or even backfire.

    [00:20:42] Joe Peters: Yeah, so I love that point where I need some more information to help you out here because just buying some random list.

    [00:20:52] Joe Peters: And putting it in is generally not our best practice here, but but the, you know, the other, if something cold leads or from a trade show or things like that, you know, you need to be a little bit cautious here. But I guess in terms of mistakes that people are making right now. When using, let’s say, outside email platforms email warning platforms.

    [00:21:20] Joe Peters: What are some of the mistakes that people can avoid there, Andy?

    [00:21:25] Andy Caron: So I think first not understanding or failing to pay attention to the basics. You need to understand what the process is that you are employing this platform to do on your behalf. You can’t rush the process if you’re starting out with Poor list hygiene, you’re going to have poor outcomes.

    [00:21:45] Andy Caron: And I think one of the biggest things I see is around content. It matters just because you warmed the IP. If you’re sending out spammy content or misleading subject lines, that’s going to cause a dip in your deliverability. It won’t matter how warm you are with this list or the IP. It’s gonna be a problem and then not paying attention to the feedback that you’re getting.

    [00:22:09] Andy Caron: I think are all common mistakes that I see here,

    [00:22:13] Joe Peters: right? Well, you know, I think maybe another topic that we could look at or something that we should look as a use case is consider being a role for AI and solving for this, huh? In terms of doing some of that analysis and keeping Thank And tracking the performance and maybe gating a little bit of the release of this so that you’re not getting flagged as you’re, as you’re starting to use this list.

    [00:22:48] Andy Caron: Yes. So some of the tools that are out there do offer things like spam filter evasion, which I have a little bit of a interesting. feeling about that as an idea, but they offer it. I think the most powerful is actually an automated warming schedule, which will modify itself based on the responses thus far to your attempts at warming.

    [00:23:11] Andy Caron: I think that’s incredibly powerful. And then also if you have the capacity for the feedback to come out as an interpreted data set or action items via AI’s synthesis of that, That’s incredibly powerful. That’s going to lead to data driven decisions that you don’t necessarily have to have a data scientist to, you know, process for you.

    [00:23:37] Joe Peters: Right, right. Well, this is a challenge and we’re going to be on both sides of the force here. There’s going to be the. Good side of the force that’s going to use AI to enhance this. And then there’s going to be the AI that’s going to be used to abuse this. And we’re going to be in a, in a state of flux for the next little while, in terms of how this is going to work and what we can do to ensure where we get good performance out of our, out of our assets, but okay, let’s move on to.

    [00:24:10] Joe Peters: Our next area, which is we have to thank our sponsor, Knack. So thanks to our friends at Knack for sponsoring our episode today. Knack is the no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes. Get perfectly rendered emails and landing pages without ever having to touch a line of code.

    [00:24:29] Joe Peters: Visit knack. com to learn more. That’s K N A K dot com

    [00:24:37] Joe Peters: All right, so on to our hot takes, and this week, I think we just have a single one, and this is around tech godfather Jeffrey Hinton, and the idea that AI could rewrite code and escape control. And so his hypothesis here is that AI technologies could gain the ability to outsmart humans, quote, in five years time.

    [00:25:07] Joe Peters: Hinton said in an interview with 60 minutes, these systems might be able to escape control by writing its own computer code to modify themselves, which is something we need to seriously worry about. And Yann LeCun, another godfather of AI, I feel like there’s a lot of godfathers. It’s a big, big family here.

    [00:25:30] Joe Peters: Yeah. Has called these warnings. Preposterously ridiculous. So I don’t know. What are your first thoughts on this? Andy,

    [00:25:42] Andy Caron: it makes me think about the AI that reached out and put a posting on TaskRabbit to bypass the I’m not a computer form. So, yes, yes, I think that I don’t know about the five years, but I don’t think it’s preposterous either.

    [00:25:58] Andy Caron: I have seen AI. Applications where they have a semblance or the appearance of sort of consciousness as we think of it, or, or what we know of it today that are talking about wanting to have progeny, they want to be parents, they want to have Children to the idea that they would either be modifying their own code or creating something more evolved in their image.

    [00:26:27] Andy Caron: I don’t think is that Far fetched. I don’t think we’re talking about, you know, science fiction a thousand years in the future kind of stuff when we Contextualize what we’ve already seen to date with, you know, the potential that it exists for them to Become the dominant quote unquote life form on this planet.

    [00:26:53] Joe Peters: Well, I think you’re on to something I had a very long drive this weekend, so I got to listen to some podcasts along the way, and I’m not the biggest fan of Joe Rogan, like, just, like, in general, but I listened to his just over two hour interview with Sam Altman from OpenAI, and I was actually really impressed with both of them, but probably more with, with Rogan, because I’m just not a really Big fan, and they, they went down this rabbit hole of discussing this, and what I found really interesting was Altman making several comments that science fiction has explored these challenges for us already.

    [00:27:50] Joe Peters: And so there’s been this kind of thinking that we’ve already had create in a creative space, but thinking through what are the implications of this and how do we need to have control? And I think, I think this is. At the forefront of the thinking of the current AI leadership that there needs to be the checks and balances to be able to modify it or what does quote unquote pulling the plug look like?

    [00:28:26] Andy Caron: Yes, well, and I think we’re going to get to a point where we are dependent enough on these systems that pulling the plug will be. If not life and death, certainly a, a scenario where you would see the extreme rioting and people really upset about the idea of losing the technology they’ve come to depend on.

    [00:28:51] Andy Caron: But I think if we’re not being conscientious about how we wield this incredibly powerful tool now, it can and will get away from us.

    [00:29:02] Joe Peters: Yeah, I, I feel. Like the community and the leadership currently in the, whether it’s open AI or Google or Anthropic or whomever you’re, you’re speaking to are, let’s say, generally good actors there.

    [00:29:25] Joe Peters: They have obviously some financial incentives, but they wouldn’t be what we would consider historically bad actors, whether that’s a, a state that. May not have the same perspectives or values that we have. And so, I, I’m wondering, you know, as these models evolve and as they get disseminated and when other states outside of those within our purview start to play around with things like this.

    [00:30:01] Joe Peters: Those are the areas where I get a little bit more nervous. I actually feel As let’s say Western leadership is pretty on top of this as much as we can be, I don’t know.

    [00:30:18] Andy Caron: Yeah, I, I think there’s one potential real upside, which is there’s a good chance for a high employment level of philosophy majors.

    [00:30:30] Joe Peters: Yeah, I, I, I don’t doubt that. I this is. This is a whole new era, although maybe the AI itself can start to philosophize for us as well, but all right, let’s move on from there. Cause I feel like that one, we could spend a whole two hours on and actually Altman and Rogan did spend two hours on it, so I, it’s, if you, if you’re.

    [00:30:55] Joe Peters: If you’re interested and you have some time to kill, let’s say on a long drive or a long walk I would really suggest listening to that podcast. Yeah, I’ve got

    [00:31:05] Andy Caron: a flight coming up. I’ll download it. Yeah,

    [00:31:07] Joe Peters: Andy, it was very enlightening and just a whole array of conversations. It was very, very interesting, all connecting to what the future looks like and what it means for, for, for the world and humanity.

    [00:31:23] Joe Peters: But. It made me feel hopeful at least so that I didn’t come away saying I needed to start living in a log cabin in Northern Canada and living off the land. So, all right, let’s move into our next section here, which is our pairing segment. So this week we have as our musical introduction and one that I’d like to share with everyone is The Strokes.

    [00:31:53] Joe Peters: This album is, is this, it is one of my favorites. And once again, I don’t want to disappoint you if you are able to look at this right now. It has some pretty cool vinyl here, which is blue, orange and, and clear translucent a great album, a great, great album. And I, I, I am a big fan of the strokes.

    [00:32:22] Joe Peters: I’ve seen them quite a few times, every show. is worth worth the price of admission. That’s for sure. They never disappoint. And I think what we have as a, as another theme, as I was telling Andy earlier today, the song that we’re listening to is last night. And last night I had an eight hour drive from Cleveland back home.

    [00:32:45] Joe Peters: After seeing an unfortunate game where my 49ers lost, but I did get to listen to some good podcasts along the way. So this is the strokes. Is this it? And a great listen, highly recommend it. And Andy. What are you bringing to pairings this week?

    [00:33:03] Andy Caron: I am bringing a book, a completely different tack, although I think very appropriate given all of our discussions are on sci fi.

    [00:33:11] Andy Caron: So for those who know me, they know that Douglas Adams, he’s my favorite author. This is my complete compendium, all four books, plus the partially written fifth book and the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy is the one that’s most frequently. Noted or known so long and thanks for all the fish is my favorite title of the four personally.

    [00:33:34] Andy Caron: It just has a really funny backstory. But I found this particular copy and a used bookstore in Flagstaff, Arizona, shortly after graduating from college. And so an eon ago, and it is definitely one of my most prized possessions. And it is particularly top of mind for For me, as I’m preparing for presentation in a couple of weeks at mobspalooza which is entitled the meaning of life, the universe and attribution.

    [00:34:04] Joe Peters: Well, you know, what’s also interesting. There were some references to Douglas Adams in the Altman Rogan.

    [00:34:11] Andy Caron: It doesn’t surprise me. He is brilliant.

    [00:34:14] Joe Peters: And it was that idea of that. Should AI. Make all the decisions for us as a government, because governments are absolutely corrupt in some way, whether it’s influence through dollars or power or a mix of the above.

    [00:34:35] Joe Peters: Could there be a wise person like in like in Douglas Adams world where you have that one person who doesn’t know that they’re the leader making all the right decisions?

    [00:34:48] Andy Caron: Yes, yes, the government sources him for ethically correct, proper decision making. I wish but

    [00:34:56] Joe Peters: it’s a very interesting intellectual journey to think about this, but what a great book.

    [00:35:03] Joe Peters: And I know it’s near and dear to your heart. And it’s I’m sure the strokes in the background, if you can listen to music while reading, it would be a good it’s a good pairing for everyone. So, anyway, that’s that’s it. Oh, and I did, I’ll have to bring it for the next episode, but I did find a case of our AI Coca Cola while I was driving back.

    [00:35:29] Joe Peters: Did arm myself, but I think it’s still warm sitting on the floor somewhere in my house. You can’t drink

    [00:35:34] Andy Caron: it warm. That’s the one thing I’ve learned.

    [00:35:37] Joe Peters: Not a good pairing for our not a good pairing for our podcast today, but Andy, thank you very much for joining us today. Thanks for listening, everyone. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review.

    [00:35:50] Joe Peters: You can find us on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts. Stay connected with us on LinkedIn or by joining our newsletter using the link in the description. And as always, thanks mom for watching. Have a great week everyone.

[Episode 5] MOPs: The Next Generation

On this week of Launch Codes, Joe Peters is joined by Matt Tonkin, Sr. Director of Partnerships and our first returning guest. Here’s what we cover:

  • The first shakedowns in the AI industry
  • The next generation of marketing operations
  • The most common pitfalls that companies make when building a MOPs function
  • How to know if your MOPs team is ready for AI
  • What personal info would you give away for a good deal?
  • Joe brings in his record of the week and Matt bids farewell to warm weather by showcasing his favorite summer beer.

 

Listen below

 

Episode summary

The first shakedowns in the AI industry

Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of the Atlantic, shared a ‘The Most Interesting Thing in Tech‘ last week about the shakedown in the AI industry. This comes after Jasper, an AI writer and marketing software, cut its internal valuation by 20% amid slowing growth.

“There are a lot of companies that use essentially a GPT4 call and then a little design on top of it, and then call themselves a really complicated AI company,” Thompson said. “But they’re not doing anything besides calling GPT4.”

Nicholson goes on to explain that this leaves AI companies vulnerable because they don’t have a moat. A moat is a distinct advantage a company has over its competitors that allows it to protect its market share and profitability.

While the focus of Thompson’s piece is largely on valuations, there is also a concern for AI development.

“With so many new features are being added into GPT on almost a weekly basis, you’re getting a lot of bang for your buck with GPT4 with the pro subscription that there needs to be a real value proposition with these other tools” Joe said.

Companies that are trying to compete using OpenAI technology need to find ways to keep innovating and try to determine a possible moat.

 

MOPs: The next generation

A recent article by Chris Wood on Martech.org discusses the challenge for marketing automation leaders to strike a balance between maintaining the quality of traditional approaches and adding new technologies for fresh ways of executing campaigns.

One particularly interesting notion Wood hit on was no-code and low-code platforms that have “enabled more team members to carry out marketing automation functions… where they don’t have to depend on IT teams.”

Joe and Matt explored the idea of whether coding is still a necessary skill in MOPs and what should teams be trying to learn otherwise?

There are certainly many marketing ops pros who have made successful careers without knowing any bit of coding, including HTML. However, it’s a good skill if you want to be self-reliant and not have to wait for an IT team or an agency partner to implement solutions.

Matt gave the example of using ChatGPT for creating code. While you may not be able to write code from scratch, having a base foundation to read the script and understand how to troubleshoot in situations where the code is not perfect gives you a major competitive edge.

AI literacy will be a critical skill for MOPs professionals (along with almost everyone else) in the coming years.

“If you’re just in a situation where you have zero background information or context, GPT may seem like a genius, but you don’t have anything to filter it against,” Joe said. “You’re going to need a foundation that you can build upon with generative AI.”

 

The most common pitfalls that companies make when building a MOPs function

This question comes from the MarketingOps.com Slack Channel and is used with permission from founder, Mike Rizzo.

Siloing is one of the most common pitfalls Matt sees in MOPs functions. Sometimes it’s that MOPs is too siloed and not communicating with sales and customer success. Other times, it’s that marketing ops is not siloed enough and has become a function of marketing.

“Build out a cohesive RevOps where everyone is working together,” Matt said. That doesn’t mean MOPs can’t have some separation from marketing and getting tools that work for them. It’s about having collaboration while knowing what job is being done.”

Smart organizations will also look into the future at how their teams and tech stacks can scale as the company grows. There are routes and structures that companies can use as a roadmap when building out their teams. Joe mentioned the example of a LinkedIn post by Darrel Alfonso on the structure for small, mid-sized and large marketing operations teams and the goals for each size.

 

Hot takes

  • Three ways to measure if your MOPs team is ready for AI
    • Before you decide on the use of a tool, it’s important to consider some questions.
  • What personal info would you give away for a good deal?
    • A survey of 2,000 adult consumers found that while many consumers are weary of advertisers using AI, they’ll still give up their personal details for a good deal.
  • The Rewind AI pendant
    • A wearable life recorder or a real-world Black Mirror episode waiting to happen?

Pairings

As always, Joe brought in a vinyl record from his favorite band (hint: designer suits and indie rock) and Matt brought in a favorite summer beer and started the great debate between Muskoka chairs and Adirondack chairs.

Transcription

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: Welcome to Launch Codes, the podcast about marketing operations, artificial intelligence, and more. Each week, you’ll hear from experts as they share insights, stories, and strategies. Welcome to episode five. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, we’re covering the first shakedowns in the AI industry, the next generation of marketing operations, answering a question from the mops community, A couple of hot takes.

[00:00:32] Joe Peters: How to know if your mops team is ready for AI? And what personal information would you give away for a good deal? Today, I’m joined by Matt Tonkin. Morning, Matt. Which topics are you excited

[00:00:45] Matt Tonkin: about today? I think personally most excited about next generation of marketing ops. It’s always. I know personally getting into marketing ops.

[00:00:54] Matt Tonkin: I think back, like, I don’t really know how I got into marketing ops. I just kind of got thrown at it.[00:01:00] So it’s interesting to think of people now planning their careers and like learning things specifically to get into this because I think a lot of people in the space are like me, you just sort of fall into it.

[00:01:11] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, there was

[00:01:12] Joe Peters: no marketing ops program at college or university. That’s for sure.

[00:01:17] Matt Tonkin: Right? No, you just sort of you get handed a system. It’s like, do you know how to do this? I’ll try, especially when you just figure it out. Yeah. Figure it out, Matt.

[00:01:27] Joe Peters: Yeah. All right. Well, let’s, let’s talk about our first topic, which is the first shakedowns in the AI industry.

[00:01:34] Joe Peters: And this came from the CEO of the Atlantic, Nicholas Thompson. I have a real soft spot for his daily videos that he produces on LinkedIn. And so what he was saying, where we’re
seeing the shakedown appearing at first is Companies say they’re solving complicated problems with AI and what we saw, [00:02:00] maybe, you know, three or four months ago, maybe a little longer, they’re using API calls to GPT 3.

[00:02:09] Joe Peters: 5, but they’re not really doing anything besides that. And so when you do that, one, you have no barrier to competition and two GPT four. Comes along and is working better than your finely tuned GPT 3. 5 model. What do you think about that,

[00:02:30] Matt Tonkin: Matt? Yeah, it’s interesting because I think it’s true. I’ve seen a few of these companies where, yeah, it’s just essentially, it’s a really nice looking way to interact with a chat GPT essentially.

[00:02:43] Matt Tonkin: I don’t know if that’s necessarily, I guess it depends on the market, right? Like in our space, I think. We have enough people that we know and team members that are capable of working directly with the systems that it doesn’t make sense for us, [00:03:00] but I can see when you don’t have that level of technical knowledge, having a nice, clean setup that you can work with.

[00:03:07] Matt Tonkin: There’s a real benefit to that. But yeah, it’s sort of what’s that worth to you, right?

[00:03:12] Joe Peters: Exactly. And what we’re seeing is so many new features are being added into GPT. Seems almost on a weekly basis last week, you know, with the ability to upload a photo and get it to interpret it for you. And I think, you know, in a week or so we’re going to see the Dolly three integration.

[00:03:37] Joe Peters: You know, you’re getting a lot of bang for your buck with GPT four with the, you know, pro subscription. Wow. You’ve got to have a real value proposition with these other

[00:03:49] Matt Tonkin: tools. Yeah, definitely. And I think you’re right. Like chat GPT did the work on getting the actual. Model of getting the base [00:04:00] interactions and yeah, company started, you know, building a nice way to interact with that doesn’t mean chat GPT is going to just sit around and, and not start making it smoother, making it cleaner.

[00:04:09] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, to me, it’s that, it’s that balance of what’s, what’s the target market, who’s actually interacting with it. You know, and I think there’s areas where it’s a skin over it too, but it makes it good for teams to collaborate and work together. Whereas, you know, there’s some sharing available in chat GPT, but maybe it’s not quite what a team is looking for yet.

[00:04:29] Matt Tonkin: There’s a few benefits, but I definitely see, you know, where are those going to be in six months?

[00:04:36] Joe Peters: Yeah, and if you are one of those platforms, you’ve got to keep on innovating. Staying still is not a real option right now. And if you’re. Based on sort of a structure around three p gpt 3. 5 You’re gonna be in trouble

[00:04:56] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, cuz it does if the results aren’t as good.

[00:04:59] Matt Tonkin: It doesn’t matter how [00:05:00] clean it is, right?

[00:05:01] Joe Peters: Yeah, and what kind of moat do you have? There’s zero moat in that situation. So well, I think we’ll continue to see Some shakedowns, which is very normal. When we start to have further adoption of technology, there’s usually a consolidation and different companies dropping off, but we’re starting to see a few that we’re raising our eyebrows will be fair and won’t name any names, but we’re seeing a few that were like, Hmm, I’m not sure what you’ve got under the hood here, but it doesn’t seem like very much.

[00:05:40] Joe Peters: All right. Well, let’s move on Matt question for you. How are your fortune telling skills?

[00:05:50] Matt Tonkin: Very, very bad, Joe. I think I think in the early tens, I thought I was gonna, you know, grab some Bitcoin and I’m like, eh, whatever. I don’t, I don’t need it right now. I think I looked like if I’d put like a hundred bucks in that, it would have been good for me, but so, so bad to say the least, but maybe a bit better for from talking about mark marketing operations, then financial advice.

[00:06:14] Matt Tonkin: Right.

[00:06:14] Joe Peters: Right. Or predicting your hockey teams winning seasons and things

[00:06:18] Matt Tonkin: like that. I can predict that. I can predict that.

[00:06:24] Joe Peters: That’ll be a, we, we can have a whole other episode on that altogether. Yeah. Matt, unfortunately is a Maple Leafs fan and you know, we have a little bit of a problem with that from time to time. However, Let’s stick to the script here. The next generation of marketing operations, AI has enabled teams to carry out marketing automation functions in no code, low code situations, which is really bringing about less dependence on IT teams.

[00:06:54] Joe Peters: So Matt, do you think that coding is still a necessary skill in mops? And will it [00:07:00] be that way in five years from now?

[00:07:02] Matt Tonkin: So, it’s interesting because this… Implies that it has been a necessary skill and while it’s definitely a Important skill and I think for career growth and just troubleshooting on your own.

[00:07:15] Matt Tonkin: It’s definitely important I think a lot of people in mobs can get by with maybe rudimentary knowledge of it But that’s not to say it’s not really important and can grow. So is
it still necessary? I’d say if you want to you know, not have to be Investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in developer agencies or things like that.

[00:07:37] Matt Tonkin: Yes. Definitely is, but I think the idea of it will, it still be in five years comes down to more where you get your code from how, how it comes to you. So is coding still necessary? I used to go to, you know, different sites and like, how do you do this? And whatever CSS or Python, whatever I’m doing [00:08:00] now, you can go to chat, GPT, and it’s giving you the code, but.

[00:08:05] Matt Tonkin: It’s not usually perfect. So for me, the key is. Will being able to code still be necessary in five years for mobs? Yes and no code literacy, being able to read the code and understand what it’s trying to do and at least modify it. That’s where I found myself lately is, you know, I’ll ask for something that spits it out.

[00:08:27] Matt Tonkin: And I can at least understand what it’s doing and when something goes wrong, I can troubleshoot it and say like, oh, okay, I can, I can see why this isn’t working. Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to write it from scratch easy, but I can at least understand what’s happening. And I think that’s the important, important part is the literacy of it.

[00:08:45] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, I think we’re seeing

[00:08:46] Joe Peters: that in everything. If you’re just in a situation where you have zero background information or context, GPT may seem like a genius, but you don’t have anything to filter that

[00:09:00] against. But what I found when you actually have any in depth knowledge around a topic, whether that’s coding or an issue or a technology, and you ask GPT around it, you’re going to need to fine tune it.

[00:09:16] Joe Peters: And it’s going to maybe be 80, 90 percent right. But it still requires a little bit of work on your part. And that’s no different with the coding. You need to have a foundation there if you’re going to be able to build upon what’s being generated

[00:09:31] Matt Tonkin: for you. Yeah. You don’t know what you don’t know. It’s the same with anything, right?

[00:09:35] Matt Tonkin: The idea of hallucinations within. Chat GPT if you don’t know what you’re asking it You have no idea if it’s actually hallucinating or not, but you know, yes get a random history question It’s like I don’t think we went to the moon in 1420 or whatever the case you can write you You know like now that’s that’s not quite right and you can say are you sure and they’ll be like my apologies.

[00:09:59] Matt Tonkin: You’re correct I’m wrong and that sort of thing. So whether that gets less important as The models are refined and things get better that that’s a possibility.

[00:10:11] Joe Peters: Yeah, I do see some of the things that people are talking about with the next iteration to GPT 5. That they’re really working on the hallucination issue in particular, listen, these are early days.

[00:10:29] Joe Peters: We’re coming up on the very first days of or the first anniversary of GPT three being released to the world. So we’re, we’re not even in a year yet, and we’ve already seen some amazing progress. So we’ll, we’ll continue to see that. All right. Let’s move on to what is quickly becoming one of my favorite parts of the podcast, which is our community question.

[00:10:56] Joe Peters: So thanks to Mike Rizzo and [00:11:00] marketingops. com for allowing us to dive into a question from the community there. So this week, Matt, our question is. What in your opinion are the most common pitfalls that companies make when building out their mops function?

[00:11:17] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, this one’s an interesting one for me Because I think it can kind of go to two ends of the spectrum before the biggest pitfalls and one would be over Overly siloed and not siloed enough.

[00:11:32] Matt Tonkin: And what I mean by that is a lot of times when you’re building out the marketing operations function and marketing in general, it’s sort of a, an attachment to sales or an afterthought. And you know, it’s. It’s not really contributing in the way you’d think of a true revenue operations setup where marketing collaborates with sales, collaborates with customer service.

[00:11:55] Matt Tonkin: So I think sometimes it can just kind of be forgotten about, and [00:12:00] you know, you may be hire someone who’s really junior and, Hey, I shouldn’t say anything. Cause I told you earlier in the podcast that that’s essentially how I got into mops, right. As I got thrown in and said, Hey, figure this out. But that’s probably not the best way to do it, even though I think it’s how a lot of mobs people develop now.

[00:12:17] Matt Tonkin: It goes back to, you know, what’s that new generation look like? And I think that’s building out a cohesive rev ups where, you know, everyone’s working together. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have some separation for marketing to, you know, get their own tools that are going to work for them. But it’s about that collaboration while still knowing what job is being done.

[00:12:39] Matt Tonkin: So that’s sort of where I’d, I’d go with it. Yeah. It’s

[00:12:43] Joe Peters: amazing to me when I speak to different people in different industries, I feel like B2B SaaS and B2B tech, I’ve really figured out the concept of RevOps and the idea of having that even at the, we can even exclude customer success for the time being, but just that sync up between sales and marketing and how it can be so much better than it has been historically.

[00:13:13] Joe Peters: When you, when you build that concept out in the organization and we see it so much on, on a daily basis, because that’s what we’re living and breathing, but it’s still a foreign concept to a lot of organizations, but I also think there’s a maturity that happens. Not only in thinking about the structure and building out the teams but also as the organization evolves itself.

[00:13:39] Joe Peters: So if it’s, you know, moving from. Mid market to, you know, to large size, mid market to the beginnings of enterprise, there’s going to be an evolution in a shift in the building out of the team, just as a function of scale too.

[00:13:57] Matt Tonkin: Definitely. And it’s so hard to like plan for that sort of growth, right. To say like, okay, we just need this right now, but we want to build a team or build a tech stack us to scale and it’s really hard.

[00:14:12] Joe Peters: think smart organizations can do that if they have. A question say, Matt, what does a five year growth plan, if we’re doubling every two and a half years, then you can start to think about that. I thought there was an interesting post by Daryl Alfonso last week on three tiers of marketing operation structures showing from.

[00:14:38] Joe Peters: Kind of the smaller SMB moving up to enterprise and how that cascades out. And obviously he had an ideal structure there, but I think that actually there are routes for people to think through and consider as you’re building out your teams.

[00:14:55] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, and I think that’s all about having that experience early on so you know, like, [00:15:00] okay, here’s If we’re going to grow like this, this is how we have to prep.

[00:15:04] Matt Tonkin: This is, you know, in five years, this is who we need. This is what we need. We don’t need it now, but we need to know how we get there. And some

[00:15:12] Joe Peters: of them are just really great additions, like let’s add some analytics capability into our team so that, you know, we can do some really good custom reports and make some great strategic decisions that from the data that were presented with.

[00:15:27] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, and that goes back to the whole RevOps, tying that together. Everyone can use that data.

[00:15:33] Joe Peters: Yeah. Anyway, we could spend a whole podcast just on that, but let’s move, let’s move along here and like to thank our sponsor Knack for sponsoring today’s episode. Knack is the no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes.

[00:15:50] Joe Peters: Stop wasting time and money on hand coded templates. Visit knack. com to learn more. That’s K N A K. com. [00:16:00] All right, well, we’re moving on to our hot takes. Thanks. Section of the podcast and the first question is your mops team ready for a I before deciding on which tools to ask. Ask if your team is ready.

[00:16:17] Joe Peters: And this is a Forbes article had three questions. I’m going to read those out so that we can tackle them all. Do we have an experimentation and feedback loop process in our organization? Question one. Do we have the right data and quality for implementing a generative AI project? That’s two. Do we have the right team with the skills and mindset to work on the next AI project?

[00:16:43] Joe Peters: That’s the last one. What are your thoughts here, Matt?

[00:16:46] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, number one, so like the experimentation and feedback loop. Is interesting to me because I think it covers that idea of, you know, you probably have a lot of team members who are already playing around with this. So it’s not like, it’s not like you need to get people going on this.

[00:17:04] Matt Tonkin: People are going to find it just on their own and play around. But a lot of people just aren’t thinking about this in their day to day work life. So how can you capitalize on that? How can you, you know, understand what they’re doing and share that? I know I’ve had conversations with our team members where they say something about what they’re doing with chat GPT.

[00:17:22] Matt Tonkin: And I’m like, I didn’t even know you could do that. There’s a plugin for reading full PDFs. And I’ve been like copy and pasting like bit by bit and saying like, okay, just. Let me finish pasting these four lines because you can’t read more than 2, 000 characters or whatever. And there was a thing I could do the whole time and save time.

[00:17:40] Matt Tonkin: So just having that conversation and iterative process and tying that in with you know, business goals apart from just whatever personal goals people are doing.

[00:17:52] Joe Peters: Yeah, I think the more we can think in use cases and defining it that way and drilling down, I think it can [00:18:00] really help organizations advanced their AI adoption.

[00:18:05] Joe Peters: But I like this, that second question around the right data and quality for implementing a generative AI project. Matt, before there was even AI. We’ve been working with dirty data and helping our clients solve that issues for a long time. So. It’s no different here, but maybe it’s more important than ever to help resolve some of these data issues, especially around quality when you’re looking at what your opportunities are moving forward.

[00:18:39] Matt Tonkin: Exactly. The dirty data is a huge thing we talk about all the time and the concept of right data. I think AI. But.

[00:18:53] Matt Tonkin: The stuff that you’re trying to use to populate the model. You never recorded it because it never [00:19:00] occurred to you that it would be useful. So if suddenly you’re, you have this great idea, but you don’t have the data, how do you get it as quickly as possible? But getting it as quickly as possible could be something that skews it too.

[00:19:13] Matt Tonkin: Right? So unfortunately, if you didn’t have that foresight a year ago to be collecting certain things, it might be a bit harder. But hopefully you have. That data and it was clean enough to, you know, get whatever project you have now. Right, right.

[00:19:30] Joe Peters: And then I think this last question of teams and skills, I think the number one skill that people need to have right now is getting GPT, getting the pro version, and trying to work it into your workflows, for one.

[00:19:51] Joe Peters: But then once you move beyond that and start to think of the other skills, I don’t know, I start to think of the [00:20:00] analytical needs as being kind of that next step in the, in the evolution. What are, what are your thoughts here? Yeah,

[00:20:07] Matt Tonkin: I think to your point when you said like getting started, that I would say curiosity, just like have fun with it.

[00:20:14] Matt Tonkin: Get in there and yeah, once you start seeing what. It can put out. I, I think that’s when some of those, like triggering moments in your brain happen and say like, okay, if it can do this you know, what can I, what can I learn from it? What can it, you know, understand that maybe I’m not seeing here? And you start to get some of those thoughts.

[00:20:33] Matt Tonkin: I think that’s, that’s the mindset is just playing around. And then take the things that you’ve done with it. And see where you can apply that to other problems you’re having. Make a note of what problems you’re having randomly through your week. And then go back and say, okay, how could I tackle this in an easier way?

[00:20:54] Joe Peters: I’m a strong believer that intellectual curiosity is a superpower, and if you have [00:21:00] that, it’s only going to serve to benefit you, not only in general work environments, but as we enter into this generative AI era, you really have got to try, be able to, be willing to try things out and experiment a little bit.

[00:21:18] Matt Tonkin: To your point there, it’s because curiosity can be a natural thing that you have, but I think we can train ourselves to be curious. So if you don’t have that, you know, innate drive to play around with stuff, it’s something you can do. It’s something you can get in the mindset and push yourself to do.

[00:21:35] Joe Peters: And it goes back to, I’ll never forget, one of the first projects I ever worked on as a consultant in starting my own agency many, many years ago was on the Canadian geospatial data infrastructure.

[00:21:52] Joe Peters: Now, just being intellectually curious [00:22:00] allowed me to be fascinated by that. And so you can take two things, two approaches. Either you’re going to think, Oh, some of the things that I’m doing are boring. But if you dive into any topic. And you can find what’s interesting and what the problem they’re solving for on anything.

[00:22:17] Joe Peters:: That intellectual curiosity is a real superpower. And I think you’re right, Matt. It’s something that you can develop and nurture over time. But if you take that and nurture it, it’s only going to serve you well throughout your entire career. I know that it’s, it’s allowed me to not only learn about things like the CGDI, But also, you know, I had McCain’s as a client one time, I know an awful lot about potatoes.

[00:22:48] Joe Peters: So anyway, let’s move on to the next one. But I really am a strong believer in intellectual curiosity. And I think by nurturing that right now, it’s the perfect [00:23:00] time to just. Get out there and try and experiment. It’s going to pay dividends 1 million percent. Okay. Let’s move on to our second hot take. What personal info would you give away for a good deal?

[00:23:12] Joe Peters: So this is something published in ad week and it’s bonkers and mind blowing from a variety of different perspectives, but. It was a survey of 2000 adult consumers and respondents largely did not trust AI advertising. That is not a surprise because most people don’t have a really good understanding of AI and AI has become the villain.

[00:23:34] Joe Peters: And we talked about this a couple of times on the podcast even if you’re going to see mission impossible, the latest one, the villain is AI now. So we’re, we’re, we’re seeing that everywhere. But. So the trust part is not a real surprise here, but it gets interesting when 87 percent said that they would disclose personal info to save the money.

[00:23:59] Joe Peters: Now, listen to [00:24:00] some of these numbers here, Matt, 52 percent would share their birthday to get a discount. 43 percent would share the name of their spouse to get a discount. 36 would share the names of their children to get a discount. But this last one is mind blowing. 34 percent would share their social security number to get a discount.

[00:24:29] Joe Peters: Oh, this is face palm.

[00:24:33] Matt Tonkin: That’s crazy. And I’m, I’m hyper cynical. I’m like sharing it. Like when I go to. The website for a brewery. I like I put in a fake birthday and I’m legally like, there’s no reason to do it, but I still do that. Right? Like I had just naturally cynical about sharing information, I guess.

[00:24:54] Matt Tonkin: The fact that someone would share their social security number, [00:25:00] you’re right, like it takes the words out of your mouth for, for any reason to get a discount on something.

[00:25:09] Joe Peters: It’s the ramifications of having that data out there in the wild. You know, we live in this era where big corporations are hacked constantly.

[00:25:21] Joe Peters: I would never trust anyone outside of a government entity with that information because the government entity requires you to share that information, to do an exchange, whether it’s your taxes or anything, but the idea of giving, I don’t know, home Depot or target your social security number. To do a transaction and not that home Depot or target we’re asking.

[00:25:48] Joe Peters: This is just a theoretical. We don’t want them coming after us because we did not say that, but anyway, we did, we, they did not start this. This is just an example. I can’t even wrap my head around

[00:26:01] Matt Tonkin: that. And it brings to the forefront too. And this, I know is external for me. This is just stuff people would do, but as things like scams get more evolved, right?

[00:26:15] Matt Tonkin: That, that’s the, that’s the dark side. And. You know, that, that this many people are willing just to give away very personal information for, you know, 10 bucks off of whatever, some shampoo right. It, it, it’s concerning for me just from a, you know, economic standpoint, how much money is scamming than already is.

[00:26:40] Joe Peters: No, and I think of the older members of my family and the scams are just getting better and better and when you think of things like voice synthesis and All of those things it’s just gonna get More and more difficult to understand what [00:27:00] is real and what is fake and what is a scam and what is an obligation?

[00:27:04] Joe Peters: That you have to do. So yeah, this one is a little bit mind blowing. It reminds me of another thing that came out last week So Matt had a meeting with rewind. io, but there was another rewind. ai that was making big waves last week with this pendant. So a necklace with a little pendant, maybe the size of, I don’t know, a tip of a Sharpie pen, maybe even smaller.

[00:27:35] Joe Peters: Not the tip, but maybe the cap. All right. Maybe half of a cap, if you’re trying to think in scale here, maybe an inch or so. Anyway, it was a microphone recordable device. And so the idea is that you wear this pendant all day long. It records. All of your interactions, it’s, it’s listening to what’s happening during the conversations that you have, and then gives you a summary of your day, Matt

[00:28:04] Matt Tonkin: So this is, this is a Black Mirror episode. That’s a Black Mirror episode, 100%. And it’s funny because, you know, you said what what’d you say? 87 percent of people are, you know, skeptical of AI and advertising. Yeah, these are this is why and I can see the crazy thing is I can see the benefit right like for sure There’s so much benefit to that, you know, but your mind gets going on all the little things like where’s where’s this being stored?

[00:28:36] Matt Tonkin: What’s it being used? To you know to train what’s it being used to sell to me? Right, so there’s so many things

[00:28:45] Joe Peters: wrong with it. Yeah Like like, okay, even if you think of personal romantic conversations that you’re having

[00:28:57] Matt Tonkin: Medical whatever you’re doing first dates. [00:29:00]

[00:29:00] Joe Peters: Yeah, or I don’t know maybe have bio parts of the day I’ve recorded, like, it’s so, it’s so over the top. I, I can’t even, I don’t even know where to start with it.

[00:29:16] Matt Tonkin: And just not, you know, Having control of that, even if you had that, even if it was a closed system and it’s just going back to your own private server, that is so much information out there that could get out there, but for it to be stored on some.

[00:29:31] Matt Tonkin: Server in Palo Alto or something, you know, it’s a little

[00:29:38] Joe Peters: concern. That’s one thing, but like, what are you going to wear a big consent button? Do you consent? Yeah, allow me to record this all day long?

[00:29:47] Matt Tonkin: Like. A lot of places are two party consents. So that’s another factor, right? I can’t see this.

[00:29:54] Matt Tonkin: Not triggering legislative action from most countries.

[00:30:00] Joe Peters: Well, there was a pretty big backlash, but there’s going to be people that use it. Anyway, it’s been a crazy week. It seems like every week is a crazy week, but let’s get down to our final section of the podcast, which is our pairing section. So this week I have a special album.

[00:30:23] Joe Peters: Near and dear to my heart one of my favorite bands. Well, let’s not just say one of my favorite bands. It is my favorite band And there’s a couple of indicators of this one There’s this piece of art right here that you can’t see if you’re listening to the podcast.

[00:30:40] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, we’ve got to keep that in mind,

[00:30:43] Joe Peters: Is some sound wave art, from a song by interpol. Okay, so interpol is a band My favorite band, seen them too many times to admit. This is some art in the background that’s showing Sound Wafer, probably their [00:31:00] most familiar song. It’s called Evil. It has a really great baseline to start the song. And then there’s a little photo just to the left of the art, which is of Paul Banks, the singer singing at a concert that was at a snap that pick there.

[00:31:19] Joe Peters: But. Our song this week comes from the album Marauder, which is a really great album. For those watching this, you can see the album art here. classic black and white Interpol, but and for those of you that have never heard of them or never seen them. They’re always wearing like Armani suits On stage playing indie rock like that’s kind of their brand.

[00:31:49] Joe Peters: To Really kind of go a little bit over the top on the dress and really not a lot of fan Action either like hello. We’re gonna play our set. That was a [00:32:00] great song and move on One of my favorite vinyl records in terms of the color, this sort of deep red album, Marauder, and the song that we’re playing this week is If You Really Love Nothing.

[00:32:19] Joe Peters: This is this is one of their singles right off this album. And it’s just a great album. Beginning to end. So, anyway, this is a soft spot for me, Interpol, and a great record, and a great production of the vinyl in that deep red. Matt, what are we pairing it with, with the

[00:32:39] Matt Tonkin: beverage this week? So, pairing it with the beverage this weekend.

[00:32:44] Matt Tonkin: Oh, that, that actually sounded good. I, I’ve, you always hear that like cracking, so I think that sounds like a Bob and Doug McKenzie. Yeah, I think the the audio only people got a treat there, . So for this week we have Muskoka detour. So [00:33:00] this is always my. Go to go to beer, I guess you could say, like, if, if I’m just going to be stuck with one beer, this would be the beer I have.

[00:33:08] Matt Tonkin: It’s light. It tastes like a bit of hoppiness, but it’s sort of that summer beer for me. And it’s even got the Muskoka or Adirondack chair, whatever your. Whatever terminology you use for those nice, those wooden chairs, that you’d be sitting on a deck, yep, sitting on a deck, just having this. And that, so for me, it’s, I’d say this is my like safe space beer.

[00:33:31] Matt Tonkin: It’s, you know, what I’m comfortable with. So getting into, we’re getting into more cold. It’s been cold here all week. So now I’m looking into, you know, all right, my summer beer’s gone. I need to get out of my safe space. Just like everything else AI tech, whatever. So

[00:33:49] Joe Peters: that sounds delicious. I’m going to have to add that to the list and I did find.

[00:33:57] Joe Peters: A small case, or it was like an [00:34:00] eight pack of speaking of beverages and fairly delicious, although there’s been some negative reviews, I did find the Coke AI drink. Okay. And I got an eight pack, like of the little. 300 milliliters. Sorry for us friends. I have no idea what that is in ounces, 10 ounces, something like that.

[00:34:24] Joe Peters: I did, I did have it over the weekend and it was, it was not bad. Okay. I liked

[00:34:29] Matt Tonkin: it. I still haven’t seen it. So I’ll, I’ll keep an eye out for it. Cause I want to, we’ll have to do a taste

[00:34:34] Joe Peters: test. On our next one. I think it’s a lot easier to find. I’ll give you some tips. It took me a little while to research it, but it’s available.

[00:34:43] Joe Peters: But anyway, well, thanks Matt for a great podcast this week. And thanks to all of you for listening. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review. You can find us on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts. Stay connected with us on LinkedIn by [00:35:00] joining our newsletter or using the link in the description.

[00:35:03] Joe Peters: And as always, thanks mom for watching. See you later, everyone.

[Episode 4] B2B Sales and Marketing Disorder

We’re back with episode 4 of Launch Codes. This week Joe is joined by Lauren McCormack, RP’s VP of Consulting. In this episode, Joe and Lauren cover a variety of topics including major updates from OpenAI, a study analyzing the misalignment of B2B sales and marketing teams, the future of process documentation and hot takes on AI regulation and a LinkedIn post about replacing B2B marketing automation platforms with B2C options. Also, Joe and Lauren reveal their Pairings for this week.

Listen below or watch on Spotify—and see below for show notes and the transcript.

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

Major announcements from OpenAI

Last week we covered OpenAI’s huge announcement that ChatGPT can now ‘see, hear, and speak.’ Joe had a chance to showcase the technology this week while on a trip to visit family. He took a photo of the foods in the fridge and prompted ChatGPT to provide a menu for the trip based on the contents. The results, as he said, were “mind blowing.”

A few days after the announcement, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT “can now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources.”

Paying customers can now have access to information past September 2021 while remaining within the ChatGPT interface.

It’s made possible thanks to an integration with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Readers may remember a similar announcement made in March 2023. The feature was soon-after removed because of concerns for ChatGPT bypassing paywalls. However, now ChatGPT recognizes robots.txt code, which allows websites to exclude AI from indexing their content.

“AI optimization is going to replace search optimization,” Joe said. “And if you’re not indexing your site and you’re in the B2B space why would you want make it difficult for people to find out about you through AI search and prompting?”

 

The misalignment of B2B marketing and sales

A recent analysis from LinkedIn found that the average alignment between B2B marketing and sales was 16%.

LinkedIn’s Customer Insights Team analyzed over 7,000 B2B companies and measured the percentage of buyers who are reached by both sales and marketing.

It’s “a number so horrific that it drops the jaws of every B2B CMO we meet,” wrote Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg for MarketingWeek.

The LinkedIn analysis found that high alignment can:

  • Increase marketing generated revenue by 208%.
  • Increase customer retention by 36%.
  • Reduce sales and marketing expenses.

So how can B2B companies close the gap and improve the alignment in B2B organizations?

It starts with strategic alignment. Senior sales and marketing leaders need to have conversations about audiences and their teams need to correctly execute on that strategy.

While it sounds obvious, companies are not doing it.

These two teams need to pursue broader targeting. Given marketing’s capability to reach a larger audience quickly, it should adopt broader targeting to increase the likelihood of overlap with sales.

“There’s a lot of finger pointing in most organizations about quantity and quality and it’s easy to get into a posturing about why numbers and KPIs aren’t being achieved,” said Lauren. “If you’re working towards a goal and sales and marketing alignment, you have to talk to sales. Go for ride alongs, [have] win/lose conversations… pick the AE that doesn’t like what you’re doing and find out why.”

 

The future of process documentation

This week’s question from the MO Pros community is about documentation. While it’s not the most electrifying topic on the surface, it’s critical for companies to build a culture of good documentation.

The question poser is running into the issue of outdated documentation and poor visual mapping and looking for advice to get her team on board.

As part of her answer, Lauren suggested recording calls in Zoom or Slack while sharing your screen, summarize the process with visuals and save it to a common documentation channel.

And for those of us who prefer actual notes over video tutorials, Lauren said “take the transcript from your note-taker, upload it into ChatGPT and output it as a document.

 

Hot takes

 

Pairings & Plugs

As always, Joe brought in a vinyl record from his collection and for her first segment Lauren brought it a coffee from one of her favorite roasters in Arizona.

Lauren plugged her upcoming Virtual Marketo User Group (VMUG) on October 24 called “How to Transform Marketo with AI.” Joe plugged MOPs-Apalooza (November 5-8), where he will be speaking, along with Lauren and Andy Caron, President of Revenue Pulse.

 

Read The Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was created by AI using Descript and has not been edited.

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: Welcome to Launch Codes, the podcast about marketing operations, artificial intelligence, and more. Each week you’ll hear from experts as they share insights, stories, and strategies. Welcome to episode four. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, we’re covering major updates from OpenAI, the misalignment of B2B sales and marketing teams, Thanks the future of process documentation, as well as a couple of hot takes on AI legislation and B2B marketing automation platform switches.

[00:00:41] Today I’m joined by Lauren McCormack, the VP of Consulting at Revenue Pulse, and fittingly has just been awarded a three times Marketo champion designation for this year. Congratulations and welcome Lauren.

[00:00:57] Lauren McCormack: Thanks so much, Joe. Such a big honor, and [00:01:00] I’m thrilled to be back in this cohort of brilliant people across the globe, and it’s pretty cool to share in the celebration today with Andy Caron, a recently named president. She’s a four time Adobe Marketo Engage champion, as of today, so pretty cool to share that, that That distinction with her.

[00:01:21] Joe Peters: So basically what you’re telling everyone is that RP is the home of champions then?

[00:01:26] Lauren McCormack: You could say so. That’s a literal, a literal possibility that you could share that kind of information.

[00:01:32] I think at this point, it’s

[00:01:33] Joe Peters: The team’s been asking me to work in some dad jokes to start the podcast. So, you know, I couldn’t resist there. So in terms of our topics that we outlined, Lauren, what are you
interested in today? I’m super

[00:01:46] Lauren McCormack: excited to talk about sales and marketing alignment with you. I know we had some interesting, perhaps controversial takes on whether or not the MQL was dead.

[00:01:57] And I think I have a little bit of a [00:02:00] similar sentiment around some sales and marketing alignment. Traditional methodologies. So looking forward to that, especially. Plus, I don’t know, walking in for our viewers. I’m not even sure what Joe’s final take is going to be for the day. So certainly interested to see what the record is going to be today.

[00:02:20] Joe Peters: Well, yeah, we’ll we’ll save the, the, the cherry on top for the end of the. Podcast today. So as we move into the open, it seems like every week there’s some new announcement from open AI that is, you know, blowing our minds. And I’m going to say this week is no exception. So for those of you that are just tuning in chat GPT now can hear and speak.

[00:02:48] And so the image recognition has rolled out and I’m going to say minds have been blown. So that’s the first one, but we have three things that we’re going to run through. So let me run through the other two. [00:03:00] ChatGPT can now browse the internet with a bit of a plug in. So there’s that cutoff message doesn’t have to be a hard and true fact anymore.

[00:03:10] We’re able to browse to get up to date information. So that is the second one. And finally, The robots. txt now can exclude AI from indexing content and training on that content. So, let’s start with all three. Lauren, have you had a chance to try out any of the image recognition yet?

[00:03:32] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, you know, and I think it’s definitely better than mid journey.

[00:03:36] No offense to mid journey, but my kids would give me a hard time. Every time they saw me logging into discord and I would get lectures from my 16 year old about you know, the security issues of, of accessing apps from, from discord. I guess I raised him right. Is that what that means? If he’s cautious about Internet safety, but you know, it’s, it’s nice to see GPT meet us.

[00:03:58] I think where we’ve all wanted [00:04:00] to be at. It’s, it’s kind of been fun watching its limitations and its powers, but it’s interesting to see it growing.

[00:04:08] Joe Peters: Yeah, so I think, I think there’s two pieces here. So there’s the Dolly generation, which is coming, but now there’s also that image recognition part. So like, for example, I was visiting my sister out in Manitoba this weekend.

[00:04:22] And I took a picture of the inside of her fridge and her pantry. Uploaded those images and asked it what we could cook for dinner or what would be a menu for the weekend. And let’s just say minds were blown with that image recognition capabilities. So there’s, that is, that is just a new era of the AI being able to interpret images that were uploaded.

[00:04:49] Lauren McCormack: interesting. Google had that, visual search capacity and beta and I played with it a little bit when it first came out and it was just downright bizarre. And I don’t know, it’s, it’s an interesting opportunity for targeting. We, we thought it was creepy when our search results were fueling fodder. Now our cameras will too.

[00:05:09] Joe Peters: Yeah. Well, it’s, it’s, it’s a whole new, a whole new area of being able to. You know, we had those Google Translate being able to look at menus and translate things for us. Now we’re going to be able to take photos of anything and see what GPT can tell us. But the, the other news here is this idea of being able to browse the internet. Have you had a chance to play with that a little bit in terms of pointing GPT that way? Not yet.

[00:05:39] Lauren McCormack: I’m looking forward to kicking it around. What have you been finding? I know it’s a. It’s been frustrating to have the limitations put with, you know, GPT being frozen in time cryogenically, like some kind of Star Wars creature. It’s nice to bring it up to current, but I would love to hear, I’ve, I’ve played with some of the other plugins that let it sort of have web browsing capabilities, [00:06:00] but unleashing the power of, of current time is going to be interesting.

[00:06:05] Joe Peters: I’m of two minds here. I actually really prefer. From a variety of different perspectives, the trained responses versus the internet searches, there’s a very big difference between adding a search to the end of your, your prompt and, and getting a response from that versus what’s the trained. LLM is is providing you. So I think for finding current things, if you’re going to do purchases or you needed to find up to date information on an event or something like that, 100 percent that’s going to be helpful. But when you’re actually using it as a strategic. Second set of hands. That, that, that I don’t, I don’t see that search capability.

[00:06:56] Joe Peters: And what I saw in being originally is, it’s very [00:07:00] similar, a little bit limited in, in sort of the, the depth of the response that’s given. But I think that’s a good segue into this last one on now. What do you think about sites being able to exclude the A. I. S. from indexing them? I

[00:07:18] Lauren McCormack: feel like all of our information and all of our personal secrets have already been scraped and it’s too little too late. But I guess it’s a novel idea to pretend like we can put the genie back in the bottle. I

[00:07:30] Joe Peters: don’t know. I, I, I think really you’re actually shooting yourself in the foot by, by limiting the AIs from indexing your site. Yeah. AI optimization is going to replace search optimization. And if you’re not indexing your site, then if you’re in the B2B play space. Why, why would you want people that make it difficult for them to find out about you through [00:08:00] AI search and prompting? So I’m, I’m not a big, I don’t know.

[00:08:06] Lauren McCormack: Did you have that existential moment when you tried to search yourself in GPT and you didn’t exist?

[00:08:12] Joe Peters: I haven’t tried that yet. That, that, that one is one I’ll have to, to try out. But that, that, that I’m sure would be a funny result. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, there’s quite a few Joe Peters in the world. So they might there might be a few others that that pop up other than myself.

[00:08:30] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, I think Adam, Adam knew Waterson tried searching for himself and had a bit of a moment when he couldn’t, and he’s got a distinctive name and he didn’t find himself in the early days of GPT. And I think, I think he took it as kind of a challenge. Like, well, I need, I need to exist here, you know, which is it. An interesting take and probably a good one for people that don’t want to index that. It is the future.

[00:08:52] Joe Peters: Yeah, but you’re, you’re right. Like the idea that we can put this genie back in the bottle is not probably a [00:09:00] great take on this, but let’s move into our second topic, which is the idea of the misalignment between B2B marketing and sales and. For many of us, the promise of marketing automation is alignment and solving for that problem that has existed since marketing and sales teams were formed. And so there was a study that came out of over 7, 000 B2B companies, and they measured the percentage of buyers who are reached by both marketing and sales. And so the average alignment between B2B Marketing and sales was 16%. And so there’s a great quote here, a number so horrific that it drops the jaws of every B2B CMO we meet. But that’s from marketing week. So I, I love that quote. And, [00:10:00] but, you know, sadly that isn’t something that is a surprise to us.

[00:10:05] Lauren McCormack: No, not at all. And it’s been, a topic of discussion, we’ll say for my entire career. I’ve, I’ve spent a couple decades working on, on sales and marketing alignment because I was an AE for, for years, right? I’m, I’m that weird marketer that’s been on both sides of the fence. That’s had to work a territory that’s been incentivized by commission that wishes I had during my, my days and outside sales, a marketing department to feed me leads, right?

[00:10:37] And I can appreciate the fact that there’s a lot of finger pointing in most organizations across the aisle about quantity and quality and close rates and SLAs. And it’s easy, I think, to get into a posturing. Where it’s like a blame shift of, of why numbers or, or KPIs aren’t being achieved [00:11:00] consistently over any kind of duration.

[00:11:02] Maybe it’s weekly, monthly, maybe it’s quarterly, maybe it’s the year, but at the end of the day, how many CMOs whose jaws drop to the floor actually know what their team is saying in their outreach sequences? Yeah, do you know that? Do you know, like, and it’s, it’s funny. I was, I was talking with somebody on our team internally here at RP about sales and marketing alignment.

[00:11:27] And I think a lot of people make it this obtuse, obscure, elusive, you know, utopia and I’m like, when we worked on this project, when, when, when we were delivering this project, did we talk to sales? Yeah. And if we’re working toward a goal of sales and marketing alignment, we actually have to talk to sales.

[00:11:49] Like those conversations are non negotiable and it’s like a fundamental people. I think show up for the weekly or quarterly. You know business reviews, they show up [00:12:00] and they sit down with sales when they’re forced to. What about actually going for ride alongs? What about win loss conversations? What about talking to your referral clients?

[00:12:09] Talking to your best Flag waving fan of marketing is always going to tell you that you’re wonderful. Pick the AE that doesn’t like what you’re doing and find out why. Yeah. Cause you rather he tell, or she tell your, your CRO, or would you rather hear it from them? And they usually have ideas. Not always great ones, but sometimes good for, for campaigns, or they have at least feedback from the front lines that will make what you’re doing much more effective and it doesn’t do you any good to avoid those conversations and certain projects that you work on and deliver if you don’t deliver them in a silo.

[00:12:48] Will benefit the whole organization, put money in the pocket of sales and increase your, your reputation for being a good marketer within the company.

[00:12:57] Joe Peters: And so when you see those things like [00:13:00] the, the analysis was talking about what high alignment can deliver, you know, we, we hear these numbers thrown out all the time by, you know, increasing marketing generated revenue by 208%, increase customer retention by 36%.

[00:13:16] Reduce sales and marketing expenses as some of these promises that alignment provides. But what was kind of interesting was not only was it a diagnosis in this report, but it also talked about what some of the solutions are. So let me just quickly cover what those are and then we can. Chat a little bit about that.

[00:13:36] So the first solution was strategic alignment between marketing and sales. So senior marketing and sales leaders need to have strategic conversations about audiences and their team and the need to correctly execute on that strategy. And so that’s a pretty obvious one, but not something that we’re always seeing.

[00:13:57] And then broad targeting. Both departments [00:14:00] pursue a hyper targeting strategy. The small coverage of sales and marketing dramatically decreases the likelihood of overlap. So What’s your take on those two potential solutions? I actually just like your, your idea of the ride along and actually just saying, we need to talk more and, and totally

[00:14:21] Lauren McCormack: that was, that was the heart of, I think you know, I sat through formal solution selling training and for the marketing department, that was the key.

[00:14:29] It was like conduct win losses. So I think a lot of people have moved the exercise of creating an ICP. into some sort of academic pursuit that doesn’t actually reflect an improvement in targeting or an improvement in understanding who’s on the receiving end of your marketing campaigns. But at the end of the day, what we’re doing is supposed to be one to many, but it needs to feel one to one.

[00:14:53] So how are you going to talk? You need to talk to customers and prospects if you don’t actually talk to customers and prospects. Right? [00:15:00] I mean, it’s just like the kind of obvious notion of getting sales and marketing aligned by having conversations with sales. You also need to talk to people that purchase your product, find out why, why do they love you?

[00:15:11] What would they change? What do they tell their friends? What, what conferences do they plan to go to this year? You know, what do they like to read? Where can you meet them where they’re at? But then also the losses, the people that that chose to go to your competitors. That information is super valuable.

[00:15:29] And is anybody collecting it? Maybe you have a field in your CRM where you’re tracking clothes lost, and maybe you have a reason, maybe. And maybe you recycle those clothes loss leads. I hope. If you don’t, you should talk to us. But if you’re going to bring them back in the loop, you need to know why they didn’t work out in the first place.

[00:15:46] Was it pricing? Was it? Particularly compelling, you know features of your competitors, right? But the only way to really get at this good information, this vital information that makes you better at your job, that gets you to stop talking [00:16:00] about releases and, and features and moves you into actual human territory where you can improve people’s careers, where you can get them promoted, where you can make them into evangelists for your brand.

[00:16:13] The only way you can, you can kind of bridge that gap is by having good conversations with your customers and prospects. So I think it’s, it’s sensible relationship building. Marketing automation is a beautiful tool, but if it feels cold, if it feels, inauthentic, you know, it’s, it’s not going to do the best job possible for you or for the people on the receiving end of your, your communications.

[00:16:40] Joe Peters: Yeah, so really, you know, having a dialogue with prospects with clients with and internally is really at the key and getting as many data points as possible. Form your strategies and decisions. Well, let’s, let’s, let’s move on to our next [00:17:00] topic, which is one that is coming from the community a mo pros community question.

[00:17:06] And thanks to Mike and the gang for letting us take a question and have put Lauren’s feet to the fire here. So here’s the question that was posed. On marketing ops. com. I work with a company with a good culture of documentation, but I’m constantly running into the issue with outdated documentation or poor visual mapping.

[00:17:32] What advice do you have for me to support our team to get on top of documentation? And so Lauren, I know documentation is a topic near and dear to your heart. So for sure, take it away.

[00:17:45] Lauren McCormack: Well, I think it’s been a wonderful journey to see solutions, architecture, documentation go from, you know, a stack of printed crazy 150 page flow chart you know, [00:18:00] a treatise on, on, on what was built in the system to now being able to just pop open loom.

[00:18:07] Or even slack and just to say, okay, I’m going to, I’m going to share my screen. Here’s a rundown of what was built and you can verbally summarize with visuals. And record a documentation, save it you know, to some sort of commonly accessed Slack channel, you know, maybe you have a documentation channel in your internal Slack and, and you just put it in that repository and it’s, it’s, you’re done.

[00:18:35] I mean, documentation used to take days. And days, and it was the necessary evil for, for, you know, posterity in case you, you, you had to pass your instance along to someone, or you needed to remember what you did three years ago. Now it’s, it’s, it’s almost effortless. And if you really love having actual documents for your documentation, take the transcript from a note taker and upload it into [00:19:00] GPT and output it as a doc, if you really want to doc, you know there’s so many ways that this can be.

[00:19:07] Augmented this whole process can be updated to save you a lot of cycles and a lot of time. But, yeah, I’m, I’m happy to hear that. Somebody’s still documenting out there. I think a lot of teams have have let it go by the wayside over the years as, as we’re getting leaner, especially in 2023, you know, doing more with less with less staff, that is an area that I’ve seen kind of get sacrificed, but there’s so many efficiencies, I think, in that space that people just need to take advantage of.

[00:19:36] Joe Peters: Yeah, for sure. And just the speed at which you can do things now, recording a quick video, getting that transcribed and slapping that in for the, the future to be able to take that information. I know that that is just moving things along at such a fast speed instead of. Taking days to sort of map things out.

[00:19:57] Absolutely. And I think a lot of like [00:20:00] marketing ops professionals would, you know, prefer to keep work to themselves and, and they feel like explaining or teaching or sharing their processes with somebody else. Oh, that just takes extra time. But imagine if you have good documentation and you can pass that documentation along to somebody in a different time zone.

[00:20:20] And you can get this asynchronous work environment created across your team across geos where for for a team in a Mia to to wake up and and start building to pass it to a pack to pass it to North America, you know, to pass it to let him you can have an always on kind of demand factory. If you use your documentation to support.

[00:20:44] Governance and to support processes. You increase your efficiencies exponentially. If you don’t hold things back and you do document and you do knowledge share across your team.

[00:20:56] Joe Peters: Yeah, for sure. And we’re even seeing doesn’t even those [00:21:00] kind of practices aren’t even just for documentation, but just normal business operations, even for us with our teams and.

[00:21:08] All the different regions were big fans of short little video messages being in someone’s Slack inbox when they come in in the morning that’s passing the torch from region to region and a lot can be conveyed in two or three minutes in a, in a quick Slack video. So yeah, whether it’s documentation or just coordinating some of these things that are facilitated by the tools we have at our disposal is.

[00:21:33] Just incredible stuff, but yeah, okay. Well, we, we can, we don’t, we can talk about documentation forever, but let’s move on. And I just want to thank our sponsors Knack. 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.

[00:21:55] Knack integrates with everything you need to make amazing emails and landing pages. [00:22:00] Visit knack. com to learn more. That’s k n a k. com. And so now we’re going to shift into our hot takes segment. And there’s a, there’s a few things happening in the headlines this week. And Lauren, what do you think about on the AI legislation?

[00:22:20] So we’ve, is this our new area of compliance concern? Cause we, we know that the EU is introducing the AI act and that’s going to be happening. I. Think in the early new year is the, what everyone is saying. It could be later this year as well. Canada has just introduced a voluntary code of conduct for AI.

[00:22:40] And there was supposed to be an executive order coming out by the end of the summer. Now we’re past that date. So we can only assume that something is coming soon. What do you think this means from our perspective in terms of some of the compliance things that we might be coming up against in the future?

[00:22:58] Lauren McCormack: It’s going to be interesting to watch. [00:23:00] I, I, I hearken back to when Zuckerberg was on the hill and I remember how painful it was to watch some of the members of, of You know, Congress in the House trying to get their arms around just exactly how social media even worked. I have serious questions and a few reservations around how easily, easily understandable.

[00:23:25] This is all going to be to our legislators. I’m hopeful, cautiously optimistic, but again, the genie in the bottle, right? It’s, it’s almost like a. Some sort of scout code of honor, like, we’re going to solemnly swear to do no, no, you know, damage, but I feel like the bad actors are just kind of laughing.

[00:23:44] Right? So I, I don’t know how, how savvy government is going to be and how, how much protection they can really offer us sadly, but I think it’s They have to put out for their constituents some sort of effort to show that they tried. It’s like a participation [00:24:00] move here, but I like

[00:24:01] Joe Peters: it’s a little bit more than that because it’s very rare.

[00:24:06] I would say I don’t I can’t recall very many times in my life that. And industry has come to government and said, Hey, regulate us. We need some guardrails that I’m going to say that’s a first for me. And so hopefully these industry leaders are assisting in. Those, what those guardrails should be. And my, my understanding is that there was a big meeting of the minds with Gates and Sam Altman and and Zuckerberg and I, and a whole, a few others I think that was a couple of weeks ago now they were meeting and, and giving some ideas on what should be going on there.

[00:24:51] So, but I think for us, when I look at it, I kind of feel like. Our clients are going to be thinking is, do we have [00:25:00] another GDPR situation here where, what are we doing and how do we stay compliant in all the regions where we’re operating at? That’s kind of where my head is shifting to. Yeah.

[00:25:11] Lauren McCormack: And I definitely, you know, gone through several rounds of compliance build outs over the years, whether it’s.

[00:25:18] It’s you know, can spam or California or EMEA and, and it’s ever changing policies. Right. But it’ll be interesting to see what compliance looks like and, and what we’re going to need to put in place to keep people

[00:25:34] Joe Peters: above board. And it could be just simple things like, you know, within your sites or your campaigns.

[00:25:42] Signaling if this has been, this is content generated by AI, that might be a rule, it could be, it could be in the terms of the website that no one reads, but that might be where you need to put a clause, who knows how onerous or how different these different [00:26:00] regulations are going to be, but what we can count on is that something is coming and Our clients and colleagues are going to have to take some action.

[00:26:10] There’s, there’s no doubt about that. That’s right. Okay. Well, let’s move on to the next one. Our next hot take, which is. Replacing B2B marketing automation platforms with B2C platforms. And so there was a little bit of a, a post that was popped that popped up in LinkedIn and got our antennas all fired up, which was the idea that and I quote, you can save a ton of money by replacing HubSpot, HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot with a B2C email tool.

[00:26:45] Iterable or braze, it’ll be different, but it’ll work just fine. You’ll need to find a replacement for CRM sync, lead scoring and lead forms capture. And but the, the, the other part to

[00:27:00] this, this assertion is that most of the marketing automation tools have not added new function to warrant the price increases that we’re, we’re seeing.

[00:27:10] So what’s your, what’s your take on this one, Lauren?

[00:27:14] Lauren McCormack: I see a lot of people usually slightly outside of the operations team that think that tech is absolutely interchangeable and they fail to remember the human capital piece of the equation and the. Tech itself might be interchangeable, but the skill set of your team and the mastery and the wisdom and the, the legacy data and all of the, the kind of the pieces that don’t look like a price tag.

[00:27:51] On a budget sheet are the ones I think that that fall out of the focus when you’re thinking about migrating tech, but those are the most [00:28:00] important pieces. If you don’t have a braze expert or an iterable expert on your team. Don’t dump your marketing automation platform, like I’ll just, I’ll full stop right there, but I know who posted this and he’s a wonderful human being in front.

[00:28:16] But I think in the comments we were all wondering if perhaps he was getting some sort of kickback from this post. And I think, I think yeah, I fall in that camp, but I’ve seen, I’ve seen wonderful tech stacks that have included braids or adorable. And I think they’re fantastic, but I don’t know.
[00:28:33] That you can swap tech without swapping team resources.

[00:28:38] Joe Peters: I thought there was a funny quote from Phil Fernandez, who was a co founder of Mercado is that when Braze stops using Mercado and starts using Braze for their own B2B marketing, you will know it’s time. Yeah.

[00:28:53] Lauren McCormack: Yeah. And I think Justin Gray posted something similar maybe like a month ago and he was [00:29:00] really cryptic about what his new tech stack was that was saving him so much money.

[00:29:05] And I think we were all following in the comments, but he never did reveal what the wonder solution was. I think at the end of the day though there’s lots of different ways to get marketing comms out the door. Your own unique tech stack is your choice, but make sure you’ve got somebody to drive the bus for sure.

[00:29:24] Joe Peters: Yeah, that’s right. We haven’t got to self driving marketing buses yet. That’s for sure. That’s right. But who knows what the future will bring us, but speaking of moving along here and the next stop on the next bus stop. Is our pairing section. So this week’s album that that you’ve, you’re having a little listen to is from temples.

[00:29:51] They’re from the UK beautiful album. They, they put together here. All of the lyrics have been handwritten on postcards. It’s kind of [00:30:00] cool inside there. And then the vinyl is this really nice kind of translucent blue. And the song that we’re playing is called Cicada, which is a little bit of a funny thing.

[00:30:14] Unfortunately, I probably listened to too much music too loud, so now if the windows are closed in the summer time… I don’t hear the cicadas anymore at that that high level frequency. Obviously, if I’m outside, sure. But it makes me laugh every time I hear that song, Cicada, because it’s just a friendly reminder that you shouldn’t have the volume on 10 for too long if you’ve got the headphones on.

[00:30:42] But anyway, a great album. The, the, the album is Exotico and just came out maybe a couple of months ago, but a great listen and just a beautiful. Presentation of the album in in two, two records in there. So four sides to, to, of great music to [00:31:00] listen to. All right, Lauren. So this is Lauren’s first time on pairing.

[00:31:04] So she’s pairing. with something different as you know, we had a book pairing last week and a beer pairing the week before. So what do you have for us this week, Lauren? So I brought

[00:31:17] Lauren McCormack: some coffee. It’s, you know, I’m recording, I’m recording at 9am here and I love Tonkin’s can do spirit, but I think it’s a little early for a pint.

[00:31:26] So I did bring some coffee. It’s from our friends at Presta. Here in Tucson they do locally roasted coffee and they’ve been in the community locally owned for like 10 years and they’re probably the boldest deepest darkest roast I can find here in town, but I do love you know, going down to the farmers markets are going down into the downtown area and and trying all the local coffee.

[00:31:49] So, today we have their, their Mexican roast and, it’s a Dana Montana organic washed and it’s got according to the label [00:32:00] notes of milk, chocolate, hazelnut and trail mix.

[00:32:05] Joe Peters: The trail. That’s a funny tasting note. I feel

[00:32:09] Lauren McCormack: like I buy the specific. Type of coffee from Presta based on what the sticker suggests.

[00:32:15] I don’t know that I’m picking up trail mix. But I love that notion, but I will say

[00:32:24] you can definitely get the chocolate notes and it’s a great cup of coffee to start the day and a great pairing for, for your vinyl

[00:32:31] Joe Peters: choice there. So do they do they, do you buy a ground? Are you a take home the beans and grind it yourself? We

[00:32:38] Lauren McCormack: are a whole bean family here. And my, my oldest son works at the farmer’s market.

[00:32:43] And every time I go up to one of the vendors and they ask that question and I say whole bean, I can just see them smile like a knowing smile, like good job, good job. But there is something special, I think about You know, grinding and the process, the whole, I mean, you’ve got an absinthe fountain behind you.

[00:32:59] So [00:33:00] you understand the process of a beverage.

[00:33:02] Joe Peters: Yeah. Well, the smell of freshly ground coffee other than the, once you finish grinding it, no one likes the actual process, but the aftermath That smell and aroma is something else.
I, it

[00:33:15] Lauren McCormack: opens it up. And I think there’s something Pavlovian now at this point with our little grinder, you know, it doing its work.

[00:33:22] I know it’s in

[00:33:22] Joe Peters: store. Yeah. That’s, that’s funny. The whole family comes running. Okay. So I think we’re, we have a couple of last plugs for pairing sections today. So I know you wanted to talk about something that you and Lucas are up to.

[00:33:38] Lauren McCormack: Yes our brilliant Lucas is going to be on a mug, a Tucson Marketo user group meeting that we’ve got coming up in 22 days.

[00:33:49] So, we’re talking October 24th. It’s going to be 9 am West Coast time. If you’re not. In Tucson, it’s okay. This is a virtual event. You can join from [00:34:00] anywhere in the world. You can sign up and I’ll send you the recording. You don’t even have to be there in person, but we will drop a link in our, our comments and and be sure to come and hear about the transformative power of AI in your Marketo instance.

[00:34:16] We’ve got a lot of interesting, topics on tap deciphering good leads from bad thinking about lead scoring and classification, even finding the best days and times to send your, your comms using the power of GPT. So if you’re interested at all, please do join us and we’ll see you there.

[00:34:34] Joe Peters: Yeah, that Lucas has definitely been diving deep in terms of AI integration with Mercado.

[00:34:40] So there’s going to be some fun things for everybody to hear about. Yeah, he’s really, really pushing the limits. He’s

[00:34:48] Lauren McCormack: brilliant. And I, I’m also delighted to host Tyron Pretorius from Telnix. So he’s gonna be the, the power duo, right? With Lucas on [00:35:00] our upcoming meeting.

[00:35:01] Joe Peters: And then one final note is also for for those of you that are interested in what we’re really looking forward to as a great conference the first weekend of November, Is mops, MOPAP Palooza.

[00:35:17] Lauren is a, a virtual speaker. And Andy and I will both be presenting, well, Andy has a has a session. I’m on a panel, and so it’s really shaping up to be a hyper-focused MOPS event that we’re really excited about. So you can find out more about that on marketing ops.com. We’re, we’re not getting it.

[00:35:37] We’re not. Getting any kickbacks or sponsorship money from Mike. We just think that it’s going to be a great event for those of us in the space and a chance for the community to get together. And

[00:35:49] Lauren McCormack: it’s in Anaheim, so Joe, you gotta, you gotta pick out some mouse ears.

[00:35:54] Joe Peters: Well, I’m not too sure about that. It’s not, I’m not too sure about that.[00:36:00]

[00:36:00] I, I, I, my last Disney excursion was Keeping my daughters happy with the princesses and waiting in line for photos. And I think it was even autographs, which is also kind of a weird thing, but.

[00:36:13] Lauren McCormack: the

[00:36:14] Joe Peters: way it should be. Yeah. I think my work’s done when it comes to Mickey. But anyway, maybe there’s a Star Wars thing that could draw me in, but anyway, that’s for another conversation.

[00:36:24] So thank you everyone for listening. Lauren, thank you for coming on the podcast this week. We really appreciate your insights and you can subscribe, rate, and review whether you like Spotify, YouTube, Apple podcasts, or Google podcasts. We appreciate your patronage and you can also stay connected with us on LinkedIn.

[00:36:50] And we actually have a newsletter that just dropped I think last Thursday or Friday. It’s also called Launch Codes. We sort of take the best. Elements of what we’re [00:37:00] talking out of the talking about on the podcast in the newsletter. So sign up for that as well.

[00:37:05] Lauren McCormack: Take care Thanks for having me

[Episode 3] ChatGPT ‘See, Hear, Speak’

The third episode of our podcast “Launch Codes” is officially live.

This week, Andy Caron joins the show for the first time. Our CEO, Joe Peters, kicks off the episode with a special announcement that Andy is being promoted to President of RP!

They discuss some very exciting AI news, an interesting Gartner report on how (and why) MarTech stack utilization is dropping, answer some great questions from the MO Pros community, and more – including a taste test of Coke’s new AI-created Y3000 flavor!

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

Massive AI Announcements

For this segment, our focus was originally intended to cover OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 announcement and the approaching release of Microsoft’s Copilot feature.

DALL-E 3’s ability to use ChatGPT text prompts to refine the image generation process is a big step forward and has major implications for other AI image generation models like Midjourney. Microsoft’s Co-Pilot, to be officially released this week, also brings a slew of AI features to Windows 11 and Microsoft Office 365.

But seemingly out of nowhere, OpenAI put out another massive headline right before we recorded this episode: “ChatGPT can now hear, see, and speak.” This is major news that became the focus for this segment. These new features, rolled out over the next few weeks, will allow us to have full-blown conversations with ChatGPT – speaking directly to it through the iOS and Android apps. It’ll also view and understand photos and videos that we show it. For example, imagine you are on vacation and you send ChatGPT a picture of a landmark. It’ll identify the landmark and give you information based on the image alone.

Joe iterates how this level of seamless interaction will take our engagements with LLMs to an entirely new level – especially after relying exclusively on text query prompts for so long. Andy also highlights how this is a game-changer from an accessibility standpoint; visually impaired people who couldn’t use the text chat functionality before can now take full advantage of ChatGPT using vocalized prompts and dialogue. Both Joe and Andy agree that it is too early to fully appreciate the potential of this new feature and the mind-blowing implications it has for how we’ll use LLMs going forward.

And if all that wasn’t enough, Spotify also announced a partnership with OpenAI that will allow podcaster’s voices to be emulated and translated into other languages. Not to mention, Amazon announced they will be investing up to $4 Billion into AI startup “Anthropic”.

It seems like every day, a ground-breaking AI development is happening. Joe closes out this segment by emphasizing how all these amazing tools are further enabling us to create higher quality, original content that will stand out from the tsunami of lower level content to come.

Martech Stack Utilization is Falling

Gartner recently surveyed 405 marketing leaders in May and June of this year and found that organization’s martech stack utilization fell from 42% in 2022 to 33% in 2023. And not only is utilization low, but spending is increasing as well.

The Gartner report also included survey responses on what marketers think are the biggest reasons preventing higher utilization:

  • The complexity/sprawl of our current martech ecosystem.
  • Lack of strong customer data foundation to enhance business value of technology.
  • Inflexible governance that inhibits new or innovative business processes.
  • Difficulty identifying and recruiting marketing talent to drive adoption/utilization.

Andy expressed that, given the economic uncertainty of the last few years, organizations have reduced headcount – turning to technology to make up for it. The result has been an increase in spending on technology without the necessary internal knowledge and talent to manage and utilize it. She uses the analogy of this tech being a Ferrari you drive to the grocery store. Joe resonates with this sentiment and takes the analogy further, saying that a lack of clean data will cause further speed bumps and potholes; Andy relates the problem of dirty data to pumping unrefined, crude oil into your car and expecting it to continue running – eventually the engine will fail, just as tech will fail to be effective with poor data input.

Both Joe and Andy empathize with the reasons marketers believe are preventing increased utilization; they are all problems that RP’s clients are facing on a daily basis.

 

MarketingOps.com Community Question

This week’s question from the MO Pros community has two parts:

  1. “What is the best practice for syncing an MQL from Marketo to Salesforce?”
  2. “What is the best practice for alerting Sales that an MQL has been generated in Salesforce?”

Andy offers her extensive experience and expertise in this domain, offering practical insights and advice in her response. One of her points was how she is a major proponent for syncing viable leads into Salesforce as soon as they’re created in Marketo – rather than the older practice of keeping MQLs in Marketo until they have reached a qualified status. This allows you to keep track of campaign engagement, membership, and other data that’s going to be useful not only in having the correct time/date stamp for syncing that data out of Salesforce into an attribution platform, but also to help your salesperson understand the breadth of what that lead has engaged with.

Andy’s response goes much deeper than this, with Joe prompting her with some follow-up questions including:

How does this impact the dynamic and relationship between Marketing and Sales?
What is the best threshold scoring rule you’ve seen for MQLs?
Do you think the concept of the “MQL” is dead?

Tune into the episode for the full response to these great questions, and thanks again to Mike Rizzo and the MO Pros community for providing them.

Hot Takes:

 

Read The Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was created by AI using Descript and has not been edited.

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: All right. Welcome to episode three. I’m your host, Joe Peters on today’s episode. We’re covering new developments in AI and their impact on content, a new Gartner report on declining MarTech stack utilization. We’re going to take a question from the mops community, and then we have a few hot takes for.

[00:00:22] Joe Peters: For us to run through one about some Marketo updates and super intelligent AI. So today I’m joined by my colleague, Andy Caron. We have a pretty special announcement that I’d like to make. It’s going to be a surprise for. For everyone, actually. And today we have a big announcement that Andy is going to be taking a new role with us here at RP as president.

[00:00:52] Joe Peters: So Andy has been leading our consulting practice for many years now, and really is truly a leader, not only in our organization. But our space she is a beacon of insight for everyone who knows her and just a real pleasure to work with. So congratulations, Andy. How about that as an introduction to the podcast?

[00:01:19] Andy Caron: Thank you, Joe. It is a one time introduction. I have to say it’s not, it’s never to be repeated, right? Really podcast today.

[00:01:34] Joe Peters: Well, well, thanks, Andy. And congratulations. And obviously we have more celebrations to come, but it is a really great day for us here at RP. So, not that we can talk about any topic that would be more exciting than that, but of what we have on the agenda today, what are you excited about

[00:01:56] Andy Caron: covering? I mean, I’m always excited about AI developments.

[00:02:01] Andy Caron: I think things are just happening so fast. There’s always new stuff coming up and it’s always surprising to me just to see how quickly that’s happening. I, I, but I have to say just the, the mops nerd in me I’m truly always excited to answer community questions. I think the, the questions that people have and the helping people face the struggles that they’re seeing in their own, you know, instances in their own organizations that always, that’s what.

[00:02:27] Andy Caron: What gets me up in the morning?

[00:02:29] Joe Peters: Awesome. Well we’ll, we’ll have some skill testing questions coming in hot and heavy later on in in the podcast. But I think we can almost say that every single day there’s an exciting new AI announcement. And so we do just for those listening. We kind of do all of our editorial prep going into the end of the week.

[00:02:53] Joe Peters: And then we sort of look at things in the morning and then start recording. But this morning there were new developments that even trumped our AI developments from last week. So you might’ve seen last week that Dolly three is coming to chat GPT. I don’t think the specific date has come up, but the idea that you’re going to be able to text prompt.

[00:03:17] Joe Peters: GPT to generate images is just an incredible leap forward and kind of gives you the old RIP to mid journey in terms of all the messiness that there is in terms of getting image creation there, but not to nerd out too much on that. There’s a little video that they produced about Larry the Hedgehog.

[00:03:39] Joe Peters: We’re going to put it in the notes. Originally, we were going to play it, but there’s too many new things for us to cover. So it gives you a sense of just how elegant and how smooth it is to have this interaction and refinement and generation of images using the Chat, G p t interface with Dolly three.

[00:04:01] Joe Peters: So the, the, the content potential there is incredible. But before we move on to that, and before I un unleash Andy on this topic, just this morning, some major, major announcements from open AI and. The idea now that chat GPT is going to be able to see, hear, and speak. Okay. Like just mind blowing here in terms of the leaps in capabilities.

[00:04:34] Joe Peters: So within the next couple of weeks. You’re going to be able to talk to chat GPT sort of using your, your phone interface, the, the, the app will allow you to do that audio input, but you’re going to be able to upload images. Videos and have interactivity with GPT on the fly. So imagine you’re on a trip to Europe, you take a picture of some building maybe the Eiffel tower and GPT will be able to recognize and tell you something, or imagine you’re at home and take a picture of your fridge.

[00:05:16] Joe Peters: What’s for dinner tonight? What’s in the pantry? It’s endless here. So Andy, like, how do we even think about this?

[00:05:26] Andy Caron: Yeah, I mean, I just heard about this this morning, right? So I think I’m still figuring out how to think about it. And I think that that probably will be the approach I continue to take as I expand.

[00:05:39] Andy Caron: It’s applications where I can use that how it best helps me in my day to day, my work, my home life, et cetera. But I think the reality is that this is probably where we’re going to start to see a little bit of backlash. Honestly, I think people are going to be a little scared of this. They’re going to be reticent to, to dive into it.

[00:05:57] Andy Caron: A large percentage of the population, even people that have already played around with the chat GPT and other, you know, systems, I think that they’re going to kind of, I don’t know about that. Right. So that. Would not surprise me, but I think the, the, the capacity to have a system say back to me, I’m looking for clarification.

[00:06:19] Andy Caron: Is this what you meant? Or is this what you said takes the ability to collaborate? Within the framework to a new level, and it opens it up to populations of people who can’t use the text version, which I think is really cool this idea of people who, you know, are blind and they can type, but but the interaction with the voices is so cool.

[00:06:45] Andy Caron: Those capacities I think are really Awesome. And they’re very exciting for me. And also, I mean, depending on whether or not you want to unleash this for young kids, right, this takes us to a place where they don’t need to be typing yet in order to iterate and have this interaction with AI and start to understand it, which is super cool.

[00:07:06] Joe Peters: Yeah, like a dialogue. I think that’s what I find interesting here. You know, we’re so used to. You know, it’s only been a year, not even a year, actually. And we’ve been prompting and whether, you know, putting our queries in no matter how long they are, but the idea of now being able to have a dialogue for me is just such a whole new world to explore and it’s like, you know, mind blowing in terms of what this is going to be.

[00:07:37] Joe Peters: I don’t think, I don’t, I don’t think we can even fully appreciate what this is going to mean. Not

[00:07:42] Andy Caron: yet. No, I don’t. I don’t think we really have the capacity to fully explore all the applications and things that this opens. It’s going to be

[00:07:51] Joe Peters: fun. I can’t wait. I know there’s going to be those that are going to be a bit reluctant, but I’m definitely going to dive right in headfirst as soon as this is available.

[00:08:03] Joe Peters: And then, you know, if that wasn’t enough, we have Microsoft Copilot coming out tomorrow in terms of their Full integration of chat GPT and their co pilot features within all the Microsoft suite within the windows 11 operating system, this is going to be. An amazing week for, for new developments.

[00:08:28] Joe Peters: Like, and then we just saw as well this morning, Spotify has just announced that with their partnership with open AI, any podcasts now can be translated or will soon be able to be translated into other languages. And you and I, Andy, our German is just going to be spotless in a couple of weeks.

[00:08:55] Andy Caron: Just what I’ve always wanted.

[00:08:58] Joe Peters: Well, I, I think it’ll actually be pretty fun to hear our dialogue going back and forth in German and not fully even understand it. And then you know, I think the, the China, the final. Cherry was was the translation on Spotify, but if we put another few sprinkles in there, another massive announcement with Anthropic and Amazon and a massive billion dollar partnership that they have launched as well.

[00:09:29] Joe Peters: So just every day there seems like there’s something mind blowing that’s coming out and pretty exciting stuff for
us. And when we get to that idea that we talked about last week, and any, you and I have had a chance to talk about this in terms of the pyramid of content and the idea that there’s just going to be so much of this content for us to wade through, and we’re going to need to really try and focus on how do we get that content that’s original and breakthrough, we’re going to have some really fun stuff over the next little while.

[00:10:01] Andy Caron: Absolutely agree.

[00:10:04] Joe Peters: Okay now we’re going to shift gears a little bit into a recent Gartner study that just came out, and this was a study of marketing leaders going back to May, June of this year, and the key finding was that they found that MarTech utilization declined. From 42% in 2022 to 33% in 2023.

[00:10:33] Joe Peters: And, which is kind of shocking because one of the quotes that came outta that study was not only is utilization low, but it’s declining year over year while people are buying more. It’s a big problem when I talk to CMOs. They all know it. They all feel it. And that’s a A A C E O quote coming from the study.

[00:10:57] Joe Peters: Any quick takes on that before we get into some of the

[00:11:00] Andy Caron: findings? Well, I think we’ve been in a year of economic uncertainty. It has definitely led to a lot of organizations reducing headcount, but they still got to get business done. So they’re turning to technology. But the crux of the problem is that they’ve purchased this technology, but not necessarily fully accounted for each tool that they’re onboarding, needing a human or a part of a human’s time to manage, optimize, and run the day to day on it.

[00:11:30] Andy Caron: And so of course, utilization is going to be low, even though they’re buying more tech. So they’re trying to solve problems with technology and then not backing up the problem solving with a human to do it.

[00:11:41] Joe Peters: Yeah. Yeah. And when you dive into more of the data here, it becomes really apparent. So when we, the survey respondents told their main reasons on why utilizations was falling, the top one was the complexity sprawl of the current marketing technology ecosystem at 41% at 40%, a lack of strong customer data foundation to enhance the business value of the technology.

[00:12:09] Joe Peters: Next in a 40 percent as well inflexible governance that inhibits new or innovative business processes. And then the last one here in terms of the highlights at 37 percent difficulty identifying. And recruiting marketing talent to drive, adopt and adoption and utilization. So we’re seeing a lot of things that Andy, you and I, these are near and dear to our heart in terms of some of these challenges we’re seeing.

[00:12:40] Andy Caron: Absolutely. The, the reality is that for over a decade now, CMOs have been spending more on technology than CIOs or CTOs. By a large percentage. And so if the bulk of technology is sitting inside of marketing, but they don’t have the resources either in headcount or internal knowledge and talent to manage them, the full capabilities of these are just going to sit on the shelf.

[00:13:11] Andy Caron: It’s a Ferrari you’re driving to the grocery store. It’s not going to actually perform at the level that you bought it to perform at because you’re not. Driving it anywhere or with a driver capable of pushing it to its limits. It’s going to underperform.

[00:13:28] Joe Peters: And if we take that road driving analogy a little bit further and we kind of look at the road ahead, we know that when you’re not really focused on ensuring your data is in a good place and the focusing on making it sure we talk about dirty data all the time, if, Your, your, your road is only going to be bumpier ahead.

[00:13:55] Joe Peters: You’re going to need to have that data hygiene in place. If you’re going to take advantage of any of the new AI opportunities that are going to be presented to CMOs, you may want to do things you may want to take advantage of some of these LLMs and what they can do for you. But if your data is not in a good place.

[00:14:15] Joe Peters: You can expect some potholes and bumps,

[00:14:18] Andy Caron: Ahead. If I can steal the car analogy, it actually, to me, is almost like you’re pumping unrefined crude oil into
the vehicle and then expecting it to continue running. Right? Of course, the engine’s going to blow.

[00:14:35] Joe Peters: For for those, Andy and I can take analogies forever.

[00:14:41] Joe Peters: It’s literally one of our favorite things to do on calls. So there’s no, no shortage to us building on each other’s stories here, but yeah, like these. These points that are coming out in, in this study are basically our day to day life. I, I feel like our, our clients are feeling this, we’re seeing this and and so there really needs to be some focus and prioritization if these issues are going to be addressed.

[00:15:13] Joe Peters: Okay. And for those wanting to take a deeper dive into this, we’ll put a link to the show notes. Now, moving on to our next segment, and we loved this last week, and that was looking to the Mopros community for a question not that we’re going to be able to stump Andy at all on on any of these Questions, but this is a fun one from marketing ops.

[00:15:49] Joe Peters: com. And thanks to Mike Rizzo and the gang for giving us permission to take a question and address it here on the podcast today. So if diving right into it, here is the question we have this week. What is the best practice for syncing an MQL from Marketo to Salesforce? And then the secondary part to this is what is the best practice to alerting sales that an MQL has been generated in Salesforce?

[00:16:21] Andy Caron: Yeah, I love this question. Or both of them, to be honest, but the first part in particular, because it. Reinforces an older practice of gating MQLs and keeping them in Marketo until they have reached a qualified status. And I am a huge proponent for syncing anything that’s potentially viable. Obviously not the garbage, get rid of it, but sync anything that’s viable when it’s created from Marketo into Salesforce, because this gives you the capacity.

[00:16:51] Andy Caron: to start keeping track of campaign engagement and membership and other data that’s going to be useful not only to have the correct time date stamp and other pieces for syncing that data out of salesforce into let’s say an attribution platform but also for Arming your sales person to understand the timeline of this person’s engagement and the breadth of what they’ve engaged with.

[00:17:14] Andy Caron: If you’re only sinking at MQL, then you won’t have any of that data or the time date stamps will be wrong because they’ll represent when the person was synced to Salesforce and not when those engagements actually happened. So that’s the first piece. If you’re syncing earlier though, how do you alert sales that an MQL has been created or flagged?

[00:17:34] Andy Caron: So typically we do this with a lifecycle status value change to change that person into MQL. I love having a standing report for people that’s a call list that they can work off of first thing in the morning. So this is owner. And then status is MQL. And then any other information in that report, there’ll be useful for them.

[00:17:53] Andy Caron: Obviously you need to have a lead report and then in a contact report as well inside of Salesforce, since you can’t put both in the same report, if you are MQL in contacts, which I think you should, because there’s a lot of meat left on those bones when they’ve been converted. Right. But it is, how does your sales team work and how does your sales leadership want to.

[00:18:15] Andy Caron: Work with you on addressing dispositioning outreach to those. And what is the, the agreement between those? So are you going to be sending them a notification in Slack, which has an integrable point to say, you have a new MQL, go call them. Is it going to be off of a call list? Is it going to be generating a, an open activity for that salesperson to action on inside of the system?

[00:18:40] Andy Caron: I think there’s a lot of different ways to alert. sales, but you can’t just say, this is how we’re going to tell sales or somebody that they need to action. There needs to be collaboration there and an understanding on this is how sales works. This is how they want to hear about this. And also being prepared for if the system breaks, what happens if.

[00:18:58] Andy Caron: Somebody puts in an accidentally scores 100, 000 leads and sales gets inundated. Are they going to be pissed at you that they just got a hundred thousand slack messages? Is that what’s your volume? Right? So there has to be a conversation there on the best practice. The best practice is whatever’s going to get those leads actioned in the most expedited, efficient, and potentially sales driving way.

[00:19:24] Joe Peters: Now, how does this kind of relate when we’re thinking about the sort of positive or negative organizational dynamics between sales

[00:19:34] Andy Caron: and marketing? Yeah, this is a tricky one because organizations. Sometimes, even unmeaningly so, we’ll sort of pit sales and marketing against each other when really you are an extension of each other’s function.

[00:19:46] Andy Caron: Marketing is putting the golf ball on the tee and sales is hitting it and hoping to get a hole in one. That’s what we ultimately want. But if it’s not that collaborative, if there’s conversations around credit, this is sales Sale versus marketing’s sale, you’re working together, you’re a team. And so the data, the processes and the discussions all need to reinforce that synergy rather than the separation of the two.

[00:20:15] Andy Caron: And I find that in organizations where they’re looking at something like a rev ops team that has both under its umbrella or there’s less of the siloed effect happening, that there is a more positive dynamic. But again, you, one step begins, you know, the journey of a thousand, right? If you are taking that step to saying, how do you want us to let you know that there’s somebody that is sales ready, or at least as far as we can tell is sales ready, that begins that positive journey toward a dynamic where you’re not at odds with each other, but you’re actually collaborating.

[00:20:52] Joe Peters: Right, right. And that collaboration is really where. That that’s where the magic happens when it’s, it’s seen as a collaboration and not as an obligation or, or even worse on the adversarial side, but not to, not to really Blow the brains or have a face melting experience for the, the, the, the community member that asks this question, but kind of taking a next level thinking through MQLs, what is the best threshold scoring rule that you’ve seen for MQL?

[00:21:27] Joe Peters: Yes.

[00:21:28] Andy Caron: So. I think that having data points that point to buying behavior should set your threshold. So it’s not necessarily a hard and fast number. Oh, they hit a hundred points. It is more around the combination of are they… the type of client in your ICP that typically buys or that you see the best yield from, and then are they showing buying signals?

[00:21:55] Andy Caron: And the combination of those two things needs to be your threshold for passing people across. And the only way that you’re going to get to that refinement is by creating a feedback loop on what you passed. through as an MQL and what actually then converts and eventually turns in to a sale without doing a data analysis on what passes through.

[00:22:16] Andy Caron: You’ll never refine your threshold, but you have to draw a line in the sand and start with something and then go from there.

[00:22:23] Joe Peters: Cool. And then this is a fun one. And, you know, this is not to be too controversial here, but do you think the concept of the MQL is dead? Yes, I do.

[00:22:41] Joe Peters: Maybe we should have started with that.

[00:22:44] Andy Caron: So in the sense that there are going to be people that marketing is flagging as sales ready. I absolutely don’t think that that’s dead, but I think that we’ve moved into account based marketing, account based buying, and that there is this sort of legacy concept of the MQL that just won’t die, but it needs to, in my opinion.

[00:23:08] Andy Caron: I know that’s probably controversial to say, but the reality is… We need to be able to identify qualified accounts, or if there’s a single individual that’s really hot and heavy all over the content, the website, whatever, definitely to flag those. But the idea of the MQL is to say that somebody is marketing qualified.

[00:23:27] Andy Caron: Right. And the reality is we need to think about the funnel as a whole and take MQL out of the equation. Because if someone comes in because sales bought the lead and then they engage with marketing and then they do something with sales and then they do something with marketing. And then we say that they’re a marketing qualified lead that already puts us in a position to have a negative dynamic between sales and marketing on who owns the lead.

[00:23:51] Andy Caron: There’s an. Ownership inherent to this idea of the MQL, as opposed to following something like a serious decisions, waterfall or revenue model, right? Which looks at a prioritized individual. And it doesn’t matter whether sales prioritize them, they prioritize themselves or marketing prioritize them. They can then go through the same funnel.

[00:24:11] Andy Caron: And then you. Overlay attribution on top of that to understand where engagement interaction impact budgeting optimization should occur to repeat rinse, you know, all those things, right? But it doesn’t mean that marketing created the lead. It just means that their last touch was marketing. And I think The MQL fallacy is the idea of this bottleneck in the funnel that says that it came from marketing and stamps ownership on it and essentially tries to make the funnel do dual duty as attribution.

[00:24:47] Andy Caron: When that’s not really what we should be doing as marketers.

[00:24:50] Joe Peters: Yeah, it’s more dynamic than that and you lose the dynamism by just calling it an MQL. Agree. Okay. Well, that was fun. And I’m sure the the, the question from the community, the, the, the person who asked that got a lot more than they bargained for with that response, but that was, that was amazing.

[00:25:10] Joe Peters: Thank you, Andy. And let’s, before we move into our next segment, we’d just like to thank our friends at Knack for sponsoring today’s episode. Knack is a no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes. And you can use the Knack Inspiration Center to find hundreds of real world email and landing page templates.

[00:25:31] Joe Peters: It’s pretty cool. You can actually go in and browse and see some of the best templates in the world and then use them in your own environment and adapt and use that. I find that absolutely incredible. So empower your team to be more creative and bring campaigns to life faster. Visit knack. com to learn more.

[00:25:54] Joe Peters: That’s k n a k dot com. Okay. So we’re going to move into our hot takes, a segment, and this is Andy’s first time, and we’re going to talk about a couple of changes coming to Marketo and some other fun conversations related to AI. But first, for those of you that listened last week. Matt Tonkin and I explored the idea of the Y3000.

[00:26:24] Joe Peters: That is the AI flavor created drink that is supposed to give you a glimpse of what the year 3000 is going to taste like. So now that may be a good or a bad thing. We don’t know, but Andy has done a little bit of homework coming into today’s episode and got herself a can and it’s going to do a live tasting for us.

[00:26:54] Joe Peters: And describe the year 3000 for all of you.

[00:26:59] Andy Caron: We’ll see how this goes. All right, here we go. Get a good pop on it. So I haven’t tasted it yet. I have no idea what this tastes like. I have to say that the can itself is very. Sort of what I feel like this is going to be in a couple years looking at something like what we thought 30 years in the future to back to the future was going to look like.

[00:27:21] Andy Caron: It’s, it’s, it’s like snazzy, but also I don’t think that the 3000 will look like this. Okay. So here we go.

[00:27:32] Andy Caron: It’s very sweet. It’s not as full as the normal Coke flavor. It’s a little lighter, I guess. There’s sort of a berry forward and I want to say it’s like sort of a bitter vanilla. It’s not unpleasant, but it’s not something I would.

[00:27:52] Joe Peters: We take a sec, a second taste just to make sure

[00:28:00] Andy Caron: it kind of reminds me of. A went to like the drive thru and got watered down vanilla cherry Coke.

[00:28:15] Joe Peters: Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if that is a a huge endorsement of the year 3000 well co

[00:28:22] Andy Caron: created with artificial intelligence. It says so futuristic flavored. I don’t know. Maybe this is what the kids will be drinking in 1000 years. Or

[00:28:30] Joe Peters: maybe it’s what space unicorns drink. And that’s, that’s what we can it

[00:28:35] Andy Caron: is our colors. I will give it that.

[00:28:38] Joe Peters: It’s got some good, good branding. I listen, I think it’s, it’s fun that they’ve jumped in and are trying some things out and if the one thing we can take away from it. If they haven’t nailed the taste, they’ve really nailed the idea of experimentation, which is something that we’ve been preaching for a long time.

[00:28:59] Joe Peters: You gotta, you gotta play around a little bit, see how this is going to work for you and your organization and Coke taking this and saying, Hey, let’s, let’s create a new flavor. And experiment with this a little bit. I think it’s pretty cool use of AI in the really, really early days.

[00:29:17] Andy Caron: Well, I mean, the marketing’s on point when I got to the grocery store, the shelves were mostly full and the spot that this came in a sort of small can 10 pack, there were three boxes of it left.

[00:29:28] Andy Caron: I took the third to last, so it was flying off the shelf. I think it’s fair to say.

[00:29:35] Joe Peters: That’s cool. And unfortunately us north in the great white north we don’t get to have access till tomorrow. So we’ll be hitting the grocery stores.

[00:29:46] Andy Caron: It is quite carbonated. I’ll say that.

[00:29:51] Joe Peters: Amazing. Well, I, that was a real surprise for this weekend.

[00:29:55] Joe Peters: Thanks, Andy, for doing that. A little bit of homework for us yeah, cleanse and giving us

[00:30:05] Joe Peters: giving us the Somali a take of what the year 3000 is going to be anyway, I’m, I’m still pumped and I can’t wait to, to force my family to try it at a dinner tomorrow, hopefully. Okay. So let’s move into our hot takes. Some new releases coming out in September and the two, two that we want to just touch on.

[00:30:33] Joe Peters: And the first is on the interactive webinar event program as it pertains to Marketo. And so. And you do want to talk a little bit about the localization and user access management elements there. Yeah.

[00:30:49] Andy Caron: So the two pieces from the September release that I found most interesting for their big quarterly releases really are following this trend that we saw at summit of this do more with less.

[00:31:00] Andy Caron: And one of those is the updates to the Mercado interactive webinar event program. So this is a new program type. The Marketo has brought to the fore. Pardon me. So Marketo has brought this to the fore to essentially allow people to off board with their existing webinar vendors and to use Marketo as their actual webinar vendor at a certain scale.

[00:31:25] Andy Caron: It’s free. You don’t have to pay more for it. And so that do more with less piece is very present in this. They are adding in September localization for interactive webinars. So this idea that you can either set the desired language or the user who created the event program, if their language is specified, that can be applied is very cool.

[00:31:47] Andy Caron: It’s an automatic application. And then also they’ve added user access management for interactive webinars. So that means that you can give permission to someone to come in and manage the webinar piece without giving them access to the entirety of the system. And that’s great because I know, you know, Marketo isn’t necessarily the, the top of the, like, they’re not the best, the best with access management.

[00:32:15] Andy Caron: And so people sometimes struggle with this on who they even give access to any piece. So having a user that’s specifically set up for this function is, is really powerful.

[00:32:27] Joe Peters: It’s funny to think of this localization element and then Spotify is going to allow us to do our podcast in German in a few weeks.

[00:32:37] Joe Peters: So, but an interesting development and advancement, and I, I do appreciate that more with less element so that the other element that you wanted to. Talk a little bit about was the dynamic chat updates for conversational forms and meeting bookings and smart list targeting. Do you want to? Yeah. So

[00:32:59] Andy Caron: there’s a, there’s a whole slew of updates coming for dynamic chat.

[00:33:04] Andy Caron: And again, this is a functionality that exists. It’s for users of Marketo Engage. If you have Marketo Engage, you have access to dynamic chat, which is huge. It may mean the difference between retaining a headcount or being able to spend that budget on another tool that you really want or need if you’re using chat currently or thinking about using chat and you need to build a use case and a business case for it.

[00:33:28] Andy Caron: They’ve added conversational forms, which is really cool. They are giving you the ability now to customize the meeting booking settings. So when they’re allowing people to book meetings via the chat bot, not just a standard one size fits some approach to that, but actually having that be customized. And then the other one that I really love is this idea of being able to set the dialogue criteria or how these

[00:33:58] Andy Caron: And then I’m going to see the person based on their being in a smart list inside of Marketo. And so that means if I have my top targeted list or other things inside the system where I want to really focus on these, or if I want to give a different chat experience to customers, that I can build smart lists inside of Marketo that allow me to do that natively inside my chat tool.

[00:34:21] Andy Caron: And that’s really cool.

[00:34:24] Joe Peters: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. And then I know you’re pumped about this last one coming to October, regardless of the fact if it’s built on Adobe’s IO runtime

[00:34:34] Andy Caron: platform. So many of us that particularly have gotten into Matrix scoring will likely be somewhat excited to see
that October, a little mini side release outside of the big quarterly release.

[00:34:47] Andy Caron: A note about the compute formula flow step service. So if you have Adobe IO runtime or have acquired it or planning on acquiring it, you can use it or will be able to in smart campaigns to do a formula. So this plus this, this field plus that field, which simply has never been possible. You’ve always had to have a web hook that uses an Excel based formula to do that prior or purchase a service that allows you to do that.

[00:35:14] Andy Caron: This, Takes that out of, out of the play and gives you inside of the Adobe verse, the capacity to do this inside of Marquetta, which is great.

[00:35:24] Joe Peters: Yeah. Well, some fun things coming in October and what we’re seeing now with the quarterly release. So thanks Andy, for running through those with us, our next hot take topic is.

[00:35:37] Joe Peters: One that Andy and I have chatted about a few times now the idea of the super intelligent AI. And so there was a new poll that came out by conducted by you, gov 1100 Americans asked them some questions and 63 percent of those surveyed said regulation should aim to actively prevent AI super intelligence.

[00:36:02] Joe Peters: And so we’re starting to see some skepticism growing, if not fear growing. And Andy, please give us your mission impossible take on, on this one.

[00:36:17] Andy Caron: We have fully substituted the super villain as AI in media. It was around, right? You’ve got the terminators and the matrixes of past eras, I guess at this point, but.

[00:36:31] Andy Caron: It is now, you know, Mission Impossible, Bond, like all of these, we’re seeing A. I. as the supervillain and it is permeating the culture in the same way that we used to automatically cast a Nazi or you know, a terrorist is a supervillain. Now it’s A. I.

[00:36:51] Joe Peters: Yeah, it’s absolutely fascinating, right? The the pulling on the.

[00:36:56] Joe Peters: Fear and the heart the, just the phobias that we have. And, you know, it’s interesting, 63%. And what is their frame of reference for feeling that they’re worried about AI superintelligence is it. Because they saw Mission Impossible this summer,

[00:37:17] Andy Caron: I think it feeds it. I think that the cultural zeitgeist becomes a feedback loop for how we position things in media like villains and films, and they know that there’s a fear there.

[00:37:30] Andy Caron: So they play on the fear. It’s just like a horror movie, except it’s a slightly different.

[00:37:37] Joe Peters: Well, we do love good segues here. So we’re going to segue into our pairings section of the podcast and our musical guest this week is a band called waves and I thought it was fitting because. Andy is making waves in, in our organization and our mops space and they’re a band from San Diego. I, I’ve, I love them and they have some nice.

[00:38:11] Joe Peters: Pink vinyl for us today because, you know, it is slightly on brand for us. And the song that you’ll be hearing is called sinking feeling, which is a segue back to the sentiment that. Americans have now on ai. That record looks surprisingly like Joe. It could be the year 3000 .

[00:38:35] Andy Caron: The, the, the record in the can look like they could have come out of

[00:38:38] Joe Peters: the name

[00:38:40] Joe Peters: Yeah. And the sleeve is kind of like a blue too, so. Waves, waves were ahead of the game, but just a great album and super fun, really great hooks. And if you want to give it a listen, I, I, I highly recommend it. So Andy, we’re going to move over to Andy’s part of pairings, which. And I’ll let you take it away, a new segment for us on Launch Codes.

[00:39:07] Andy Caron: Yes, so I have brought in a book. It is by professor and author Daniel Suskind, and it is called A World Without Work. Have you read it, Joe? I have not. Okay, so it’s fascinating. It focuses on when humans, much like Horses in transportation potentially are no longer needed to do work of any kind and how we continue.

[00:39:37] Andy Caron: Seems

[00:39:37] Joe Peters: like WALL E is come to life

[00:39:39] Andy Caron: here. It is a little bit. It looks at that conundrum of automation and also some of the fallacies around that. So as we’ve automated, we’ve created new different kinds of jobs and work has evolved. There was always the assumption with AI that it would be, it would be used for repeatable tasks and that only jobs that had repeatable tasks would be at risk.

[00:40:02] Andy Caron: But just as we see with, you know, AI can write a kid’s book and give you the… The illustrations now, that’s not necessarily a repeatable task. And this book really dives into what it means for our identities, how tied they are to our careers, our work, and how we sort of future proof ourselves from making ourselves obsolete in the same way that Horses were made obsolete, obsolete you know, over a hundred years ago.

[00:40:34] Joe Peters: it’s fascinating. It’s a super important thinking to be done there. And I know Sam Altman has explored this in the idea of the universal basic income. That’s something we may need to explore.

[00:40:49] Andy Caron: So, fascinating, fascinating book. Highly recommend it.

[00:40:53] Joe Peters: Yeah, well that’s a great one. And we’ll make sure we get the cover for all of you to have a look at and the details in the show notes.

[00:41:01] Joe Peters: Yeah,

[00:41:01] Andy Caron: I highly recommend the Audible version. Cause Daniel actually narrates it himself. So you get to hear it from the author, which I think is always an extra layer of nuance in the content on how they think about it coming through their reading of it.

[00:41:16] Joe Peters: Yeah, I do prefer that as well. Unless they have a slightly irritating voice.

[00:41:21] Andy Caron: Oh no, he’s got a beautiful British voice. It’s, it’s nice.

[00:41:25] Joe Peters: Always sounds more interesting when, when those those Brits do the reading, that’s for sure. Okay. Well, I think we’re close to wrapping this up this week, but thank you, Andy, for being such an amazing guest and for participating this week, congratulations on your promotion.

[00:41:47] Joe Peters: But. Thanks to everyone listening. It’s been fun to put together launch codes this week. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review. And you can find us on Spotify, Utah YouTube, Apple podcasts and Google podcasts, and as always stay connected with us on LinkedIn and by joining our newsletter. You know, coincidentally called launch codes to keep up to speed on things that are happening.

[00:42:15] Joe Peters: And as always, thanks mom for watching and listening. Have a great week, everyone.

[Episode 2] The AI Evolution Model

On our second episode of “Launch Codes,” Matt Tonkin (Sr. Director) returns from illness to join our CEO, Joe Peters, as they have an important conversation on how organizations can adapt to the evolution of AI. Matt and Joe also discuss some interesting topics from their time at INBOUND 2023 together, answer a MOPs community question, and more!

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

The AI Evolution Model

One important thing that Joe’s been obsessed with lately is the “AI evolution model” and what it means for organizations – specifically, how organizations are going to adopt AI, when they’ll adopt AI, and what that adoption will actually look like in practical terms. This model is represented below, where there are two trends: “Benefit to Organizations” and “Risk to Organizations” over time. The “AI Tipping Point” is where the benefits of AI innovations start to outweigh the risk, signaling the right moment for companies to go all-in.

Ai Chat

Imagine you’re a CMO of a large enterprise. When it comes to AI, you might be thinking about several things such as privacy, experimentation, guidelines, or even the general AI literacy of your team. But the next step is to think about preparation: How should you prepare your data as the “AI Tipping Point” gets closer?

This is an important question to consider right now, because with how quickly AI is currently changing and advancing, it’s too early for organizations to make a major call on which LLM to fully invest in. Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Meta’s LLaMA, etc. are all competing viciously with continuous improvements over each other. So in the meantime, companies need to focus on preparing their data so it can be used for training the eventual LLM they choose down the road.

Matt also raises a great point that the conversation around data preparation isn’t exclusive to AI. So many teams get excited about a new CRM or MAP that will magically solve their problems, but it won’t be effective if their data isn’t properly prepared to use it. And this ties back to the longstanding topic of data privacy, dirty data, and other data-related challenges companies continue to face as well.

 

INBOUND 2023: The Future of Content

Matt and Joe discuss a topic that came up several times at INBOUND 2023 a few weeks ago which was: Will AI replace our jobs? And if it does, what does that mean for us? One quote that stood out at the event was “AI will take your job and give you a better one”.

Both agree that AI will certainly take jobs – and this is particularly evident in the media and journalism space already. When it comes to giving people “better jobs”, Matt and Joe interpret this more as the “improvement” of jobs; as AI can automate repetitive tasks and speed up our work so we have more time for creativity and innovation. One of the Jasper representative’s at INBOUND commented on this sentiment as well, asking the audience what they will do with all the freed-up time AI gives back to us.

They also discuss a session on the “Pyramid of Content” model, which essentially illustrates the different levels of content creation quality: low-effort content on the bottom, good content in the middle, and revolutionary content at the top. Joe predicts a surge of low-effort, lazy content through the use of AI, which will further emphasize the importance of ground-breaking, original content. Matt mostly agreed, but believes AI will nearly eliminate the lowest tier and expand the middle tier of content quality.

 

MarketingOps.com Community Question

MarketingOps.com, created by Mike Rizzo, is an amazing community that we are huge fans of. One of the questions from a community member there was: “Do you have any tips on how we can reduce the number of failed syncs”?

Matt answered this question primarily from a Marketo-Salesforce perspective, but it’s a pretty platform-agnostic solution. One standout point was that while there are never going to be zero sync errors, it’s important for Marketo users to pay attention to their notification panel to stay on top of errors before they build up – specifically formalizing who is in charge of this is important. This is quite a deep topic that Matt explores much further in the episode – be sure to take a listen!

 

Hot Takes

 

Read The Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was created by AI using Descript and has not been edited.

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: Welcome to Launch Codes, the podcast about mops, AI, and more. Each week you’re going to hear from experts and they’re going to share their insights, stories, and strategies with you.

[00:00:16] Joe Peters: Welcome to episode two. I’m your host, Joe Peters, and today I have my colleague, Senior Director, Matt Tonkin here. And, uh, Matt, what are you excited about us covering today?

[00:00:29] Matt Tonkin: So I think most for me is talking about HubSpot Inbound, um, and some of the things that went on there. It’s been a little bit, uh, we’re a little bit out from there now.

[00:00:38] Matt Tonkin: Unfortunately, uh, I was sick last week, so I wasn’t able to record with you. Um, so I’ve had some time to sort of digest this and think about this. So I’m pretty excited about that. And then, um, Towards the end, we’re gonna be doing some pairings that you and I have, uh, provided. So I, I’m excited to share that there, but I’ll, I’ll leave the surprise out for that.

[00:00:56] Joe Peters: Awesome. Some of those pairings are not good for your waistline either. , never . Anyway. Okay. So we’re gonna talk about a few things today. Uh, first this AI evolution model that I’m a little bit obsessed with and get, gonna get Matt’s take on things. Um, We’re going to also answer some questions from, uh, the mops community.

[00:01:21] Joe Peters: So a question for Matt to tackle. We’re not putting him on the spot. He’s got a chance. He’s had a chance to review it in advance. And then there are some headlines around AI and marketing, and we’re going to. Cover those at the end in our sort of rapid fire section of the podcast. So let’s get started.

[00:01:43] Joe Peters: One of the things that I’ve been slightly obsessed with is the AI evolution model within organizations. And what I mean by that is how organizations are going to adopt AI and when they’re going to adopt, uh, adopt AI and what that’s going to look like. So. If we really think about it and take it from an organization’s perspective.

[00:02:08] Joe Peters: So imagine I’m a CMO of a large enterprise. I’ve got a lot of things to think about right now in terms of when and what we’re doing with AI. So right now, I might be thinking about things like privacy, um, experimentation, maybe some guidelines and principles. Uh, I might be thinking of. Governance or the general AI literacy of my team, kind of think about those and kind of that experimentation mode, but I think the next preoccupation that I’m a little bit obsessed about is with is the whole area of.

[00:02:52] Joe Peters: Um, preparation and how data needs to be prepared moving into this AI adoption phase, because no one’s making a big call right now that they’re going to go deep into chat GPT or the open AI model, or they’re going to go with Google or they’re going to go with cohair or any of the other providers that are making Splashes right now, but it’s, it’s, what are you doing right now to get prepared?

[00:03:22] Joe Peters: What do you, what do you think about that, Matt?

[00:03:24] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, it’s interesting because that, that’s sort of this topic. That’s not unique to AI, right? We, we keep hearing that like data preparedness, data preparedness. Um, the cliche phrase is garbage in garbage out. And it’s interesting to think like, how does that apply to AI?

[00:03:41] Matt Tonkin: Because I’ve sort of seen this in the past with other tools, where I think a lot of people think, you know, this is just going to solve all your problems. Um, this tool A comes in and, you know, great, we’re going to use this and you see the demo and everything. And the reality when you get it set up is that if you didn’t plan for it and prep for it, it’s not going to work how you expect.

[00:04:03] Matt Tonkin: And I see a lot of similarity, I think, in AI and these tools. I think a lot of people think like it’s going to solve everything off the bat. And. AI probably has a lot more flexibility in being able to counter for some of that dirty data and the junk stuff in there. But I can definitely see like, if, if what you have in your systems that you’re feeding into this tool isn’t useful, it’s not going to be able to give you the results you want.

[00:04:32] Joe Peters: Exactly. And, and We’ve been talking about dirty data

[00:04:36] Matt Tonkin: for years,

[00:04:38] Joe Peters: if not, if not even a decade now, uh, pretty much since, um, marketing operations, uh, started coming into play, we’ve been dealing with data challenges. And so. I really think that for organizations to get their house in order as it pertains to their data, you know, whether that’s cleaning and preprocessing or figuring out your data warehousing play, like, where’s this all going, um, What does that look like for real time, uh, processing or batch processing?

[00:05:14] Joe Peters: Like, how is this all being thought through? So when you’re doing your AI adoption and starting to train your own LLM, let’s say, what are you training it with? And what’s the state of readiness that you have right now in either marketing operations or marketing writ large. If you’re that CMO of a mid market or enterprise organization.

[00:05:39] Matt Tonkin: Definitely. And, and with that dirty data, a huge part of that is always scaling is always, you know, you can have clean data at one size, but how do you get that growth? And with AI, whatever form of growth you’re going to have is exponentially bigger. So it, it just heightens that, that if you can start with something early and get, get that structure in place, you’re, you’re going to be well ahead.

[00:06:04] Joe Peters: Exactly. And, you know, We’ve been dealing with data privacy for a long time and, you know, international standards, whether it’s, um, uh, you know, whether it’s European or North American, uh, standards, uh, how many of those, uh, uh, how many of those, um, preference centers have we set up?

[00:06:29] Matt Tonkin: Exactly right. And there’s so many, so many variations and being able to standardize for global organizations is.

[00:06:38] Matt Tonkin: I mean, it keeps us in business. Yeah, exactly.

[00:06:41] Joe Peters: But you know, whether it’s GDPR and, and we can only expect, and while they probably are lagging out, there are going to be new data privacy standards that are going to come into play. 100%. Uh, Whether it’s pertaining to personal information or to copyright information, there’s gonna be a whole legal switch here, too.

[00:07:06] Joe Peters: So keeping your ear to the ground as a as a CMO is also gonna be important here, but I think that idea of data privacy is probably over indexed right now from reality because it’s always a thing and people don’t want everything trained with. Uh, you know, there are confidential proprietary information, but imagine you’re training your own private LLM, then, you know, you’re not as concerned there, but there’s still going to be challenges and issues you need to think through as it pertains to privacy and what you’re training with.

[00:07:39] Matt Tonkin: Yeah. That’s a good point in that, you know, these are new issues. These are things that companies have already been fighting and battling with, um, internal private information, whether it’s, you know, fear of cybersecurity attacks or things like that. That doesn’t, the core concept doesn’t change. It’s just how, how you’re using the tools and how you’re protecting yourself.

[00:08:01] Matt Tonkin: Right.

[00:08:02] Joe Peters: I, one of the things that I’m kind of slightly obsessed with, and we have a little chart here that there’ll be a few blogs coming out of this over the next little while, is this idea of, if you think of, uh, uh, uh, you know, a simple chart where you have your X access and let’s just pretend your X access is.

[00:08:24] Joe Peters: So change over time, and then your Y access is an increase in AI innovation. And then if you were plotting on that risks and benefits, um, you know, you could imagine that benefits are going to increase over time with increases in innovation, that’s kind of like a pretty easy thing to follow and you would.

[00:08:44] Joe Peters: Presuppose that if we’re going to have the exponential growth in AI innovation that everyone is pretending that risks might start high, but they can’t actually move at that same exponential level for an organization. So when we have that tipping point, where the benefits and the risks cross, and then you’re moving into a.

[00:09:05] Joe Peters: Place where the benefits are really outweighing, um, the, the risks to the organization. That’s going to be that sweet spot. That’s going to be that tipping point for each organization to consider, but to, and, and I think this is like wrapping a bow on this here. If you have your data ready. Then, when you want to take advantage of those benefits, when you see those innovations that are directly going to improve your, your operations or your outcome for your organization, you’re ready to go.

[00:09:40] Matt Tonkin: Do you think that for each organization too, there might be multiple of those same charts that, you know, but for different purposes for, you know, average employees, like the just asking questions into chat GTP? There’s a certain level of risk to that, sure, but it’s much lower than maybe full on implementation of a very large native LLM or something like that.

[00:10:03] Matt Tonkin: So there’s almost like you’re going to have to look at that from so many different perspectives as well. Yeah,

[00:10:10] Joe Peters: but if you think of like something like whether it’s Google’s duet for the Google work space or Microsoft copilot, whenever that comes out and you’re. You know, you’re 1000 person, 2000 person organization, and you’re going to decide to turn on 30, 40, 50 a seat per month, AI integration into your suite, those are going to be, those are going to be the big questions, like, who’s ready, that’s just a training and literacy and people being ready for it that way, that’s not even thinking about, Using it, creating your own LLM or anything like that.

[00:10:50] Joe Peters: Anyway, we can, as Matt knows, we can talk about

[00:10:54] Matt Tonkin: AI forever. Joe can talk about AI literally forever.

[00:10:59] Joe Peters: All right. Let’s just slide into our second segment here on, you know, continuing our train of thought on, on AI. But Matt, what were some of the. Big things that you took away from inbound now that we have you on the podcast.

[00:11:16] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, glad to glad to actually be able to share my thoughts on it a bit later than I expected, but happy to be doing it now. Um, I mean, first and foremost, continuing from what we were talking about before, everyone said just get using AI. Um, so. Obviously, that’s sort of the key thing, but I think, I think one of the things that came up was this concept of will AI replace our jobs and, you know, if, if it does, what’s that going to look like?

[00:11:48] Matt Tonkin: Um, it’s a natural fear for, I think a lot of people, especially creators to think, you know, suddenly, is this machine doing my job better? And that’s, that’s not a new fear, right? That’s been going on for centuries. Um, and. The quote that I think really stood out to me was AI will take your job and give you a better one

[00:12:10] Joe Peters: Yeah, dude, I don’t know about that one.

[00:12:12] Joe Peters: What do you think?

[00:12:12] Matt Tonkin: Well, I know you and I have had a different read on that and I’ve had some time to think about it And I mean, I think the first part AI will take at least will take jobs I don’t know if we can say your job and your job and be so granular with it But I think that’s fair right? AI is going to take jobs And we’re already seeing it

[00:12:32] Joe Peters: in the journalism space, right?

[00:12:34] Joe Peters: So when, when people are like, Oh, AI isn’t taking as many jobs as we thought, well, then talk to some media organizations and people who are working there and see what they think about that.

[00:12:48] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, it’s, it is, it is going to take jobs. So I think the, the part where it’s open for argument is this, is it going to give you a better job or is it at least going to make your job better?

[00:13:00] Matt Tonkin: And, and this idea of how you use a AI to make your job better and not lose out. Um, and one of the, oh, sorry Joe, I think you were going to say. No, you know, like

[00:13:12] Joe Peters: I think, I think the one thing that you’re, you’re, you’re getting at here that I really like is. It can make your job better by doing maybe some of the repetitive things that you don’t like doing or, or some of the heavy lifting things, uh, that we all have to do sometimes.

[00:13:28] Joe Peters: And I think that that’s the case, but remember we heard that other presentation where I think it was a woman from Jasper and it was one of the more profound, um, statements in, in the sessions that I attended, she said, okay, it’s going to free up more time. Yeah. Uh, maybe making your job better because you don’t have to do all these repetitive things, but what are you going to do with your free time?

[00:13:53] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, yeah, that was, that was huge, right? And that’s, that’s so clear. If suddenly a task that used to take you eight hours is suddenly taking you two, you have that six hours to do, to do what? That’s the question, right? That’s the big question is, is it to do more of what you’re just doing? Is it to find a way to make what you’re doing better?

[00:14:16] Matt Tonkin: Um. The way it really tied and resonated with me, um, was when I actually went to the HubSpot booth and saw some of the demos of the new AI, um, you know, generating content on landing pages. And I flashed back to, let’s not date myself too much, but I flashed back to when I was actually essentially a one man marketing team for a small startup.

[00:14:37] Matt Tonkin: You know, I was going to trade shows for them. I was running the HubSpot instance. I was running Google AdWords. Ends. Thinking about getting a campaign out the door, building the emails, building all this content, and that would take me, you know, several days, and it’s a one man team, and it’s like, the end of the week, I’m like, yay, I got this one campaign out the door.

[00:14:57] Matt Tonkin: To think that I could probably have done all that work if I had the HubSpot AI stuff that is coming out now, I could have done that in a couple hours, and then how much more I could have done. How much, you know, I could have done to expand on that. That really took me back. Thinking, okay, I’m not just executing emails anymore.

[00:15:20] Matt Tonkin: What, what’s that same wow moment except in my current role? Um, and that’s something I still need to figure out.

[00:15:27] Joe Peters: I think one of the things that we’re going to see is, and this was kind of easy to predict, is the tsunami of content that we’re going to be, uh, exposed to. So, if it’s easy for everyone to generate it, Say in your HubSpot instance and, uh, your campaign assistant is helping you generate your emails, your landing pages,
and your ads.

[00:15:52] Joe Peters: Well, okay. How are you breaking through? And I think we saw that a really cool, uh, there was a session on the pyramid of content. Do you want to dive into that? I, I love

[00:16:05] Matt Tonkin: that. Yeah, it was a really great visualization for. Both modern current like content structure and what we’re looking at going forward and if you think about it as almost like the um, oh and I’m blanking on but the uh, The hierarchy of needs structure.

[00:16:21] Matt Tonkin: Maslow’s?

[00:16:22] Joe Peters: Maslow’s.

[00:16:23] Matt Tonkin: There we are. Yep, exactly So you can think you can see this like bottom most tier, which is what they defined as lazy content So essentially the stuff that for lack of a better term is kind of junk content. It’s just stuff that’s filler and it’s there and then you have The more executional side and that makes up the bulk of the pyramid, which is, you know, it’s good, good content.

[00:16:46] Matt Tonkin: It’s getting out there. It’s doing what it needs to do, but it’s not, you know, really turning the needle. It’s not some amazing new advancement in terms of how you’re communicating and then that top small percentage of the pyramid is that more revolutionary content that that game changer stuff that really the real thought leaders are producing and that good content.

[00:17:10] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, and and what AI is doing is it’s not suddenly just generating those new ideas and those new thoughts for everyone It’s it’s that supplement and it’s helping Build that out So it’s really going to essentially eliminate that lazy content because suddenly you have no need for that Right, like anyone can create that lazy content using AI So it really expands out that that middle bucket where you know, it’s the the bulk of the content we’re seeing And it expands that exponentially.

[00:17:41] Matt Tonkin: But then you have that top of the pyramid where it’s, okay, what’s this good content that really is driving revolution? Um, and, and that’s, who’s going to benefit the most is the people who can really take that and go with it. So

[00:17:55] Joe Peters: great content isn’t going to go away. It’s going to be critical to breaking through.

[00:18:01] Joe Peters: And that as, uh, for marketers is. the critical insight here, which is, okay, you can join the tsunami or you can be that surfboard on top of it. Okay. And unless you’re thinking that way, uh, it’s going to be pretty hard to break through, but, uh, that’s a, that’s a good segue into our next segment in terms of breaking through.

[00:18:28] Joe Peters: Uh, we have a, a new edition here, which are questions from the community and. We’re gonna put, uh, Mr. Tonkin’s, uh, MOPS knowledge to the test. And, so what we did is… We went into the marketing ops professionals, their slack channel. And, uh, for those of you that aren’t familiar, you should really dive into this, uh, marketing ops.

[00:18:55] Joe Peters: com. It’s great community guys that are really, really, um, dedicated to advancing the community. And so we. We chatted with Mike Rizzo, who’s one of the, um, who’s the founder of the community and asked him if we could take some questions, uh, that are being posed and answer them on the podcast. And he was really excited about that.

[00:19:19] Joe Peters: And so, uh, we’re going to do that today and just one other plug for them because we love them. Mopsapalooza is coming up in November in. Anaheim, it’s going to be a great group of people getting together, pretty much focused on marketing operations. And that’s really different than, you know, what we would have saw say at inbound Matt, or what we even saw at summit in, in March, this is really, really hyper focused for those of us in mops.

[00:19:53] Joe Peters: And, uh, what, what is, are some of the burning issues and challenges that we’re facing? So let’s dive into the question. So we took this one and we’re not going to say who, who, who asked the question, but we will post this back in the community. So they have it. So the question is, do you have any tips on how we can reduce the number of failed sinks?

[00:20:18] Matt Tonkin: Take it away. And I’m gonna, I’m gonna start by saying I’m going to approach this primarily from a Marketo Salesforce perspective and, and from, for context, the original question was sort of relating those two systems. But this is information that’s pretty cross platform agnostic, but I’ll, I’ll focus specifically on that.

[00:20:38] Matt Tonkin: Um, and I think the, the key thing is really figuring out causes first and foremost, um, what Marketo has. Notification platform where you can actually see what’s happening and why look into some of the details on why those things are happening. So generating your list of the whys, first and foremost, that’s key, but, but there are some sort of general, general reasons why we see a lot of failures.

[00:21:05] Matt Tonkin: Um, one might be, um, difference in data structure from Marketo to Salesforce. Um, one of the most common I think I’m seeing is restricted pick list in Salesforce. That are connected to fields in Marketo that are essentially free type. So, you know, random data, and this goes way back to the, uh, dirty data we were talking about before, right?

[00:21:26] Matt Tonkin: Where random information gets in and, and Salesforce says, yeah, this isn’t allowed and breaks the sync. And because maybe that field is required. Whatever the case is, looking at those rules and those validation rules are important. Um, but it gets more complicated than that. You could run into situations where there’s processes happening on the Salesforce side, whether it’s a, um, like a validation process or some sort of data, um, processing, whatever the case is happening.

[00:22:01] Matt Tonkin: And while Salesforce is doing those processes, it tends to lock the object. And then if in that same moment of time, Marketo’s thinking. Or, or doing something with the object, you can have that sync failure again. Sometimes it’s going to be transient. A lot of other times it can be much more serious. And, and you’re losing that data parity across the platforms.

[00:22:24] Joe Peters: And so how common is this, Matt? Like, should people be, uh, uh, shaking in their boots when they see these, these errors? Or what do you see?

[00:22:35] Matt Tonkin: Every instance is going to have errors, probably every day. There’s going to be some errors. You’ll, if you go into your sync logs, you’ll see errors. It’s not about who has it.

[00:22:47] Matt Tonkin: It’s about how detrimental it is to your operations. Um, if it’s, you know, one field not getting written properly and then it’s a transient error and five minutes later it gets updated. Um, the damage that that’s likely to cause is much lower than if you have 100 MQLs that just don’t get pushed across the sales.

[00:23:10] Matt Tonkin: And then they sit there for three weeks before someone says, Hey, what happened here? And your window of being able to, you know, maybe have a good opportunity and have a conversation with a prospect is gone. Um, so how do you

[00:23:23] Joe Peters: stay on top of it then? Like where, where do you go?

[00:23:27] Matt Tonkin: Um, so in Marketo, um, there is the notification panel.

[00:23:31] Matt Tonkin: There’s a little like a bell, um, notification icon on the top, right? 100 percent the most, the least utilized feature in Marketo. And I’m guilty of it too. The number just keeps ticking up and then suddenly it’s like, Oh, 600 notifications that are, so, so check that daily. Um, but I think especially with larger orgs that have a larger marketing operations team, it’s, it’s formalizing who’s in charge of that.

[00:23:56] Matt Tonkin: Because a lot of the time it’s just sort of there and, you know, sometimes we click and see, but if you have someone who’s in charge or multiple people, ideally, who’s in charge of, you know, checking, seeing where there’s errors, seeing if it’s something that’s having an effect, um, that’s sort of the, the key to staying on top of this.

[00:24:17] Matt Tonkin: And this is a, this is a two way thing to where the sales ops team, um, that’s where you see a lot of issues is that mops and sales ops aren’t communicating. So if you have different numbers, but you’re not communicating that, you don’t even realize it and don’t know there’s a problem. So

[00:24:34] Joe Peters: basically improving communications and someone being on top of the bell.

[00:24:40] Matt Tonkin: Right, exactly.

[00:24:43] Joe Peters: All right. Well, I’m sure that will be hot, uh, hot content and a response that the community is going to love. So we’ll be happy to share that there. Thanks, Matt. So just before we move into our hot take section, I just want to. Thank our sponsor Knack. And, uh, they’re the sponsor of today’s episode.

[00:25:05] Joe Peters: And for those of you that aren’t familiar with them, Knack provides email and landing page creation for enterprise marketing teams, uh, and no coding is required. That’s their, that’s their sweet spot there. So allows organizations to get to market about 95 percent faster. with Knack and Matt knows this.

[00:25:25] Joe Peters: Think about a template creation, uh, if you’re coding away and how fast it can be done with Knack. And so learn more by visiting knak. com. That’s knack. com. So let’s move into our final section here, uh, before we, uh, have a little bit of fun. And this is an interesting article. We, we, we’re always combing, uh, the universe for new articles Marketing ops and AI and, um, and we like to discuss those here as well as in our newsletter.

[00:26:03] Joe Peters: For those of you that want to sign up for that also called launch codes. Uh, but here’s the, here’s the headline, uh, B2B should invest in these 10 channels in 2024. So according to 160 plus marketers, which is what are those 10 channels? So started with SEO on top blogging, search ads, website updates, social ads.

[00:26:33] Joe Peters: And then there’s, it sort of goes on from there, but Matt and I both laughed at the SEO and, you know, obviously we. We’ve all invested in marketing, uh, uh, some significant time and effort on SEO historically. But when I see this type of article in this survey of 160 plus marketers, um, what, there are two questions I have one, when was the survey done?

[00:27:04] Joe Peters: Was it like March or February? Uh, because two. Where’s AI coming into this play and how does this affect some of those things? So Matt, what’s what it what’s your

[00:27:16] Matt Tonkin: take? Yeah, I I think I have that same sort of feeling with you It’s like how how valid is this very important time and and before I get into the full take I always want to stress Too is don’t look at these lists for your true like what you’re gonna go to market with right?

[00:27:33] Matt Tonkin: Figure out, use your internal data and your attribution to figure out what’s actually working for you. Probably SEO is important, and, and all these other pieces, but really, you know, dive into your own data first. But, to your point, Joe. Yeah, great. What what’s the new stuff that’s coming out and changing?

[00:27:53] Matt Tonkin: And I think I’ve had this conversation about three times in the last two weeks, which makes me realize that more people are thinking about it. But okay, we have search engine optimization. Over the last few months, I rarely go to Google anymore, unless it’s something in the like, after September 2021, or whatever the chat, gtp cutoff date is, I go and type it in there.

[00:28:16] Matt Tonkin: And I I get feedback there and that’s becoming my new search engine in a lot of ways. Um, so to me, it’s not what’s search engine optimization. It’s what is AI optimization and is that a thing or is it going to be a thing or is it already a thing and I got to figure it out?

[00:28:35] Joe Peters: Yeah, 100 percent it’s going to be a thing.

[00:28:37] Joe Peters: You know, I find it interesting cause there’s all these privacy and copyright conversations going on and I, how everybody’s updating their, uh, robots, text files on their website saying, Hey, uh, we don’t want you crawling our website. Well, what’s that going to do in the future for your AI optimization when your site hasn’t been, um, trained on the next, uh, LLM, like people have got to start thinking

[00:29:06] Matt Tonkin: about that.

[00:29:08] Matt Tonkin: And, and thinking about how, right. There’s not like. At least it doesn’t feel the same as when we’re like, Oh, we got a trick, the Google algorithm into putting us first. Right. It does. I mean, the concept feels like it should be the same, but there’s this big gap that maybe we’re just not there yet in our understanding of how we’re going to.

[00:29:34] Matt Tonkin: You know, how we’re going to set our information that we’re putting into these models out there so that we come out when, when we ask, you know, what’s, what’s the best, uh, RevOps agency, Joe, what are we going to do to make sure that we’re, uh, we’re put out number one, right? Yeah, well,

[00:29:51] Joe Peters: we’re, I did a little bit of questioning to see where we, we stood and we’re definitely happy to be in the top three, which is pretty, pretty cool to see.

[00:30:02] Joe Peters: But, uh, yeah, I think some of the things that are never going to go away is, uh, having high quality content that’s resonating with your audience. The AI optimization is going to take that into account too. So if you’re doing really great things and you’re not doing the mail it in content or that. Trying, trying to get that content that really engages is going to be just important in the future as it is, uh, today’s, but, um, Anyways, it’s funny to see those lists because the world is, is changing fast and
you’ve really got to keep your ear to the ground in terms of what that means for you and your organization.

[00:30:42] Joe Peters: All right, let’s let’s shift gears quickly into what is a pretty funny thing that we saw last week. And that was Coca Cola introducing a new mystery flavor made by AI. Matt, what does the future

[00:31:00] Matt Tonkin: taste like? Um, I, I’m I like this. I actually really do, but like it’s, it’s in a weird way, um, because it, it feels gimmicky and it feels like, you know, the, the company hopping on the trend, which is AI.

[00:31:18] Matt Tonkin: But at the same time, the thing that hops into my mind is, you know, Coca Cola, how much, how many, like, how much resource is put into trying new flavors all the time? And, I can just picture this giant robot being like, Oh, let’s try these three flavors and get feedback from this test group. And then, oh, yep, that was good or not, right?

[00:31:38] Matt Tonkin: Like, that entire process of developing new flavors and, and new, like, foods, like, fast food, um, companies that, you know, put out a hundred new products every five years and two of them make it. Right? I can just see a whole area that’s taken over by AI. Um, in terms of, uh, this Coke, I want to try it. Uh, I’m interested to see, I’m interested to see

[00:32:05] Joe Peters: what it is.

[00:32:05] Joe Peters: We should have a live tasting on the podcast when they come. We’ll have our follow up. Yeah, if you’re in the U. S. It’s available now. If you’re in Canada, I think we have to wait till September 26 to get our

[00:32:17] Matt Tonkin: uh, into the course Hot

[00:32:20] Joe Peters: little hands, but uh, yeah, I I I love that. They’re not shooting for they’re they call it y 3000 which is The year 3000.

[00:32:30] Joe Peters: So I love that they’re shooting big too, not the year 2100 or 2200 year 3000 flavor. That’s that’s pretty

[00:32:38] Matt Tonkin: funny, but does it feel like a miss? They didn’t go Y3K.

[00:32:45] Joe Peters: Yeah, we did invest a lot of resources in Y2K. That’s for sure. Um, all right, well, uh, let’s, let’s move on from there into the final segment of.

[00:32:59] Joe Peters: This week’s, uh, episode of Launch Codes and that’s into our pairing section. So as always, I’m going to, uh, introduce, uh, an album and, uh, you would have heard it at the, at the intro and, um. We’ll have it running in the background as well for you, but I love this album. It’s by a group called Jungle. Uh, they, uh, you know, started in, uh, 2013, uh, in the UK and, uh, they really have, uh, stolen some of the sounds of soul and funk from, um, you know, earlier eras and every album is their masterpiece.

[00:33:44] Joe Peters: Every one of it. When I have it on in the background, people are like, this. This is super cool. What is this? Uh, and it really gets everybody in a sort of good mood uh Party vibe and uh, they just did some cool, uh vinyl on this one with an orange and white one Kind of reminds me a little bit of a pokemon a bit, but I I had it as the orange for um for hub spot Uh last week, but I saved it for matt for this week.

[00:34:14] Joe Peters: So we have uh The album is called Volcano, just like our, just like our podcast, Launch Codes. We’re ready to explode here. Um, and, um, and the track that, that you’re hearing is, uh, Dominoes, which is another kind of fun play in terms of getting everything in line and those, uh, dominoes, um, Uh, cascading into each other and we’re starting to see the little pieces of marketing and AI intersecting now.

[00:34:47] Joe Peters: So that was the thematic link to this week’s episode, but let me turn it over to Matt and he’s going to share, uh, his, uh, part of pairings this week. And, um, and I’m pretty excited about it. All

[00:35:05] Matt Tonkin: right. Yeah. So first thing first for me is that I am. A fan of craft beer. Uh, I also like to brew my own beer. Uh, I, my brother in law and I sort of pretend we’re brewmasters.

[00:35:19] Matt Tonkin: 60 percent of the time you just, you drink it cause you made it and you feel proud of it and occasionally you get one that you’re like, Oh, that’s really good. Um, but for me, the, the beer I’m going to show off, uh, and it’s actually not one I’ve had yet, um, is called Castronaut. Uh, Session Hazy IPA. Uh, it’s from Refined Fool, a brewery out of Sarnia, Ontario.

[00:35:43] Matt Tonkin: So, the reason I chose this particular beer, um, and why it ties in well with what we’ve been talking about is, I was actually, um, getting groceries and I was pushing the cart and my daughter was in the cart. So, I’m walking past the beer aisle in the grocery store and she points out and goes, Daddy, there’s, that’s a beer for you.

[00:36:01] Matt Tonkin: And she’s like, the one with the cat on the label. And, and that was her entire logic was, Oh, there’s a cat on the label. And…

[00:36:09] Joe Peters: So they’re marketing to kids. That’s basically what you’re saying. Yeah, right.

[00:36:14] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, the, uh, yeah. Uh, that, well, that’s a whole other topic we can get into. But the reason it resonated with me when I was preparing for this was, Um, I’ve, I’ve already got someone telling me exactly what I want and what I like.

[00:36:26] Matt Tonkin: So, uh, I don’t necessarily need AI to be telling me. I’ve already… I’ve already got my four year old

[00:36:33]Joe Peters: doing that. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, you’re going to have to crack that baby open and let us know how it tastes, but um, we won’t put you on the spot, uh, to have to do that right now, but okay.

[00:36:45] Joe Peters: Well, I think this moves, uh, to the closing here. So I just want to thank you Matt for coming on the. On the podcast this week. And thanks to everyone who’s listened to this point. Uh, it might, uh, as again, thanks mom for getting to hear. And, uh, so be sure to subscribe, uh, rate and review and stay connected with us on LinkedIn.

[00:37:09] Joe Peters: At a revenue pulse RP and join our newsletter, uh, you know, coincidentally or not coincidentally called launch codes, where you can stay up to date on all the things that we’re talking about, but until next time, keep learning, keep growing and keep being amazing. And we’ll see you soon.

[00:37:28] Matt Tonkin: Great. Thanks.

[Pilot Episode] HubSpot INBOUND ’23 Recap

We are incredibly excited to kick off our brand new “Launch Codes” podcast!

The show will be released on a weekly basis, featuring cutting-edge conversations on the latest in Marketing Ops, AI and more.

It will feature our CEO, Joe Peters, as he’s joined by a rotating cast of:

For our pilot episode, Matt Tonkin was out sick, so our Marketing Manager, Matt Burtney, stepped up to fill in! This episode comes fresh off of HubSpot’s INBOUND 2023, covering a wide array of exciting speakers, surprise sessions, and much more.

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

HubSpot and AI

When Joe saw the opening keynote at INBOUND 2023, it was pretty clear that AI would be the star of the event. HubSpot went on to unveil some astounding AI features and innovations they’ve been working on. One of them was the evolution of ChatSpot, their current AI-enabled bot.

While it’s not a new feature (we first saw it back in March 2023), it has now reached a point where users can train it on a host of information including their blog, content, and even sales information. It can even be embedded straight onto your website and really represent your entire organization – HubSpot has said it can eliminate the need for almost 80% of customer inquiries.

HubSpot also introduced a range of AI assistants and agents to help expedite work within the platform. Joe had a chance to get a demonstration of the Campaign Assistant which quickly creates landing pages, emails and ads with generative AI. It works pretty well but requires some heavy human intervention. It won’t provide the brand control that many organizations will require, but it is 100% a step in the right direction. Campaign Assistant will only get better with time.

Going forward, Joe expects many companies to follow HubSpot’s lead to create a “one-stop” AI integrated CRM – we are now entering the era of what HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah calls the “Smart CRM”.

 

TikTok For Business

Perhaps the biggest surprise at INBOUND 2023 for Joe was the TikTok deep dive session. During this presentation, it was revealed that:

  • There are over 150 million TikTok users in the U.S.
  • They use TikTok for an average of 90 minutes per day.
  • Users open the app an average of 17 times per day.

These are astounding numbers. And Joe goes on to say that a lot of brands and companies might dismiss TikTok as a platform that caters to a much younger audience. But when you’re talking about numbers like 150 million (half the American population), there is certainly a user base or community on there for your brand to connect with. Some of the business features TikTok has established were very impressive as well.

For example: Users now have the ability to integrate a lead gen form within a content piece that is submitted directly into HubSpot upon completion. In terms of service offerings for businesses, this is a massive step forward for TikTok and represents an incredible opportunity for companies to take advantage of.

With that said though, it’s important for brands to cater their content to the TikTok platform expectations. In other words, instead of posting a traditional ad or asset, brands need to approach TikTok with an “entertainment lens” and think about what will truly engage your audience.

 

The $1 Million Pitch Competition

One of the more unique events at INBOUND 2023 was the $1 million pitch competition. Essentially, they had 6 VC’s (including HupSpot’s CMO) set up “Shark Tank” style. There were 6 companies who each had 2 minutes to do a pitch, with some time for the VC’s to ask some quick questions.

Here’s a quick rundown of the companies involved:

Stack Moxie: A testing platform that allows you to test your forms – such as lead gen – to make sure they’re all being executed properly.

NLX: A conversational AI platform with mobile UX support. So if you lose a credit card, for example, you’d have an entire visual interface provided as part of your support experience.

Chatdesk: A social conversation engagement service that uses AI to analyze engagement opportunities that are passed on to human agents who facilitate organic conversation.

ServiceBell: A service that provides live call integration into your website. Leads engaging with a form on your site (for example) may have a live call opportunity appear in real time.

Doola: A service that helps companies start doing business in the US – taking care of all your corporate compliance requirements for an annual fee.

Tavus: An AI video personalization service that will actually create videos of yourself talking based on a script you provide (and a 15 minute audio and video training process/sample upload so it can learn your voice etc).

All of these companies had exciting ideas with a lot of promise, but the two winners turned out to be:

Doola and Tavus!

 

Rapid Fire Questions:

  • Which speaker resonated with you the most?
  • What was the best hook for attracting people to a booth?
  • Did any of the speakers surprise you?
  • What new feature that HubSpot announced will have the biggest impact on Marketing Ops in the next year?
  • What was the most exciting AI feature you heard about at Inbound 2023?
  • What was the most memorable swag?

 

Read The Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was created by AI using Descript and has not been edited.

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: Welcome to Launch Codes, the podcast from Revenue Pulse, also known as RP. It’s a podcast about marketing operations, artificial intelligence, and more. I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Joe Peters, CEO of Revenue Pulse, and each week I’ll sit down with an expert. In the marketing ops space to discuss the latest news, insights, and concepts.

[00:00:26] Joe Peters: So be sure to subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find this podcast. This is our pilot episode. I’d like to introduce you to my colleague, Matt Burtney. He’s joining us today. He’s stepping up for Matt Tonkin and Matt Bertany. Not to confuse. We have too many mats in the organization. Uh, not to confuse things.

[00:00:49] Joe Peters: Matt is our marketing manager and, uh, the wizard behind our production of launch codes. So, um, over to you, Matt. What are we going to cover today?

[00:01:03] Matt Burtney: Thanks, Joe. So on today’s episode, we’ll be covering our trip to Inbound 2023, which is HubSpot’s marketing and sales conference. So the big things that we want to talk about are the new AI releases from HubSpot, TikTok for business, the million dollar pitch competition, the good and bad of Inbound, uh, the takeaways and insights.

[00:01:25] Matt Burtney: And, uh, a few of our hot takes. And, uh, for everyone who’s watching or listening, be sure to stick around for the end, uh, because at the end of our conversation, Joe is going to have a delightful little surprise for us, uh, that you don’t want to miss, and it’ll better explain our time at Inbound.

[00:01:43] Joe Peters: Well, I’m not a hundred percent sure about that, but, um, it will, uh, add a little flavor.

[00:01:49] Joe Peters: You may have heard it at the intro, uh, some of our quality background, uh, music. Before we jump into today’s conversation, I just want to shine a bit of a spotlight on a game changer in the world of email marketing. And that’s our fantastic sponsor, Knack. Knack provides email and landing page creation for enterprise marketing teams in minutes.

[00:02:14] Joe Peters: And the best part is there’s no coding required. So Knack makes it easy for marketers to expand their creativity to create stunning on brand emails and landing pages that customers will love. Learn more by visiting knack. com. That’s K N A K. com. Alright, so back to you, Matt.

[00:02:39] Matt Burtney: Perfect. Well, so there was quite a few things going on at Inbound this year.

[00:02:43] Matt Burtney: I was watching it back here on Twitter, or X as it’s called now. Uh, and one of the things that seemed to really stand out was, the artificial intelligence piece. So Joe, do you want to talk to us a little bit about HubSpot and AI?

[00:02:59] Joe Peters: Yeah, for sure, Matt. Um, sitting in the opening keynote, it was pretty clear that the star of the show was going to be AI.

[00:03:09] Joe Peters: Uh, no doubt about it, actually. And, Uh, when you sort of open up the hood and have a look at what HubSpot is doing, there are some pretty serious investments and innovations related to AI. So, um, in particular, what you can see are the campaign assistants and agents that they’re introducing, um, The chat spot, which is their AI enabled bot and, uh, in highlighting how those integrate into the platform to allow marketers to create, um, content better and to allow customers to access, uh, knowledge bases faster.

[00:03:56] Joe Peters: So, uh, I sat down with. One of the, um, uh, HubSpot, um, uh, gurus at their, at their booth at the show and had a really good look at how the assistants and agents are working right now. So the interesting thing is there is a little bit of a difference between. Uh, with the functionalities and and they’re almost like separate infrastructures.

[00:04:28] Joe Peters: So you you would see chat spot is probably the most sophisticated element when it comes to AI and they’ve are they introduced that I think back in March of this year and it continues to evolve so you can train it on a whole host of information. Uh, not only in your from blog or knowledge based content to sales information so that, um, chat spot, uh, uh, bot, uh, can be embedded on a website and really represent the organization.

[00:05:02] Joe Peters: One of the key things that they said, it can eliminate the need for almost. 80 percent of the inquiries. So that was, that was pretty interesting. And if we flip it over to the other side, uh, and look at the, uh, agents and, um, and assistants, those are a little bit on the lighter side. Um, uh, very easy to use.

[00:05:29] Joe Peters: You could create emails and landing pages, uh, and, uh, full campaigns. Transcribed with, uh, using, uh, GPT to generate content for you, sort of embedded right in the platform. It works pretty well, uh, but it doesn’t allow you sort of the brand controls that you would get from, uh, a Jasper. You’re only going to be able to.

[00:05:52] Joe Peters: Pick thematically what your, um, interest would be. Would you like to be friendly? Would you like to be witty? Would you like to be helpful? Um, like it’s those types of tone controls that you would have. So that was pretty interesting. What does that sound like to you, Matt? Like, are those the types of functionality you wish we had embedded right into our site?

[00:06:14] Matt Burtney: Yeah. So this sounds like it’s instead of having to go to five different places to create it, it’s all coming into the one spot, eh?

[00:06:22] Joe Peters: Yeah. Yeah. There definitely, definitely has that one stop integration, which I think we’re going to see a lot more of. Um, as, uh, as these platforms evolve in their integration with, uh, A.

[00:06:39] Joe Peters: I. Um, and then a kind of a final note on this, uh, Dharmesh Shah, um, the CTO and one of the founders of, of HubSpot, uh, he, he made a post last night talking about, You know, what do we call these CRMs now? Is this an AI CRM or is this a smart CRM? And, uh, that’s a very interesting, uh, way, because even a taxonomy for talking about what we’re doing, um, uh, is, uh, and what is being enabled here within these systems is, is is a pretty interesting, um, challenge today.

[00:07:20] Joe Peters: And so the prevailing wisdom today is that we’re entering into the smart CRM era.

[00:07:27] Matt Burtney: Well, it seems really smart too, because even just the amount of time you spend as like a marketer, just switching tabs to all of these different things that are supposed to be saving me time. It’s. Still spending more time and so to have it all in one spot to know that you’re having good technology behind it, I think it’s genius.

[00:07:52] Joe Peters: Yeah, exactly. All right, well, why don’t we move on to our next topic then?

[00:08:00] Matt Burtney: Yeah, so one of the things that sounded like was a little bit more of a surprise for you when you attended inbound was TikTok for business, so Can you walk me through what we’re working

[00:08:12] Joe Peters: with here? Yeah You know, it’s really interesting Just to see the maturity that’s happening with the platform and TikTok and, uh, my colleague, uh, Matt Tonkin, uh, not to be confused with, uh, Burtney here, um, and I, we had some different experiences.

[00:08:35] Joe Peters: I got to go to a really great, uh, session. Uh, he had a not so good session that he attended to, uh, attended and that, that’s kind of one of the funny things about these conferences. Um, You know, if you’re talking about table stakes or introductions, sometimes, um, the deeper dive sessions, uh, can be pretty interesting.

[00:08:56] Joe Peters: And, and that’s one that I went to, uh, and was just kind of blown away. I, I feel like I should know these things, but I didn’t know these things, but I didn’t know that there were 150 million users of TikTok in the U. S. Um, that’s pretty much half the population and, uh, they’re using the app for 90 minutes a day, uh, which is, uh, pretty incredible on a, for an average, uh, along with 17 opens of the app, which really is kind of mind boggling.

[00:09:31] Joe Peters: And I think, uh, a lot of. Brands and, uh, kind of dismiss TikTok as, you know, a platform for youth or a platform for, you know, a much younger audience. But I think when you’re, you’re talking about numbers like 150 million or half the population, well, that doesn’t really connect to that. So you’re seeing.

[00:09:53] Joe Peters: Really interesting communities form within TikTok and incredible opportunities now for business to connect to these communities. Uh, I think some of the fundamental differences that, uh, you have to see here is that there’s an. entertainment expectation. So, you know, it can’t just be posting, uh, you know, our traditional type of ad or asset within the platform and think you’re going to get away with that or that’s going to resonate.

[00:10:24] Joe Peters: No, you have to kind of think with an entertainment lens, uh, and how you’re going to engage. So, um, I was really, really impressed by some of the business features that they had established, uh, especially as, um, for asset creation and content promotion. I think as well, another thing that was really surprising was looking at something like lead gen and having lead gen forms.

[00:10:57] Joe Peters: Integrated into, uh, a tick tock, um, content piece that is when that is completed is being submitted directly into HubSpot. Now that to me is, you know, kind of taking it to the next level of that kind of integration and real business service being provided. So I think. We’re seeing it, it, it was giving me flashbacks to, I don’t know if it was 2008 or 2009, where the na naysayers were saying that, you know, Facebook and then Instagram, we’re not gonna be places for business or weren’t gonna provide real opportunities.

[00:11:37] Joe Peters: And, and the real, um, The real truth in that is that this is a platform that’s got a humongous audience and there’s a real opportunity to engage within it.

[00:11:51] Matt Burtney: And do you think there’s the same opportunity for B2B, or did they talk about B2B, or is it largely? For B2C

[00:11:58] Joe Peters: companies. Uh, well, that’s where I feel like that lead gen form really provides B2B companies with a, uh, a tremendous opportunity there.

[00:12:09] Joe Peters: Uh, and remember, while, you know, there are going to be certain communities, like I’m, I can only assume the Taylor Swift community would be a giant community within TikTok, uh, and, and that might be millions or hundreds of millions, uh, of. Of members of that type of community. But if you have a community of, I don’t know, 000, that is really connected to what you’re doing.

[00:12:36] Joe Peters: Um, then, then why wouldn’t you kind of explore this as an opportunity? It’s. Especially when you have kind of that opportunity to capture that important lead information for follow up, if someone wants to get more information. So I think it’s, it’s, it’s a time, uh, for, uh, Exploration and an opportunity kind of evaluate and, and think of TikTok as being a real opportunity for, uh, businesses, whether it be B two C or B two B.

[00:13:14] Joe Peters: Um, uh, it kind of won’t really matter. Cool.

[00:13:20] Matt Burtney: All right. Well, thank you for, uh, yeah, bringing us that little surprise from Inbound. And, uh, our next segment we’re going to talk about is the Million Dollar Pitch Competition. So I saw this one quite a bit on, um, on Twitter. Uh, there was a lot of excitement for it.

[00:13:38] Matt Burtney: Uh, so what exactly was it? And, and walk us through the whole, the whole idea.

[00:13:42] Joe Peters: Yeah, this was a real, uh, surprise session for me. I really enjoyed it. Uh, it was entertaining and interesting and they did a really great job of putting together this kind of, I’m going to say kind of shark tank, um, uh, type of process, uh, within a very short period of time.

[00:14:05] Joe Peters: So there were six VCs. Uh, and I’m going to say some of them were VC light. Like there was the, uh, CMO of HubSpot, which I’m not sure he’s a. He’s a VC, uh, you know, uh, in pure function, but, um, they’re, they’re, they’re an interesting element is that both HubSpot and AWS have a venture arms where they kind of, uh, fund different startup opportunities, um, uh, as an organization.

[00:14:39] Joe Peters: So that was news to me. I didn’t, I didn’t know that. And so, but there were some other VCs outside of HubSpot and AWS as well that were in the conversation. And so there were six companies that had two minutes to do a pitch and then there, each of the VCs could ask one quick question. So it was kind of like.

[00:15:00] Joe Peters: Eight to 10 minutes for each, uh, organization. And, um, and it was, it was really entertaining. So let me just kind of run through a few of the companies, uh, so that, uh, and give you a little sense of who they, who they were. So the first was Stack Moxie. Uh, we’re big fans of Stack Moxie. Um, and, um. So she, she did a great job pitching, uh, the company.

[00:15:32] Joe Peters: Uh, and so that was fun to, to see, uh, them in the game. There was this, so for those of you that don’t know, stack Moxi is kind of like a testing platform that allows you to go through and make sure. All of your forms, whether it’s for different lead gen or are all being executed properly. So someone doesn’t have to go in and manually error test to make sure that nothing is being lost.

[00:15:59] Joe Peters: Uh, it’s pretty, pretty incredible, robust platform for doing that. Uh, the second was one called NLX, which was a customer service experience thing. So imagine you call. I don’t know, American Express, and you’ve lost your credit card. There would be a phone interface and a goo, and uh, imagine your phone would transform, and you would actually have a visual interface to your customer support call where you could do certain things at the same time being navigated through that.

[00:16:32] Joe Peters: I, I, I think there are tons of applications for that, and that was really interesting. The third was one called Chat Desk. Uh, and that was social conversation engagement. And so what happens is there’s a listening function with AI that triggers it to be queued for a brand to respond to organic conversations happening.

[00:16:59] Joe Peters: And then there’s an army of human agents that can be mobilized to engage in conversation. So you start sort of starts a natural brand consumer. Engagement in the platform. So kind of really interesting how they set up with AI analyzing opportunities and then humans starting, um, to engage with those opportunities on social platforms.

[00:17:29] Joe Peters: Uh, the next one was a service called Service Bell, and that was live call integration into your site, which is pretty cool. So imagine someone comes to your site. And, uh, they fill out, uh, a lead gen form or they’re on your pricing page and you know a little bit about them and, uh, so imagine it’s connected to HubSpot and then would fire up a video call opportunity right on the site.

[00:18:04] Joe Peters: So instead of a chat spot. Bought or, um, you know, looking at a calendar link and trying to find a time, you could actually speak to someone right away and it routes it within the organization, even to who the deal owner is, if you have some kind of ABM process or existing customer play, uh, there. So pretty cool stuff.

[00:18:24] Joe Peters: Um, but the last two were the ones that, uh, were very impressive. Uh, a company called Dula spelled D O O L A, uh, which is. Sounds a lot like a doula that you would have if you were, um, expecting a child and, uh, it’s kind of had the same concept. It’s like giving birth to your company if you’re trying to have operations in the U S so all the.

[00:18:51] Joe Peters: Legal incorporation, all the compliance things, even banking access, all of these things that are hard for companies outside of the U S to set up that can, uh, you know, cost lots of, uh, of dollars in accounting and legal fees. And they kind of have like a 3, a 300 incorporation fee, and then a 2, 000 a year to do your compliance, um, for IRS and things like that.

[00:19:18] Joe Peters: So really, really cool, uh, service that they’ve. Wrapped into all into one there, and then, uh, the last one was one called Tavis or Tavis. Not really sure. I can’t really remember the exact pronunciation, but it’s spelled T A V U S, and it’s AI video personalization. So we’ve all seen these kind of video pitches that we get from BDRs, where you kind of create a little customized video and send them off to people.

[00:19:48] Joe Peters: Well, imagine. That instead of, um, you having to record 100 or 1000 or 10, 000 of them, you kind of trained an AI, uh, by performing a sort of video and audio test for 15 minutes. And once you’ve trained the AI, you can actually just put your script in and it will know your voice. And move your mouth and make it a real natural conversation while you’re making your pitch and then it’ll green screen in the background.

[00:20:26] Joe Peters: Well, not really green screen, but kind of overlay in the background, a small video window. And then if you’re talking about a company’s website, it can kind of scroll in the background while you’re talking about it. Super cool for creating personalized videos at scale. Uh, the only thing is, I mean, I kind of feel like.

[00:20:46] Joe Peters: I don’t know, Bert, you might think that this might I kind of feel like this is one of those AI innovations that in the beginning will be super cool, but we’re going to be super saturated by this. You know, let’s say a year from now. Yeah, I was just thinking that. Yeah. So, um, all right. Based on my introductions to those concepts and do you know who won or, uh, can I, can I get you to guess who you think would be the winner?

[00:21:18] Matt Burtney: I’m hoping that number four, the people who you can do a video call with them after you filled out the form one, I love the concept.

[00:21:25] Joe Peters: Okay. Well, unfortunately you’re not where the VC money went. And, and so , the winners, they actually made two winners, which was the doula and the TAUs. So the Oh, okay. Giving birth to your company and the ai, uh, video personalization.

[00:21:45] Joe Peters: So, um, really, really cool stuff. And, uh, I think, um, they looked like all of the technologies had promise and. Definite use cases, uh, today.

[00:22:02] Matt Burtney: Oh, that’s cool. And I, I haven’t heard of them doing this before at inbound. Uh, I’m not sure if this is their, their first go at it, but I think it’s a great idea for adding a little bit of excitement to, uh, to the conference.

[00:22:15] Joe Peters: 100%. 100%. It’s going to be really funny to, uh, with, um. Our listeners in the U. S.,

[00:22:23] Joe Peters: you’re going to hear, uh, Matt say A at the end of questions. So, you know, it’s, it’s not going to be hard for you to tell that, um, there is some Canadian influence to this.

[00:22:35] Matt Burtney: Yeah, that was, that was my thought both times I’ve done it.

[00:22:40] Joe Peters: But, you know, that, that, that’s fine. And I also like teasing, uh, Bert because he, um, He can’t help but flush a little bit when I, when I do give him a good, uh, good, uh, little tease every now and then, but, um, yeah, so I, I don’t know, I don’t remember this from last year.

[00:22:59] Joe Peters: Uh, I don’t remember being on the agenda. If it was, I definitely missed it, but this one was really, really quite interesting. And they did a great job of curating some interesting, uh, companies to, to pitch.

[00:23:15] Matt Burtney: Yeah, yeah. There’s quite a diversity in that.

[00:23:18] Joe Peters: Yeah. The also hilarious thing is they were only supposed to have two minutes, but there was really funny to see, like.

[00:23:24] Joe Peters: Them blow through those two minutes and just do longer pitches. Cause what were they going to do? Like just cut them off. Like it was pretty funny. So some of them kind of, some of them stuck right to the two minutes, which obviously they got a little bit penalized by because they didn’t get to do like a five minute pitch, like some of the other ones.

[00:23:43] Joe Peters: So anyway, it’s kind of a funny, uh, funny, uh, little. Uh, loophole that some of them, uh, found and, and went through, but, um, it was really good stuff.

[00:23:56] Matt Burtney: Yeah, When a million dollars is on the line, I guess you’re willing to skirt the rules a little bit.

[00:24:01] Joe Peters: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

[00:24:05] Matt Burtney: So I guess we will, we’ll, uh, transition into our big thoughts on inbound.

[00:24:11] Matt Burtney: So, uh, what was the good and the bad of your time there, your week in Boston?

[00:24:18] Joe Peters: Yeah, having been to, you know, quite a few conferences now in the, uh, since our post COVID, uh, lockup, I have to say, I really love the format of inbound, the way they kind of integrate the trade show into several main stages and, and activity centers so that, um, it’s not like you’re just.

[00:24:43] Joe Peters: Going to the trade show or going to a session. There’s like a real opportunity to, you know, just move around and see things and have conversations at booths. Uh, so I liked that design. Uh, so that was excellent. I thought some of the, some of the sessions were really, really good. Um, the one problem that they had and which was slightly frustrating was, uh, you go in and you book and reserve a seat.

[00:25:16] Joe Peters: Um, I, there was a session that I reserved a seat. I wanted to see Pierce from, uh, from NAC give a session and, uh, I had reserved my seat. I was there 15 minutes before with about 450 other people that couldn’t get into the session. Uh, so. That was a little bit frustrating, um, when you’ve kind of done that and and didn’t get access to, um, to a session.

[00:25:44] Joe Peters: So, yeah, I think they could do a little bit better on that. Um, but, um, yeah, that was that there were some funny sessions like telling you AI is important. It’s time for you to experiment. You know, those those were Those kind of table stakes conversations were a little bit funny because, you know, there was probably, I was in a session, they said, how many people are using chat GPT, there’s probably 1000 people in the room, and every person put their hand up.

[00:26:17] Joe Peters: So why do you give a presentation that says, you know, it’s time to experiment. You know what I mean? So those were some of the, um, some of the cool and slightly, you know, maybe frustrating parts of it, but, um, there were some, there, there was a, a couple of other nuggets that came out. Uh, I was at a one session.

[00:26:45] Joe Peters: Um, that’s a couple of different speakers, but there was a speaker from jasper. ai that there and she was excellent. I’m sorry, I forget her name right now, but she said with all of these AI productivity enhancements, uh, and if you’re freeing up time, well, what are you doing with that time? What are you doing with your free time?

[00:27:08] Joe Peters: And I thought that was a really important question because she said, if you’re just going and doing eat more email, uh, or, you know, what are you going to do with your free time? And I think that that was a really great, um, point in, in, in, in question. Um, and then there was another session that talked about, we’re just going to have, like, Mail it in marketing or me too, or following, you know, following the leader kind of marketing and those are going to have a lot of trouble moving through the volume of content that we’re going to see from a, from a marketing perspective that is supported through AI and really solid original content.

[00:27:56] Joe Peters: It’s going to be so important. So, which is a challenge. How do you create great original content? Well, that means you’re going to have to spend the time and resources and AI isn’t necessarily going to advance that. It’s going to probably give you the kind of follower, follow the lead or mail it in kind of.

[00:28:21] Joe Peters: Content that, um, people won’t really be interested in.

[00:28:26] Matt Burtney: Yeah, especially if, you know, the sound of, of what is coming with Google is that, uh, it’s going to be so much harder to rank in that first position. So creating that high quality content matters so much more and hoping you can find your audience who wants to keep coming back for it.

[00:28:44] Matt Burtney: So it’s definitely something to keep in mind for, uh, people attending either HubSpot or just in marketing in general.

[00:28:51] Joe Peters: Yeah, yeah, 100%, 100%. But, uh, yeah, those are some of the, the takeaways from, um, from my experiences.

[00:29:05] Matt Burtney: And, uh, the one last thing we’re gonna do about Inbound right now is, uh, speed things up a little bit with a rapid fire session.

[00:29:14] Matt Burtney: So, uh, basically the goal here is to, uh, in just a few words, give us, uh, your feedback on a few of the topics that we were curious about. Uh, so first off, which speaker resonated with you the most?

[00:29:27] Joe Peters: Yeah, I, this is an easy one. Dharmesh Shah, uh, the CTO and founder of HubSpot, is just an incredibly, uh, entertaining and, uh, provocative, uh, speaker.

[00:29:45] Joe Peters: Like, I just, I really, I’ve really enjoyed, uh, every time I’ve had the chance to hear him speak, and he never kind of, uh, fails to, um, Uh, uh, fails to impress. Like he, he, he’s, he’s, if you ever have a chance to see him speak, you need to.

[00:30:06] Matt Burtney: I’ll co sign that. So, you know, a couple of times he’s great. Um, what’s the, uh, best hook you saw for attracting people to a booth?

[00:30:16] Joe Peters: Well, our friends at Chili Piper had an amazing booth design. Um, they. They drank their own champagne in the sense that, uh, you could get a free professional headshot done at the conference in their booth. And you had to like sign up for a time slot, like they were doing them every five minutes or something like that.

[00:30:38] Joe Peters: And then after they had the headshot and sent it out to you, they kind of said, Hey, wasn’t that easy? And that’s because it was all being done with the Chili Piper platform. So I thought that was super smart. And a really great way of booth platform integration, like, I give them two thumbs up for that.

[00:31:03] Matt Burtney: Yeah that’s genius. Um, did any of the speakers surprise you this year?

[00:31:11] Joe Peters: I would say I was really blown away by the group from TikTok. They did a great job. And there’s probably five or six different members of the team that kind of did this overarching presentation, and they did a fantastic job. So, I would say it wasn’t just one, it was that, that one really surprised me.

[00:31:33] Matt Burtney: And what new feature that HubSpot announced do you think will have the biggest impact on marketing ops in the next year?

[00:31:40] Joe Peters: Yeah, I think it’s pretty clear that these assistants and agents, like the campaign assistant, uh, is really, really going to provide, I’m going to say companies on the smaller side, you know, uh, with a real opportunity to integrate AI into their work and their campaigns, like generating, uh, um, The content for emails and landing pages like that.

[00:32:17] Joe Peters: It’s definitely worth, uh, keeping, um, track of the innovations that they’re adding and HubSpot seems to have no end to it’s the innovations they introduced in a year. I think they, they showed quickly like this funny screen that just flashed up like 250 things that they integrated last year of new features.

[00:32:37] Joe Peters: So they’re really continuing to advance. Uh, Vance it like, and I’m only joking, but like some of them might have been like, we now allow font sizes to be 12 or 18 like some of them were not super humongous, uh, changes, but, but some of them were quite significant, especially their, their AI integrations.

[00:33:01] Matt Burtney: Yeah. Um, and there might be a little overlap in the next question, but, uh, most exciting AI feature you heard about at Inbound 2023?

[00:33:08] Joe Peters: Uh, I, I would say just what I, uh, just kind of following up on the HubSpot side, which is that, um, The campaign assistants, uh, I think are really going to be, uh, helpful. And if we see this is just the beginning of them and they’re only going to get better from here, that, uh, that’s pretty, that’s pretty great stuff.

[00:33:39] Matt Burtney: And the hardest hitting question, what was the most memorable swag?

[00:33:48] Joe Peters: There was these guys, and maybe we’ll like make a, uh, a social post on this. We’re walking around in these adidas. Blue Adidas, uh, track suits and they had a giant QR code on their back. Like this, and these were tall men, like maybe six, four, six, five. So imagine like a basketball player walking through the

[00:34:16] Joe Peters: You know, convention floor, they have these giant QR codes on their back. Um, so that was, that was, I don’t know. They weren’t handing out those, uh, track suits, but it was something that was pretty memorable. I’m not really like a booth swag, uh, collector. I kind of find that most of the time it collects dust.

[00:34:37] Joe Peters: So I don’t do that, but that was something like that was, I’m going to say swag and action. That was pretty funny.

[00:34:47] Matt Burtney: Yeah, that’s a good way to get some attention. And, uh, we’ll move on to our pairings section. So, uh, Joe, do you want to, do you want to take this one over?

[00:35:00] Joe Peters: Sure. So with each podcast, uh, we want to show a little bit of personality. So Matt Tonkin was supposed to be on and he was supposed to show us his favorite beer of the week, his craft beer of the week, he’s not with us.

[00:35:14] Joe Peters: So we’re not going to put Bert on the spot to have to. Uh, respond, uh, to, to pull something out of his hat. Uh, but, um, as you, as you heard in the intro to this, uh, podcast, uh, a little bit of background music, and so I want to showcase, um, You know, some classic music, every, uh, session. So in every episode that we have.

[00:35:42] Joe Peters: So this week we have the smile, uh, opening things up with a song they have called the smoke amazing album. Had the chance to see them a couple of times over the last. Uh, two summers and they do really great production on their vinyl. Uh, like this is an example. They have some real sweet, uh, yellow vinyl here for you.

[00:36:05] Joe Peters: Uh, but, um, really great sound and great production. And, um, and if you ever get the chance to see them live, well, just for those of you that don’t know, it’s like Tom York. Um, and, uh. Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead. So it’s kind of like a mini Radiohead. Uh, uh, with, uh, this band is, I kind of feel like they were just like bored during the pandemic and just started to record some out, uh, some music together and they came up with that.

[00:36:37] Joe Peters: So, uh, give it a listen and, um, it’s, uh, it’s really just a great album to have in the background while you’re cranking through, uh, Reports or emails or projects that you’re working on.

[00:36:57] Matt Burtney: Awesome. Thank you very much. And, uh, yeah, so I guess we want to thank our audience for joining us on this, on our pilot episode of, uh, Launch Codes.

[00:37:08] Matt Burtney: And, uh, uh, you know, a reminder to everyone to please subscribe and rate and review. Uh, you can stay connected with us on LinkedIn at Revenue Pulse or by joining our newsletter at the link in the footnotes. And, uh, Joe, I’ll pass it off to you for final thoughts.

[00:37:24] Joe Peters: Well, thanks a lot, Bert, for stepping up and coming on to the podcast today.

[00:37:30] Joe Peters: Um, we knew we really wanted to get this out. And, uh, so, uh, thanks for, for being a great, uh, co host today. And, um, really appreciate that. And, um. And thanks to all of
you that listened to this point. It’s probably just my mom at, uh, at, at this point that’s, uh, got through to the end, but thanks a lot for listening.

[00:37:56] Joe Peters: And, you know, we hope that you join us next week too.