E152: Re-imagining Marketing with AI

Joaquin Dominguez: welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing Futures, the podcast for B2B marketers sponsored by AdSact. Today we are tackling a topic that's moving faster than most organizations can keep up with. How AI is reshaping marketing, not just at the surface level, not just content or campaigns, but across the entire go-to-market engine. Because right now, most teams are experimenting with AI in pockets, while a few are starting to rethink how everything connects, from strategy to targeting to execution to cells.

And that's really what we are exploring today. What actually changes when AI is applied end to end, and what still remains fundamentally human. but... Before we get into it, I'd love for each of you to briefly introduce yourselves and share a little bit about your background and current focus.

Dan, would you to start? Give a sentence in yourself. Dan Talbot: Hi everybody, so Dan Talbot, I'm Senior Director of Solution Marketing here at IFS. I've been in the marketing space for about 15 years, predominantly over the last 10, I've been in enterprise software and IFS is a global enterprise software company.

leading sensor team, we are heavily utilizers of AI, so your topic today is very personal to us. Joaquin Dominguez: ⁓ Thank you so much and welcome. welcome. Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: Thank you so much.

Great to be here. So yeah, my name is Bettina and I work as CMO in Super Office, European ⁓ platform with the aim of becoming Europe's most loved CRM. So ⁓ really motivational and ambitious that we're on, on behalf of all of our customers. Been in Super Office for two years on AI topic, we are also using AI heavily, both tools that we use in our work, but also on perspective of how do we ⁓ meet our buyers out there the channels and the tools that they are using to discover what type of CRM they should buy.

Joaquin Dominguez: Interesting. Well, welcome Bettina and Carl, welcome. Carl Carell: Yeah, hi, Kvaken. Nice to meet everyone.

My name is Carl Carell. I am one of four co-founders and Chief Revenue Officer of ⁓ GetAccept. We are the number one AI digital sales room, helping everybody to create personalized deal experiences at scale, helping them to work smarter, close faster, and win more in any type of B2B sales. And I say AI native company ourselves, of course, one big part is internal AI operational efficiency, something, a journey we've been on for like everyone else for the past, I would say two years, very, very heavily.

And I'm very excited to share some of the things that actually worked for GetAccept and some of the things that maybe haven't worked so well when it comes to go to market and AI and so forth. Joaquin Dominguez: Great, thank you so much for those great introductions Let's start with a bit of reality tech because there's a lot of noise around AI when you look under the hood most organizations are still somewhere between experimentation and partial adoption very few have actually connected everything into one system so I'd love to understand where each of you sits today and more importantly where things start to break Dan Talbot: my experience with IFS, a ⁓ bit like Carl, we're an AI first company.

⁓ Our CEO took us that mantra a couple of years ago. So we ⁓ heavily invest in AI. ⁓ And ⁓ from marketing context, pretty much every marketer at IFS been empowered to go and explore and find new AI solutions, particularly with the of how but then in the background to that, we've also been doing a huge amount of how we go and integrate our solutions directly to what you said, rather than having a disconnected environment, something where they're retangible. So I actually like to think that IFS and comparatively to some of our competitors we're talk to, we're quite ahead.

We have a number of solutions which are interconnected. Our attitude to AI is interconnected. And there's so many examples I could give off from use of copilot is incredibly integrated across everything. Our DAM system, AI-orientated, our CRM systems also AI-orientated, and we're able to join a lot of those dominoes connects.

We're still on a journey. There's still more to do because whenever you get a new solution or whenever you're looking at how do you want to make things more efficient, there is always some form of connection. And one of the biggest limitations there is actually is probably not all of the AI tools integrate with our existing tech stack. So we have to consider that when we are selecting solutions because we do want to have an ideal scenario a system of record that connects with everything.

And that's how we're going to continue to become more efficient. But I think from Microsoft, sorry, I'm going to jump from onto you Carl, but it sounds like you're similar in that Germany yourself as well. Carl Carell: Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. mean, for us, it's been a journey as well to kind of go from what you mentioned before Joakim as well, the permission to experiment, to figure out because it's different.

Like I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years. ⁓ been kind of a best practice on how to run a startup, how to scale through seed through A to B, towards to ⁓ scale up. ⁓ When it comes to AI, there is no precedent on what great looks like. You have to figure out great yourself.

And took us a time to kind of find a baseline. Now we're actually on the path where we're not trying to get ⁓ ICs to actually do things or sit in prompts. We're actually trying to get away more from these kind of prompting situations to take away certain and automation to actually automating whole workflows. When you look into marketing, for example, in the way we...

produce content in seven different languages and ensuring that that gets shipped faster. one big key to that that I think that actually is working is how we're controlling a lot of our AI tooling and what kind of data lakes and access they have. So like, for example, Do everybody sit and work from platforms understanding what their critical objectives are for this quarter? What are our performance throughout the quarters?

So when they're sitting creating, for example, marketing campaigns or content, is it pulling from that data lake and those strategical initiatives, critical data that we have available in HubSpot CRM, example, MQL conversions in different regions? So for us, kind of the key has been creating this. this operational AI that actually understands the holistic challenges and opportunities we have as an organization, instead of having people sitting in individual AI tools kind of being dependent on their ability to utilize them.

I said, easier said than done, we're looking a lot into the cloud MCPs, a lot into the data lake and a lot of these things to optimize this. We're also wary about not pulling sensitive information into this. ⁓ we're getting sensitive. I spoke with an investor the other day that said, ⁓ the first thing we saw that some people started query when we gave access to kind of everything and emails is, ⁓ how much do my colleagues earn and how much bonus did they get that year?

So I think it's been, how do we put guardrails into AI to actually produce repeatable outcomes across go-to-market, regardless of who is activating the AI? And I think that is going to be one of the biggest challenges. when you look into kind of just activating a core team to deploying it to 10, to 50, to 100 and 500 people. Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: Yeah, very interesting.

think based on what you're both saying, we're also in the same boat for, past two years now from, starting off where, focus has been on getting the prompts right, but now on how you can, or how you can integrate different data layers, different insights ⁓ and ⁓ combine that with a and that what you get out requires, less, ⁓ less human touch, but At the same time, I think hopefully we can all agree that human touch has become increasingly important. So it's not just about, volume, but also about quality.

But what I'm also seeing, within the team where all of us are using AI on the daily, I think there's this, ⁓ vision on how you want to truly have ⁓ systems across and focusing on. continuing to expand that while at the same time also respecting that people, individuals are also on different levels. supporting those who are still, in the learning phase, while at the same time supporting those who are super advanced. And also another that I think is important is that while we work on this bigger picture is also to focus on, okay, how can we solve this little thing without making it a huge, ⁓ a huge project?

it's kind of a two-folded perspective, which I believe many can relate to as well. Joaquin Dominguez: Yeah, really interesting perspectives. And thing I believe is all the things that you have mentioned are valid with or without AI. example, the example of having a data lake, like a knowledge repository, that's so important in ⁓ company.

think about 10 years ago without AI, like that was, in my opinion, equally important. think now we realize that if you don't have those things, then ⁓ can't press that accelerator that everyone knows that you could have. And I think that's pushing organizations in a good direction. ⁓ would love to hear what breaks when you try to connect strategy targeting campaigns ⁓ ⁓ that human thing that you mentioned, Bettina, that is so important.

What breaks ⁓ you put everything in one system? What breaks? Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: what I think and ⁓ we're seeing is that, the different AI platforms or the AI tools, they, they ship new versions ⁓ every day, every week. then one week it's, it's ChatGPT, the next week it's Cloud, and then, Google comes with something new, which I think for us as users of those tools, it's really important to ⁓ utilize those tools in a way that you at any given time move your operations.

so you don't become completely dependent upon one tool for, history of time because to move it would cost a lot of time and effort and money. So I think we're definitely seeing a rise of how important that is to be agile ⁓ in how you set up your operations. But for us, think also as a company with your strategy, how do you want to show up in the market? How you want to show up with your customers?

becomes increasingly important so you don't have like what you call AI slop everywhere just because you can. So for us in SuperOffice, we're all about relationships with people, with our customers. So making sure that we as people are both very visible but also felt in how we show up digitally is increasingly important. So I don't know how you see that Dan on your side.

Dan Talbot: I mirror a lot of what you just said and certainly your thought processes. I think it's become more important than ever that marketing and your content has to have a point of truth to it and a point of value. It's now too easy for anybody to go onto a chat, GPT, a co-op pilot or a general, whatever it may be and type in a question and your source of content is now where they're first going through and LLMs are pulling that information very, very quickly. So if you've got outdated information or conflicting information, the LLMs can't pull it or they're going to provide the wrong thing.

So for me, because you can do something, just because you can create something doesn't mean that you always should. I think one of the things that certainly from an IFS perspective, but also personally, I think we've taken a step back over the last six to 12 months and we've had a look at what is the existing content and collateral that we've got out there before we're going to go and create new ones. There's no point just creating new stuff because we can. We have to look at how this fits into our strategy.

And ⁓ went on from what you said, where I came How does that tie into our go-to-market? We have a concise go-to-market here at IFS where we don't want to target everybody. We want to target a number of select accounts, and that's because we have solutions designed for those accounts, and we have a point of value that we can deliver to them. So therefore knowing that that's where we ensure and again, on from the AI slot, I see it so often now whereby personally, the things that aren't targeted across social platforms like LinkedIn, it's completely irrelevant that comes to me.

It's very clearly an AI auto message. The ⁓ dash is so pertinent now for people that use ChatGPT and think you can spot it so quickly. Whereas what I think is really good is people that use AI but you can't tell it was created by AI. That's where I think it's really effective.

And then it's the subliminal touches that come behind this. think but rounding out all of this, is this, I think the opportunity for companies and anybody within marketing to pull information ⁓ mirror what you said from Carl from a data log, data link, pull that information from a source, interpret a point of view, you have a clear go to market strategy, you're then aligning that to a clear content strategy. No, we've never had this amount of tools at our disposal to be able to do this as well as we have.

And that should be how everybody's thinking is that. but they're you there, you have them and now go and use them for the right purposes. Don't try and use them for everything. And I think the people that do it try and do too much.

They're the ones that are gonna come unstuck quite quickly. mean, Carl, feel free to add into that contract. think ⁓ an open forum a lot in this space with AI because it is so new and it changes so rapidly. Carl Carell: Yeah, I think you asked what breaks before shocking and I think you're on a really important time.

It's also what's the rules of engagement with AI. think whether it's marketing or pure sales, you still have to focus on great fundamentals. AI is kind of a Pandora's box in the sense that if you apply AI to something that is not really working, we'll just amplify the bad and it has the opportunity to do the same thing with the good. A lot of people that are struggling that we're talking to, we serve 5,000 go-to-market organizations as customers.

A lot of them started looking for AI as a silver bullet to something that's not working. For example, DemandGen, for example, or over the past two to three quarters, everybody's performance marketing has gone over a cliff. Okay, what's the answer? Let's just produce more content and hopefully then helps to solve that or we produce better AI ads, et cetera.

I think you have to still think about, like you said, Dan, what do we believe is going to work in the future? What's the plan? What do we need to cover? another example for us where things tend to break has also been updating and maintaining the way the systems pull data.

So are we doing things with AI based on instructions and what we thought was correct or data from Q4 in 2025 when we've got the new data now already? We're ending April in about a couple of hours, right? Like do we have actual data that can help to guide better decision or better outcomes based on the use case? That's one side of it.

Another is I think when you look at go to market, go to market is rapidly changing and you can't just apply ⁓ AI kind of ⁓ what the traditional way a SaaS company brings demand in ⁓ the ⁓ I think things like brand, for example, is becoming significantly more important. How do you amplify human voice in B2B organizations? Because people don't trust the AI slop. So I think it's going to be much more important with C-level people, founders, the ambassadors of the company actually being out there promoting real voice, real conversations that are not AI avatars or AI produced context ⁓ ⁓ And another example of that is we still see that the conversion when it comes to converting inbound demand is still over the phone.

So we're focusing a lot on enabling our sellers, our inbound or SDRs to actually have the best conversations and getting the best connect rates possible because that is still where we see we're generating the opportunities. That is where we see all the efforts in terms of paid performance marketing. All the content is actually converting to finally to customers. and getting more of those real conversation is our objective, the human side of things and trying to automate everything else.

So ultimately I spoke to another sales leader where hopefully in the future, the only thing that salespeople needs to do is pick up the phone and then they'll have the conversation with the right buyer and we still convert through that medium more or less. Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: Hmm. If I can just add to what you said, Carl, on what's breaking and also to your question then Joachim, is that when you said that many years ago, we would still need the data lakes and still need to integrate data and information, right?

And I think with AI, it's becoming increasingly more important to have good data, to have good records, to keep your house clean that way. And I think it has only... also just shift like previously you would spend maybe years to build these data lakes or to connect and integrate systems. While that takes much shorter time now, you would still need to make sure that what you want to connect and data that you want to flow between systems and the actions you want to be made, that is set up correctly from the get-go.

Or less what the output is just, doesn't matter. So I think that's kind of the shift we're seeing, but the foundation still needs to be really good. That doesn't change. Carl Carell: Yeah, I think in essence, what you're describing between us, the opportunity is greater with a great data later, a great setup of context, but also the risk is as high as well, because if it's not pulling from the right thing, and this is what I meant, it's still about the fundamentals.

If you don't get the fundamentals right, you either break things or you missed opportunity to do something great. And I think it's just the speed of the impact of wrong decisions is as fast. Joaquin Dominguez: What? Carl Carell: as the speed of impact of great decisions when it comes to applications of AI.

you're going to see businesses a much broader gap in operational efficiency because some people will figure it out, but there will still be a small percentage of ⁓ businesses, whereas the other ones will suffer. And ultimately, I think we'll go out of business much, much, much faster. You know, the typical Kodak moment and whatnot that's going to happen in the future. Joaquin Dominguez: Do you guys think that that fundamental thing is customer centricity?

Because I think everyone assumes that the buyer stays the same before AI. And I think that's not what we are seeing. Buyers are changing how they discover, they evaluate shortlist vendors, and AI is starting to sit in the middle of that process. So how is AI changing buyer behavior, in your opinion?

and if it's the fundamental thing that you were saying, Carl, for example Dan Talbot: I I'm gonna go hugely. I don't think there's anybody here on this call or any marketeer can't say that AI hasn't changed their buying behavior. I mean, just a personal story for now, I go to chat GPT when I'm looking to purchase something. And the new washing machine, I'm going to there going, this is what I want.

And I'm coming up with options. And when you're thinking about that on enterprise software solutions, it's a similar perspective. Buyers are going to AI and saying, what's the best solution based on this? And they're gonna get a list of five, 10 solutions.

and that instantly is what they're triggering their thought process. So I think the buyer behavior within AI has made it for them to go and find solutions. But at same respect, it's also made buyers slightly lazier because they're taking the things like the chat GPTs and the CLAUDE and that as gospel. ⁓ saying that and that's number one, so therefore that's the default.

Historically, that sort of information would have been best reserved for independent thought leaders. mean, you people like your Gartners and your IDCs, they would have been the de facto sources of truth. So was like, okay, if a company is in that top right of these magic quadrants, they are the best solutions. They're the ones that I want to go and explore.

It's like the AI is also, to make sense, competing with independent reviews as well. And what I found quite interesting actually is you can go and type in our scenario of enterprise software, for example, what's the best manufacturing ERP solution? that could be hugely different to the likes of the GTs and the Gartners to what is peering in chat GPT and co-pilots because it's just again how they pull information. So if buyer behaviors now drawing more to looking at AI searches as their source of information.

that is also going to change it. And additionally to that is also, think the other part, which is AI has had a huge impact on is quite often or not, people are now bypassing websites. Websites have always traditionally been your shop front window. And that's where you showcase your products, irrespective of what it was you do, that's where you showcase your products.

But now for people, they're going onto the AI searches, they're getting the information they need, and they can quickly go on a contact form. And from there, the conversations open up. It's like they bypass the website. So for from myself from a marketing perspective, your website now has to do a twofold function.

One is gonna still be your shopfront window for that traditional, but two, it's gonna provide enough substance for those AI searches who are, and we've seen that shift. We've seen the amount of leads that are coming in from AI searches is increasing, and it's only going to continue to increase until I think we find a level. But I think it's hugely, in short, it's hugely changed by behavior, and I think it will continue to do so. AI is not slowing down, So I think biobehavior will evolve rapidly with it.

Bettina, please, I mean, you're seeing from CRM solution, but you're probably seeing this very closely yourself. Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: Yes, we definitely are. And I completely agree. think biobehavior changing and has changed super rapidly.

And we are seeing it ourselves in terms of, okay, you from ⁓ not visible in the LLMs at all to now seeing that, that's one of our top sources when it comes to self-reported attribution. That hasn't happened by, ⁓ It's been... a lot of work put into the website, you say, Dan, on content and writing content for the LLMs, but at the same time also for the buyer. A little note, the one thing I'm looking forward to is that, one thing is what a website is for buyer is changing.

You go in there, yes, you want product information, you can get that in the LLM as well, but I also see it as a place where you kind of go to get confirmation on what you have learned to, ⁓ to like, okay, cool. I ⁓ it right. This looks ⁓ from what I saw on ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. And then what I'm also anticipating and expecting is that, you know, when engagement can also happen in LLMs, you can book a meeting with the sales rep ⁓ in office in ChatGPT.

I'm almost surprised that it's not possible already because we see from a B2C perspective, like in LLM, you know, experiences, et cetera. And on the third side or whichever number I'm on right now is that behavior changes, but also user behavior. Being a CRM company ⁓ in how do users expect to interact with the data and with ⁓ the that is in the CRM? The users over time probably expect more conversational ways of...

with the product and that's not just for CRM, I'm sure that goes for many also beyond this room. So I think there's ⁓ changes and for I've said it's both a scary time but also a fantastically exciting time ⁓ to in this space. What about you Carl? Carl Carell: You know, mean, journey is obviously get accept.

⁓ started the software category, digital sales room platforms. We got Gartner to write about it, but it's a little bit over four years ago. That's one of the fastest growing software categories on G2 with 77 plus competitors four years later, where it was only us. our at the time was that kind of the buying journey is broken in terms of how people want to buy versus how organizations choose to sell.

⁓ And there's a big disconnect in that one. I think that the web, like websites to be different. I think they need to provide a much, much more in-depth conversation and be adaptive in a, previously talked about optimistically, and you do some small tweaks based on what type of personas come in. ⁓ I you're going to see much more personalized experience already on websites.

What we built internally and our product that we sell to people is to take that journey to be coherent into an actual conversation with. ⁓ selling and buying committee where actually people are involved. But I also do think that in transactional sales, we're already seeing people experimenting with agent on agent purchasing. I think that traditional B2B transactional will be commoditized further and further and further.

And then when you look at bigger purchases, I IFS and super office are good examples where still humans will kind of guide and build trust. But I think the expectancy on and vendors will be more around on how do you help the project management, their decision, it become less sellers, more project managers in an ever more complex world with more information available. see like our paid marketing is really tough to get back on track. And we don't believe we can really do that as we did half a year, a year ago, but we see the LLM search becoming super important.

So what we're thinking about this, okay, where people find this information, how do LLMs index information? It's not always super clear, but we see, for example, if you go on Reddit today, sponsored posts by tech companies and software vendors insane. I don't believe it because they think they're going to find the conversion on Reddit. It's because Reddit have sold their data to LLMs.

And that is one of the major things that is indexing, you know, what is the best ERP for manufacturing, like you mentioned, for example, what is the best ERP for this? So I think when it comes to kind of the The buyer's expectancy will get more and more. There will be more and more educated. We've said that for 10, 20 years, but it will just be accelerated and you need to meet that.

And I think a basic website or basic standardized experience or standardized content is not good enough. Every content needs to be hyper personalized based on the knowledge that you have on them. It's not just good to say in optimize the, ⁓ these are probably from the food and beverage industry. let's from the case study for food and beverage.

No. You need to write a case study that hopefully tackles the key challenges. Salesforce as a big partner of us as well, a competitor to Super Office to some extent, but I know they're not as big in Scandinavia, but ⁓ have a pretty interesting take on it, which is our sales reps doesn't do discovery. AI is good enough.

We come with statements ⁓ the sales process already there because we don't want to waste our prospects time. ⁓ sitting wasting an hour and a half, two hours on discovery that we already know. We confirm things, we go deeper, faster. I think this is also what buyer wants.

They want to be project led. They don't want to share information that you should know. And I think that gap is something that a lot of companies are struggling with. They're still running the traditional MEDPIC If you're band set up and you're doing the Spanish Inquisition, not great experience.

I think... A lot of companies have to rethink what the sales methodology and handover for marketing look like. What's the expectancy from the buyer on how much you know about them. Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: And I think you're pointing to something really, really important, Carl, with these buyer behaviors, because I think it just puts a higher expectation to truly know buyer.

What is it that they want to solve? What are their pains? And it needs to be super detailed because now you can do it. You have the capacity.

And when you truly know, then the AI on top, can truly increase speed market, right? But with more precision than what you could do, half a year ago, even, ⁓ it moves really fast. Carl Carell: Yeah. And I think the challenge that you'll have is that have a role internally called AIOps that supports the entire organization, not just the go-to-market teams, the traditional kind rev ops role, the statement that we had when we kind of concluded all of our AI efforts in December last year was that it blew our off last summer, already feel antiquated in December.

⁓ It's just the speed you to innovate and change things. So you can't really If you stand and think, we built something great, we're super AI native in marketing or whatever, that is probably going to be antiquated already by this summer. So how would you build an operating system to continuously renew how this is working? Right.

And I think that this is kind of the challenge people would be continuously trying to catch up as the capacity of LLMs and opportunities and software is exponentially increasing. And you have to kind of follow that curve again, otherwise you have that steep drop off between. Dan Talbot: you Carl Carell: great organizations and the ones who are ultimately going to die. Dan Talbot: And if we could just add on to what you said, Carl, I see myself and the two of may have also seen this.

No longer are people planning 12 month calendar views. It's being done on a quarter by quarter basis. The need for creating reactivity based on prolonged planning, it's becoming rife because what's happening today is gonna change tomorrow. And if you're working to these elongated planning processes and you're going to a very strict 12 months.

you're going to shoot yourself in the foot because the markets and the models are just changing so quickly. Joaquin Dominguez: I want to take one step further and talk about differentiation in the AI world, because imagine, I know that all the things that you have mentioned are hard to achieve. It requires a lot of effort to on, ⁓ appear on LLMs, but in one or two years time, probably will be a tool or something that you press a button and the AI will do everything for you and you will be present on LLMs that world, I'm not saying that will be true but how you compete in that world?

what actually creates ⁓ an what creates differentiation? Carl Carell: I'm happy to start, but I think this is where the brand comes in. I think it's that important to having brand and having a voice that is tied to individuals. think that if you look at the companies that I look up to, brands that I look up to ⁓ general, I'll take, we have an orange logo, ⁓ part because we looked up to HubSpot and what they did with inbound marketing.

They created a new software category. That's what we ⁓ out to do 10 years ago. took us six years to get there. ⁓ ⁓ But they have founders that are very present on LinkedIn together with their buying, you know, their personas, et cetera.

So I think that your brand, the people behind the brand and the voice before you could say, ⁓ you're an enterprise company. So it's enough that you say you're in the magic quadrant and you're on Gartner and whatnot. And that's enough to drive demand at conferences and inbound so forth. ⁓ don't think that's enough.

Joaquin Dominguez: Carl, how do you manage that dichotomy? Because earlier you mentioned that is really hard to get to the point that paid media was a couple of years ago. ⁓ today, LLMs are maybe covering ⁓ paid used to do in the past. So ⁓ as CRO, I guess that's like a complicated thing because ⁓ you see that the revenue is coming maybe from LLMs.

Should you stop? spending on paid media and building a brand, apart from all the job that you need to do as a human, as a person to be that integrity that you need to build trust. Carl Carell: Yeah, think Dan said it before. think it's about how often do you look at your metrics and change them and cut the spend that is not working.

If you take paid, for example, we're doing so much changes to our paid every single it feels like, because it's changing so fast. We the same budget, so we reallocate it, for example, to optimize for LLM search some of that that hasn't worked. And ⁓ we out some different things, but when it comes, I still feel that the brand piece... ⁓ is becoming more important.

If you think about kind of the super rockets of startups, the lovable, the Claude, etc. Claude is a little bit different. But if you take a few of these, Legora is another legal tech. latest campaign is not a lot of information about what they do is Jude Law who says law is suddenly cool, right?

I think they're building a brand and a recognition. Okay, I want some legal tech. I'll turn to Legora. I don't really know what they do.

⁓ ⁓ where I'm turning. I think that kind of marketing will become more more important for companies to do to associate a category with a brand name. It's always been around, but I think more and more traffic will come that way. More and more business will go to the ones that you immediately associate with it.

If you take the magic quadrant, you have the top two, three, get the top one gets 50 % and then it's spread on the ones below. But I think now it's almost going to be from a word of mouth. perspective is that, ⁓ which are the top three I think about when I think about legal tech. Okay, there's Legora as a good example, then which ones are the one?

And I think it's going to be the same for every category. And I think if you're in B2B, LinkedIn will continue to be extremely important, not as a sense of converting actual inbounds into MQLs, but ⁓ think as a way of impacting them. when they're in a buying cycle where you become relevant, they have seen seven people, they have a connection to those people. ⁓ Producing valuable content not AI slope actually sharing stuff that they care about all those things becomes and we see LinkedIn Not just in the early stages to create top of the funnel But we have a strategy of how we engage critical stakeholder and buying committee for us is sometime 12 14 15 people How do we enable our organization of a hundred and forty people to engage with as many with every single?

Opportunity that we have through our pipeline in any given quarter that efforts has really paid dividends when it comes to win rates. went from 1st of October until ⁓ of April, we increased our win rates with blended 53 % because of the efforts around LinkedIn and stakeholder engagement. Of course, there were other things coming into that, but ⁓ think that's just an example of how important it is to be perceived as a personable, trustworthy partner when they're making a big decision to spend the big bucks.

Dan Talbot: I also want to add to that, because I think brand is hugely Very fortunate is IFS's brand team, they're incredible bunch of people. We've been doing a huge amount with a lot related to our brand as well. And this is investing in things we may not have done before. One thing that people don't know is we're now currently the sponsors Chelsea Football Club.

So you see our logo on the shirt, something that IFS has never done before. But it's also things like airport advertising. A lot of buyers and customers, they want to see the logos of the people that they're buying from in visible places, because it instills confidence fundamentally in the back there. But I also think there's an element of human nature and human touch to this.

We go back a number of years ago when certainly was email and email marketing was such a big boom. Direct mail fell off a cliff and actually the companies that continue to invest in good DM saw good returns from this. I think it's going to be a similar perspective of what's happening today. Companies are going to invest heavily in AI search.

They're going to heavily invest in paid media and doing multiple versions of ads. But the companies that continue to keep their original tone of voice, continue to sometimes go against the curve and keep with some of the traditional metrics and not lose touch of that. They're the ones which are going to continue to showcase because they're not putting all of their eggs in one basket. And I think there's so many scenarios whereby companies are pivoting to the AI thing because it's the big shiny penny at the moment.

That's the one way people are investing in. It's one where investment companies and board members, they want to see what you're doing. So there's a lot of people that keep track with it because they think it's the needs of it. But I think you've got to have a narrative and you've got to be able to justify your return.

I certainly I get this heavily from our own CMO, which is like, Dan, every dollar you spend, how has it been spent? Give me the reason. Sometimes I can't give a tangible reason why I want to go and spend something on a paid ad. So I don't necessarily know the outcome, but I know I need to do it.

And I know I need to do it because of X. And so sometimes you need to be able to justify that narrative and the setting tools that can help you do that. But I think brand originality is hugely, hugely important. It's one of the differentiators.

think, Makin, the other thing that I think I just want to add on to your question around in the sea of AI at the moment, what's going to be a differentiation point is actually the people doing it and people that are willing to learn. I've seen this with myself and we're currently hiring people. I've seen younger team members come in fresh out of university. They are coming with such great ideas because they Joaquin Dominguez: Hmm.

Dan Talbot: embracing the AI tools and as a result of that it's a fresh spark of energy and I think investment in talent at the moment is a huge piece as to what's going to be a differentiator because you want that talent that one is hugely supportive of these tools but two is they are the ones that are willing to work out what does and doesn't work they're going to push them to the limits and ultimately they're going to want to want to be able to get the results so I think talent is a huge perspective and thirdly I think the other thing which is going to be a big differentiation for every in the marketing space is how are you using AI personally?

So talking about it from my own context, I have five personal AI agents that I built within Co-Pilot. And some of those are my work and my performance engine. One's my executive administrator. I use them from the perspective of how can I become more efficient and more productive?

I did work with a mentor previously. He challenged me a lot related to AI, was specifically, if you do a task more than three times, how can AI simplify the at a task and speed it up. And I think for me, that's the other differentiation. We've spoken a lot around things like content.

We've spoken lot around stuff about brand, but actually process, speeding up and making process more efficient. That's also a differentiation. That stuff that happens in the backend, pulling information from your data, it's pulling information from live opportunities, pulling information from closed opportunities. All of that is a huge wealth of information.

And if you can do that. really, really well, you're gonna build ⁓ a fundamentally impressive marketing machine that's gonna deliver differentiation, personalization, and a human touch. Bettina Isabelle Berntsen: And, I think, with AI and the AI tools, ⁓ we see, ⁓ how fast or how much faster you can execute on things, right? But it doesn't change who do you need to reach and how are you going to, and the level trust, or how much trust means in that perspective.

⁓ If we think about the B2B LinkedIn Institute, when they published their ⁓ brand awareness report a few years ago, when the famous 95/5 rule came, stating that only 5 % of your ICP is in market to buy today. So meaning you need to build mental availability for the 95%, which was sort of like a hallelujah moment for many marketers who kind of had known this for all time, but got really, really good proof backing the arguments. And then when you add AI on top, it kind of levels out the field in terms of what you're able to do with the tools and the speed and the precision.

But at the same time, think true to your tone of voice, ⁓ your positioning, what type of areas are you going to own or what type of topics are you going to own as a company and stay CONSISTENT, Because I believe that trust will continue to climb on the ladder of importance when you buy from a vendor. And then when the playing field is a little bit more leveled out when it comes to or with the AI tools, think then a big differentiator will be how you up and ⁓ who you up with ⁓ and continuing build that authenticity.

If that is also how you want to differentiate, some companies, have made some very conscious choices that we are ⁓ AI only also our GTM, also how we want to be perceived because maybe those who buy from us are also agents. That perspective is also really, really important to take into account from a strategic point of view. Because if I think, you know, for super offices part, we sell CRM European businesses and we focus a lot on those who have been in business for quite some time.

They have ⁓ a of customers ⁓ and have had successful growth, but they want to continue growing. And they see that where we are today, ⁓ ⁓ it's not cutting it, the Excel sheets or, the folders or whatever. And then we need to be, where they are. ⁓ And that is our own research.

It's not, picturing and AI only with avatars, ⁓ meeting them. So I think that's also something to be truly conscious about. Joaquin Dominguez: Exactly. I think that's so true because I think there is ⁓ a thread through ⁓ all this that AI can everything but it doesn't decide who you should be targeting or why someone should trust you ⁓ and I think ⁓ we should forget ⁓ well you all for joining this been a great great conversation ⁓ and for all the ones listening Please don't forget to follow B2B Marketing Futures on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube.

Thank you so much. Until next time.