Best of LinkedIn: AI in B2B Marketing CW 23/ 24

This episode is provided by Thomas Allgeier and Frennis, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about AI in B-to-B marketing in calendar weeks twenty three and twenty four. Frenis is a b to be market research company that supports enterprise marketing teams in unlocking the full potential of their customer data with the help of AI. you can find more info And welcome to the deep dive, everyone. Yes!

Welcome. we're so glad you are here today. or on a pretty specific mission We are analyzing The absolute top AI in B-to-B marketing trends that have just exploded across LinkedIn over the past two weeks. Right and were cutting through the hype.

Were looking at what is actually working out there and honestly What's completely breaking Exactly To make this easy to follow We've clustered all these insights into three main themes for You. First, we'll look at AI visibility and search. Basically how you even get found by AI which is harder than it sounds right now. Oh!

It really is. then our second theme is agentic GTM and sales automation Which is all about scaling your outreach without completely alienating Your buyers. And Then We'll wrap up with Our third Theme Ai Readiness Customer Experience What We're Calling the Human Edge Because You Really have to redesign your whole operating model for this. Yeah its a lot.

So Let's Just Jump Right Into That first Theme AI visibility. Because look, before you can sell anything to a buyer they have to actually find you right? Right and the way that finds you has fundamentally changed. It really does!

Being number one on Google used be the ultimate finish line But now buyers are having conversations with chat GPT or Gemini or Perplexity. Exactly The blue links are kind of disappearing. Yeah And if your strategy is just standard SEO You might totally invisible. Saharsh Agarwal actually had this massive ah-ha moment about this recently.

Oh right, I saw his post. it was a harsh reality check. It really was. His team was ranking number one on Google for all their target terms.

Their SEO dashboards were all green But then they actually tested by asking ChatGPT the exact queries that buyers use. Let me guess They weren't there at all. Completely invisible Competitors with like half of content we're getting cited instead just because of how their content was structured. Wow, that's rough!

It is it? well...it's like being the absolute best restaurant in town but The Hotel Concierge which is the AI doesn't even know. you exist to recommend perfect analogy.

But it begs the question, right? If our optimized websites aren't what the AI is looking at where's actually getting these answers from. so submit ended some really fascinating research on this. he tracked were the citations we're coming from and you found that I almost never sites company website.

wait Never! Almost never. It pulls its answers heavily from places like Reddit or G-II, or listicles That's... I mean why would it prioritize a random reddit thread over an official company page?

Because recency and plain words just win. AI models are trained to mimic natural language So a reddit threat where people are naturally debating a tool is incredibly rich for the AI. It skips over that polished jargon heavy marketing copy. Ah okay so wants real answer not marketing stuff.

I know Sinomo Basser has been testing this aggressively. He actually built twelve specialized, clawed AI agents just to optimize his content for AI search. Twelve agents? That's a lie!

Yeah, twelve - he has them covering completely new concepts like intent mapping and answer optimization... he basically proved that traditional SEO tools are just ignoring the new conversational layer. Right but you also need the right strategy behind those tools. Carlos Silva shared a brilliant insight about focusing on category entry points or CEPs.

Oh, I've heard of those. What does that actually look like in practice? Well instead of writing article for generic keyword you write For the specific situation The buyer is in Like Carlos's team literally titled an Article AI keeps citing other sites Instead of mine. oh That smart You're matching the exact prompt.

A frustrated marketer would type into JetGPT Precisely! You target the Situation not the Keyword. And he noted that because of this strategy, his content is still getting continually cited by AI engines months later. That is so cool.

And you can see the whole market reacting to this shift, I mean Adobe just launched an entire brand visibility suite. Jasper has their GEO agent now. Yeah The big platforms know that if the AI doesn't recommend you You aren't making a short list Exactly! Okay So let's follow the journey here...

The AI finally recommends you..the buyer has intent. Now how does your sales team engage? This brings us to theme two Agentic GTM and Sales Automation.

We are seeing an absolute explosion of AI, SDRs and multi-agent stacks. Yeah let's start with the extreme successes. Luna Chen built a six agent system that detect real time buying signals on LinkedIn. How does that actually work?

It scores the signals from zero to one hundred based on intent, and then automates the outreach. She's getting like twenty-five to thirty booked calls a week with this setup? That is a massive amount of volume! Right...

And Dima Billis took it even further. he completely replaced his SDR team with a seven agent GTM stat. Replace the whole team. Yeah He has an AI signal hunter An email finder A tier sorter Its'a whole automated machine.

We really need to talk about the backlash because there is a very dark side of this trend. Oh, spam my inboxes in nightmare. right now it's and It's hitting voice calls too. Attica Abdullah shared his awful experience of getting a call from an AI SDR.

He said those as robotic two-second latency And he just completely failed to match his human energy. that sounds so incredibly awkward was. I couldn't handle any deviation from the script And the market is pushing back hard. Noah Sturm shared a stat that AISDR startups are seeing fifty to seventy percent churn rates right now.

Wait, seventy percent? That means people are buying it realizing its hurting their brand and just ripping it right out! Exactly. Noah pointed out that ninety-five percent of cold outbound is already ignored by buyers.

so using AI to send ten times more you're creating volume slop. Yeah, Jonathan MK brought this up on LinkedIn too. He asked are we just giving a megaphone to someone who doesn't know what to say? That is the perfect way to phrase it!

Right like if you multiply a fundamentally broken GTM motion with AI You don't magically get pipeline...you just get faster broken GTM motion. Exactly The problem isn't volume It's context. Henry Shuck, CEO of Zoom Info actually argued that the AI models themselves aren't the bottleneck anymore.

Really?! What is the bottleneck then? Entity resolution. Yeah, it's the context.

Basically knowing which Cisco in your messy CRM database Is the actual enterprise account you want to target. Oh I see because a human rep can look at five duplicate records and just know Which one is real right. But an AI doesn't have that intuition. So if your data is bad, the AI just guesses and then you end up automating emails to a plumber instead of a global tech VP.

Ouch! Yeah That's exactly how you alienate buyers. so How do you fix THAT? Well Lindsay Rothesberger had A great take on this.

She says winning teams need a hybrid approach. You Need centralized agents run by revops To handle The Data Hygiene And the rules. Okay so Secure the foundation first Right, and then you have distributed skills. You empower the individual human reps to build their own automations on top of that safe foundation.

Oh like Johnny Barrett at Stripe He's an account executive who built his own agents To solve his specific workflow bottlenecks. he reported a five x productivity boost from doing That. Exactly! You give The Human the superpower?

Which is the perfect transition to our final theme. Redesigning the operating model, customer experience and human edge. This is a big structural shift And honestly A lot of leaders are struggling with it. Yeah I know we were looking at some insights from the recent Forrester CX summit in Amsterdam about this.

Right! Anika Kroll shared wild data From the big consulting firms. Sixty-five percent of CMOs expect AI To completely disrupt their role. Okay so they now its coming.

They do. But then she noted that only six percent of European marketing organizations have actually advanced their GNI maturity. Wait, so sixty-five percent know it's a disruption but only six per cent are actually doing anything about it? Exactly there is this huge gap!

Her takeaway was leaders need to stop just measuring tool adoption like how many licenses they bought and start measuring actual workflow redesign. That perfectly matches what Elden Thomas was arguing at that Forrester event. He told CX leaders they need to stop advising and start operating. I love that, What was his main point there?

he basically said cx leaders need to own the agentic infrastructure layer. They need to carry a revenue number instead of just running. you know journey mapping workshops all day! That makes total sense because AI is literally turning brand loyalty into a customer access problem.

Pizzi Anurjimbali used that phrase, and it is so accurate. A customer access problem because AI's standing between the brand in the buyer now? Yes! The AI as the gatekeeper.

And this scariest part ends at Ian and Paula share That only sixteen percent of consumers actually fully trust AI. Oh wow So you have a gatekeeper. nobody even trusts Exactly Which is why absolutely need the human edge. Yes AJ Xsteen talked about.

after the zero-click NYC event He had his great line. Taste Is the new job security. That is so true. Like, sure an AI can write the blog post or code the email but it takes a human to look at and decide if its actually good!

Right because without that human taste you get what Jay Pacheco calls blanding. Blanding? That's such great word for isn't it? AI convergence is creating this massive brand sameness Because everyone using the same LLMs train on the same data.

everything just reverts to the average. They see it constantly on LinkedIn, every post has the exact same structure and the same rocket ship emojis. It's a sea of AVERAGE Exactly! The human taste layer is literally THE ONLY thing keeping your brand from blending in with everyone else.

Karen Flanagan actually offered a golden rule for this. He said RENT THE MODEL OWN THE INTELLIGENCE. That should be on a poster at every marketing department. Seriously, don't outsource your core strategy to Claude or chat GPT.

Rent them for execution. but you have own unique human insights Definitely and actually. that brings up a really provocative final thought from Zach Peruch I want leave with today. Oh late on us.

So Google has been telling marketers To survive this shift we need write non commodity content Right like unique first hand experiences Stuff the AI couldn't possibly know. But Zack pointed out that the very second you publish your unique perspective, an AI crawler reads it and absorbs into its training data. Oh wait! Yeah The moment the AI learns your unique point of view It stops being unique...

it just becomes part of the AI's commodity knowledge base. So does unique content even have a shelf life anymore? Exactly. Does everything just eventually become an AI commodity, it is definitely something for you to think about as you play in your next campaign.

That's... wow that was heavy thought to end on but very real one. Well we've covered A LOT today from AI visibility To multi-agent SDR stacks to the human edge. It is a wild time to be in BtoB marketing.

thats for sure! It really is well if you enjoyed this episode. new episodes drop every two weeks. Also check out our other editions on account-based marketing, field marketing channel marketing, MarTech.

go to market and social selling. Thanks so much for joining us on this deep dive! Yes thank you. keep your human edge and don't forget to subscribe.

see ya next time.