CMO Jillian Als: Rebranding in the age of AI

Tom Rudnai (00:13) Hello and welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses. I'm going to get straight into it today and introduce my guest who I've been very looking forward to having on. So she is the CMO at Leigh feeder. You might know it as deal front and we'll get into that. Gillian Ells. So Gillian, hello, welcome. Jillian (00:27) Thanks, Tom. Thanks for having me. Tom Rudnai (00:29) That's alright and the reason that Gillian is laughing everyone is because just before we recorded I stopped and asked her how to pronounce the name so I'm hoping that I still did it right in spite of that. Jillian (00:37) To be fair, it's my married name and I had to learn it too as an American now living in Denmark, so you're not the only one. Tom Rudnai (00:43) Okay, so you've been through this as well. Well, I'm Tom Rudd. It's no one ever gets it right. I've had like rudiny red eye in my time. So you learn not to take it too personally. Jillian (00:46) Yes. No, exactly. I'm just glad when people get my first name right, because I get Julian all the time. I'm like, no, Jillian. Tom Rudnai (01:01) That seems slightly rude, that's a guy's name. Yeah, okay, fair enough. look, Gillian, we're already way off track, so I'm gonna bring us on. First of all, yeah, good to have you. Rather than me doing a really bad job of giving people a rundown of your background, do wanna just maybe take us through a little bit of who you are, where you've been, what you're doing? Jillian (01:18) Yeah, so thanks for the quick introduction, Jillian CMO at Leadfeeder. My background is B2B marketing pretty much my entire career, which is almost 20 years, so I'll let you guess my age. But I got started in digital, did my come up managing 200,000 keywords, and then I've been in enterprise and startups and scale-ups. I love scale-ups. I love kind of bringing organization to chaos. I've done... multiple funding rounds, mergers, acquisitions, even a bankruptcy in a pear tree. So I feel like I've tried it all. I love change, I love brand. And I think in today's AI age, brand is the mode, right? And so I'm really enjoying flexing that muscle, even though I'm still 100 % a subscriber to the ethos that marketing generates revenue. So yeah, my background, B2B SaaS, since before it was called SaaS. PLG, SLG, partner-led, I've done a lot of different things in my career. So I feel like, yeah, you can ask me pretty much anything. Tom Rudnai (02:18) Okay, well, I'll take you up on that. I'm going to put you up on one thing you just said. Was it you love bringing organisation to chaos or you love bringing organisations to chaos? Which... Organisations, I think. Jillian (02:26) I'm bringing organization to chaos. I don't know, maybe some of my ex bosses would like to disagree. Tom Rudnai (02:34) We won't go down that route then. I've got to also tell me a little bit, I've never spoken to someone who's been through the whole bankruptcy process. I don't want to go maybe too far down that rabbit hole because I don't know how much you're going to be able to share about the behind the scenes. Jillian (02:45) I mean, I'm an open book on that. mean, bankruptcies, at least in Denmark, are public information, so there's nothing too secret about it. But yeah, it was a crazy time. I think it's like one of those things where you're like, what's the worst could happen? And it was like, oh, the worst happened. And I got through it. And I learned a lot and made it to the other side. And so it just made me much more robust, if anything. I think it was hard in the moment because I am a control freak as well. So like the idea that something Tom Rudnai (03:00) Mm. Jillian (03:15) so big was out of my control, just showing up without a paycheck and then like being, you know, completely without a job from one day to the next without it being my own decision was just mind boggling. But I think it took me about a month and I found a new job and life was fine. Tom Rudnai (03:29) Yeah, was it a large organisation or was it something that you kind of seek out of the blue? Jillian (03:32) No. So it was like right after the height of like the sass bubble, if you will, I just exited a company. We did a very nice exit. It was like right before the kind of sass bubble broke. And so maybe I took this job with the wrong colored lenses on, so to speak. It was a startup. I thought I did my due diligence short of just asking them to like open up their HubSpot or their books, right? Like this is where we started the year. This is where we're going to end up. I started talking to them in like August and when I showed up in November to start working, I was like, sorry, is there another HubSpot? Like, where's the money? And so at the time the CEO was just like, well, remember I said we were struggling a little bit with the product. And I was like, yeah, but you didn't say that like you were so far off your budget. So basically December, we closed the books at like 10 % of what we like, what I was sold into what we would. due for revenue that year. So I was like, well, in August, you should have already seen that writing on the wall. And by the time I showed up in November, like there was no way. So that was writing on the wall really for the beginning. So this whole experience was only about eight months. And we had a lot of different investors and I was just being, you know, go, go, go. We were able to book meetings. We were able to like get top of the funnel. But like something was wrong on the pricing side. We couldn't get things to close and There was some glitches in the product and so forth. So I think we really struggled with product market fit. I came in to do an ICP exercise because I was like, you know, and the founder at the time was just like, anyone who has a brain needs our product. I'm like, okay, but like, love the energy. We got to be a little bit more strategic. Yeah. And I was like joking that I could set money on fire faster than the way I was burning it and being asked to burn it. And, you know, part of me feels like It wasn't just what I was doing that made the company go bankrupt. I was specifically mandated to continue to spend the money. But yeah, it was a weird experience and just didn't sit right from an ethical perspective afterwards. I think I learned a lot of early warning signs. And yeah, it was eight months of chaos. And I did not bring any organization to what I tried. Yeah, I think we were like 45 people when we got ... dissolved. It did restart a month later in a much, much smaller format, but then it went back up again. So, yeah. Tom Rudnai (05:51) Do you, so you said that you came to that from a kind of pretty successful, I think it's interesting. What you described is like you were during the sass bubble and so you kind of have this bulletproof confidence that just things grow. And I think there's going to be a lot of people in the next year or two that might go through that as well with AI. Jillian (05:55) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. trust me. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a different dawn, right? I think I'm an older millennial, but like I've never led through a downturn before. Like, how do you lead teams through a downturn? How do you lead teams through disruption? We thought the sass bubble in itself was a disruption, but right now what we're going through is like 10x that if not 100x that in terms of what AI is doing and forcing and what was it? Meta laid off 8,000 people last night. Like it just keeps going. Right. And so This is another new chapter that happens relatively fast, but I got out of college with the financial crisis. I graduated college in 08, still got a job, entry level. I wasn't the people that were kind of impacted by that downturn, if you will. But yeah, so after the fast bubble, leading people through, it just is something, a muscle I never had to use before, even though I had been a leader for over a decade at that point. So it's interesting, for sure. Tom Rudnai (06:58) Would you say you learned more in the successful startup before or during that process? And what do you think is like stuck with you most from that process now? Jillian (07:08) Yeah, I learned through both, obviously. I think you learn through both successes and you always learn more somehow when you're... And I don't know that I look at it as a complete failure. It wasn't like me essentially failing the business, but multiple things that led to the failure of that business. And I learned a lot about myself in both instances. And that's what I've just been able to kind of take with me into other roles in terms of continuing to have confidence and... conviction, early learnings or warning signs, if you will, of things that, you know, definitely aren't right and choosing the right job for the right reasons. And like that's an easy learning, I guess you could say. But also, like I said to you, like, just even right now, I'm like, I've been through something really crappy. This is new. This is feeling somewhat crappy because everyone's feeling like they're going to be replaced by AI in any second now. I think we'll get through it. I still... At the end of the day, I in people. I believe in the skills that I have around people. And I think it's just given me the confidence to say, you know what? We'll take it when it comes and we'll get through it and we'll have a lot of fun along the way, at least. Tom Rudnai (08:16) Yeah, well, that's a nice uplifting message. So let's get in from that into what you're actually doing with what is now Leadfeeder. So we were joking in our kind of prep call for this that I think you joined there in October 2025 and the first thing you did was a rebrand, which is obviously the massive cliche that you're like, I swear. You talk me through. Jillian (08:21) Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Super cliche. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I didn't take the job with the mandate to rebrand the company. I took the job with a mandate that things have to change. speaking of like rocket ships and stuff like that, we are not a rocket ship right now. Like we are turning the boat around. And so when I showed up, I was kind of like, okay, we've got Dealfront, which is the result of a merger three years ago between a very traditional German sales first. in office heavy culture and a finished remote first PLG motion. Wow, what a concept. like the products were just finally three years later getting to a point where they were integrated, but there was still so much chaos in the organization in terms of like different audiences, different narratives, different entry points, two different websites, two different brands, because we kept the lead feeder brand as our moat. It's a data asset that AI can't disrupt. So that was the strategic decision, it the right decision, like we're going to keep Leadfeeder. But when I show up, I'm like, okay, but you're killing me because as a marketer, my resources and my budget, like, it only goes so far. have to, I can't set a brand and forget it. Can't just have Leadfeeder and just ignore it. But even if I split my budget 50-50, like, they're not going to get 50 % of their potential. it just, you know, it's diminishing returns when you're kind of separating your mind space and your... people and your focus and your resources and your budget across multiple brands, especially at the stage we're at, right? We're not, you know, a $400 billion company like with all of the brand equity in the world to begin with. So we got together as a leadership team, like, all right, like we're making things too complicated. We had a new leadership team, new CEO, new CMO, new CPTO. So it was time for a change. And we came to the kind of the strategic decision that we were going to consolidate. And it didn't make sense to make yet a new brand because even the market had still not fully adjusted to deal front. But that we would hate saying the words go back to Leadfeeder. And a part of it was because AI did disrupt our sales intelligence use case. And so where we have the moat in terms of our company to IP data and the website identification and doing something for the marketer, this is where we wanted to focus. And the marketer knows Leadfeeder. So the brand became Leadfeeder. And now we're just doubling down on the persona being, know, performance, demand, marketing leadership, building out the product to solve more of the pains that are keeping marketers up at night. Some things that people already use our product for that are kind of like jailbroken in terms of attribution, like we should be able to do more there. You know, what is keeping marketing up at night? Justifying our existence. It's not new, but it feels even more intense than ever. So yeah, it became like a pretty obvious decision, but then it was like, cool, the board supports us, do it yesterday. So we did it in a quarter. We rebranded a new website and new look and feel, new vision, purpose work, which for me was the most important part. Like I can't get on a pedestal on a website, on a podcast and talk to you about what we do without fully believing the purpose of what we're doing. And so that was a huge part of the work, not just the colors and the fonts and these kinds of things. So that was the story and we did it in a quarter and we launched March 24th and now we're two months into it. Tom Rudnai (11:53) It's funny that you said that's the second time in two days that I've had a conversation like this about like vision mission purpose, because I think it's one of the most important things we've just got done. on our side doing this big study where we were looking at 90,000 pieces of HR content and we wanted to look at over the last decade of content, how has it changed and how well optimised is it and how well differentiated is it? And one thing we found across all of that content, optimisation of content is pretty solid. We've all got quite good at that in the kind of search area because that was what drove success. In the AI area, differentiation is what drives success. Are you giving models and humans something they can't get bespoke from chat GPT, which obviously has synthesised all of your content? that differentiation is unbelievably low and actually you can look during 2025 the huge uptick in content volume and differentiation falling absolutely off. So I think what you've just described ignoring whether you need to rebrand, whether you need to reposition or anything like that, that process is something every single brand needs to do at the moment. So it's like interesting a bit earlier before this was really born out in the data. Jillian (12:51) 100%. I mean, I did it at my previous company as well. We didn't rebrand, but we did a huge work on our purpose, vision, mission, kind of because we needed to build the brand. And in order to build the brand, you need your identity and you need your internal team lockstep in terms of every interaction they're having with the market or with customers. It's just as important, right? So I think without it, to your point, like there's no differentiation and there's no conviction and it just becomes. Tom Rudnai (13:08) Mm-hmm. Jillian (13:21) Meh, AI slop out there, right? You just are part of the noise. Tom Rudnai (13:24) Yeah. So how did you think about defining that? Because I think it's a difficult thing to define. Like it's easy to define that with a startup because you come into the market with a fresh idea, right? It's a little bit harder to do with like a turnaround type job or turn around a bit harsh, but you know what I'm kind of trying to say. How do you come in from the outside and define that? Jillian (13:40) Yeah, no, it's not untrue. Yeah. Well, you feel like an imposter, right? Because you're like, there's all this legacy and here I am going to tell you what your purpose is. But it's like listening and bringing in the organization to a certain extent, but also knowing it's not a democracy, right? Like you're in leadership for a reason and your job is to lead and to get everyone on board. And if you just start asking everyone their opinions and you make it a vote, it's never going to work. So. Tom Rudnai (13:50) Yeah. Hmm. Jillian (14:08) It was actually worked with an external consultant in terms of like, what do we actually solve for our main persona today? Like what is the value that we're bringing to them? And so we actually defined our mission first, because that's the easiest thing. That's what we do. Like that's how we do it. Even if you think it might be backwards, that's where we landed. The mission was the easier part for us because it's the motion of what we're actually working on today and what we believe in going forward. Then we did the purpose. Like why are we showing up to the world and to the market? with this problem that we're solving for, and why do we want to continue to do that and continue to build products that can serve that purpose? And there was something like, is it our purpose, like, why we show up to work individually? No, it can be, but like, yeah, we're B2B software for marketers. Like, we're not feeding starving children. Like, we're not. But we're showing up to help businesses grow. We're showing up to help marketers be better at their job. good that we're doing and like that's where the purpose was born out of. And that was the leadership decision where we were a little bit wider on the group. And at that point we're like, cool, we don't need three things just to be putting them on a wall somewhere or in a handbook just for them to be forgotten. Let's go with this and be really intentional about how we integrate it into all of our all hands and our content and so forth. And then at the end of the quarter, we really realized that like, where's the ambition, like for the company and like, what are we building towards? And so we actually worked on a vision statement and that was something that was born out of like the CEO's work, to be honest. And I think that's also where it lives, right? Like, what is, where are we going? Like, can't have everyone telling you where we're going. We need someone with real conviction of like something bold, not unachievable, but like, okay, that sounds like. We're not going to get there in the next five years and that's the purpose of it, right? Like that's the reason why you have a vision is like it's much, much longer term. So then we did the mission at the end of the brand rollout actually. So now we have all three and they each sit pretty well. I hope that I could like phone a friend right now and ask them, what is our mission? What is our purpose? And they would be able to say it. Like that was my goal to the organization. was like, my goal is that like I can call any of you on a random Tuesday and you tell me what our vision mission purpose is. So it doesn't just die in the handbook. Tom Rudnai (16:29) Well that's funny because that's actually the next segment is I'm going to call... Yeah, well I know a little bit about your business because think Jamie was one of our first guests on here and Jamie's people who are missing from that episode is the director of content I believe there. Jillian (16:34) Yeah, yeah. Call Jamie, my team. The Encyclopedia. Yeah. He's not my director in demand, but yeah, that's where he started was content. Tom Rudnai (16:52) Yeah, and kind of blew me away with the systems thinking Jamie is a very, systems thinker. got the impression. Nice. But then it's cool when you've got something like that sitting, someone like that sitting in the organisation, all they need is this direction, right? So what you've done is like, think we think about content systems a lot and you can build really good AI content systems that aren't producing AI slot provided you have those three things clearly. Jillian (16:55) Yes. I call him Jamie GPT. Tom Rudnai (17:20) So I'd imagine that must have been a huge unlock for him, certainly. how have you gone about, so you kind of define those three things. How have you then gone about getting that to actually seep through the organisation? Because that is easy to write this stuff on a slide deck, right? It's hard to get it to actually be acted on. Jillian (17:34) this is the narrative work, right? This is the storytelling because again, slogans, then they just become taglines and taglines don't mean shit. So we worked and that's where product marketing is so important, right? And that's not Jamie, for example, that's Bernardo on my team, but it's how do we tell the story? It's the same story, whether we're telling it internally or to the market. And how do we get so that employees can tell this story? from their own perspective without losing the essence of it. And that it's still the same story as just with their own words and their own beliefs. And we talked a lot about this signal over noise in terms of everything out there just being inundated with AI generated content or AI generated outreach and just how much noise there is that you actually lose sight of the signal if you're not paying attention because you're just inundated and overwhelmed. And so we started to really tell the story and integrating our kind of our our purpose statement into it and our mission statement into it. And that I think is what helped the organization internalize it. And that's what we've been taking out to events since we've launched and since we've had stage opportunities and things like that. We tell the story, we relate to our persona and the world in which they're living and explain through the narrative who we are and why we're showing up. Tom Rudnai (18:50) What was the process of building, doing this work and then of kind of doing everything that you've just talked about different? I'm sure you've kind of been through similar processes before. In this world of AI led discovery and kind of execution, how has it changed in your experience? And was it quicker? Was it easier? Was it harder? Jillian (19:08) harder because people start using AI as a clutch and thinking, it's clever, it can help me with more words, but then it just gets so muddy. can't tell you and Jamie could probably tell you how many versions of stuff are just like, what is this? Like, what is this even saying? Like, this is AI slop, like stop. Because we're trying to define it as we go, it's not defined to use for the AI engine. Like, I was just like, all right, no AI allowed. Tom Rudnai (19:14) Yeah. Jillian (19:36) like, like, get back to your roots and let's start creating content and creating original thought here. We can figure out AI afterwards and we use it now, of course, to train our skills and all of these things. But it was, it made it harder because suddenly everyone's a storyteller. Everyone's got platitudes of words to share with us. it just, another error we made was like we used, we were like, oh, we'll get humans. to help us. We hired some freelance writers just for the sheer kind of volume that we needed to produce. Well, they're using AI and they don't know our business. like, that didn't work either. And so like, it just all got scratched. It was like wasted work almost because it needed to come from Kevin, our CEO, me, the CMO, our new CPT. Like it needed to come from us and not AI. And you have to build it from scratch in that instance, in my opinion. Of course you can help get the help of AI later to help. Tom Rudnai (20:24) Hmm. Jillian (20:31) tune it or make the grammar better or whatever, but like this level of work, I don't think AI should replace. Like I really don't. Like you can use it as a sparring partner and pick it apart and these kinds of things, but it can't be the creator. Tom Rudnai (20:46) Yeah, well, that's what our data showed really clearly is AI doesn't produce differentiated thinking. mean, but the very nature of this, technically you should not say AI because I think AI can, LLMs can't, which is what most people are using at the moment. But it doesn't produce original thought. It's literally not within its remit, not within how these models are built. So I guess there's certain things that you can't do quicker, but that must be difficult. You must have pressure above to do everything quicker. I think that's something a lot of market Jillian (21:11) Of course, yeah, we needed to do this in three months. this is like, I mean, around the clock work and then even as a human, you get tired. everything starts to look the same to me as a human when I've read the same paragraph 18 times. I'm like, my God, like you have to step away from it and come back. so there's enormous pressure to do things more faster and so forth. But I think the way I've been viewing AI, especially in marketing is like, yes. Tom Rudnai (21:26) Yeah. Jillian (21:39) It is the enabler. It is not the thing. Like we can't just make up what can we do with AI. It's what do we do? What should AI help us do better or faster than, you know, run with it? And so there's certain things that I'm like, okay, tell me what you do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. Okay, of these things, what are the things we don't want AI to do because it needs original thought? What are the things that we want AI to fully automate it? Like there's two different ends of the spectrum. Like what stays fully manual and what stays and what goes fully agentic. And then there's the messy middle. What is mostly manual with AI assist? What is AI driven with human kind of intervention or kind of editing? And then what's agentic, right? So, and I think any given task or job to be done, whatever you want to call it, sits somewhere on that spectrum of where it should be. Doesn't mean everything needs to be agentic. It just means you need to know where it should land and optimize for that. And I think that is a... big unlock for a lot of people who find it in a dating or behind or maybe I'm just projecting a little bit here. like, it's, it's, it's not meant to be the thing. It is an enabler. And I think a lot of people are getting so caught up in look what I can do with AI. And I'm like, that doesn't scale. Like, yeah, anyone can code an app or whatever. hard part is making it like land in the market and grow. And like, that takes emotion. Funny enough. Tom Rudnai (22:59) But I think it's difficult because this is so in your organization, you're obviously saying this and you're saying this from the top, right? You're the CMO. What I think most marketers feel caught by that I speak to and I sometimes feel it myself actually is the because AI has been so fantastically marketed and the earliest most aggressive adopters and like recipients of that marketing are investors, boards, CEOs. These are the people who have been sold promises by AI that then junior marketers are expected to deliver. And so it's one thing for you, but a lot of people would sit lower down in an organization like we've seen headcount get chopped. We've still had the same pressure to do things. So on the one hand, I have all of the burden of delivering the promises of AI, but none of the freedom and time to do all of the thinking. And that's, think where you see a lot of turnout AI slot. Like, how would you, what would you say to a marketer who maybe agrees with everything you're saying, but doesn't necessarily have the mandate from above to act on it? Jillian (23:58) Yeah, I mean, I think it's maybe showing two examples, right? Like for me as a leader, I'm always like, don't come to me with problems, come to me with solutions, right? Like the same could be said, like show me what is your original thought and show me what AI produced and then let's have the discussion of how much time did it take you for each of these things because sometimes AI even takes longer because you're fighting with it to make it do what you need it to do. And I'm like, my God, I could have made this slide so much faster myself. and I think, you you just need to Tom Rudnai (24:19) Yes. Jillian (24:26) It is my job as a leader to empower my team to think smarter and challenge me because I'm being pressured. I get it. I'm, I feel like I could be replaced any day. Like I, I don't know what value I'm adding. I'm not a specialist in anything anymore because I'm like operating across a much wider remit and hop my context switching on a given day is, is, you know, quite extreme, but like it's not just junior marketers feeling the pressure of AI. And I still want to build something genuine and authentic. I think it's both top down, but it's bottom up and fighting for what you believe in and having the right conversations. And hopefully you'll have a good leader who's going to listen to you. And if you don't, you got to find that's any job AI or not, you need to go find yourself a better leader. Like that's always been the case. That's actually nothing new. Tom Rudnai (25:10) Yeah, and it's actually something I think people never think about enough when they just start a role, start to a company. Don't pick a company, just pick a person you want to work for. But if they're good, you'll follow them throughout your career and they'll do amazing things for you. Let's talk about, so we've talked about the AI execution side of things. When you went about the rebrand, to what extent were you thinking, how much of this brand was built for humans versus how much were you thinking about building the brand for AI? Did that come into your mind at all? Jillian (25:18) 100%. So for the website itself, obviously, like it was an opportunity to say, okay, we're redoing the website. How do we build it for LLMs? Right? Like what are we doing specifically on the structure of the content and these things that make us more, you know, digestible, if you will, or more likely to appear in LLM results? A lot of that is external anyway, but there are certain things that, you know, the website can do. We are working on our product to be more agentic endpoints, to be able to kind of sign up and, you provision yourself through endpoints so that you could in theory also. So we're working on a MCP server into our product, like all of that stuff doesn't sit with me, particularly it's in the product organization, but I get to market it soon enough. So spoiler alert, we're working on a MCP. Tom Rudnai (26:17) our first ever breaking news on the podcast that's cool. Jillian (26:21) I think to be fair, we've set it in a webinar to our customers, so don't think it's any proprietary information as such right now. But yeah, I mean, it was definitely a part of the thought process and, you know, for the external side of things, but also internally. like how to like in the space that we're in, legal reviews all of our content. So we built in a legal kind of bot into our CMS to be able to like digest the content directly there and flag anything. Tom Rudnai (26:25) Yeah. Jillian (26:50) that might require legal official approvals. I mean, there are a lot of things along the way that we thought about AI in terms of integrating it into the new processes going forward, as well as the actual kind of content website itself. Tom Rudnai (27:05) Yeah, okay. And then have you, guess maybe, I don't know, might be a little bit too early to say, but since the rebrand, have you started to get kind of signals come through that show you like this is working and it's all operating as you kind of expected it to? there been, you know, just afterwards? Jillian (27:19) Yeah, I mean... There were some very early positive signals, one being our core web vitals were fucking off the charts. Sorry, excuse me. I'll have to edit out my cursing. The super proud of the web team and the SEO manager that we have like hitting 100 % across the board almost on each four elements. Google rewarded us because we had two websites talking about the same stuff. Tom Rudnai (27:30) Thank you. us. Jillian (27:46) So we saw rankings improve across the board on a lot of our English ranking content. We are struggling with our German just because Leadfeeder.com never had German content before. So even though we did the 301 redirects from Dealfront, some of that has been fine, but it's still a work in progress for us on that side. But the consolidation around the website visitor identification type keywords, that was the lights turned on. And instead of two domains competing on it, we just saw our domain. increased pretty significantly. Those were early good signs. Our lead volume has maintained itself. We were actually bracing for impact. We told the business we're going to take a hit. And we have on the SEO side, like I said, on the German side, but otherwise, we've kind of held stable, which is better than we could have expected. And now it's just about landing it in the market. We've had great feedback at events. I think positive signals, signals for sure. Tom Rudnai (28:42) I'm not surprised because one thing from our work that we do in the AI search space is just it's very, very clear that focus, clarity is more important than anything. If you've got all of these different brands, floating around and no one quite knows who you are, who you help, what you're for, then that's going to have a very negative impact. So what you've done is just focus and it makes it much easier then to build and build in a way that gives clarity. Jillian (28:51) Mm-hmm. 100%. Like back to what we talked about and like why we made came to this decision. Like as a marketer, I need clarity to the market needs clarity. need clarity. It all compounds right when we're able to do the one thing that we're really good at. Tom Rudnai (29:16) Yeah, I was thinking that as you spoke earlier, because you were like, I have to split my budget across let's keep it simple and say it was two directions. It's not like it was actually a little bit more. And if yeah, all the marketing compounds that we're doing is preventing like it's the second 50 % that actually gives you the most return if you cut yourself off that. How do you think about that? If we boil that down, because it actually makes me think that I make very bad decisions, actually, sometimes. If you boil that down away from a brand and to actually a single channel, I think what most people or the common the thing I hear a lot at the moment Jillian (29:24) Mm. Yeah. Tom Rudnai (29:46) is you have to be everywhere. But by doing that and spreading your bets across lots of channels, lots of distribution channels, do you think that you get the same effect where you actually prevent any of them from compounding? Jillian (29:57) Yeah, it's an angel question, right? Like how much, for example, does paid search have a halo effect? And how much is cause and correlation? Because you're so addicted to fast results, new logo acquisition, demand capture is always easier to show attribution, all of those things. So things like paid search get heavy investment because it's bottom of the funnel stuff. It's not efficient. I've never worked anywhere where paid search was like super freaking efficient. Tom Rudnai (30:23) in Jillian (30:25) SEO long term, it just, no one wants to hear like, we're still building, it's going to take six months. Like, you can't say that unless you're also doing the stuff that's bringing in like the dollars at the same time, right? So it's always been this balance. I do find that if I've turned off search, other channels, or paid search, other channels suffer. I've never been brave enough to turn it off long enough to see like how that changes over time. So I agree with you, I don't have the perfect solution. think Everywhere is too much, like picking two or three horses definitely and like your fourth horse is always a testing right until you get it, you know Working to a point where like okay, this one's gonna replace something but I am looking to get reduce our paid search spend dramatically because I just I don't I don't believe It's as much as I used to I don't know that I ever was like the biggest fan of it to be honest I think it's everyone's kind of thing. They love to hate Tom Rudnai (30:59) Mm. Jillian (31:18) But to answer your original question, yeah, you need to definitely, probably reduce and just focus to get more compounding results over time. It's just, does your board have the patience? Do you have the patience? Do you have the runway? Do you have all of these things, right? Tom Rudnai (31:35) Yeah. And I mean, it's interesting. You talking about paid search. I remember having a really interesting conversation with one of my advisors who I would name, but was at Google. And he was kind of talking about how the greatest trick Google ever played was convincing you that particular metrics matter when it allows them. So they convince you that things like, cost per cost per click and ROAS all matter when actually they don't matter to you at all. All it does is allow them to sell you really bad inventory at cheap times. they can give you, they can sell you ads that give you really good apparent cost per click and things like that but they're just telling you the wrong people at times and those people otherwise wouldn't have had an ad to see. So I think there's a lot of games there that make it very hard, has always made it very blurry to understand whether paid search is working. What's triggered you at the moment to be very particularly skeptical? is that, you more skeptical than you? Jillian (32:20) It's just like, you know these things when you look at your brand search versus your non branded search. And you report on the blended because it's easier to explain instead of trying to create even more metrics in someone's face who doesn't need to know that level of detail. But like, it hurts, right? But you still need to deliver the leads and it's delivering the leads and it's like, okay, if it's 12 month CAC payback on this, is that okay? But then I start to look at the longer term lifetime value and like if you're able to kind of actually track from that channel and then you get into the whole like, last click versus first click, like how much of the channel actually drove that behavior, but like how did those segments retain? And so it becomes a balance of this obsession with new business logo acquisition with what's actually healthiest for the business. And I think I've gotten to the point where I'm like, we're gonna have to sacrifice on low logo acquisition here because it's not good for the business. when businesses are not looking at growth at all costs anymore and it's all about margins and how you retain your customer base over time, you got to cut the thing that the cancer, you will, that is kind of feeding it. And so I'm a little bit, yes, triggered at the moment because I just don't believe in it. And I think for us, it's because a lot of our paid search has performed in the past around sales intelligence use cases, and it's just not a use case set. stays and sticks anymore. So that's where I need to say, sorry, SVP of sales, you're gonna get less leads for a little while while we work on some other things, but this is just not healthy for the business. Tom Rudnai (33:47) Yeah, okay. Where does that spin? Because it sounds like it's actually a refocus towards kind of activating existing customers and retention and kind of upsell. It's like that. what other particular channels that you've identified can really help you with that? Because I think that's often a hard thing to isolate. Jillian (34:10) Yeah, mean, marketing channels like nurturing existing customers, is that your question? Or just, yeah. Tom Rudnai (34:17) Yeah, it might be a confusing question. guess what I was thinking is if like, it's difficult to be very, I think marketers often struggle to know how to spend their money on that. When I was talking to them outside of just maybe running customer events and things like that. Jillian (34:29) Yeah, and oftentimes it's more about resource than it is actual like budget dollars. Yes, there's events, there's delight the customer, there's initiatives like you said events, but sometimes you have to like realize where are you in the hierarchy of their needs and would they ever come to your event? Like, not at this company, but like two roles ago, I was like, oh, let's have a customer event and we'll do like, you know, a half day of content and we'll treat them to a nice dinner and we'll, you know, pay for their hotel, but like flights are on them and they're like, I use your product like three times a year. why I'm not coming to Copenhagen, which is awesome, by the way, to talk about your product. So you got to know your audience. But it is a difficult one. like right now don't even have it solved. It's mostly my PMMs that are working with customer marketing because they're doing a lot of communication around things that are happening within the product. But like I think there's there's something missing. There's an unlock here. And if that's it's with like the growth team, like I'm still trying to figure that out, to be honest. what that requires, the budget is also a question mark to me. I don't have any sure playbook answer for how to get that right. Tom Rudnai (35:35) Yeah, okay, no, we're gonna have to get you back on in a year then to find out. it's something we've done. I've had a few conversations, I remember speaking to a guy called Dave who was like, there's the whole, I'm blanking on the name, but the kind of idea of the bow tie method and actually most of the opportunity for most brands lives on the right hand side of the bow tie, which is everything that happens after close one. Jillian (35:56) Yeah, 100%. And like, I totally feel that marketing needs to like sit at the pleasure of growth of the business. And if growth is over there, marketing needs to make its own relevant over there as well. It's not CS's jobs. Retention is a team sport. It is not CS that owns retention, is the company that owns retention. It's product, it's marketing. It's everyone who touches the customer journey and the brand, right? So it is something that marketing needs to have a lot of focus on. but it's just not the traditional thing that marketing is measured on or even given the mandate to do. I think that's changing, but we don't have the playbooks for it. Tom Rudnai (36:32) Yeah, well, hopefully it's something that a slightly different funding environment actually brings, right? As people are a little bit focused on gaudy growth numbers to exit and a little bit more and just building a sustainable business. Then you start to look at what people can actually have the most impact. And think often that is actually marketing can have a huge impact on things like value realisation and stuff like that. It's something I think a lot about with Demand Genius actually without going too far down our rabbit hole. One of the challenges often with having a very well differentiated product is that no one knows how to use it. Jillian (36:51) Yeah. Tom Rudnai (37:02) why now we get a lot more hands-on with people but long term I'm like well that's actually one of the biggest impacts that marketing can have for us as a business is teaching people how to use our products because it's different to what the kind of marketing machine of the AEO injury teaches people and that's a huge challenge. Jillian (37:16) Well, yeah, and I guess that we have in common. We're marketing to marketers, right? So like we should be able to speak their language. We should be the we call it dog champagne instead of dog feeding or dog food and drinking your own champagne somewhere in the middle. And that's owned by my team now. That was something I came in and was just like, we absolutely need to be doing this like in a structured or unstructured way. don't care how like just start doing it and start making new use cases and start being the number one bug reporters of our platform. Like we need to be. Tom Rudnai (37:42) Yeah. Jillian (37:44) living and breathing this and that is on us. And marketing is just natural communicators, right? So it is our obligation, I think, to help on activation and retention. Tom Rudnai (37:54) Yeah, I mean, if you're not the power user of your own product, then that's always going to be a problem, right? And it makes it harder. Cool. I'm conscious of time and I want to let you get on with your day at some point. So maybe we'll wrap that up there and get into a couple of quick fires that I like to do at the end. So first one is always a super cliche, super cheesy one. What is an AI use case or an AI tool, whatever, that you absolutely love, like the one that's most blown your mind? Jillian (38:08) Okay. Well, right now it is the fact that I finally found AI that can help me create slides because I joke that in my career, how am I still just focused on making slides and Claude, co-work, we build a kind of a slide skill and it has all of our brand and stuff. I don't know, like I have pretty slides without taking hours and hours. So that's been the biggest unlock for me in my role for sure. Tom Rudnai (38:43) Nice, have you tried code design? Jillian (38:45) My team has. I guess it's somewhere in my cloud somewhere, but no, not me personally. Tom Rudnai (38:49) It's only you can only get it on the web at the moment. It's just come out of beta. But if you're using it for slides, so we've we do kind of not really brand, but we build on the website because I was like, I'm just going to do it myself. I'm going own it with Claude. And so I've done a lot of work to get our design system documented. And now I can put that Claude design spits out those beautiful slides. Great. Jillian (38:54) Okay. Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, our design team is using it running out of tokens on a daily basis. Now we're trying to make the business case to like get more. But I actually already unlocked the slide design and co-work. So, yeah. Tom Rudnai (39:11) Yeah. Okay, interesting. I didn't get that far. The next question is maybe for you personally a little bit more. Is there like a skill or trait that you have that you think has been the most helpful for you in your career? Jillian (39:26) I did this analysis, apparently it's problem solving. Like I just, thrive in it. I like to make decisions. It's based on all the data I have available to me, my gut, which is also a data point. My experiences kind of build my gut feeling around things. And then I get to kind of use my creative part about how do I see the future? And that I just really thrive in making decisions. And I think that's a big part of the problem solving thing that really gets me going. So that's all I'll say. Tom Rudnai (39:51) We got that one very, very ready to go. Is that something that you've thought about before? Because normally people pause there and think. Jillian (39:59) Someone asked me this question quite recently. So it is something I've thought about. I am reflecting, like, who am I in this world of AI? Like, what do I bring to the table that Claude doesn't, right? And I think it's my ability to have conviction and decisions. They could be the wrong ones, and you figure that out, and you learn from them. But being able to move and make the decisions. And I like it. I thrive in it. So I think that's maybe why I was on the tip of my tongue. Tom Rudnai (40:22) Yeah, okay. Well, I mean, the two things that I think humans are really valuable for now is context and judgment. That's probably the only two things that I do better than AI and problem solving is basically just applying judgment to context. So that makes a lot of sense. And I think you're probably going to be all right based on that, Julian. Jillian (40:28) Hmm. Let's hope, let's hope. Otherwise, you know, I make a mean cocktail, so I might just have to like go back to my roots and open a bar for all of us unemployed tech. Tom Rudnai (40:46) Well, you've really sang a lot more fun, so I didn't do that. Jillian (40:51) I worked at a tequila bar for seven years. Tom Rudnai (40:53) Oh did you? So that was when you did your background. You were all like, I was CMO here, I CMO here, you didn't tell us about the tequila bar. That's a good one. Next question is, and this was just a bit of fun, if I was to approve your Plan A budget request tomorrow for one campaign, one big bet or something like that, the way I always think about it is like, one, did you say Kevin was your CMO, your CEO? Yeah. The one Kevin would never be stupid enough to approve. What would you do? Jillian (40:58) Yep, that's how I got through college. And it's one that I'm not even super comfortable with, but I will go PR. It's not a muscle that I have myself very well, but I think it's making a huge comeback in terms of what its impact on LLMs and bringing that authenticity to the market. It's expensive to do well, but I think it would be the one thing that I would just, I wouldn't have like an immediate ROI or a way to calculate it, but I think it would be the big bet. Tom Rudnai (41:46) Yeah, from our experience and what we do is one of the first things that we're normally telling people is you need to be doing some level of PR, producing original research that makes that a lot easier. Jillian (41:55) Yeah, we have that and we're doing that. But I just mean like actually getting a PR agency to come and like pitch us and do all of the work because back to what AI can and can't do. Like so much of that is relationships in the media industry. Right. And and getting the right PR agency to do that and help you get your story out there. But original research is the story. Right. Because no one cares that you rebrand and no one cares that you know your product is this thing. They care about the story or like the results or the outcomes. Tom Rudnai (41:59) Yeah. Yeah, for sure. No, that's a good one. That one actually sounds very sensible. That sounds like one that Kevin probably should approve. So if you're listening to this, Kevin, give brilliant. Jillian (42:29) Well, yeah, but I mean, like, if I had some idea that, is stupid, like, that would be a weird question. Tom Rudnai (42:35) What's the stupidest one that you've ever had that you secretly thought might work? Jillian (42:38) jeez, I don't know. Now you've stumped me. Tom Rudnai (42:42) There you Jillian (42:42) well, I tried to pitch that customer event and it didn't, it felt like that was a failure. I had to like cancel on two people that did say they wanted to come. And that was kind of awkward. yeah, like it just had all this conviction that no one wanted to come. Tom Rudnai (42:58) Copenhagen's lovely. think that is a common mistake though, is people just forget what role they play in people's lives. Especially if you're like a peer product, it's like a customer, they view you as this particular thing and they don't necessarily want all of that hand holding if they don't need it. Jillian (42:59) No one loved the product as much as I did, apparently. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Tom Rudnai (43:16) And then final question just before I you go is just I always like to get a recommendation out of everyone So whether it's a book a podcast a thought leader that you find really helpful Is there anything that you would recommend people check out? Jillian (43:28) Yeah, I get this question on all these podcasts. I feel like I'm cliche. I'm not a big business book person, to be honest. I just, don't, if I want to fall asleep, I'll read those. But I did read a book with our leadership team called Unreasonable Hospitality. I gave you the goose egg that like I worked at a bar and stuff. Like there's so much that can be applicable to the business world and it tells a real story. So like if you've worked in the service industry, you'll love this book. But it has some business parallels. called unreasonable hospitality. Tom Rudnai (43:55) Okay, awesome. That's a good one. That's something slightly new. And then finally, just anything that you'd like to promote that you're doing or that you're doing at Leadfeeder. Jillian (44:04) Yeah, I mean, we turn your website, your B2B website into a lead generation engine. So come on over if you're interested in learning more. But by all means, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm the only Jillian Elves out there as far as I know. So I'll, you know, I'm not here to pitch a product, but if you're intrigued, please do check us out. Tom Rudnai (44:21) Cool, well would like my website to be a B2B generation engine, so I might just do that. Thank you, I've been, yeah, I've really enjoyed this. Thank you, you've been very, very open and very friendly and easy to chat to, so I appreciate that. Very easy. Thanks, bye everyone. Jillian (44:25) Cut! Cut! Likewise. Thanks, Tom. I had a great time.