AI Search Is Changing Marketing Forever

When people get answers from these AI agents, they are much more qualified because they can ask the question the way they want it and they'll get detailed information back. So when they do contact a vendor, they're a lot more qualified and a lot more ready to be serious about something that they're researching versus if you're one of the, you know, on Google, you're one of the answers, they still don't know that much about you. They have to go to your website. So I think what's going to happen and you know, is you need to begin to design your websites to be geo friendly because as people use AI to ask their questions and not just, you know, Google or, you know, whatever, Bing. Unless you're, unless you've got a lot of Q and A and unless you, at the top of your blogs, you put, you know, the things to make, you know, websites more geo friendly. If your website is not geo friendly, you may not even be considered. I mean, even if you're in some of the search results, you may not be in what you want to be. And it's, you know, it's not happening overnight, but it's slowly but surely it is happening and it's going to take over SEO power. Marketing Podcasts Here's Kevin hi, I'm Kevin Lee with the E. Marketing Association. I also run dit, an agency. I have an incubator called Various Ventures with a bunch of platforms in it. I run a brand and a nonprofit, so I'm pretty busy. But the common theme is of course, marketing and always happy to chat with folks in the marketing ecosystem. Super excited to have Alan Gunsenhauser with me today. So what's been your focus for clients most recently? Last six months or so. Thank you, Kevin. I'm really happy to be here and thank you for inviting me to your podcast. My pleasure. It's been an interesting time without talking about AI initially because that's been a large part of it. A lot of it is go to market productivity and alignment between the go to market functions of marketing, sales, product, customer success. And a topic that's come up over and over again is ideal customer profile or ICP and how to do it right. A lot of companies are not doing it right and underestimating the importance of having a consistent ICP and governance around it. So you're bringing on the right type of customers that you can keep and grow. That's been a big part of it. And also talking about brand gravity and the importance of balancing short term, current quarter and long term growth objectives to reach financial impacts that the company's looking for. So let's drill into ICP a little. There are a bunch of companies, ICP is more of a B2B term, but obviously target audience would be the equivalent in the B2C world. Yes, but in B2B there are a lot of companies that say, well, I actually have like three ICPs. This one's like my 70% ICP, but I also have some others where the use cases or the industry sector or the headcount size or whatever is slightly different. Do you think it's that it's good to have multiple ICPs? If as you look at product market fits, certain things bubble up to the surface where you're like, wow, I didn't really expect that restaurants would be using this. I really didn't expect this to be used in the manufacturing sector. Should you reevaluate whether or not you actually have segments of ICPs that maybe have some commonalities in a Venn diagram but are not entirely unique? Absolutely. You know, and what I liken it to is companies usually go through three stages when they're a startup. They have to get problem market fit, so they have to solve problems that people care about that they have pain with and are willing to pay for. And when you're in that mode, you're doing a lot of experimentation. You're trying to figure it out. You're trying to figure out your first icp and then if you're successful there, you go into product market fit where you have to scale your infrastructure and your business becomes a little more complex. You may have multiple ICPs, and if you're successful there, as the business continues to grow, you get to platform market fit, where probably the majority of your sales are from current customers and you have a lot of data on your customers as well. I think it's normal to have multiple icps depending on the stage of the business, but not for the wrong reasons. Like, okay, these deals are easy to close, or we think we should be in this growth segment or this industry is growing really fast. When I net it down, I like to start with a customer cohort analysis for those businesses that are in the product market fit or platform market fit, and take a look at segments of your customer base and at least initially, look at three ratios, look at win loss ratio, look at gross revenue retention, and look at net revenue retention so you can begin to triangulate those customers that are easiest to not only get, but get, keep and grow, because that's tied to long Term growth. And once you do that and you have a hypothesis of which segments ought to be your best ICPs, then by segment you would look at, you know, what's the external market opportunities within that segment? Are there headwinds and tailwinds, products, regulatory things and which segments are most appropriate from an external basis. But then look at your internal capabilities to be successful. Do we have brand gravity? Do we have the right products? Do we have the right value proposition? Do we have the right sales channels? You know, can we reach that segment? Because we know who they are and we can reach them. So it's then important to balance great market opportunity with we're very well set up to be successful. And that's where it's kind of like a four blocker. You know, you would invest there first. A lot of companies are investing in great market opportunities, but they're not set up to be successful yet without making those investments. So it gets back to strategy. But I guess that was a long answer to your question. The answer is yes, it depends like many things do. So you know, one of the areas that one goes through in evaluating, you know, ICPs and choosing the pro rata investment into the different ICPs is you're going to be looking at LTV by the segment or sector. And of course startups, they don't have a lot of data to go on, right? So what are some leading KPIs when you don't know how long a seat or an engagement or customer relationship is going to last? Should people be using as sort of predictive of, you know, okay, these will probably be the higher paying, longer retained customers. And So I have three ICPs. They're sort of tied to each other if you just look at the surface. But I want to go deeper, I want to sort of predict where, where I should pick sort of my, my, my lead icp. I mean without having retention growth LTV information. As you point out, when you're a startup, you're doing a lot of experimentation. You're trying to figure it out, you're trying to figure which icps would be the best. And I think customer research really understanding pain points and how custom your offering is to solve those pain points and how easy or difficult is it for customers to get value. And you're going to make some mistakes and that's good. You want to fail fast because you're trying to figure it out when you're a startup. You don't have all the answers yet and you don't have customers yet, but you will over time. So I think it's putting, you know, planting a few seeds and watching how they grow or not over time. Does that make sense? Absolutely. So let's move over to brand gravity, which other people may use other upper funnel KPIs to talk about the ability for your brand to make it into the final selection set. Right. So people establish a level of trust with a brand either because of the people they run into or the testimonials they see or all the other pieces of the upper funnel marketing that one does. But of course the CMO and maybe the CFO are looking at a fixed marketing budget and they need to decide, well, there's a lot of demand harvesting we could do using high intent signal like search. And so if we can just grab those people, that should be, you know, where we put, put all of our budget if assuming there's enough elasticity in that market. And then of course to your point, like, well, but if you're not just going to get the lead, you need to close the lead and you need to keep the customer. So that's where branding can often make a huge difference. So how should they go through that thought process? You know, human capital and marketing capital are a scarce resource. I couldn't agree more with what you just said. And let me point to some industry research that I think helps tell the story. Consistent research from Aaron Berg and also from Sixth Sense, the 2025 buyer study that Kerry Cunningham did at Six Sense is really telling and consistent with the Ehrenberg research. And basically what that research says is at any given time, and we're talking B2B but in any given time, only 5% of potential customers are in market looking to buy something. They will be in market maybe in six months, maybe in 12 months, maybe in 24 months. But they are consuming content now and they're developing short lists of companies they will consider when they do go in market. And so when they do go in market and they want to buy something, they buy from that short list of four to five vendors 95% of the time. So if you aren't on that short list, you won't even have an at bat. And brand seeds demand. You know, instead of calling it demand, I'm beginning to call it demand capture because you're trying to capture as many of that 5% that are in market. But if they don't know your brand, it's very unlikely at that point that you're going to be able to close them. So there's a key correlation between developing not only Awareness, but preference and comfort early on to seed your demand later. And when I have those conversations with CFOs and I love having those conversations, you know, it's all right, well, we can try to harvest as much as we can on the current quarter. What about next quarter? What about the quarter after that? What about next year? We're going to want to be successful in those quarters too, won't we? And I try to take marketing investments and translate them into something that the CFO and the board can understand. So when I talk about investments in brand, reputation, gravity, the things I talk about are win, loss ratio, when they do get in the 5% and they're buying something, pricing, power, retention, LTV, all the, you know, things like that. And having more at bats. You won't even have an at bat unless they know who you are most likely. And CFOs can understand what that means. And yeah, you, you know, so it's tracking some of those metrics and CMOs, being careful not just to say, hey, we need to make investments in brand, but describe what the ramifications or the impacts or the outputs of those investments are, even if there is a lag, because that's how the buying process works. So there's some education I think is involved, but there's some really good industry research that makes that point clearly. So one part of that I'm sure drives that is trust building at the brand level. And of course there's also trust building that happens at a personal relationship level, which is why I've seen a huge surge of in person events post Covid where almost it surpassed the footprints that were there before. It's almost like this insatiable desire for in person events. And those scale from the very big ones like the trade shows and booths down to more and more of these hosted dinners and more intimate settings. So of course some of those tend to be expensive, but they really do seem to move the needle heavily on the personal trust building. Right. And so how would you help marketers think through that sort of again, marketing budget allocation? Because that bridge is not just into marketing budgets but sales budgets. Right. So it's almost a fight probably to either get the other guy to cover it or other gal to cover it. Right. But you're sort of, it really is this, this area depending on whether it's the trade show or the hosted dinner or whatever, you know, those have become critically important. And I guess the good news is you can really hyper target your ICP there. Right. You know, more so than most of the Other media types you have at your disposal. So what are you seeing happening there and how are you advising your clients when they sort of probably need that to accelerate their growth? And the thing that makes it difficult in B2B is unlike B2C, B2B is multi touch. So trade show and conferences can be one of those touches, can be a lot of others, and a lot of the buying journey is done by the time someone wants to contact you and become a lead. I've seen a lot of success to your point with targeted dinners and targeted smaller, more intimate events. I'll give you an example. When I was at Serious Decisions in Forrester, I used to do a lot of CMO dinners and the way we would set them up, they wouldn't be selling, they would be just having a nice evening, no sale. Even though salespeople were in the back if anybody wanted to talk to them. There was no selling at those events. But we seeded those events with customers and prospects and the customers sold the prospects. We didn't, you know, because they had a lot of questions. What is, what would it be like? You know, was it worth it is, you know, and I've seen those events be extremely productive terms of growth. And to your point, you can target them much better. You can target your icp, you can combine customers and prospects and you have more control over the event versus a trade show where you have a bunch of tire kickers and people that want to drink the espresso or get your latest thing you're giving away and don't know if they're going to be qualified. You can spend a lot of money on events. I'm not saying you don't do that, but I think you should be more careful and look at, don't do an event unless you have really good pre show and post show planning which includes salespeople getting cell phone numbers of the people they want to have meetings with. So you can make sure you've got meetings and then you've got reporting before and after. And you train people really well. But given a choice between the two, with my experience, I tell people that more intimate events with your ICP with customers and prospects are very productive ways to grow business. In B2B also. Yeah. So did you find that you would use one anchor, sort of VIP CMO as the hook for the event, as in so and so from this company is going to be there and you know, we'll chat for five minutes on, you know, what they're doing this year or whatever to lead the dinner or Is it literally just like it's a dinner, right? No. No talking points, no agenda. Once in a while we would do that. Once in a while we would say, hey, here's a couple topics we can talk about. But it's more the former. It's a dinner with your peers. It's nice dinner. We always did them at nice restaurants and come out and have an evening of fun, you know, eating and drinking. And we, you know, there wasn't much of an agenda and we wanted people to look at them as networking meetings with your peers. I would always ask in those meetings, is it okay if I share everybody's email so you can all collaborate with each other afterwards? No one ever said no. And I thought those were very productive events. And I enjoyed doing it too. Everybody enjoyed coming. They, you know, thanked me and those were, you know, those were relationship building events. They also were productive for sales. But that was not the agenda. It was the output, but it wasn't the agenda. Yeah. Another idea popped into my head because it's something that's getting a lot of discussion, which is sort of the SASS apocalypse, if it's real, if it's not real. But I wanted to discuss it because we can debate whether it's real or not. But from the perspective of, given that it's getting a lot of buzz, should companies that are SaaS companies at least recognize the elephant in the room? Right. And talk about why via their APIs or their MCPs, they're essentially future proofing your customer usage of the platform to allow you to mix and match. Right. And to plug into their systems for the things that they do great. And maybe, you know, use other stuff because it was. We had the API revolution right now we're sort of having the MCP revolution right after that. And so to the extent that it's either already live in a product or in the product roadmap to avoid margin erosion, should the SaaS companies be sort of saying, you know, it's not that we can't beat them, so we'll join them. It's really like we're joining them because it's a force multiplier. You know, the SAS model was so effective and grew quickly because it was a good model, it was a good alternative to what existed before, you know, and I think that's still true, however, and, you know, it's been thankfully at least 15 minutes until we start talking about AI. But you can't have a conversation these days without getting AI. A lot of companies are doing AI Washington and trying to hitch their star to the AI wagon. And what they should I think be doing instead is talking about AI. AI and AI with SaaS and these tools in terms of the problems they solve. It's like sell the problem, don't sell the product as you know, some people say. But, but I think there's no question that AI is a very disruptive innovation. It's a very exciting time to be in marketing. You know, a lot of people are trying to deal with it and you know, and there's a huge opportunity for AI to enhance sales platforms and infrastructures but do it in a way where you really understand the problem you're solving and why it's more productive to bring in, you know, MCP servers. And you know, I mean I live on Claude co work. I think it's astonishing. It's amazing what it does even for an, even for a solopreneur like me. I mean I'm doing so many things with it that makes me more productive. It's like I have a staff of people now, you know that I pay very little for, you know, in terms of what it cost and you know, perplexity is my IT department. When something software hardware doesn't work, I ask. Perplexity gives me the solution. It's great and it's very, it's very disruptive and like with any disruptive innovation it'll stay and you know, people have to learn, you know, not only in the product, how you, how you modify it for what AI can do, but also marketing. You know, it's disrupting marketing, it's disrupting every function. So I don't know if I answered your question directly but. Yeah, well certainly, I think, yeah, we certainly covered it sufficiently. You know, one area obviously of disruption of AI is the fact that you and in particular high value individuals in many markets are not googling things anymore, right? They're choosing their chatbots of choice or even creating a meta chatbot that feeds multiple data sources into the same thing for analysis which is made. So the Geo category or if you want to call it aeo, whichever you prefer. That's like the hottest area for the DITA team at the moment. As a matter of fact it's probably, you know, more than three quarters of our current proposals out relate to geo. Right. And I've even had to build some technologies just because I wasn't particularly pleased with the leaders in the category as it related to providing roadmaps to marketers as to what to do next. Right, because you know, you can regress out LLMs and vector databases and how they work, but it doesn't necessarily tell you what to do next, which things are going to be most material. So we, you know, that that's certainly a hot area. But do you feel like there's still an underinvestment? Because a lot of these same SaaS companies and B2B marketing companies and B2C as well had under, under invested in SEO already. Right. And so SEO is the foundation, fundamental foundation for layering on, on, on geo. And you know there's a lag, right? Even more of a lag. You know, SEO was always a marathon, not a sprint. And I sort of feel like GDO is even more so. Right. And do you feel like it'll be too late by the time some companies realize that their visibility in LLMs is either gone or disappearing and they'll have to sort of run twice as fast or six times as fast or overinvest in order to catch up? That's certainly a risk. And I see, you know, GEO is only expanding and I mean I've gotten some new clients from ChatGPT and in cloud searches that found me, you know, which made me feel good that some of my stuff is getting into geo. If you go to interim CMO now I'm at the top with the GEO results, which is great on Google. It's what I see happening. Absolutely. To your point is people are going to be going to their GEO of choice or their, their AI of choice to ask questions. And what I also see is when people get answers from these AI agents, they are much more qualified because they can ask the question the way they want it and they'll get detailed information back. So when they do contact a vendor, they're a lot more qualified and a lot more ready to be serious about something that they're, that they're researching versus if you're one of the, you know, on Google, you're one of the answers they still don't know that much about. You have to go to your website. So I think what's going to happen is you need to begin to design your websites to be GEO friendly because as people use AI to ask their questions and not just Google or whatever. Bing, unless you've got a lot of Q and A and unless you at the top of your blogs, you put things to make websites more geo friendly, if your website is not geo friendly, you may not even be considered. Even if you're in some of the search results, you may not be in what you want to be. It's not happening overnight, but it's slowly but surely it is happening and it's going to take over SEO. So I, I, yes, I agree with you completely. It's really important. And if companies wait too long, they could be behind the curve to catch up. Yeah, what I, what I find when I, when I speak to somebody, prospect or client who's a little resistant to investing in LLM visibility and maybe SEO as well, is we find that we can often articulate specifically some of the things that their competitors are doing, which are usually things you should be doing anyway. Right. That they're not doing. Right. So if you look at the quantity of content production and where that content is being syndicated out to, or the kinds of things you and I are doing now, podcast recordings and those kinds of things that create the organic human content that the LLMs are preferring. Right. Because they don't like to eat their own slope, they prefer to get new stuff. Yes. That's, that's verifiable and useful. So I find that, you know, when I, when I frame it to them, oh, well, don't just do this because it improves your visibility in an lm. Do it because it's good for the business anyway. Right. It creates assets for the sales team. It creates assets for, you know, your PR teams to talk about. It's social media activation fodder. Right. Those kinds of things tend to correlate pretty highly. Of course, the most expensive thing is community participation. Right. That's still extremely labor intensive. But you'll find folks who say, wait a minute, I have to be active in Reddit, you know, not so much in B2B2B has its own, even more B2B now because of, because of the deal that Google and Reddit made together. So if, you know, and it's something I, as a solopreneur, I'm thinking of, but it's, you know, it's 24 hours a day. Right? Yeah. But Reddit is becoming more important slowly in B2B also because Google is relying on the data. If you look at a lot of the answers and some of the stuff in the LLMs, but also in Google's results, it's more and more from Reddit. So I think that's quickly becoming a factor in B2B as well as B2C. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the other reasons I think it's doing that and the engineers are starting to favor it, is even though there are spam issues in Reddit, as there are in other communities and Wikipedia even to some extent, although To a lesser extent, at least it's mostly human. Right. Because they. If you start putting a lot of stuff in without having the karma. And Reddit also. Exactly. So at least it's got some. Yeah, yeah. So, so there, you know, of course, you know, like SEO, there's black hat things you can do pretty much anywhere and you usually get in trouble. But you know, I think it's a really interesting evolution in sort of visibility management. Right. That marketing teams need to think about because, you know, you could probably make a case for being active in Reddit even if it didn't have SEO and GEO implications. Right. To that, you know, to that earlier. Let's try to figure out what you should do. Anyway, so what else should we be talking about, you know, with the marketing teams this year that they should be doing or what else are you advising that they do? Well, I work with a lot of CMOs that are in private equity portfolio companies or sometimes I come on as an interim CMO or I help with go to market alignment and go to market transformations. Those are the types of things I do with clients. And you know, a couple things that I coach cmos on because I see these issues a few times over and over. One is narrowing down. Pick three things and do them well. Don't try to boil the ocean, but, you know, figure out what's going to move the needle. And yeah, you'll do 10 things, but make sure you really focus on the three things that are going to move the needle and prioritize and resource those. And the other thing is learn to speak the CFO and the board's language. You know, communicate what you're doing in marketing as investments, not costs. Develop a close relationship with the CFO that's a critical partner for the cmo. And don't just get involved when it's budget time, but six months before it's budget time. So you can get in the assumptions that they're building, not when they've already baked in the assumptions and you're trying to defend your budget, that's too late. But some of those relationships that are really important in the C suite and CMOs should not think of themselves as the head of marketing, but rather as a P and L general manager. Operate that way. If you see things that are not doing much, cut it before someone asks you to cut it. Be responsible for the assets and the investments that you've been entrusted and act like a general manager and look at ways you can help other functions even if they're not marketing. You know, those are some of the, you know, and I also, you know, I'm big on customer led growth, big on defining a remarkable customer experience to your ICP audiences and doing things like net promoter score, not as a vanity metric, but as a vehicle to continuously improve your customer love, if you will. What I see with some companies, the downstream impact of not having the right ICP are churn issues where, you know, maybe easy to bring on. You know, you make the quarter great, you made the quarter, but if you bring on prospects and customers that you can't keep and grow, you're buying debt, you're not buying long term growth and you're just rotating around. And I've seen this in some of the companies I work with. So that ICP and governance around the ICP is really, really important to run, you know, an alignment between the different functions. It's really important. Yeah. It's interesting you mentioned the private equity folks. We do a fair amount of due diligence on the rain the dated hat for PE firms pre acquisition. Great. And it's fascinating in the last two years and in the last six months in particular, used to be we would just help to find, you know, where's low hanging fruit, how high is up, what's the marginal cost of incremental, etc. Etc. Right. All the usual stuff we identify the, the roadmap, right. For the first six months to a year. And that way they could decide, you know, what multiple are we willing to play based on how much upside there is. But increasingly now there's some of this AI transformation that they want in there, right? To the extent that can we change headcount? Because certain things can be partially or fully automated or can we get, I mean I certainly get close to 50 to 100 times more mileage out of a coder in comparison to three years ago. Right. But marketing hasn't reached that point yet. Clearly the marketing toolbox includes AI where it didn't before. So it's interesting that the investment community, PE usually starts first in a different way than VC does. But PE comes in from a cost and upside ROI perspective and looks at things. And I think interestingly, that AI transformation is also the kind of thing that a CMO who's branching beyond their defined roles and responsibilities to other touch points would be looking at. Right. Because customer service is a marketing touch point. Right. Even though you don't own customer service, it's a marketing touch point. And the chief revenue officer and all the sales touch points, those aren't marketing, but it's a marketing touch point. And so to the extent that any of those are broken or suboptimal, you know, you need the invoice or how or the collection process under finance. Another. Yeah. So it's really interesting, you know, when you look use both the AI transformation lens to look at things and you look at every touch point as somehow impacting marketing, it really changes the mindset of the cmo. Right. In being a team player of a much really owning the P and L. Right. Absolutely. And I sometimes call myself a customer capitalist because I'm big on customer experience and how that drives long term growth. And there's a great book. Fred Reichelt, who is the father of NPS, he's been at Bain for 40 years. He wrote a book called Winning on Purpose and it's all about how customer, you know, how businesses should be using NPS. I call it NPS 3.0 but how they should be using it as a vehicle for continuous improvement. And he says that only about 5% or 6% of companies are doing it. Right. A lot of companies are giving it lip service or using our NPS. Is this it's great versus what are we doing to improve it over time? What problems are we identifying? How are we responding to it? How are we telling the customers that we listened and actually changing something? And I've done some of those initiatives with different private equity portfolio companies to reduce churn and improve their industry scores. But loving customers and having a culture to do that across the different functions is critical. And it's an area a lot of companies can do better can do much better than they are. It's got to be in the culture. You have to have a customer centric and employee centric culture together and that has to come from the CEO first. And all the functions got to be part of the culture. Agree 100%. Well, we've certainly given everybody watching or listening a huge homework assignment as a result of our content conversation to go out and see what they can improve. I appreciate you jumping on and sharing your wisdom with myself and the audience. My my pleasure. Great seeing you again and thank you for inviting me so.