AI's Role in Transforming Marketing x B2B Sales, with Mobeen Khan | Sponsored by SearchMaster

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Times analytics podcast. I'm your host Alex Sofranis and today we're on with Mobeen Khan. Mobeen, would you like to introduce yourself?

Speaker B: Hi. Thanks for having me here. Excited to be on the podcast and engaging with your audience. My name is Mobine Khan. I live in Dallas. Most of my life was spent in the east coast in the New York, New Jersey area. I'm an engineer by training. Worked primarily in the mobility and telecom industry uh, and then later on in the software and uh, uh, industry and mostly in, in the B2B space. Started off in the engineering, moved into product management and marketing over time and then the last 10 years uh, as general manager and managing P and L and sales.

Speaker A: Tell us how mobility has in B2B sales has changed in your career.

Speaker B: Yeah, so I've been in the workforce for over 20 years now and so I've seen a lot of changes over time and we all have and I think the rate of change that, that, that acceleration that on, on, on the changes is, is just been on a high. So the curve is very high and it requires everybody, not just if you are an engineer or write code or build products but also as people who sell it, people who market it have to stay up with the changing times. The way buyers buy has evolved and uh, accordingly the way people sell has evolved and we'll go through it in our conversation and I have a framework I like to use that I've developed over time and uh, not rocket science but something that helps me wrap things around that we'll go into. I have worked as both in startups building new products and bringing them to market and then also inside of high growth organizations in large companies like AT&T and Amazon where call it an intrapreneurship effort and, and I can give my learnings from both sides in, in that I, at this stage at this time I am working with a venture fund and helping a lot of other entrepreneurs, uh, advising them on their startup journeys, especially from a sales perspective and a fundraising perspective. And my focus industry areas are of course mobility, telecom but also enterprise software and what I call physical AI. So this is think about robotics or connected products and IoT those are the areas that I focus on.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's very interesting. What would you say investors are generally focused on right now? It's November 2025. I know there was a big AI wave. Is that still focus? Is there any specificity you can provide on specific verticals within the general AI applications?

Speaker B: Yeah, AI, ah has taken over Everything in terms of investments, it's sucked the air out. If you had a business that does not have the word AI in it in some shape or form, it is difficult to get attention unfortunately. However, it is also a core technology that is going to change every industry and every function. So no matter what you're building, you will have some component of data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, uh, capabilities in your products. As you build, every product, every function, every capability will have some level of data based learnings elements to it. My area that I am um, right now focusing on both in terms of investments and incubation myself, is bringing the world of the physical world and the digital world together. Something as simple as a connected robot that does specialized welding or a 3D picture of your teeth that automatically produces the right denture, designs and prints it for you while you wait in the lobby of a dentist office. These are all new businesses that I feel bring the, that are bringing the physical world into the digital and vice versa and bringing those together. Another area that um, I love is, which is going to change a lot of the industries is the bringing the video element into optimization of workflow for B2B companies. So a camera is like our eyes, you're looking at things. Camera machine vision has been in use for a while in industries like manufacturing. You look at product defects at a high speed camera and then you say, oh, that product number XYZ is not good, take it out of the line. But you can take that same concept, add to it a virtual, uh, overlay, so augmented reality or virtual reality on top of it. Then you can start to make really strong optimizations in human, machine and process interaction. For example, a connected worker who comes into a place, let's say a factory to fix some wiring issue or H vac issue and he has an a connected VR headset on which is looking at what he's looking at and all the wire mesh and everything, it automatically starts to make sense because he's seeing an augmented reality version of that. So I think these kind of concepts have been talked about. Products have been built over the last 10 years, but they never could meet the compute price points for mass deployments. And I think now the timing is just about right to bring that physical and the digital world together to optimize a lot of the processes in the B2B businesses. So those are the areas I'm focused on. As I said as an engineer I love to think through products. But what I practice is going to market and building revenue and scale with those kind of products.

Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. What would you say are some best practices for B2B businesses in terms of going to market in the current environment?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think sales is a, uh, it's a. Going to market is a block and tackle game. It's very tactical. It's very quarter to quarter. It's very like what have you done for me lately? A game and however uh, it's. You could be pushing a bus, but are you pushing the bus in the right direction? There's a vector element to this. Are you selling the right thing to the right people at the right price? If you're not, you're, you're not, you're not making the real change. If you're getting the wrong customers, if you're selling in the wrong markets, if you're selling with the wrong price points which are not profitable over long term, you're actually hurting the company, your business. I'm going to just talk a little bit about. There's a difference if you are an entrepreneur and if you're a larger company has a larger budget to put down and they need to do the right analysis and strategy. But in a startup world, the world is upside down and it's all about the hustle. It's all about typically a founder who's also a product leader or a industry leader is hustling, finding the contracts, finding the network, uh, plugging himself or herself in and creating these opportunities out of pure grit. And that's, that's admirable and we see that all the time. I've done that with my companies that I've been part of and it's both exciting and taxing at the same time. However, most of the time those uh, you do what you need to do but those are not scalable practices. And so you got to go revert back to how this thing, this needs to be done. And so my model that I advise entrepreneurs is yeah, you need to get the first five customers or 10 customers, any which way you can. But as soon as you start to put real investment into building repeatable, reliable sales flow, you got to look at this as a structured model. And you may not take all the pieces of that model, but you need to have that model in mind. And the model in, has five dimensions. Number one is what is the, what is the sales model you're using? And we'll go into uh, what I mean by that. The industries could uh, be structured very different ways that, that you are servicing. You may be compliant to that, to that structure or you may be there to just Disrupt it and have people rethink it. But anyway, in any case there is a structure in place that you're entering and so you need to start looking at how you are going to sell. And there are basically three models we'll go more detail into. It's a sales led growth model, it's a product led growth model or it's an ecosystem led growth model. My experience is in B2B or B2B 2C so I'm speaking from that filter if you will. Primarily the uh, second thing which is the second most important thing is your targeting strategy. Entrepreneurs by their nature and when we are in the entrepreneur seat we think our product would be loved by everybody in the world and everybody, everybody should buy it and everybody will benefit from it. If I just made this tweak and there now I can serve the healthcare industry, I can serve the utilities, I can service all these customers. But the targeting strategy is really important. Who are you going to go after first and the second and then just as important, who are you not going to go after or service? So that targeting strategy is really important. As you start to build through a framework there are a couple of things. And the third thing is sales management. Any good VP of sales has a framework around hey, this is the CRM I'm m going to use. There's the 5 stage or 7 stage or 10 stage sales process. Here's the KPIs, here's the Coda compensation. Especially if you're in a sales led growth model, all of that stuff. But you have to have equivalence of that in the other models as well. So what is that sales management process? The next two are not typically thought of as a, as a sales process elements but I think they are very important. And as a CEO especially you got to think through this. You may design an organization where these two pieces are within the sales organization under the CRO or you just have a VP of sales and you'd really want to keep it under yourself or some someone who's running end to end strategy. It depends on the company. So those two elements are product alignment and customer management. What is product alignment in the world today? The feedback loop from customer to product to new features or competitor to your customers to a product to new feature is shrinking and it's becoming so, so small that you need to react sometimes instantly. In addition there are the new organizations your customers are not very clear. So for example, if you're selling an agentic AI solution in an enterprise, you may think that the CIO is your customer or CTO is your customer, but it's not. It's the customer support organization working with a sales organization, working with the marketing organization. And each of them have a user story that you're trying to service. But you don't have the feedback mechanisms built so that you can pipe those information back to product. And then the product makes the changes and enhances the features near real time or as close to real time as possible and you start to service, get that nice feedback loop to make your customers really happy. So the product alignment, I say, is really the responsibility of a person who owns the customer. And typically organizations don't pay a lot of attention to that. But that is a very important element of doing your sales job because the next customer you uh, go to in the same space may have heard from that other customer that you serviced and didn't do a good job. And, and now you have an uphill battle that you're gonna climb. And the last element in that is similar product alignment. And then customer management. Customers go through a life cycle, just like products go through a life cycle. Your customer may be in an exploratory stage, they may be in a pilot stage, they may be newly deployed customers just learning about your product. They may be an old customer that now have identified some real needs in the market and in their processes that now they want, they trust you and they want you to build those and, or they may be churning out that's just as important as acquiring a new customer. Um, so a customer management life cycle process and information feedback is also part of the sales organization. So do again going back those five elements. There's your sales model, there's your targeting strategy, there's your sales management strategy. There's your product feedback loop and alignment, and there's your customer management strategy. Now you may say, oh, that's a huge organization as a startup or a young business or even a division inside a company, I'm not going to invest all this. I would say that you should have all of these things in mind as you build your strategy. Number two, it's not really people, it's processes and systems. Also, many times you can over time automate a lot of that. Uh, if you're looking at the right data at the right time, with the right constructs in the right context. And beauty of AI is that it can allow, if you understand that it will allow you to collect all of that information now, which is really important. And over time you do build the organizational pieces as you grow, as you scale. And that's where you get that instead of growing over a period of time, your sales at a nice reliable clip, you can actually get to an inflection point where you can just take off. And we see that in many companies of today where the companies are getting to a hundred million dollar ARR in record times or a billion dollar in ARR in record.

Speaker A: Why is that?

Speaker B: It is because you're building those systems that are reinforcing. Of course you have to have a great product, but that's having a great product is not enough. You got to have that go to market structure around it. That's bringing those customers and keeping those customers and getting more diffusion out of your product into those customers.

Speaker A: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How does analytics play into all of that?

Speaker B: So analytics is a really broad term in my mind. I'll go back to having the processes and the systems to organize data. To organize data correctly, first you need to know what data you need to collect or have. Having a strategy allows you to collect those pieces of data. And sometimes it's not easy to collect. Sometimes that data can be inside of your product, other times the data can be inside of the customer systems and you need special ways or permissions to get it in a legal way. Sometimes there are compliance issues so you need to make sure your systems are compliant and you're taking care of all the industry responsibilities in order to collect that data. So it's, I think initially it's all about again going back to the strategy piece. You need to have that, that thinking 360 thinking around your customer and your customer data and your sales data. Then you need to have as I said, a certain structure in place that allows you to organize the data in a certain way and that goes through to your KPIs, your governance and uh, we haven't even talked AI yet. This is all about getting the data and getting the data organized in a place where it's accessible. In most organization our data is spread in at least a dozen different systems. We use something different for our communication, a slack or notion or collaboration. We may use for product. We may m need may use JIRA to manage our sprints and our product management cycles. We may use Monday for customer engagements. We may use Zoho or Sugar CRM for our customer management. We may use HubSpot for marketing. Your data spend is in a dozen different systems and the key is figuring out how this data collaborates or affects or where are the dependencies and so on so forth. So uh, I think it is extremely important in when you are building your sales management piece of the organization that you have data scientists, analytics people on the staff that know how to go and get that data. That is like the most important thing as you're building your analytics strategy. And it doesn't have to be elaborate from day one, but it needs to be flexible. But it also needs to start from the, if you start from the top, let's say, what's my, uh, quarterly pipeline Funnel statistics, You would very quickly, in two quarters, get to a point where you will decipher what is the next layer of data that can build up to the layer that I'm looking. And then you go deeper and deeper. And it's an evolving process many times and it should be an evolving process. You're never going to design a perfect system on day one, but you should spend time and effort investing in it just as you're investing in your sales teams and training.

Speaker A: Yeah. What do you look for when you're hiring? The different functions to make a, to build out a SLG motion.

Speaker B: Great. I'll uh, expand your question a little bit. Each of the motions requires different types of people that you're gonna, you're gonna hire. In an slg, which is very much a relationship based, network based sales motion. You're looking for people with depth and experience, understanding the language of the industry you're selling into and having a network. Um, when they walk into an industry event in Chicago or Las Vegas, they should know a lot of people walking the floors, they need to know the language being spoken at the roundtable sessions. So that piece at the front lines is important. Now in the back, there are, uh, two types of people that I think are extremely important, especially in slg, in other motions too. One is, we talked about the analytics piece, people who understand how to manage the data science piece of sales processes. Because, uh, the better insights and faster you have, the better you can, you can evolve this. The second area is people don't think about it too much, but it's really about lead generation. I'm not saying marketing, but let's call it lead generation. Marketing is a part of it. It's, it's. How are you getting the engagement from your prospects? Because you can hire a really powerful sales team and for a short period of time they may be reliant on their personal network, but that's not a very scalable model and it's a very expensive model. And what you really need to do is to figure out how you can lead the horse to water. How can you get there? Most salespeople when you get them a, an interested customer, uh, any good salesperson to a meeting, they know how to sell and they have close rates from Depending on the industry, 20% to 40%, 40, 50% really good close rates. The problem is they don't have enough people in their calendars to go have meetings with and everybody struggles with that. And in today's environment that is going to be a differentiator for you. And there are many clever ways you can do that. So simplest uh, ways that people have been using over the last almost a decade is hey, I'm going to be an expert in search engine marketing and bid on keywords and sales on Google Ads and so on, so forth are equivalent. And that's great. You should have a search strategy. But we all know what's happening. People are not starting their searches inside of uh, search engines anymore. They're starting it in social media channels like TikTok. They're going to AI perplexity and uh, OpenAI or ChatGPT to start to say, oh, where do I buy commercial air conditioning units? Or what's the best collaboration software out there for my team of 10 who are architects? That's where they're starting. And I don't know how to get discovered over there because I've spent all my time in optimizing for Google searches and now those Google searches are declining. I was just recently speaking at, at a uh, hospitality conference all the large hotel brands and they're seeing this like they're panicking because you and I, when we go search for hotels, we're starting in ChatGPT and they have absolutely no visibility into what do we, what do you care about? You may care about a young, hip, outdoorsy hotel and I may care about something that has a spa or whatever or a tennis court and they have no visibility into it. They're scared and um, they may be the tip of the iceberg. But all of us have to start to think about our lead generation strategy. How are we going to do that in this new environment, in this changing environment? Are we going to be the person, the entity that is going to rely on human touch? Are we going to over amplify our social media voices? Are we going to create a buzz around with our customers? Are we going to create some fancy VR related product demos? There's so many ways to do that and it depends on your industry and what they respond to. But unfortunately a lot of young companies especially don't pay a lot of attention to lead generation. And you may build a strategy and a sales model, but you're not feeding it. And if you're not feeding it, it's. It tends to be very expensive and then you end up firing your salespeople because they're not bringing the quotas that you set up without giving them the support. So I think analytics from a management point of view is really important and I think lead generation and some people may call it marketing is really important from, from the point of view of feeding your sales process.

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you. That was such a great digest of how B2B sales works with marketing analytics and I appreciate it so much. Uh, anything else that you think would be useful to the listeners in addition to what you provided already, One thing

Speaker B: I'll say is the more and more the product led growth motion, which tend to tended to be something that was a standalone. So think about how Slack was sold, uh, or some of the other software where you just go and buy a freeware version of a product, use it, tell up your friends and the product becomes the entity. It's a standalone motion. It was thought about that this is a way to sell collaborative products and so on. That element is actually seeping into everything. As consumers of any of these products, especially in software and hardware, we all want to experience the product. It's not, hey, I'm going to buy it, then I'm going to run a pilot, then I'm going to experience it. That's old school. I want to experience it now. So as we build the new products, even if they are complicated products, like what is the data center management software or hardware or chassis that I'm building and how is it going to be used? People want to experience that right away. Like for hardware, for example, people are using virtual reality to showcase how the product works, build a digital twin and let you experience the product in real time even before you buy it. There's a company I funded called I give you ig I V u dot com. They build that every day because the hardware companies and companies that build molecules for pharma have a hard time having people engage with their product. So they're building virtual reality models around those and going out. So I think that engagement of the whatever you're selling with your buyer in real time, even before they purchase the product, product is becoming an extremely important part of sales.

Speaker A: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I definitely learned a lot today. Thank you, Mabeen. I really appreciate it.

Speaker B: Thank you very much. Appreciate the talk on this nice Saturday morning and have a great weekend.

Speaker A: You too. Thank you and thanks everyone. For listening. We'll talk to you soon.