How AI and Revenue Orchestration Are Reshaping B2B Marketing Strategies

Gartner calls a collaboration drag. And they've got some really compelling data that shows that companies with high collaboration drag, as they define it, are 34% less likely to hit their revenue number and their people are four times more likely to leave due to burnout. So it has a revenue impact, it has a throughput impact. You're listening to the B2B revenue executive experience, a podcast dedicated to helping executives train their sales and marketing teams to optimize growth. Whether you're looking for techniques and strategies or tools and resources, you've come to the right place. Let's accelerate your growth in 3, 2, 1. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the B2B revenue executive experience. I'm your host, Corey, and today I'm talking to Matt Hines. He's the founder and president of Heinz Marketing. And if you're a B2B marketing leader on LinkedIn, I'm sure it's a name and a brand you'll immediately recognize. He has more than 20 years of marketing, business development and sales experience across a variety of organizations and industries. Matt has also been featured multiple times on the top 50 most influential people in Sales Lead Management list and the top 50 sales and marketing Influencers list. Matt, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah, I'm excited to get into it. And first, let's start with your journey. I want the audience to get to know you a little bit more. So obviously, as I just said, 20 years sales, marketing, biz dev across companies like Microsoft, Boeing. Tell us about your genesis of your marketing career. You know what first attracted you to the field, to the space. Well, I will say this has been a giant mistake. I started as a journalism and political science major. I edited my high school paper. I wrote for my college paper for four years. I wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein, right? I wanted to go and do long form investigative journalism and got out of school, got a job at a suburban newspaper covering state government. And I don't know if I got. I just, it just didn't, it didn't feel right. I ended up going to a PR firm, I ended up going to Microsoft for a while and then went and ran marketing for a couple startups in Seattle. And that's when I really kind of got the B2B marketing bug. I really enjoyed the complexity. I enjoyed the, just the, just the ability to work across a complex buying journey, a complex buying group sort of partner across teams. I mean, it's not like, hey, let's just run an ad and someone buys something. I really enjoyed that complexity. And then about 18 years ago, decided to kind of hang up my own shingle, do my own thing, and, you know, 18 years later, here we are. Yeah, that resonates with me. And it kind of reminds me of a LinkedIn post from years ago. I feel like this was back in the pandemic when everyone was sharing memes and like, almost vine level clips on LinkedIn. And it was, how did you get into marketing? Across the top? And it was this passerby walking on the street with a garage door that was up. Motorcycle comes in, and then the garage door sweeps down, just sweeps that person into the building along with it. Thank you. Yep, you've seen that one. It's so this, you know, earlier this week was the Forester B2B summit down in Phoenix, and we. I had a little podcast recording booth set up, and we had a whole bunch of, like, CMOs and marketing leaders come by and just in. In doing my sort of research before the. Before the show, I realized, like, you got these, like, very successful sort of B2B CMOs, and. And almost none of them studied marketing. Right. Like, there were a lot of engineers, there were some music majors, some philosophy folks that didn't know what they were doing. And so it's really. I mean, some people really do study marketing, but I think a lot of us, you know, this is what I tell my kids as well. Like, have intention, allow for serendipity, and realize that most of life is written in pencil. Right? So just be okay with going a different direction, knowing that maybe you'll love it, maybe you'll pivot again. It's okay. Yeah, I think that's fantastic advice. So you mentioned. I mean, you fell into it and you liked it. You liked the complexity working across a buyer journey. As you said, systems that integrate, that don't integrate, trying to figure out, solve complex problems. So. But then in 2007, you know, hung up your own shingle, and so what is that? What does that journey look like? And what, you know, how has that space evolved over time? Oh, boy. So, I mean, so when I started. So actually we're coming up on year 18. So we started November 2008. And if you remember, like, the market had just tanked. We're at the beginning of the financial crisis. My wife is finally pregnant with our first child. No time like the present. But it was just me and a laptop at a bus pass. And I'm. That's not even. That's not even facetious. Like, I bought a shiny new laptop Because I didn't have one because I always use my company's laptop. And then I had a bus pass for the rest of the year from my company that had just left. And so my clients were downtown Seattle. It was just me. And at the time it was just, it was demand gen for tech companies. And it was a lot of what we considered demand gen at the time. Right. It was digital ads, it was Google, it was email, it was, we had a fair amount of sales enablement efforts going on in there and it was just trying to sort of feed the beast. It didn't accommodate at that time, a lot of that buying committee sort of that what we now think of that consensus building, what we call today, account based marketing. But that dynamic had already always existed. We just didn't, didn't lean into it. I think what, what I, what I appreciate now, 18 years later, the, the growing complexity of the internal and external environments for how we have to get work done right externally, bigger buying committees, more people involved, a lower and lower sense of confidence on buyer side for what they're trying to achieve. And on the seller side, oftentimes seller sellers describe a high degree of friction inside their own organizations to get things done in the cell. Gartner calls this collaboration drag. I mean, and sometimes if to define collaboration drag, I'll just ask a cmo, how many meetings does it take for your team to produce a webinar? And they'll be like, ah, way too many. Too many people involved, too many meetings, too many emails, too many. And so like that's, that's, that's keeping you from being successful. And if I now require my marketing team to coordinate together with each other to create integrated campaigns and coordinate with sales CS to do that as well. Like the marketing orchestration, revenue orchestration has become a requirement to really tackle the complexity and scale of what's in front of B2B marketers today. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that too, because I think that collaboration, what'd you call the collaboration drag? Gartner calls a collaboration drag. Yeah. And they've got some really compelling data that shows that companies with high collaboration drag, as they define it, are 34% less likely to hit their revenue number and their people are four times more likely to leave due to burnout. Right, right. So it has a revenue impact, it has a throughput impact, and it has a, you know, ideal employee churn impact as well. Wow. Wow. I mean, I think that's, it resonates though, because I think it's something that many of us have experienced over the years. And you know, for many of us who have worked sort of on the agency side or as a consultant, you know, sometimes you look at these companies from the outside and they're just like these shimmering towers of like, oh man, they must have everything together. And then you peek behind the scenes, you're like, I'm sorry, you do what? Yeah. And you've been doing it for how long? And I think so. It's interesting and maybe the research has changed on this and I'd love to get your opinion, Matt. I think it was either a year ago or two years ago, Gartner was actually recommending something called a go to market council where you essentially get all the revenue leaders in one room and actually hash it out and to essentially combat something like that drag. Do you know if that's still their position or has that changed? What are you seeing? I don't know, but I'm already kind shaking my head, right. Because I think that, you know, it's. It sounds like a meeting version of doing jazz hands at sales kickoff, right? Where we just like say like we all agree we should be doing this together. The last thing you need is a bunch of like SE suite members getting together to say we should work together. Like there's a big, big, big difference between jazz hands at sales kickoff. And what are you doing Thursday morning? Like we were recording this here Pacific. It's like 9:15 Pacific time on a Thursday. What is your team doing? Right? Things are happening in your market. Maybe a lead comes in, maybe an intent signal is identified. Maybe someone was on the third webinar in a row. Like are they qualified or are they bored and what happens next, right? The devil's in the details of how you do this. And that's not going to be something that a CMO and a CRO and a head of CS are going to do in some like highfalutin meeting. You have to get down to brass tacks and get to the details of how this operates. Strategy needs to drive that, right? Like you can't start with a workflow, you can't start with a tool. A lot of companies will say, well we bought them Monday.com or we bought them at sauna or whatever. Like if you don't have a process or approach for how you're using it, it's counterproductive to give people a work efficiency tool. Strategy first, process second, implementation technology third. So yeah, if you're not doing anything, if you've got those teams aren't talking at all then you do have a bigger problem. So maybe a go to market council is helpful, but too often it's, it doesn't translate into the weeds and therefore it doesn't translate into anything. Yeah, no, I think that's a really good point. I mean I can see the value of it from a strategic high level standpoint, especially if you have teams that are going head to head versus actually collaborating. Right. Yeah, I, I, I'm, I'm on board for that. And I do think those leaders should be forced to at least sit in a room together, you know, on a periodic basis. I, I think that's a good. But also like you said, like I do question it because it's something that we don't talk a lot about. But high level leaders like your CROs and your CMOs, they are so detached from the work that is going on in the weeds, quite frankly, many of them, that's not their expertise. They couldn't do it if you put the workflows in front of them. Right, right. And so there is a lot of happening in those details and it needs to be orchestrated. Right. So how does your strategy actually filter down? And we've all seen the research on that. Like once you get to even Director VP level 3 out of 5 can tell tell someone what their company strategy is. So we don't even agree on what Elite is. We can forget Elite. We don't even agree on what companies we're selling to. Right. You go and ask like a lot of companies, like what's your, what's your, what's your target market? What's your ideal customer profile? Oh, you know, big hospitals, that's all they say is like, or you know, like anyone in health tech or you know, anyone that has, does marketing and needs, you know, automated services. Like no, no, no, no, no. You need to focus on a subset of the subset of your market. And that doesn't mean you can't sell to others, but it means you should be focused on that subset of the subset, like that's who it's worth going after. And the narrower that is, the more likely you're going to come across as best to breed and best in the world of doing that. And the more likely your message is going to be more targeted to them. But most companies don't have that target that agreed upon, including those that tell me they do. Because if they say, oh no, no, we all agree on that. Right? Okay, where is it written down? No, we don't have to write it down, we just have it in Our heads. Like I guarantee you it's not being applied correctly if you don't applied consistently across your organization, if you don't have it documented, if it's not documented, it can't be followed by all. And I know I'm getting into sort of process and this isn't meant to be draconian but this is bedrock because if you don't have that defined and if it isn't being consistently followed by everybody, forget collaboration, drag, even good well intentioned marketing is not going to work. Yeah, I agree and also I think it's particularly relevant right now because what was table stakes, right? Like ICP defined, shared amongst everyone. Now we're getting into a day and age where a lot of companies are going to, or at least some of the more forward thinking ones are going to things like rolling icps powered by AI, right where you're actually like having that data evaluated in real time, changing your targeting, changing your messaging based on that. So if you can't even agree on a static definition, I think when you try to get into orchestration and automation things are just going to fall apart much, much faster. Yeah, yeah it's, I'm glad you brought that up because I think a lot of companies are now taking these sort of AI forward tools and you know, just, just like a lot, you know, we continue to find ways to do marketing faster. Right. And when I say marketing I just mean like send stuff out. So you know, AI makes it easier, faster, cheaper to like get a bunch of drip campaigns going. Well if they don't address your target market, if they don't address the right person, if they, if they personalize based on where I live vers I care about and what I'm doing and what I did yesterday is probably not going to land right. And so the fundamentals are more important than ever. If we're not going to have people like if you've got institutional knowledge on what your target is and you're right, well at least that you can translate that. But you AI is only as good as the insight and prompts you give it and if you don't give it that bedrock, it's going to go crazy and it's going to be counterproductive and potentially even damaging to your brand. Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you mentioned AI too because let's get into it. I feel like we've been trending toward it, dancing around to it for the first 10 minutes of the episode here and Matt and kind of just glancing through your LinkedIn. I am and Tell me if I'm wrong. I'm sensing a complicated relationship because on the one hand, I see you cracking jokes about creating a CFO AI to write checks, and then on the other, I see you enthusiastically getting behind posts of someone who's built a suite of AI agents. Yeah. You know, and it's. It's getting 10 million in revenue from a GTM agent team. So where's your thinking now? Kind of where do you stand on it? It's revolutionary. Right. I mean, I think that, you know, there's, you know, many of us that are old enough can think about the pre web world and the post web world. We can think about sort of pre iPhone and post iPhone in terms of, like, having smartphones and the capabilities there. I'm already thinking about, you know, pre clod cowork and post cloud cowork in terms of sort of like, what's cape. What's capable now? Right. Let alone what's coming. Right. You know, so I. I think that there's a massive amount of value. I'm just sitting here as we record Claude in. In Chrome. I could keep seeing my tabs change because, like, Claude's doing a bunch of stuff that it's scheduled to do on Thursday morning. Some of them are weekly things, some of them are daily things. But, like, it's just. It's become this amazing sort of chief of staff slash assistant doing all kinds of stuff for me. And we are even internally, like, we have reinvented how we do sales and marketing by looking at things that, like, here's the objective. How can we do that better? Here's something we've always wanted to do, but it's been just kind of, like, impossible, given our capacity. But now I've got a tool that can do that for me. But it's still back to, like, what's the job to be done? Like, what am I trying to achieve? Just because, hey, I can do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. But I also think a lot of people say, okay, like, what's my current process and how do I automate that process? That process may be archaic and now's the time to totally reimagine it. Right? Like, and I don't know if I wrote about this, but, like, it's like, let's say the job is to get to Chicago. Like, I got a Cubs game to go do tomorrow night, and I need to get Chicago. Right. Well, adding two more horses to my stagecoach is a dumb idea when the jet engine exists, right? Like back in the day, adding a couple more horses might have gotten you there faster. Now it won't. Right. And so if AI is the jet engine that exists now, like, how does that change how you think about getting to Chicago? And so I would, I would encourage folks to say, like, it's not about a faster stagecoach, it's about getting to Chicago. What is your Chicago? What is the objective you're trying to achieve? And just reimagine what it would take to do that, knowing that things that were previously not possible or feasible are more accessible now. Fair enough. It's an excellent analogy. And we were talking that you're a sports fan before the show. You're a Dodgers fan, clearly, right? Not at all. No, absolutely not. You can tell I'm a husky, so I got my husky helmet up here and Born and raised, die hard Cub fan. Fair enough. Fair enough. You're the second person that I've had on this show in the past couple months, Matt, that's mentioned an AI chief of staff. So I'd love to ask, how did you go about building that and what kind of tasks does that run for you? Well, it's a, it's a work in progress for sure. And let's start with what the definition of a chief of staff is. I, I see some people that still think in chief of staff is an assistant. No, it is not an assistant. Sort of like, you know, schedules your books, your travel and books in your calendar. I don't need a chief of staff for that. I need. The chief of staff is another me. It's a vice me. Right. And so, like, I think about what are the things I need to be thinking about and doing. They're going to help me be more successful. I'll give you a fairly simple example that, you know, part of my job at my company now, I've got, I've got a CEO, we've got a client services team. My job is to create content, to think about strategy, to figure out what direction our market's going. So it's a lot of learning, it's a lot of writing, it's a lot of discerning. I have a series of tools now that condense information from some of the thought leaders in our space and give me a morning digest of what they're thinking about doing. I've got a process where three times a week, cowork goes through all of my everything I've been doing. It looks at all my zoom transcripts, it looks at my slack interactions, it looks at everything I've sent an email and it will say here's the through lines of what you're doing and what you're thinking about and here's some potential content ideas. And it will pre write some substack notes for me as well. Like, they're never perfect. They always have to get, you know, sort of rewritten or edited. I've got, I've got a CMO community, right? And so like every day there's conversations happening in Slack. But if I said like, hey, like, look at all of last year's conversations and then look at the conversations that have happened in the first four months. How has the CMO narrative changed? How has the CMO conversation changed? Like, these are things that would be really hard to do if you didn't have some of these tools. But like, I need insights to make my job better. And so that's just scratching the surface of the things that, you know. It's not like assistant level stuff, it's. It's second brain level stuff. And this is where I really think. Again, like, I hate. I don't want to. This is the last time I'll mention the Chicago analogy. But just the things you are doing today, the things that are normally part of your workflow, like automate those first. That's the easy thing because that's what you know. But step back and say, what is my job? What am I trying to achieve? What are the insights? What's the access to information? What's the data that I don't have pulled together that can help me be a better leader, that it can help me make better decisions and get really creative about what that could be. Not tactically, not what the tools and data points are, but what the outcomes are you want to achieve. AI may not be able to do it today, but I am blown away what it can do now versus the beginning of the year. Yeah, no, no, I mean, I'm with you. Even the, you know, I think there was a lot of collective enthusiasm early on. Look, ChatGPT, or excuse me, ChatGPT can do a thing. And then, you know, behind the scenes you're kind of looking at that thing and thinking, well, it's not that great. But even the leap to that and then cowork and more agentic workflows, I mean, in the past year, it's. That's been wild. It's been a journey. For sure. Yeah. So I want to ask you about this in the context of SaaS platforms, because I saw a recent post where you, you laid out three steps that need to be on the roadmap of SaaS tools and platforms right now. One was true integration. And I think no argument there. And it's an important distinction because I think a lot of surprisingly sophisticated buyers get fooled on that one. Right? Yeah. You don't know the difference between like it integrates or it doesn't. I mean, a lot of times a company will buy like, you know, like Salesforce goes and buys Pardot and says it's integrated. It's no more integrated than Marketo is integrated with Salesforce. Right. They didn't combine the code. Like most people have no idea how that all works. Yep. That's when you don't, you don't know until after you buy. But hybrid human agent use cases. And this is the one I really want to dig into. Right. Because you said essentially the same workflow has to work whether the user is a person, an agent, or both at once. And the reason I'm stuck on this point is because as looking back over the podcast episodes that we've done over the past seven years and everyone that AI was mentioned, and you can see the theme that runs through it all is augmentation, not replacement. However, about every two years, what people mean by augmentation changes, especially over the last two years, it's become replacement. It's like, oh, no, no, we're going to replace these roles. But it's really augmenting another human role to oversee xyz. So I'm kind of fascinated by this because it seems to insane that the workflows need to be designed for a human and agent or both. I could take it as saying, well, the work being done in those platforms could be done by either. Mm. We've created a real mess of our for ourselves, haven't we? Like, we buy, you know, like when I first started 18 years ago, there was a handful of cool technology tools. And then when Scott Brinker started the, the Martech super graphic, there were, I think they were like 2,500 or 2,800 when he first did it. And we're all like, holy crap, that's a lot. Well, I mean, have you seen the late. It's like 10x plus that now. Right. And so, and we keep, we keep buying these tools and we buy a tool and then we blame the tool for not working. And then a new shiny object comes up and then all of a sudden three tools that do the same thing, but we only use two of them. I mean, I, I mean the car, I mean, you probably see it too. Like, I mean, I, I have companies I have, that have Marketo and, and Pardot and HubSpot because either they've bought it for different divisions and different business units, have different tools, or they've acquired companies and never done the consolidation. So it's a mess. I'll take a step back though, like, if again, like, back to the job to be done. What do we need marketing to do? What do we need go to market to do? And the answer to that question is like, well, where are our customers and how do we need to sort of direct our customers where we want them to go? So if we say the customer, there's a buying journey or there's a customer journey across buying and using your product or service, and then there's the orchestration of that that we're trying to facilitate with some ease, with as little friction as possible and with as much predictability and scalability as we can create. And then how do we do that? Back to strategy, process, technology, in that order. Right. I think that AI and the capacity to do this and the complexity of the tools we have, like, forget AI for a second. Just the volume of tools that we have access to is exposing the lack of work design and workflow discipline that just doesn't exist in a lot of organizations. You can't just light up Marketo and say we're done. You can't just light up clay and say, like, well, we're, we're good. Like, it's way more complicated that than that in most B2B organizations. And that's just an inconvenient truth. It just is. It's fully tamable. This isn't rocket science, but you have to get to a very detailed level to make that work. And what's, what's beautiful when you get to that level of sort of workflow design is when things aren't working, you can diagnose it very quickly. Right. If something isn't working the way you want or we're not getting this particular outcome, you go back to the blueprint and you can pinpoint pretty quickly a part of the process that is gumming up the machine. Fix it back to work. Yep, absolutely. I think it comes full circle back to that collaboration drag that you mentioned early on that we were kind of talking about. Right. Because, you know, a lot of, if you step back and look at what is my job and what would the ideal state be? Like you said, it's a, it's a fun puzzle to solve, it's an intriguing problem to, you know, work out, but it's not rocket science. I think the rocket science really comes in when you look at well, why can't I do this? And most of the time it's not a systems problem, it's a well, we haven't done things that way problem or we have these data gaps problem. And it's a cultural problem. You know, it's, it's, it's a human LED problem in many ways. I, I was on a call yesterday with a couple people from Smarter X. It's the broader organization that used to be called the Marketing AI Institute and we're talking about Macon, their Marketing AI conference coming up this, this fall. Highly recommend anyone who is involved in marketing go to market work. B2B go to market Work should, should be there. Of the hundreds and hundreds of speaking submissions they got in the last month or so, only one specifically address change management in organizations. And as important as I think it is to sort of go back to the job to be done and think through sort of work design, this is a massive level of change that is coming not just to your process but to your people. And if you don't manage that change, if you don't think through the culture change and the change management components that our lizard brains are going through. Do I have a job? Am I going to know how to do this new job? Am I going to have the time and ability and grace to figure out this new job before they fire me? Because I'm not doing it well. I mean, the, your people are all thinking this, right? I mean, you can put the best workflow and the best playbook in the world in front of people. And if they don't know how to use it, if they don't have context, if they're afraid of it, they will spit it out and they will create a narrative around what's happening in and around them. Every one of us has a bowl and that bowl is full of information that we understand about ourselves, about our lives, about our workplace, about our future. You need as elite as an organization to fill that bowl with context. It can change. You can change what goes into the bowl, but you need to give people a sense of the path you're going, going down. Because if you don't fill the bowl, they're going to fill the bowl themselves. You may not like what they put in the bowl and they may tell other people that inaccurate parts of what's in their bowl. And that's when you get lots of problems, right? And so, you know, I would encourage everyone as you're going through this Change to be upfront with your teams about what that is, upfront with the context up front for what's in it for them. That change management plan is really critical. Yeah, no, I think so too. Especially because. Especially when you think about what's being replaced in a way and you start thinking about, okay, some of the marketing work that we've shifted toward AI or some of the SDR BDR work that we shifted toward AI. And what does managing those platforms look like? Well, a lot of times it feels like being on an assembly line. And I think, you know, when you start getting how my job is going to change. Pascal Fanette. And I'm going to go. I'm going to go take a step back. Pascal Fat is, calls himself a futurist. And he talks a lot about just sort of innovation and how we, how we accept and how we move through periods of innovation. And he has something he calls the innovation paradox. And I'm going to paraphrase it poorly, but I'm going to try. Says the innovation we have been through appears far, far easier than it was, right? Like, think of like, you know, it wasn't that long ago we did not have a supercomputer in our pocket. You know, it was less than a year ago that when I could have Cloud just doing a bunch of stuff behind me behind the scenes that I otherwise either wouldn't have gotten done or would have taken my time to do. But, like, our lizard brains are really good at accepting a new normal, right? So the things that have happened, the innovations, have it as steep as it might have been, no longer feels that steep. It feels very normal. Conversely, the innovation in front of us that we don't yet understand, that we don't know how it's going to play out, that is not yet fully known. That innovation curve feels steeper, appears steeper than it will feel as we go through it. Because if we sit here and say, oh, everything's going to change three years from now, well, that's a. That's more than a thousand days away, which is a thousand days of 24 hours. We've been recording this for 30 minutes. Like time does. The pace of time does not change. And our lizard brains are pretty good about learning about things and then rationalizing them somehow so that future innovation will happen. The future three years from now. We're like, oh, it's going to look so different than it did today. Of course it will. Of course it will. As I put my iPhone in front of the screen, right? But, like, that's Normal this is just accepted. When the WI fi on the plane doesn't work, we get pissed. We are hurtling through the sky at 34,000ft at like 600 miles an hour and we're upset that our websites won't load fast enough. We start to accept things pretty quickly. Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to rein myself in, but I'm tempted to dive headfirst down the rabbit hole of apprehension versus expectation and what that means for the human condition. But anyway, let's, let's, let's talk about that evolving role and how, especially for marketers, how that's going to change over the past, over there, over the next three years rather so. I mean, I think, you know, you've argued something similar to, you know, as the value shifts toward systems thinking and strategic judgment, it's going to move away from, you know, sort of those low level deliverables campaigns, that old systems that we've run that may or may not be working. Right. So I guess tell us a little bit more about where your head's at for, you know, the next three years and where we're going. Well, I've mentioned before, I think fundamentals still matter greatly. I think that, you know, I liked when you mentioned earlier sort of the dynamic icp, the fact that like you're who's not, not just who's in your icp, but the criteria that matters. You know, tradition. We've had to go do a bunch of research and we come up with something, we say, well, let's use that until we do the next batch of research. You should be doing research every day. Right. There should be always all in tools that are sort of constantly evaluating the market, constantly evaluating your own data, what's working, what's not, and identifying shifts in behavior, identifying shifts and trends in what's working and what's not. And there's always going to be shades of gray. Right. Like I mentioned before, like let's say you've got a very narrow ideal customer profile. We have one as a business. If you said like what's your target market? I give you a very specific list. I sell services to people outside of that list. Bigger companies, smaller companies, different industries. This isn't constrain who you can sell to, it should constrain who you pursue. Right. But that list is going to change on a regular basis. For instance, when I started in 2008, my very first client was selling software into HR. And during the financial crisis, the head of HR, who previously had budget, whose purchase authority for the product. No longer did it had to go to the cfo. So all of a sudden CFO is a member of the buying train. Like we discovered this because we were talking to our sales team and finding out, you know, this other person had to get. So we had to create a whole workflow. We did that. But like, those are things you should be able to see and discover more quickly today through the data by looking at what other people are talking about. Like you should if in your industry, another thing you should do is have a regular screen across your industry of other people that have your job or of people that have the job of the Persona you have. Like, what are they talking about? If I, if I'm selling into large hospitals, I should have a, I should have a list of who the large hospital administrators are and I should be, have a regular feed of like, what are they saying? They're probably not posting on LinkedIn every day, but they may be quoted in industry publications, they may be speaking at industry conferences. So like, go figure out how to find out what they're talking about and look at that across all administrators. I mean, content gold for you. But there's probably a lot of that content that you wouldn't want to publish because that's a competitive insight that should, that should change your messaging, your product strategy, your product roadmap. Again, like this, you know, you could, you could probably have googled all this stuff in the past or set up Google alerts, but just having that information is one thing. Synthesizing it is a whole nother thing. And so this is where the thinking and reasoning skills within the AI models today can really help you. You're still going to have to look at that reasoning, reasoning in that synthesis and say, what do I do about this? It may give you some ideas of what to do, but I think just the fact that you can now get that chunk of gold on a regular basis, massively valuable. Yep, yep, it's definitely huge. And so to pull on this future looking thread a little bit more. So if you had to narrow it down so maybe 3, 5 skills that B2B marketers should be investing in right now, what would they be? I mean, I would definitely. You're not going to get a job unless you have proven that you have built sort of AI driven models and workflows today. Right. And so it's not just, oh, I know how to use ChatGPT, it's like, here's how I used it to speed up my content development process. Here's how I used it to automate asset production. I'll give you an example like so I mentioned around this CMO community in Slack we've had it for about six years. People regularly share sort of examples of board decks and sort of data in sort of spreadsheet or you know, dashboards and things and there's but, but they're all over in Slack and so it's like a great library but all the books are on the floor in about two days time. Cloud built me an HTML shell that was a directory of all the resources categorized by topic and so it's still all in Slack. We didn't put it anywhere else. We want to keep it within the place that's only for the members. But all of a sudden this resource library that I've wanted forever is live, right. And so I think think about things like that where there's a problem you just need to solve and then you go and build it. So I would, I mean I really do think you have to sort of have that use case if you're intimidated or not sure what to build for work. Build something for fun first. What's something that is your passionate or enjoy that you can build first. For example, my, my 15 year old son is a huge Star wars fan but he's specifically a Star wars of like Clone wars stuff. Now I' old guy. So for me Star wars is like original trilogy. Like I'm a pretty simple guy. I don't know much about Clone wars but he loves the Clone wars and he really likes Clone wars trading cards. And you can go to ebay, you can go to Facebook, you can go to all these places. But we created a tool that will look at like 16 different marketplaces and narrow in on exactly what he's interested in. And a couple times a week just sends him an email with oh, here's the ones you don't have that you might want to look at and here's, you know, there's some matchups either it's a trade or a purchase or whatever like oh, you can do that. Yeah, you can build that. You can do that for yourself in like cloud cowork or if you want to build that and say I've got a, I've got a group of collectors, I'd love to give it to go have Cloud code build it and then give it to everybody else as an app. Right. So anyway, I think, I think having that skill set and being more comfortable and be able to talk about scenarios is going to what light people up. I also think you know Forest for the trees. Back to, like, you know, there's, there's strategy, process, technology. Be able to speak to the outcome and the job to be done. Get out of your own language. As a marketer, we're really good at inventing our own language and acronyms, but speak the language of the business, right? I mean, too often you have a marketer that's sort of like, you can have the most complex marketing in the world, but if it's. It's not about those workloads, it's not about, it's not about the demand you're creating. The closer you can get to the money, the closer you can get to metrics you could buy a beer with, the better. I'm actually, I'm actually feeling fairly. This week. I'm feeling fairly optimistic about our industry. We had a marketer meet up last week in Austin, right, about 80 marketers in for like a lunch and learn. And I said, okay, we're not recording this. We're not taking, we're not keeping track who says what. But raise your hand if your primary metric is an MQL. And about 5% of the audience raised their hand. I said, what's. Raise your hand if your primary metric is pipeline. About 50% raise their hand. Raise your hand if your primary metric is marketing source market attributed revenue. About another 25% raise their hand. So clearly some people weren't paying attention or were multitasking. But two years ago would have been the opposite, right? Two years ago would have been like, you know, everyone's focused on leads and not really focused on pipeline, let alone revenue contribution. So I feel like we're moving in the right direction there, but that's critically important. First, I love, I love the suggestion about, you know, build something that is tailored toward your hobbies or your passions outside of work with AI, Because I think that's going to remove a lot of the barrier, right, to that bowl analogy, right? Here's the story I'm telling myself about my work, the culture of it, what I have to do. But if you can experiment with the tool in a space that's going to fuel something outside of that, that's awesome. And then, yeah, I think I've heard it again and again. I think years ago I had had Sherilyn Casterman on the show, and she was relaying this advice from a Microsoft CEO. And I don't remember her name, but she said, you've got to get close to the juice. And what she meant by that was, you've got to get close to finance. Right. You have to speak in finance and ROI and the language of money, because that's the language of business. And so I think it's. It's worth. Every time someone brings that up, I think it's worth repeating. It's excellent advice. I'll take that a step further. We. So in our CMO group, we meet every Friday, and we have a different topic every Friday. And a couple of weeks ago, we did one on financial literacy specifically for pre. Public, pre IPO companies. And you realize all these very successful CMOs, if you say, can you translate a cap table? Can you define solutions? You know, the difference between strike value, stock value, and enterprise value? Most of them will say no, but they don't want to say no in a public place. They feel like they should know that stuff. So we had a CFO come that was, like, super generous and just, you know, including those stuff, but built a spreadsheet, sort of theoretical spreadsheet, and kind of showed block everyone through everything. So I can sit here and say, like, you know, translate your, you know, marketing efforts to the revenue goals and get closer to the juice. But the juice isn't just hitting your pipeline number. It isn't just hitting your quarterly sales number, like your CFO sitting back here. And the investors they're working with are saying, like, there's a rule of 40, or in some cases now, a rule of 60. What the hell is that? Well, you know, we're not gonna have time to unpack all that here, but, like, go figure out what that is. Go figure out what sort of, you know, what the owners of the business care about, which is sales is a driver towards that. Right. The goal of the business, it may be to close deals this quarter, but the goal of the business may be to exit by the end of this year. Right. So, like, if you understand that level of finance strategy and translate that down to how you're going to market and down to how you execute on that, not only is your. Is your go to market strategically better, your CFO is going to have more confidence in what you come to them with, because they have a better sense that it might actually be tied to the things they really do care about. Yep. Thank you for expanding that. That was a good point. Okay. I think we're getting into the final sort of leg of the episode here, and we talked a lot about AI, like, what it can do great, what it can accelerate, maybe some limitations that it has and where we're going for the future. However, stepping back and looking at a lot of real world state of what's going on right now. It seems like people are just still spewing out a lot of content. And maybe that content is fantastic, maybe it all looks and sounds the same. I'm not going to weigh in on that. But a lot of it hasn't been tracked to meaningful improvement in business value or even stepping back from that, the pipeline. So I think one, you know, what does that mean and how do we shift things and what metrics should we use to really measure the efficacy of AI adoption? Yeah, so content's clearly gotten more complicated because, you know, we've always been writing for people and now we are writing for agents. I mean, literally today we are rolling out a whole series of FAQs on our website, not because we think people want them, but because we know the LLMs love them. We are already in a place where we are writing landing pages for agents, not people. So we know people are still accessing those landing pages. But you also need to think about the schema on your site and on those landing pages. Right. I mean, I wrote about this yesterday. It's kind of the final nail in the coffin for the gate versus not gate debate. Because if you have stuff behind a gate, if you have stuff in PDF format only, like the LLMs can read PDFs now, it's fine. But like, if you have stuff that someone has to like, you know, request first, that was a bad strategy for people that really want that information to begin with. But now you're keeping it from the LLMs could be referring you business and traffic and referrals. So, you know, I, so I think that the way you propagate content has changed. But also you now have to consider the LLMs as a member of the buying committee and what you put in front of them and how you present that data has changed. Yeah, yeah, no, and that was great. And I'm glad you touched on that because I did see that when you said the final nail on the ungated versus gated, I was like, ooh, that's a good one. I'm glad you brought that up. But yeah, so the second half of the question was, okay, so we tackled the content piece and then looking at AI adoption, right. A lot of companies are adopting AI, but we haven't seen any really meaningful ROI numbers on the investments that they've made. So I think, you know, I want to take it down to a company level and say, what metrics should leaders actually track when they look at is the AI adoption we're doing is it having a tangible impact on the revenue. So I'm glad you asked this question because we get this quite a bit from people. I get that we need to do this, but like what metric can I tell my CFO we're doing this for? We literally just this morning, you know, we're about to kick off a project with a client where it's all about applying not just AI, but just revenue orchestration efforts. Like, what do we get out of this? I am seeing 20, 30% plus increase in production from your, from teams in terms of campaigns and speed to market because this, the process and the AI combination makes them more efficient. I'm seeing faster optimization of marketing campaigns. I'm seeing people fund orchestration efforts through the near term media budget reduction where you're spending less money but achieving the same or better results because the speed at which you are learning, the speed at which you are innovating, the speed at which you are adopting better strategies, better messages that work better, the right workflows are accelerating that learning curve for organizations so that the performance improves. They're doubling down on programs that work, they're cutting programs that don't. They're doing that faster and they're doing that more comprehensively across their programs. And it's because they have this 24, 7 set of workflows working together to figure that out. That's that. I mean, and there's. We can talk about speed of content production, we can talk about just, you know, comprehensiveness of asset management. One of my favorites is sort of that, you know, what we call the messy middle, like between leads developed and opportunities created. Like, we have a bunch of tools like outreach and Salesloft and others. But like, there are so many interesting tools and workflows now that can increase speed to lead. They can increase speed of lead to context, lead to account mapping. That can increase the speed and personalization and intimacy and response rate of engagement between your target and you. And it could be automated, it could be a AI sdr, it could be just a sales rep who now has better data. But we're seeing massive improvements in conversion and throughput and velocity. Like, I'll give you an example of this. Like, so if you're working an enterprise deal, it's, it's a multithreaded deal, right? But let's say one person at the company you want to sell to, one member of the buying group shows up, they come to your booth or they download a white paper, they show up. A set of workflows can immediately multithread that deal for you can immediately identify what's the account, what's the history of the account, who are the other people that should be involved based on their role? Do we have them? Do we not have them or engage with them, or we not engage with them? How do we want to engage with that? What are they all talking about? Are they all talking about the same thing? Are there certain topics they talk about differently but actually have a correlation together? And how does that all translate into what I say next to that person to help them go build consensus amongst everyone else? And I said that quickly because I know we're running out of time and those all happen immediately. And so instead of just like sending that lead to a 23 year old BDR that says thanks for downloading the white paper, would you like to see a demo? No. But now the ability to create that richness of context, that richness of insight, to have numerous action steps across sales and marketing to show that prospect that you're listening, that you understand now, you stand out. It's not just about having more emails faster, cheaper, easier. It's about having the right message, the right person at the right timing, doing that at scale, not only across that buying journey for that individual, but down into the buying group as well. Yeah, I get pretty excited about this. It's a huge, huge opportunity. Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I think that the tendency is to focus on top of funnel because historically so much focus has been there. Right. With outreach, with meeting set, all this. Right. But then I think we've always kind of lost sight of fundamental things are important like speed, delete and also speed to multi threading. That's the first time I've heard that. And I agree, I think that's going to be huge. But as you say, we're running out of time. As we come to the end of the podcast, Matt, there are two questions that we ask every guest. The first should be easy. So we've talked about it a lot, so we'll treat it more as a summary. But recording this in 2026, let's fast forward five years out, 2031. What's the biggest shift coming for B2B marketing that not a lot of leaders are talking about right now? I wish and I hope and I think. Right. So I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna go for it. I think in B2B we are gonna figure out that the CPG marketeers had it. Had it. Right. And that we're going to adopt a Strat, an organ org Structure that is more like that. If you look at, if you look at Tide, Tide detergent, right. The brand director for Tide is not the arts and crafts person. They're not doing the. The just the style guide and figuring out what's in the ads. The brand director at Tide owns Tide. They own the market. They own the market position. They own the P and L. Like, they manage the business, not just the go to market strategy. I think we've got it backwards in B2B. I think especially in software and SaaS, I think we have a marketer that really is just a demand generator and we want them to report to the CRO. That's backward. I could argue that a good chief market officer who understands product, marketvid, that understands the customer, that understands the market and industry should be orchestrating how the company goes to market, period. I can make a strong case that sales, that partnerships, that channel are all subcomponents of how you go to market. So perhaps sales as a channel should be one of many things that the chief marketing officer is managing, just like the brand director manages it at Tide. I think in three to five years, we're going to see some organizations that blow up how they go to market because of the opportunities that they have and adopt a more traditional CPG type motion. It's going to be. I think it's gonna be fascinating and we'll learn a lot from it. Highly intriguing. I sense many of our sales leader listeners are just, you know, blind with rage right now. But. But I think if. But I think it hints at attention that many B2B marketers have felt for a while. So it'll be interesting to see how it shakes out. I'm not going to take a side either way. I did not, I did not wake up this morning hoping I would make someone blind with rage. But, you know, it's fun to have these conversations because this is sort of like the proverbial ivory tower, right? Like, we're sort of, we're pontificating, we're making stuff up, we're sort of connecting dots. A lot of what we do in this scenario is wrong. But like, what's interesting is, like, if someone says, like what Matt just said is frigging ridiculous, okay, why tell me? I mean, I mean, it probably is, right? And it may or may not happen. And we talked earlier about, like, how important culture change and change management is and how hard it is. And that's going to be one of the main reasons that might not happen, because they're like, oh, that's that's way too big. We can't, like, blow up the company. Okay, well, someone's going to do it. Someone's going to try it. Someone's going to start a business and do that from the beginning. Right. So I think the dialogue is what's interesting. Like, I don't have all the answers. I'm making this up like everybody else. But I love the idea of just sort of going somewhere and saying, here's why it should happen, here's why it could happen, here's all the reasons why it couldn't. But maybe that sparks someone else. Like if, if you're blind with rage, you're the next insight man. That's how we get. If we can do that in a respectful way as a society, as an industry, that's how we find the next solution. Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, and yeah, of course I was joking, but I, I think I found it so intriguing from that standpoint. Right. Like, even if you do have a strong reaction to it of like, oh, that's never going to work, but then you have to articulate why. Yeah. And going about that is a useful thought experiment in and of itself. And if you're open to it, you might change your own thinking along the way, so. That's right. I think it's a fantastic conversation. Started. I loved it. Okay, final question, Matt. Looking back across your own career, if you could go back, you know, five, 10, maybe even 15 years into the past and give one piece of advice to your younger self, what would it be and why? It's. I'd say two things. One, just really build and nurture your network. It's not about the most people. It's about having people that sort of inspire you, that challenge you, that push the way you. Networking is not collecting connections. Networking is engaging with people. You know, early in my career, like, even when I started Heinz Marketing, like, my network was mostly like the people I work with and the people I used to work with, and I hadn't really invested in building relationships in, in, in the space. And it doesn't have to be everybody, but just, just start not collecting, but nurturing and building those relationships. The other one is, I think everybody would benefit from, from, from developing content. And even if it's just sort of like, you know, your LinkedIn posts or your substack, forget followers, forget, you know, I, I, for me, writing is a form of thinking. Writing is a form of taking, like, random ideas and trying to make some sense of it. It doesn't have to make sense to other people. Maybe you don't publish that, maybe it just, it's just journaling, right? But I think like finding time in your day, finding time in the week to like sit and synthesize and don't just think about it, but put it into a form. If you want to do it just as a video, if you want to do it in audio format or just do it as you're driving, fine. But like make that a habit. And out of that I guarantee you will be innovations in your work. It'll be insights that other people need to hear. And it's not about building a follower and following and it's not about writing the best selling newsletter. It's really just about forcing yourself to synthesize what you thought and giving your brain new things to think about. And I promise you, you'll be a more innovative, successful as you do more of that. That's fantastic advice. All right, Matt. Well, this has been so much fun. Thank you for coming on the show. If you want to learn more about you, more about Heinz marketing, where should they go? You can find me just HeinzMarketing.com is our consulting practice. We've got like literally 18 years of great content up there. You can access, you can find me on LinkedIn. Also matheins.substack.com a lot of my deeper, longer thinking is, is more up on there these days. Great. Well, thanks again. Thank you. You've been listening to the B2B revenue executive experience. To ensure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show in itunes or your favorite podcast player. Thank you so much for listening. Until next.