Userpilot: Why SEO stopped being enough, and how they rebuilt acquisition with ABM in 2026

Emilia: Foreign.

Renata: This is Rebuilding SaaS Marketing, a podcast by DigitalHenge. Together with founders and marketers from across SaaS world, we are figuring out how marketing, GDM and strategy changes in the age AH of AI. In each episode we uncover one story is what worked, what failed, and what still keeps them awake at night. My guest today is Emilia from UserPilot. She runs marketing at User Pilot and co built an um, ABM platform, ZenABM and she literally wrote a book on content marketing. But that's not why she's here. Uh, she's here because the main channel that's built User Pilot, content marketing and SEO stopped working and wasn't good enough for the company's strategy. And she had to rebuild the strategy of how User Pilot finds their customers in the middle of AI shift. Welcome Emilia. Hey Renata, I'm really happy that you agreed to be on the podcast with us.

Emilia: Thank you Renata for having me. I feel humbled to be here with you.

Renata: Uh, I wanted to ask you first before we dig in into some details, tell me about userpilot, where is now so our listeners have understanding of the scale and the situation right now.

Emilia: So User Pilot, I don't know if I can go into like all the details, uh, in terms of revenue numbers, etc. So I will just limit myself to saying that it is an eight figure business with 80 plus full time team members. We are serving over 1200 customers around the world, mostly in the US but not only ranging from like large publicly listed companies and logos that anyone would recognize like Righteous and Bank and DHL and Adobe to like SaaS startups and mid market companies. So it really is a range and I would say it's like now a fairly established scale up. So that's where we are.

Renata: Okay, and what about your marketing team?

Emilia: Yeah, the marketing team is around 10 people right now. We had a couple of team members leave so uh, we're filling some positions right now like the uh, head of SEO, Head of Demand gen and GTM Engineer Marketing Operations. So uh, if anyone listening wants to apply for any of these roles. Shameless Flag hiring. But uh, also apart from that we have a Product Marketing manager. We have free full time content managers that manage several content writers. Slash these days because we do use AI quite a lot. We have an ABM Performance manager, we have uh, Google Ads Performance Manager on file, we have two graphic designers that still have their hands full with design work and we have Dimagin, uh, content. So this is what our team looks like at the moment.

Renata: Of course it's never enough.

Emilia: Not enough. But it's getting easier and easier these days for sure.

Renata: Okay, User pilot, uh, as you told me, grew almost completely on the content from the start. Organic content SEO and thousands of visitors. Tell me, when have you felt that something is wrong, something is breaking?

Emilia: May 2024. So two years ago. I wouldn't say it's necessarily wrong or breaking right. It just that the evolution of the business was taking us in a uh, slightly, it's not even different direction but it was just that it wasn't enough anymore as we were growing as a company and going up market and targeting larger and larger companies and enterprises. Just relying on inbound SEO driven traffic wasn't enough because it wasn't predictable, it didn't allow us to scale predictably. And as we were going up market and increasing our pricing, the conversion rates from organic SEO were declining because uh, again we didn't control the size of the companies that were searching for particular keywords. So it was completely random. It could have been like a very small startup that just couldn't afford the higher pricing or it could have been a really large company that would afford this higher pricing. But we had no control over who's searching. Right. So that was the first reason why we decided to look for another acquisition channel. And the second reason was what was just happening in the SEO world. So AI becoming uh, more and more popular alternative to traditional search engines and AI overviews rolling out changes to Google algorithm. We started losing traffic around that time. So this was like our absolute peak in May 2024 where we reached 235,000 visitors to our blog per month. And then we started declining and declining the conversion. The number of conversions wasn't declining linearly with the traffic luckily. Typically there are a few bottom of the funnel posts that uh, are doing the heavy lifting and the rest is for general awareness and affinity building. But yeah, it was a bit scary and we were just thinking like two things. What happens if our conversion starts declining with the declining traffic ultimately? And how do we actually build a more predictable acquisition engine where we can go after these larger companies and build a more predictable pipeline than just keep our fingers crossed that this month enough of these larger prospects will be searching for specific keywords.

Renata: And you decided to go with abm, right?

Emilia: Yeah.

Renata: Or you tested something else in between this period?

Emilia: No, because we, there wasn't really much else to test. Right. ABM is a strategy that can actually comprise of different channels and different tactics.

Renata: Mhm.

Emilia: So I would say as a SaaS company, you have the inbound product led motion or outbound more sales led account based motion. And these are the only two main strategies that I could think of. And then within these two strategies you have a lot of different tactics. So it can well be that exactly the same tactic will be used for both of these strategies. So you can totally use LinkedIn ads or Google Ads for purely inbound play, but you can also use them for account based play where you basically decide to go after a list of specific accounts. So this was the main decision. The main decision was strategic rather than tactical.

Renata: As far as I understand, no one in the team had experience with ABM previously. How did you feel and what took you to really believe in it? First of all, show me your path between actually understanding that you need to do this and really start doing it.

Emilia: Yeah, so of course I was nervous because, yes, nobody on the team has done it. And we started hiring for people that had experience and had the skill set for what we needed. I spent a couple of months literally researching how we should go about it. I was like checking out different approaches, different tactics. So, uh, altogether it took me around three months to put all my ducks in the raw. The decision or the idea came from my boss, the CEO really. So he's usually because he's so far removed from the operations that he has the bird's eye view and the vantage point to have a perspective, which is great. And he often just sends ideas forward. And we discussed things and we decided to go after it to have more control and be able to scale through acquiring larger accounts. So through increasing our ACV rather than just brute forcing the lead volume, because that, especially in a niche like ours, where our time isn't enormous, is very difficult. That was the joint decision. Then it took three months of research and a few months of hiring to get started. We hired, uh, LinkedIn performance manager. So a performance manager that had a lot of experience with running LinkedIn ads and running ABM campaigns through LinkedIn ads in the first place. And he's still with us. And then we were looking also for someone a little bit more strategic that had experience in creating account based marketing campaigns, but not necessarily distributing them through the performance channels. It's really hard to get a person to find a person that has the skill set to be do both. So we decided to hire two and we did. And we started working on that motion afterwards with our internal team and with our marketing operations person building the lists. So the prep time was around three months. I decided to run the campaigns and to distribute the uh, account based marketing campaign content through LinkedIn primarily. At that time I didn't have a lot of trust in display advertising based on my experience with Google Display Network. Yeah, still I still don't have positive experience with it honestly. And so we decided to go after LinkedIn to have like more precise B2B targeting and uh, this was a really good choice. In three months we started seeing pipeline from it and yeah, it's been working for us ever since. Okay.

Renata: And I know that people blur ABM and just running LinkedIn ads. In your perspective, what is the difference?

Emilia: Yeah, the difference is primarily in targeting. Right. ABM means account based marketing. So again the tactics or the channels are secondary. The primary thing is that you select a list of specific accounts that you want to target and that you want to acquire as customers and then you think of ways how you can reach them and what content do you need to distribute to them to convert their attention into interest. We decided to go for the one too many ABM strategy first. So targeting a lot of accounts and reaching them first with programmatic advertising. And then we were narrowing this down to more like one to few and one to one place after we have detected initial interest in the account. So you know, we are using ZenABM for that right now. It's a long story. It's ultimately something that my husband had to build for me because I didn't find the tool that would do exactly that. But what it does is essentially it scores the accounts based on their engagement level after they've seen the campaigns on LinkedIn and it also detects which of their ads, uh, the accounts have been engaging with most and based on that captures the intent signals in the accounts. And these intent signals and level of engagement inform us that hey, this is a short list of accounts that are potentially interested and what they are interested in. So based on that we can make further decisions like to maybe run one to few campaign. If we detect, oh, there are a lot of fintech companies in this interested cohort. Maybe let's talk about user engagement for fintechs but specifically and put this just one specific group of accounts into that campaign and let's follow up with them via email. We know that they are interested in user onboarding, but not really in product analytics. So we're going to invite them to an event on user onboarding and product analytics.

Renata: Okay. And we know at this moment it's June 26th that your ABM didn't fail. But I know that a lot of companies just failed to launch their ABM were in your path, some mistakes and something close to failure.

Emilia: We had failed before. We succeeded like we sure have. Um, the main reason why people fail is that they underestimate the required effort and investment to achieve the desired results. And this is the same reason why people fail at, I don't know, losing weight or achieving their fitness goals or winning a race or like building a successful business. It's perseverance and managing your expectations. So this is exactly the same approach that a lot of companies have. We were one of these companies before, so we literally had these feeble attempts at what we thought was ABM. It wasn't ABM. Um, we were just running a few LinkedIn ads. We were spending like $1,500 per month on them and they were just like these really bad display ads like book a demo, uh, without. Then we had these. You couldn't call it a. It was just like really poor execution with reasonably low budget and poor targeting. So of course it had to fail. And another reason why, even if someone like is well prepared and executes the campaign well, if they are tracking last touch conversions only, they may think they are failing when in fact they aren't. Because last touch attribution, especially for LinkedIn ads, is missing out on the 90% of the conversions. Uh, or the real influence because the conversions don't have to be last touch. I love this analogy that I saw on LinkedIn. Last Touch attribution is like saying the reason why I got home today was the door. Yeah. It's the fact that someone clicked on an ad in Google, a branded ad and then converted does not mean that it was the, uh, Google Ad that has resulted in this conversion. A, this person must have known your brand before in the first place to type your brand name in so they could see your branded campaign. Yeah. So how did they acquire the awareness? Through where for organic, through LinkedIn ads, for instance, it has to be this multi touch attribution. So what we're doing now is we're looking at the correlation between ad impressions before the deal happened in a very specific time frame and whether the deals are opening or not in the target account list.

Renata: What is this time frame?

Emilia: For us it's 180 days. It might seem like a long window. It probably is. We could be stricter with the attribution because this is where we started from. We're keeping it consistent. But we do see a very significant correlation between running LinkedIn ads to these accounts and the deals opening in these accounts. There is really no other way to Explain it. A lot of times these companies and we see all their touch points, right? Because currently in ZenABM you can see this like accounts journey where you see the touch points from organic, the touch points from Google Ads, what not. And LinkedIn and some companies have like multiple touch points from different channels and then it would be like more difficult to tease out like oh, what really resulted in them making the decision that they want to check our tool out. But in other cases it's like purely LinkedIn ads engagements. So in general there is like a very clear correlation for us and we are satisfied with this level of certainty or uncertainty.

Renata: Was it hard for you as a marketer to wait half a year to say that, okay, this is working without immediate success?

Emilia: It would have been hard if it was such a long time. But the results came after, after roughly two and a half months.

Renata: Mhm.

Emilia: So we started seeing first deals come in after that time and that was very reassuring. Already m90 days we already had $600,000 in pipeline, so they weren't closing yet. But we were opening deals with the companies that we started targeting with LinkedIn ads and that never interacted with us before. So it was a, ah, reassuring signal that we're onto something here. Mhm.

Renata: What was the difference between average ICV from the start when you were working mostly with Inbound and after that you moved up market? What was the difference?

Emilia: It was huge. I think it was actually more than 100%. Now we're closing the gap a little bit. Although again the ACV from ABM has also increased. So initially we were at around 8k ACV when we started from inbound, that was the average. Of course there were deals that were outliers that were much, much larger, but there were still a lot of smaller legacy deals from the past that were driving the overall ACV down. But it was under 10k or around 10k. We were aiming for double that from LinkedIn and I don't know if we were lucky or uh, we were so good at estimates, but we got there. We literally got to uh, I think a little bit more, 22k on average in terms of the ACV from ABM. Um, and now we're around 26k.

Renata: Uh, wow, that's impressive. Yeah.

Emilia: And the average ACV across all deals is currently around I think 14k.

Renata: Looking back then, what is the thing that you would tell yourself when starting the IBM that maybe saved you a lot of trouble?

Emilia: Oh yeah, yeah. There would have been things that would save me a lot of trouble. First place don't over engineer things really. I was trying to build these complex funnels that a weren't even possible to execute on LinkedIn. So it was a learning curve because there is a minimum audience size on LinkedIn below which you can serve ads. Even building a simple retargeting audience if you're targeting a narrow group of accounts is very hard and takes a long time.

Renata: And what is this minimum?

Emilia: It's 300 members. Yeah. So what we were doing, we were creating this funnel with different conditions. Hey, these accounts, they're completely unaware. So just identified then uh, aware. It was actually Kyle Poyer's post that inspired me a lot and that was the moment his post about ABX was literally the moment where it clicked for me how this should work. But I over engineered it and took some things a bit more, a bit too verbatim and tried to translate the ABX funnel that he wrote about in his post into a uh, campaign structure on LinkedIn. And that wasn't practicable. Basically all these stages were interested, selecting, considering, close one. Right, whatever. You shouldn't build separate campaign layers for them actually it's enough to have just one campaign for starters and then maybe do another one for retargeting. But that's not even a ah, prerequisite because if someone is interested and you capture their attention with your ads that are just talking about the problem and the solutions to the problem, they will probably do the rest themselves and ultimately convert. It might be good to retarget them with more bottom of the funnel content once they are like showing a lot of these intense signals. And I spent a lot of time building separate campaigns for different awareness stages and trying to define them and trying to build very complicated account scoring system as well. And it turns out it's very hard to operationalize interest. So it's all very directional. You can't expect that if someone clicked five times they are definitely already ready to buy versus someone that clicked three times. So it's really hard to quantify interest.

Renata: So that's one thing. This is what we want. This is something that we want to understand. But I agree that it's so hard.

Emilia: Another thing that surprised me is if you're running these one too many campaigns is really how low the conversion rates are. So we actually then ran a study with my husband on his customers or users. What is the average deal open rate among accounts running one to many campaigns on LinkedIn? And it was 0.58%. Yeah, less than 1%. Yeah. So when you think about it, uh, if you're trying to convert a list of 1,000 accounts, then you can count on what, three deals from that, Right? Roughly. So you need to really reach a lot of companies. If you're running this one too many play to see enough results. And that's another aha moment that I had. Luckily, this is something we did from the very beginning, like trying to limit ourselves and do more precise targeting. We haven't been able to nail it. Or at this ACB level, when it's still 20 something thousand dollars doesn't make sense to do one to one place. Right. Because then you need to invest so much effort and put such a high bet. Right. So you're only targeting very few companies, like a hundred companies. And you basically create separate campaigns for each. And you do gifting, you invite them to dinners, you invite them to events. You're placing an enormous bet that you will have a 10x the average conversion rate at least. And even with that, you would be able to convert a handful of accounts. So that's true. The value of these contracts needs to be so much higher to justify the effort that we just weren't there.

Renata: Like hundreds of thousands.

Emilia: Yeah, exactly. Then it makes sense. Then you can invite them to formula one raise and whatnot.

Renata: Okay, what is the metric that everyone around you looks at and you see stopped measuring it and you stopped caring about it.

Emilia: Metric I stopped caring about. I think these last touch conversions, honestly, HubSpot has their attribution. I don't look at it because it's not showing me much, honestly.

Renata: Okay. Yeah, I felt.

Emilia: Leads. Leads. Yeah. Basically these are leads. And it's very ironic that we're talking about ABM account based marketing, not lead generation. Yeah, but a lot of people, the only KPI they care about is how many people downloaded an ebook. Downloading an ebook is not a buying signal.

Renata: Yeah.

Emilia: Yeah.

Renata: I don't know if it's right to say you left behind content marketing. I don't think that is correct. Right. You're still doing something with SEO and content.

Emilia: Yeah, a lot right now.

Renata: But it's changed. I'm sure that it's changed a lot. How did it change after, um, you start working with abm?

Emilia: We didn't change into supporting ABM per se. Some of the content pieces that were originally written for SEO can be repurposed into content for ABM campaigns. But these are these two separate strategies that we discussed the first time. And the fact that we started working on the second strategy does not mean we killed the first one. So we still have Inbound as a major acquisition source in terms of the absolute revenue numbers, it's probably not number one anymore but it still provides a significant amount of pipeline. So we still tend to our ser. We are more looking at AIO so AI engine optimization or AI tool optimization. So optimizing for mentions and LLMs and AI overviews as well as for a traditional search engine. Still it is a bit tricky because sometimes these two feel mutually exclusive or contradictory from m traditional SEO perspective. For instance Google maybe. There is strong evidence that Google maybe is penalizing excessive self promotional listicles. From the perspective of AIO optimization. It's great. You should be publishing listicles and getting mentions in listicles all the time so it somehow decide what do to to do now for SEO in order to cater to both of these objectives.

Renata: You mentioned AI overviews and I have an interesting thought I want to discuss with you. Basically previously it was just content on the website that got you to some top positions. But now we know that LinkedIn is highly cited source in AI. So did it just transformed this content marketing.

Emilia: So like thought leadership content on LinkedIn for instance? Yeah, this is a very important part of our account based program and we basically bake them into the campaigns and then we promote these posts, we write them within the marketing team for other team members who then post them on their personal profiles and then we promote them as thought leader ads on LinkedIn. This is a very effective ad format because it literally looks like an organic post almost. Barring like the sponsored small print, it drives a lot more engagement and I believe higher quality engagement than display ads on LinkedIn like image ads, carousels, videos, etc. So we do use that a lot. But LinkedIn can also be a great tool for optimizing for AIO and this would be the inbound play. And this is super ironic where these two can even overlap. So I literally saw LinkedIn ads a few times now in the AI overviews on Google. I don't know if it was a bug because once I literally searched something related to a competitor, our ad against uh, this competitor cited in the AI overview. Maybe it was a bug. But I'm just saying if this bug hasn't been fixed, you guys remember that you can kill two birds with one stone here. But definitely LinkedIn articles, LinkedIn pals and whatnot get picked up a lot in AI overviews and even like in the search. There can definitely be overlap between these two strategies.

Renata: Yeah, that what I think as well. But I know that a lot of clients, companies that I work with sometimes they just don't believe in LinkedIn because it's so hard to get started. And just this feels counterintuitive that if you post something on LinkedIn after that your sales somehow will increase.

Emilia: Yeah, that I had to fight gain some pushback against TLAs because even our CEO thought oh, but you're promoting personal profiles and their thoughts and not the company. But that's the whole point. That is really good content marketing. If the post is really good and it has a coherent argument why your product should be used to solve a specific problem and you know that the companies you're targeting have that specific problem, then you're basically distributing this content to your target accounts and they engage with it as if they engaged with organic content. You can even make the argument stronger by having influencers in your niche post on your behalf. And the influencer posts have the highest ectr so effective CTR rates from all types of posts. So we tried customer advocacy. So customers posting, our internal stakeholders posting and influencers posting and influencers have the most credibility. So say we're both following Kyle Pollo, right. We think he's a smart guy and he has a lot of good things to say. So if we see Another post on LinkedIn by Kyle Poyer, we're more likely to stop scrolling and read it. So this is the first step, grabbing the attention of your target audience. And then imagine Kyle Poyer is writing about how User Pilot is helpful for product led companies to drive more growth. You would want to check out what User pilot is. Yeah. Because this is a guy and trust recommending a solution to the problem you have. Everything just aligns. Yeah. And since you're reading his post, you're invested in reading this content. So these clicks are a lot higher intent as well. So I'm a big fan. Yeah.

Renata: So basically it's B2C marketing, but for B2P companies.

Emilia: That's a great analogy, Renata. Ashley I love it. Ultimately it's people uh, that are buying from you, not companies. So you need to speak to people and understand their psychology.

Renata: So I wanted to sum up this part. So if someone is listening and they think that they need to have presence on LinkedIn and specifically make ABM marketing what deal size, sales cycle and attributes to their clients should they have to successfully launch it.

Emilia: Oh, so what are the prerequisites for running an ABM program successfully? Oh, I think there is no one size fits all response. And it really depends. It depends on your conversion rates, your product market fit, your acv like for Instance, there is a stereotype that you can only run account based marketing if you have a very high acv, as we said, like with for instance one to one place where you're targeting a very narrow, you're in a tiny niche and maybe there are only like 50 companies that can even buy from you. Extremely long sales cycles but extremely high value contracts. Then of course if you're in this position and Your ACV is $1,000 for instance, then you're pretty much dead in the water. But it's not a marketing problem, it's a business problem. You need to pivot, you need to think of a different monetization model altogether. But Even with smaller ACVs, if you are in a niche where your CPMs so cost per milli, right? So cost per reaching a thousand members on LinkedIn are low enough, then you can get away with a lot lower acv. Or conversely, if you have a very strong product market fit, you're basically an essential, a painkiller and once people know about you, they have to buy you. Yeah, I know. Maybe we're used to SaaS being in the sort of red ocean, right, where there's like a lot of choice, a lot of competitive, but there are still companies that are in this blue ocean position where maybe they're very niche but they're very needed, they're like compliance software or whatever for a specific type of company. Then it's enough to basically reach your audience to get a conversion. You have an extremely high conversion rate if you reach your audience. So there are a lot of possibilities and a lot of variables here that determine whether you should be running a VM or not. So instead of giving a specific number, I would say, hey, use your common sense, can you? With the cost on LinkedIn or through another channel of reaching your target audience and the number of accounts that you have, does it justify basically the effort? Are you able to get a positive return on investment? And maybe if you're in a. We are not in 2021 anymore, we're in 2026, the zero interest phenomenon is over. But there are still startups that don't aim for a positive return on investment. Their KPI is growth. So if you're aiming for achieving growth, like I wouldn't say at all cost, but like the cost and the ROI is secondary. You don't have to have a positive raw ads or positive return on ad spend, then by all means this can still be a great channel for you. So I'm trying to say again, it depends. Use your brain, use Your common sense and think about your objective and think if it makes sense to use this channel.

Renata: I love this answer. It makes sense and especially about the um, product market fit because I don't know if you met this problem that usually marketing is always to blame if something doesn't work. I want to ask you about Zen ab basically because I think this is something very unique when a marketing marketer. Of course you had some help from Michael, but I would say that you co built the product for your own needs. Tell me a little bit about it.

Emilia: Oh yeah, that's the big question. Do we have five hours? Yeah, I was definitely scratching my own itch because building like I told you, I spent like three months trying to figure out ABM in the first place. But it didn't stop there. It wasn't like after three months I had everything ready and then I didn't change anything and I didn't have to do any more work. It was just like constant and um, extremely intense work, especially RevOps work to make the campaigns operational and to have a reasonably good attribution. So you know, at least are you opening pipeline? Do you know what's going on in these accounts? Which accounts are showing more interest? So maybe the BDRs or AES can reach out to them. All of this was just like eating a glass, honestly. Especially the RevOps part. This was brutal. We had a full time marketing corporation, GTM engineer person that was doing nothing but this and it still didn't feel enough and still like the HubSpot setup is fragile. Right? And now we're actually trying to even do something more with it because our AES are not going to use an avm, right? They live out of HubSpot and they don't want to live anywhere else. And getting these signals to HubSpot, like all of the ones that are needed, for instance, like the timestamp when someone moved from the aware to interested stage. Without a uh, tool like the ABM that parses the data, does a lot of the calculations inside its database, instead of sending the raw data from LinkedIn to HubSpot or to another CRM, this wouldn't be possible. It would, but it would take weeks and weeks to orchestrate. So uh, that is the challenge that I was trying to solve for myself initially. And then funnily enough I mentioned it in Kyle Poyer's case study. I keep bringing up Kyle Poyer, who we both met and were hanging out with at Sostenak, into the conversation. I owe him. And when I published this case study with him, it really took off and people wanted to, to know what the ZBM thing was about. Right. Um, and it was literally like my husband cobbled together a sign up page when the case study came out so people could sign up somewhere and test it. Initially it was an mvp, solving my own very specific problem. My husband's love language is JavaScript. So he was like, I was complaining a lot about it. Yeah, I am a complainer. And I was like, I can't do this. It's taking so much time. This tool is not working the way I want it to. So I need to do all these revolves and let me look at the API documentation and see if I can send you this data or build this for you. And it turned out that yes, it's possible. And I'm like, oh, another feature request. And it became a standalone product with the vision of making it truly adapted to the ABM use case. Uh-huh. And it turned out that just other people needed to swear you didn't need

Renata: to find a product market fit. You already found it from the start.

Emilia: I feel like product market fit is probably a continuum, right. There are many product market fits that you're finding and your roadmap needs to be heavily informed by what your customers and users and prospects need. But again, I really like using common sense and thinking like first principles. What is that people want to achieve? Right. They want to have visibility into which accounts are interested in their product and what are they interested in specifically. So they can have these like very natural conversations with them, um, when it comes to the sales conversation. And they can be more effective in translating that like, fuzzy interest into proper consideration. So how can you facilitate with the data that you already have from LinkedIn, API from the CRM? There's a ton of data in the CRM that is never ever used, uh, because the rev ops are so hard and everyone would need to build their own tool essentially to do this. It's like borderline impossible to make sense of all the data.

Renata: Did building the tool change how you think as a marketer?

Emilia: I don't think so. I don't think it changed a lot. I have been building tools for a very long time.

Renata: We didn't talk much about what's changing with AI. Just tell me how AI helps your team to work better, what's easier and what you think should still stay human and what stays human in your market.

Emilia: The last three months have been super critical and they accelerated our usage of AI. What we do with it and how much it helps and how Significant part it plays in the process. I wouldn't say we have built a completely AI driven marketing organization with everything automated and workflows and you just speak to Claude and press one button or you don't even press. You tell it what you need it to do and then it executes completely autonomous. It would have taken an enormous amount of time and effort to build something like this. But B, primarily I don't think it's worth it because the outcomes are ultimately meh. You can automate a lot, but the biggest challenge is you still can't automate the inputs, unlike people think and you still need to tweak the outcomes. So for instance, what we do now, landing pages. Landing pages for whatever, for Google Ads, for whatever variation of a keyword we need. And we need a standalone landing page for or even the About Us page. I can whip them out, include in essentially minutes. Right? Because we already have so much context. I can invoke the skill that builds the landing page on a framework that we're using, push it to GitHub and then have it live in minutes. Yeah, I still need to validate the copy. Uh, if it made sense more and more with such formulaic content that's extremely well defined, it makes a lot of sense and there is very little to do when it comes to more deterministic, less deterministic or higher stakes type of collateral. For instance, outreach. It's extremely hard to get it right with AI, no matter how much context you give it. We've given it a ton of context. Our GTM engineer spent a year building this process and it still failed because there's just so many variables. And I'm not saying it was worse than BDRs. BDRs often fail at this process as well. So at least it failed. Cheaper, right? It was a cheaper failure, but it was a failure ultimately because with cold outreach you have one shot at it, right? It's one line. You either hit the nail on the head and you build that awareness or you don't. And we weren't able to do it at uh, scale. Find the right moment, understand what most at this point yet. I will be working on that because I think still this is a huge opportunity. But this is something that we haven't been able to automate with AI yet, even though we have been able, but it wasn't impactful. What was impactful was definitely like the process of creating landing pages and the process of creating blog content. This is really good. Now we built uh, a skill that we still need to give Our point of view to for each piece of content. So it's not fully automatically never ending process. Yeah, yeah, because if you want the content to provide incremental gains in terms of value, then you need to give it something original each time. It has a lot of context, it has interviews with stakeholders and existing content and it does research, uh, online, yada yada. But still, what is the magic touch for this one specific piece? Someone needs to give it to Claude for it to have that unique perspective and angle or maybe like personal experience. There are people that say, oh, you could still automate this but uh, pushing all your call transcripts, uh, sales calls, etc, etc to it. But the inputs then would be so gargantuan. You um, would need to again build like an enormous pipeline to compress the context, manage the context. It's not simple and it's not easy. And I don't know to what extent the investment required to automate this part of the process would have yielded a better result than having this one particular piece manual. It's always like a balancing act. I think a lot of companies are rushing to automating for the sake of it. Um, so that is something that I find challenging about the for AI revolution. We don't know yet until we have invested a ton of effort if automating a certain process will yield a good enough outcomes, not just outputs.

Renata: Okay, yes, that makes sense. And overall I really like your approach with this. How you balance things and have critical thinking about things and not just rushing into trying something. That's why I think you spent three months of gathering context around ABM and building at least like design of the system. And yeah, I find this really cool.

Emilia: Thank you. So thank you for inviting me to have it with you.

Renata: Emilia's whole story is one sentence. The channel didn't fail, the business outgrew it and they needed to find something to rebuild their marketing and sales. She rebuilt acquisition before the numbers forced her to. Thank you for listening to rebuilding SaaS marketing. If this episode gave you a spark or an idea, share it with a founder at the same stage of growth. Find us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast. Join us as we keep redefining how marketing works in the age of AI.