The AEO Playbook: Own the AI Shortlist - Live with Sydney Sloan at GTM Tailwinds - Ep 80

TT - GTM Tailwinds - Sydney Sloan - Full Session === Sydney Sloan: AI's changed everything. Including where your buyers go to do their research, discovery and shortlisting. What's crazy is that a year ago when we asked the question for the first time, where do you start your research? Sydney Sloan: It was like 24% of people said, I start in an LLM, not Google search.

A year later, that's 51%. So 71% change.​ Craig Rosenberg: Hi Sydney. We talked.

Hi, Craig. Yeah, we talk every day, so it's good to see you live. Um, but uh, I cannot wait to hear a Go-To-Market. I think you've delivered really good Go-To-Market stories to me and Matt on our podcast and, and other in the past.

So I'm looking forward to, for the crowd hearing yours, what's, give us a funny Go-To-Market story from your past. Sydney Sloan: Uh, funny Go-To-Market story from my past. Um, okay. First of all.

Yes, I am a, a double on scale ventures. This is also my, can I count this as my third time on the transaction? Absolutely. Okay.

And I know Scott Albro has more. Um, but on the fifth time, can we do custom sweatshirts? 'cause you got a sweatshirt game. Sydney Sloan: Leather jackets.

Thank you. Yes. Leather jackets. Leather jackets, leather.

Of course. I love them. Okay. Um, funny Go-To-Market story.

Um, how many could I tell? This isn't a, actually a funny Go-To-Market story, but it's the story that popped into my head. Um, and it was going a little bit off the last conversation. Sydney Sloan: Um.

And it's around my favorite, uh, F word, uh, which is focus. If you haven't been in the hallway, there's really cool visual there too. Um, and it's because, um, it was actually a board meeting here in San Francisco when I was at SalesLoft and you know, the board members, and I'm one now so I can make fun of us, um, was like, you should do this, this, and this. Sydney Sloan: And you were part of this.

We did this whole process around segmentation and strategy and decided what we were not going to do. Had the data to prove it. And I remember our co-founder, Rob, was like, actually, no, we're not gonna do that. We're not gonna move vertically, we're not gonna expand because we've already done the work and these are the two or three things that we're gonna go after.

Sydney Sloan: Yep. And so it, it's, sorry it's not funny, but it's very important to Go-To-Market, is to stay focused on what you know is the right thing to win. And Katie Doyle's in here, so I'm gonna give her a little inside scoop that. I was like, we've only penetrated like 20% of the, the sales engagement market outreach probably has 25%.

Sydney Sloan: There's still 50% to win, and I'm not gonna stop focusing on that and just give it to my competitor. So that Craig Rosenberg: was a really instructive story. Sorry. Sydney Sloan: No, I liked it.

I was part of Craig Rosenberg: that, Sydney Sloan: but it didn't, it was focus. Craig Rosenberg: You can see I really enjoy when they tie back to me. That's really cool. Yeah, we bought Craig Chicken too, that trip.

Craig Rosenberg: All right, so we're gonna talk about a o Oh, sorry. A O or G, you might want to, we'll have to start with clarifying that for, Sydney Sloan: well, apparently all the cool kids are calling it GEO. Um, and when I was at G2, we started with GEO but then moved over to AEO, uh, last fall because what we were focused on was answer engine optimization, uh, less on the GEO side. Sydney Sloan: GEO is like, how do you program the LLMs to like, learn your content?

But what the, why we picked AEO was. Because you wanna own the answer. I know a lot of people are like A e, OGEO, whatever, B-I-N-G-O. Um, it's all the context is, and this is the big, you know, the big reveal is ai.

AI has changed everything. Sydney Sloan: I think I'm the first person talking about ai. AI's changed everything and including where your buyers go to do their research, discovery and shortlisting, and we study this at G2. I do have a slide for this.

Um, and uh, and what's crazy is that a year ago when we asked the question for the first time, where do you start your research? Sydney Sloan: It was like 24% of people said, I start in an LLM, not Google search. A year later, that's 51%. So 71% change.

I actually thought it was gonna be higher. We just did the study in March, so it's hot off the press. But what was interesting about the shift between August of last year and now is how much deeper they're going. Sydney Sloan: So their productivity is like, 93% of people say I'm more productive because I'm using the LLMs to do my research, and it's making that go faster.

The questions are deeper and more complex. So that's the giant shift that's happening. Buyers are starting there first, and they're doing all their research there before they come to call on a sales rep or show up on your website. Matt Amundson: Yeah.

One of the big changes is before you just ask the question and you get a list. Now you ask the question and you say, put this into a presentation for me. I'm gonna move it. I'm gonna present this in front of, you know, this audience.

And it goes from being something that you might offhandedly say to something that you're now presenting in front of an organization. Matt Amundson: So it's even more important than ever. Sydney Sloan: Yeah. And one of the questions that I get, um, is like, how do I build my brands on the LLMs?

Um, and it's a strategic shift for not just marketers, I mean like. All the entire executive team has to care about this. Um, and I think there's a couple things you can do. I mean, when you understand where the L LLMs go to answer the questions, which is what the AEO tools do, um, then you can start to understand, oh, that's where my, you know, that's where the sources are.

Sydney Sloan: That's where my buyers are. And I like to recommend like. You don't just wanna answer the specific product question anymore, you actually wanna answer the questions of the person you're trying to influence. So if you're trying to, you know, influence a product leader, then what are the jobs to be done for the product leader, and how do you write all the questions for that person and have all the answers for that person that's brand building, right?

Sydney Sloan: We used to hack our way into it with SEO, and you know. Like HubSpot was building content for non marketers. Um, and I'm not sure if that was a great strategy. They, you know, 'cause they were getting a lot of people to their site that weren't their future customers.

But, so that's number one is that, that's how you, you know, I, I start to think about it like the easy hack and then this, the second thing is, um, you have to get on like the other, the things that are influencing it the most. Sydney Sloan: They're going to the LLMs first, and then where they go second is the citation source or that validation. And it's two places. It's Reddit and like the G2 ecosystem now that they've acquired the Gartner stuff and, and so.

A lot of people I in, in San Francisco, I would imagine are a little bit further ahead and like, I gotta get my Reddit game on. Sydney Sloan: I gotta get my G2 game on. Um, but when you really start to understand what is it looking for, it's looking for best of lists. It's, it's looking for, um, listicle content, it's looking for FAQs, things that match the structure of the question.

Um, and so that's what you need to think about building is like understand what are the questions being asked and then how do I provide that answer and then how do I make sure that answer in all the other places that the LLMs are, are researching. James Kaikis: Is it true that G2 is the fourth most referenced product by the LLMs? Like I was reading something along that, that data point, Sydney Sloan: it depends on the category, but it's usually somewhere between. Eight and 15% of the citation source.

There was a little bit of an algorithm change that GPT did to Reddit back in the fall. Sydney Sloan: Like someone pissed somebody off. Um, oh, this is recorded. Um, and, uh, and so, you know, their, their numbers started going down in terms of percentage of citation around B2B buyers.

That's what we research. Um, but it's, it's. We're usually in the top three to five. James Kaikis: Wow.

Yeah. How did you, you know, you said that you know, the executive team, everyone's gotta be on board. James Kaikis: Obviously with a company like G2, it's very important to the core and the acquisition of the garner data. But like, how does, does that happen?

How do you get the executive team bought in on this? Right. I think we've talked about SEO and SEO not being, you know, as popular anymore, but this is really imperative to make this switch. James Kaikis: And make this switch as fast as possible, Sydney Sloan: right?

Yeah. The interesting, I mean like SEO still matters. Right. 'cause the other 49% are still going to Google Dunno who those people are.

Um, and uh, and so you still have to manage your SEO game for now. And like PC's gotten way more expensive 'cause there's less buyers going that people are still trying to acquire them. Sydney Sloan: What's interesting is why does it matter? Uh, it's because that's where the buyers.

So if it's not a strategic initiative at this, at the C level, it definitely has to be a strategic initiative within the marketing team because that's our job, is to find where they're at, build our brand and go capture those people. Sydney Sloan: And if you're not on the short list, which you're shrinking, uh, you won't be able to build your business. And I mean, founder brand and all that is great too, but like where they're actually going to do the research on what they're going to buy is where you need to make sure that you're, you're showing up.

James Kaikis: Where does somebody start? Like where do they start on this project? You mentioned like lists and FAQs, but. Where's like the zero to one?

Sydney Sloan: The thing that I would recommend and then, and I did this to a couple of the scale port codes and they're like, we don't have that much money. We have to hack it. So I'm like, okay, I'll figure that out. Sydney Sloan: But if you do have some funding, the first thing I would do is, um, buy an AEO tool.

If you don't know what questions people are asking and the citation sources that are influencing the answer, how do you know what to. Write about and how can you track that you're actually starting to build your brand. Sydney Sloan: So first is the, the AEO tool to, in order to get visibility. Um, and then the second is a, a content strategy.

Now the cool kids are calling it content engineering Now, if you haven't heard that term. And um, and so it's really interesting 'cause if you think like writers and engineering, hmm, two things that I didn't really think went together, but, um, but. Sydney Sloan: They, you know, they're being very curious. Like my writing team, they were the first ones di diving in Claude and, and using it for ideation.

So it could be, I love where I'm starting to see this go and the AEO vendors are kind of coming at it from one direction and then you've got like the Air Ops and Growth X and all these folks coming it up from the other, and I think they're going to converge very soon. Sydney Sloan: Where they have some AI content ability inside the tool itself. Um, so it is, it's like mining for the questions, sourcing the content for the answers, and then you still have to make sure it's. Timely.

Like you can't leave it there. You have to keep refreshing it. You have to. So there's a management side that goes along with that, and then just keep on continuing like it goes.

Sydney Sloan: I think, Matt, what you said, um, the complexity of the prompt is changing as well. So a year ago people might have asked a single sentence prompt. Now they're like. Four to five sentences.

And, and so it's, the questions are, what is, you know, I, I'm looking for a solution to solve this problem. I wanna replace these two products. Sydney Sloan: Um, I'm in this industry and, um, and I wanna spend this much. And so how do you build your content to that?

Right? So you have to like, you have to have comparison content, you have to have industry content, you have to have pricing. And, and so the complexity of. The structure of the content is increasing dramatically.

Matt Amundson: Yeah, I think when, whenever I'm performing a search where I'm doing a comparative search, um, you know, a prompt that I might put in is like, Hey, I'm considering buying a product that does X. Find me the three or four brands in the space that are a good fit. Give me a t chart for the pros and cons of each, and stack rank them based upon how expensive they are initially and what the total cost of ownership would be for them. Matt Amundson: A year ago, I would've been like, what's a good au AO tool?

Right, right. So the change there is super complicated and highly, highly specific. But what I tend to get when I put up a, a, a prompt like that is a lot of data from G2. Sydney Sloan: Yeah.

That's because we've architected, and I love that you mentioned the pro we we're seeing, you know, we have our own AEO tools, so we see all the questions for all the prompts across all the categories and can start seeing that pattern. Sydney Sloan: And so ProCon started coming up more frequently about six months ago. So we created pro and con list for every category and every product. 'cause we knew that's what it was looking for.

We knew it was looking for pricing. So if, if a, if a person who claimed their G2 profile hadn't yet put pricing on, because we know that's the one way we can get a customer to talk to sales, um, is, and so we're like, okay. Sydney Sloan: The customer's not gonna put pricing on, we're gonna put pricing on. So we looked at the reviews that were left and tried to infer from that data what the pricing was and pre-populated it into the profile because we wanna make sure that, you know, the data there is relevant.

Now you can go in and change it. Sydney Sloan: I think you have to pay us to do that. Um, but that is what we're looking at. We're continu, we're con, uh, continuously like trying to understand that structure.

Um, the other thing that. Um. Is interesting is then how do you start to track and measure it? Yeah, too.

And um, and I've been getting this question a lot more from the folks I advise. Sydney Sloan: Even we had one of our, our people, she's like, the board is asking me for my AEO dashboard, which should I do? I'm like, huh, that's a good question. And so I went to some of the vendors, I'm like, what's your dashboard look like?

They're like, we don't have one. I'm like. Huh. Nobody's tracking it yet.

This is great opportunity. Sydney Sloan: Um, and, and so, you know, it, it is a thing of like, you know, how, what percentage of, um, of answer do you own? So what, what mentions versus your competitors? What is the citation and is it trending up?

Like how many, how many of your content, how much of your content that you directly own is cited? But I also like to look at indirect because when you look at what are the citation sources. Sydney Sloan: It might be G2 and so like you've invested in G2, but it might be some random blogger that just like is passionate about what it is that you do. And so that's why the influencer strategy is so important.

And so an influence on citation could be other people you've parted with your partnerships. Sydney Sloan: You can put your content in FAQs in their areas. Um, and you could do that as a. A trade off.

We used to do back linking all the time. We're getting marketing nerdy here, but you know, now why, why don't you put your FAQ on my site and I'll let you put yours? You know, like we could trade it off, um, because it's looking for the right answer and consensus. Sydney Sloan: So if it finds it in a few places, you're, you're good to go.

So, um, measurement is really important. Matt Amundson: I think that's great because the, my next question was gonna be like, what are some of the things that no one's thinking about? Because yes, people are trying to protect reputation on places like Reddit and, and other social media channels. Matt Amundson: Yes.

People, I mean, even before the rise of this category, people were always trying to have good scores on G2 and mitigate bad scores and have as many positive reviews as they possibly could show up in quadrants there, et cetera. But what are some of the things that are non-traditional that maybe we're not thinking about? Matt Amundson: Uh, I mean, the FAQ's on a partner's page is a perfect example of that, but. Are there other examples Yeah.

That, that are pushing the needle? Sydney Sloan: Two, two that come to mind that will give you a leapfrog over everybody else. 'cause I haven't heard these yet. The first is, um, on G2, there's, we've had this concept of discussions for years.

Sydney Sloan: Discussion. We try to like build a Reddit dish. Uh, if you look at most pages, the last discussion was six years ago. Nobody was wanting to discuss.

Um, but we figured out that, oh, that's another question answer format. And that is easy to tokenize and easy for the bots to read. So go get your discussion game on. Sydney Sloan: You can put whatever questions you want.

And have anybody answer those questions. And that's going to then get indexed on the LLM. So that's just another place to put it. So discussions on G2 is one, and then the other one that, um, I.

Uh, I want people to make sure that they're doing it. You, you just have to figure out where are natural conversations happening, and that's in your community. Sydney Sloan: If you have communities and community forums, developer discussions, how do you optimize that for the LLMs? And there's, um, two, uh, tools that I'm aware of currently.

Um, HubSpot has, uh, a ai, AI or AEO website greater. It used to be the website greater. Now it's an. EO grader and so does webflow webflow.

com, AEO, and then you could just put in your URL and it will tell you what to do technically, to open it up to make sure it's readable. Sydney Sloan: So those are some super tactical things just to like give access to content. Craig Rosenberg: Love it. Here's the thing I don't get, so you're trying to make sure that your website has all these answers, okay?

And then you want to make sure that you're. Uh, present in all the like Reddit conversations, et cetera. Sydney Sloan: You wanna be understanding what the LLMs are using to find the answer. Sydney Sloan: That's what the citation is.

So once you see that, you'll see it's, oh, this Reddit discussion thread, not just your Reddit presence, but the threads themselves, Craig Rosenberg: right? Sydney Sloan: And how do I then own that answer? How can I influence the ownership of that answer? And so that's what the AEO tool will give you is like, okay, what are those citation sources?

Sydney Sloan: How do I then go own that answer? Oh, by the way, sentiment matters. So if they're negative answers, how do I put positive answers out there? You can change it or you can create.

New places to ask the same question with more up-to-date content, and it will maybe favor that over the other one. It's a game. Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. Sydney Sloan: Um, and yes, you want to be able to have your content replicated in multiple places.

It's, it's the fancy term is consensus signal amplification, which basically means when you go and do a search on your LLM of choice, it's. Searching. You see it, right? Spinning.

And then it's like checking this, checking that, checking that, checking that. Sydney Sloan: Well, it's looking for the right answer. And if it sees in multiple places that question with the the same answer, it's like, ah, that must be the right answer. So that's why you wanna have your content in multiple places, because if it sees it three or four times, then it's gonna give the answer that you want to have.

Sydney Sloan: Who cares if it came from a partner website or G2 or your website or some influencer blog? The right answer is there. That's what you're going for. Craig Rosenberg: Right?

But if it's an influencer blog and that's what you get from the citation, how do you change that? Sydney Sloan: You pay the influencer. That's what I was gonna ask. Craig Rosenberg: I I, I get it.

I mean, I, yeah. Sydney Sloan: Let me sponsor you. Yeah. By the way, can you update this?

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. But what about all those people that are doing like. They're taking the a hundred questions and they're having AI answer 'em and put 'em on their website. I mean, like Sydney Sloan: that can work.

Um, and you can construct your pages in a way that favors the AI bots. Sydney Sloan: And that's another thing you can track is like how much of the traffic to my website are bots versus humans? Um, and that will also give you an indication if you're being cited more often. Um, so yes.

Uh, I've landed on a bunch of those pages lately, and I'm like, oh, this isn't for me. This is for a bot. Sydney Sloan: Yeah. Where is the answer I'm looking for?

Yeah, it's like buried. Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, I got it. Okay. Because I'm, I've always, even though I've heard your preso a bunch of times and I get it, I'm like, like, I feel like the best recommendation I can make is to start with G2 or one of those and just try to optimize one.

Sydney Sloan: I would start with the tool, understand the citation source and where they're going to get answers, and go own those answers first. Right? If it's all, and I would replicate that same question, answer format across many places as I can't. And yes, I mean, if like.

You're asking me to, should I pitch G2 or not? Sydney Sloan: But yeah, G2 is one of the top sources. You'll see that, you'll see it on G2 like so yes, you wanna build your brand on there, you wanna make sure you have your FAQs there. By the way, they can't be in PDFs 'cause they don't wanna open PDFs anymore.

Um, and so you wanna have, you know, your content in the places that it's citing. Sydney Sloan: And I'm confident that G2 will be on that list, so. Right. Craig Rosenberg: Well we can talk about, I mean, like Reddit, if you try to game re like that's a dangerous game.

Right. I mean, 'cause if everyone's gonna go try to optimize the answers, you said, I mean, if, if you're in the developer community, we were just talking about it, you go fuck with the people on Reddit, you are in, I mean, they're gonna get you dude. Craig Rosenberg: Right. Which is Sydney Sloan: why the influencers.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, which is why the influencer part of that is, is, is part of the, is concentric pieces. 'cause you still wanna, you have to have influencer game here.

You just do. And, and you want them to be educated and passionate about what you're doing and willing to go in and. Sydney Sloan: Authentically answer those questions, but. Y we played this game, right?

Like we hired at SalesLoft, like all these great advisors and people like Matt and to, you know, they were happy customers to talk about us, but they were ans like, how many times did someone on LinkedIn say, I don't know, SalesLoft or Outreach, you know? Sydney Sloan: And I was like, dad, call down everybody. And they're, you know, the, how many answers do we get versus a, it's the same game. Matt Amundson: Yeah.

I remember once, actually a funny story, I was talking to Craig. In like 2017 and I was like, I wanna start a fire on LinkedIn. Like how do I, how do I start a fire? And he was like, just post SalesLoft versus outreach.

Matt Amundson: And like within a day, I think there was a thousand comments and 1800 likes like that, that there was a time when like men, you could really stir up some shit on LinkedIn by just, uh, talking about two different vendors. One question that I have, um, on this topic is like we talk about content freshness. Matt Amundson: And we want to be updating and, and constantly have a, a new content stream there. What about like content age, like older content?

Right. And the reason why I asked the question is like, if you're a business that's been in the game for a while, how do, and maybe you don't know the answer, maybe no one's ever asked this answer, but like, I find myself at a company that's just now 25 years old. Matt Amundson: We have content that's very old, but we've been an authority in the space for a long time. Like does content age actually create a little bit of additional relevancy considering the fact that like, we've been around for a while, or Sydney Sloan: this is the interesting thing in the SEO versus AEO, uh, because like if you have a high ranking page in a, in SEO, it could be super old.

Sydney Sloan: Right. Um, I would create a newer version of those high ranking pages that are optimized for AEO, uh, be because the first thing that's likely to happen is if you actually read it, is it written in natural language? Sure. Right.

So you want the structure to be like, question and answer, insight focused definitions, things like that. Sydney Sloan: So I would just take your top performing SEO pages and then like, how do I create AEO versions of them? We did a massive cleanup of the G2 infrastructure. We had millions and millions of pages 'cause we had optimized for um, SEO for so long.

And so like literally the dev team took two months to purge all the content that wasn't performing because it was counting against us. Sydney Sloan: 'cause you're it, when you think about the math of it. When, when an LLM is going and searching, um, it costs more furthermore pages that you're trying to get through. And so if we could make that easier and better, so we prune down the, the page, the website by like 25, 30% was huge.

Um, we also thought Google was dinging us for that at the same time. Sydney Sloan: So we, we did it for both. Um, and, uh, and it does, uh, the LLMs do want recency. So refreshing is a good strategy.

Matt Amundson: Great. Sydney Sloan: Thank Matt Amundson: you. Sydney Sloan: Yeah, Matt Amundson: that, that is literally like a tactical question that I have to go answer at work later. Craig Rosenberg: I was, I mean, he was really happy about that.

Yeah. But tell, can we do the PR thing? Craig Rosenberg: Can we talk about that? 'cause I think the recency thing is a, it's one of my favorite parts of what you talk about here.

Yeah. Sydney Sloan: So, um, PR is comeback for those of us who have been doing this a long time. Uh, you know, the, the game was like, get mentioned in the, the, the publications and, um, they would do product demos. Sydney Sloan: Remember PC week?

Am I that old? Oh wow. Right. Yeah.

I guess that's trouble. I demoed a PC week, um, when we had a new product coming out. But uh, you know, they, a lot of those went away just 'cause they weren't paying the reporters anymore and there weren't as many people to pitch, frankly. Uh, so it was just really hard for the PR firms to get you coverage 'cause there was less coverage to be had.

Sydney Sloan: Um, and. So, um, now when you look at the, the citation, like the influence, like Forbes did a really good job. I think they did a deal with, uh, GPT or OpenAI. So some of the publications have created formal relationships with the AI vendors and opening up content and structuring in a way that they like.

So they've started to be cited more great strategy on their part. Sydney Sloan: Um, what you can do. Craig, since you asked the question, you can still do the old school pitching, right? That, that VentureBeat article is, um, we, we didn't believe in the MIT study that said AI was bad.

And so we, we pitched on that and we got a bunch of, of, uh, coverage for it. So, and we had, we went back and hired an agency. Sydney Sloan: I know a lot of people are doing press releases again because. New PR Newswire gets picked up so it gets indexed.

If people didn't know this, you can buy your way into Forbes. So when people see, like Forbes Council, Forbes contributor, that's only $1,600 a year, um, in order to do that. And so hashtag founder branding, why not have your founder also be a Forbes contributor? Sydney Sloan: Because it will be.

As, uh, authenticated content on a, on a good media publication. And then I still say organic social there because, um, it will still crawl that too, right? And so you don't want to not, um, put your content in that space too. Craig Rosenberg: So if I'm a series A founder, should I hire a PR agency?

Sydney Sloan: Did anybody hear Craig's question? Sydney Sloan: No. Yeah, I didn't think so. Craig Rosenberg: What, what's the, you can't hear you.

Who said that? Isn't my mic that bad? Hold on. Thank you.

Uh, what did I ask? Sydney Sloan: If you're a founder, series A founder. Craig Rosenberg: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're, if you're a founder, like series A let's start Or C, there's some C.

Yeah. I mean, to get to this, I mean, do you hire a PR agency? Craig Rosenberg: 'cause that would, the chart on PR agencies would be like really high. Then they've cratered and now they're coming back.

If your answer is what I think it's, Matt Amundson: yeah. The, the future of P agencies in the Bay Area hinges on your answer to this question. Sydney Sloan: I was just asked this question by thread.ai yesterday.

Sydney Sloan: Really? Again. Oh, cool. I'm like, well, do you have news?

Was my first question, like you have product announcements, are you're getting funding announcements because that's that you gotta give the PR agency something to work with. If you're so early that you don't have anything newsworthy, I would buy the AEO tool first. Sydney Sloan: Um, and build your brand there, um, and just do really good on LinkedIn. I don't know what he's gonna do, my advice, but, um, that's what I would personally do.

Craig Rosenberg: What, what do you mean do really good on LinkedIn? Sydney Sloan: Do everything Scott said. Right? Craig Rosenberg: Okay.

Sydney Sloan: Unfounded branding. Craig Rosenberg: Like, Sydney Sloan: you know, be your persona. Find your story and your narrative and, you know, think about your distribution channels. Sydney Sloan: Did I list right?

Those were the three things. Okay. Yeah. James Kaikis: I've got a question on this because I think to both their points, right?

It's, it's like what was. The PR game was so important years ago. It's really kind of diluted itself and died off. Mm-hmm.

Is there any other bet that you are making that you think is gonna come back? James Kaikis: Right? Because you mentioned Reddit, you mentioned pr. These are different strategies than B2B companies have been taking over the last couple of years.

Right? So is there something else you're betting on? Sydney Sloan: I mean, being back in person is, is cool again. Um, and I've always been a fan of partnerships.

I think that's an amplification, uh, strategy. Sydney Sloan: You wanna hang out with cool kids? I did. I did a road show in this, in right here.

Last, um, when was it? May it During the Saster. Crazy. I raised your hands.

You were here. I know you were right. I intentionally picked Clay to be a partner 'cause I wanted to ride there, you know, there hype and, and it was relevant to what we were doing. Sydney Sloan: So the audience, we all had the shared audience like Clay and Six Sense and LinkedIn and, and so I think who you picked to partner with says a lot about.

Your brand as well. And if you could get the leverage of, of amplification on a single narrative that it connects all the dots, all of the partners benefit from that. Sydney Sloan: So in-person events with partners. James Kaikis: Love that.

What, where do you think about the partner strategy as like, products are starting to go wider platforms and starting to compete with each other, right? Like for, even for this event and the partners we were talking to, you know, some people are like, oh, well they're, they're a competitor now. James Kaikis: Like, uh, six months ago I would've said that company's not a competitor to you. Right?

So how do you think about that, you know, frenemy strategy as well? Sydney Sloan: I think as a good partner, like. Like if you're, if you're the core pro platform that they're all integrating with, like, you know, you, you know, you got it, but to be a good partner, you're like, here's my swim lane, this is what our roadmap is doing. Sydney Sloan: This is outside my swim lane.

And, and therefore, you know, for the next year at least, I promise, you know, pinky promise not to, to go there. That's, that's one thing. Um, the, the actual way that I usually think about this as a market leader is I, first, I always wanna start with the customer and what does their world look like? Sydney Sloan: What are the influential things, product, services, et cetera, in their world?

What piece do I play? I just play a little piece. I'm not, I am not the end all, be all. And so it bothers me when I see people like telling a story from their point of view.

Like, they're the only thing you're not right. So what is the bigger picture? Sydney Sloan: How do I fit? And then who are the leaders in the other pieces of that pie that I can go be friendly with?

And, and then how do we, you know, surround the customer in a meaningful way? How do we create differentiation? You know, I'm gonna, I remember a few years ago. When I was at SalesLoft, we did a partnership with Six Sense, and we built a specific integration and I'm like, an outreach can't have it for a year.

Sydney Sloan: And that's what happened. So we had this unique integration in their sales product, um, that created differentiation for both our companies. And so I love doing that too. Like how can you create unique differentiation to both win together?

Matt Amundson: So I watched Sydnee do this presentation at Saster and just absolutely blow the roof off. Matt Amundson: That's why, uh, I wanted her here again. And she thinks that, I say that because we're friends, but I say that because dozens of people were like, did you catch that presentation? If there was one thing that everybody in the room could just, like, if they haven't started on their journey just, or maybe they have, but like there's one piece of advice that everybody in the room needs to know on this topic, what is the one thing that you want them to know?

Sydney Sloan: It is happening. This is the future and you just should start today. Like this is not, not gonna happen. This is, this is a hundred percent happening.

And imagine I, I was talking to a founder the other day. Like really like seed stage. And he's like, imagine the LLMs and you can, because now we're using Claude. Sydney Sloan: And Claude Cowork actually does all the research for you, including the demo, right?

And so it, it does the comparison side by side of the in product experience, like how far is this gonna go? It's gonna go really far. Um, and so the faster you can think of where is this gonna go and how do I build for that? Sydney Sloan: Um, we'll get you that first mover advantage.

And so like this, this is happening. You, you need to play the game and if you can think three steps ahead, even better. James Kaikis: Amazing. Uh, last maybe part two on that question is, you know, is it true then you need to have an AEO strategy tomorrow, but you still need to have the SEO strategy for the time being.

Sydney Sloan: Yes, I think so. I mean, like the data says that, um, the things that you can't tell, uh, and this is, um, one of the things I struggle with is did they go to the LLM first? Then go to Google 'cause they do, right? And then you just spent that.

And then so who, what are you giving credit for? Are you giving it the credit to the SEO or the AEO? Sydney Sloan: So, um, also, you know, PR is cool again, so is self-reported attribution, um, which means. You know, ask the person how did they find you?

When, when did they decide what did they use? Uh, and I am, I'm talking to people now who are like, can you pull it out of a gong call? How do you automate that? Could you put a questionnaire in front of that first, uh, opportunity meeting?

Sydney Sloan: Like, like before they enter the call? Like, how do you make, like, I don't, it doesn't have to be a form on the website. It just has to be asked. I don't care James Kaikis: where, yeah.

This has been a fantastic conversation. Where can more people learn about this topic? Right. Do they follow you on LinkedIn?

Yes. Tell us, tell us where to go. Sydney Sloan: Yeah, I mean, I, I, the, ooh, the slides are posted. Yes, please go follow me on LinkedIn.

Um, and give it a, like, so it gets boosted 'cause it's your content. Um, and I did put the slides that I didn't share on there, so if you want to know with all the slides, uh, they're, they're on my LinkedIn right now. Yes. Craig Rosenberg: Everyone go check it out.

Sydney Sloan: Yeah, there's other, oh, there's like, everyone go check it out. Four fun. Four fun facts on LinkedIn strategy. Where did I put that?

That's backwards. Always post from your personal account, not the branded account. Um, respond to the comments in the first five minutes. So I like to schedule, like I scheduled my post code at two 30 and then set time aside to, to like be on, to comment on people commenting.

Sydney Sloan: It, it, that's what creates virality. Um, and if you're doing a FFR a favor to a friend, like when Lars used to ask people like line up to, Hey, I'm gonna do a post. Um, you know, if there's people in the crowd that did that, um, like, and then comment and you have to comment more than eight words for it to count. Sydney Sloan: Right?

Yeah. So don't just go, Hey, congrats. Right? It needs to have more than eight words for it to count.

And here's another one. If you tag other people in your post, hoping those people with large followers are gonna do something, if they don't respond, it actually counts against you. So don't do that unless you know the person's gonna respond. Sydney Sloan: Some fun facts on LinkedIn strategy.

Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Transaction, Craig, and I really appreciate the fact that you've listened all the way to the end. What are you actually doing here? For show notes and other episodes, please visit us@thetransactionpod.com, like and subscribe on Spotify, apple Podcast or any other place you get your podcast from.

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