(139) Events, AI, and The Future of B2B Buying with Sydney Sloan, CMO at G2 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLNDe0SEVx0

Transcript: (00:00) I believe we're in this massive shift between marketing of the past and marketing of the future and AI is such a central part of that. I just wrapped up an awesome episode of the podcast with Sydney Sloan. She's a CMO at G2. We talked a lot about AI, of course, what's changing with AI, but something she told me that's really interesting is how they're rethinking their team and the marketing org around outcomes and pods instead of the traditional kind of jobs and titles and marketing structure. In this world, we put customer front and center, we put (00:28) product front and center, and we put brand front and center. So, there's still like these ideas that are the basics and foundations of marketing, but you're asking them to rethink how we work designing in where the agentic capabilities fit and what are the skills that the people need to have and I want it to be a blend. (00:46) Plus, we spent a lot of time talking about events, their event playbook at G2, how they do them, how to think about pre and postevent. I always like to start with the end in mind. What is the one to two things that you want them to learn? We're doing a bunch of events with Exit 5 and I got a ton of notes from this episode. (01:05) So, if you're in marketing, you want to hear from an awesome CMO talk about events and AI, you're going to love this episode. Here's my conversation with Sydney Slo. Okay. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Exit 5 podcast. I'm I'm your lovely, friendly, kind host, Dave Ghart. Uh, and I got Sydney Sloan back on the podcast. It's been it's been a bunch of years since we've had her on. (01:28) Uh Palmer on your team was like, "You got to have her back on. You got to have her back on." I was like, "All right, I'll see what I can do." Obviously, and uh Sydney is the CMO at G2. Sydney, good to see you. How you doing? I'm doing fantastic. As I was just saying, like off the road for a week, my dog, you know, is reuniting with my dog, so she knows who I am. (01:46) Do you remember this smell? Like I that's my favorite part about owning a dog is like if I when I come home from somewhere the way he investigates me like where where have you been and who were you with exactly? So you you just remarked to me before we started recording that you've been traveling like crazy. (02:06) Do you feel like that's a is everybody drinking from the events Kool-Aid? We're we're doing this with Exit 5. We're I'm still running high off of our event. You mentioned your event Reach is coming up as we're recording this. Do you feel like there's still a frenzy around like yeah we got to get together in person? Absolutely. I think you know and for us it's worked really well. We just wrapped up our road show. (02:24) So we did a four city road show in the last over the summer and it was sold out at every stop. Um you know 250 people that's not a bad number to to get to to register and show up. It was fun being at inbound in San Francisco. That was different. But yes I think not only is the inperson back and it's all the things around it. So, like we have Dream Force coming up and breakthrough. (02:49) Like it's just it doesn't seem like it's ending and it's this mix of large scale but also like really small and intimate cool things. I definitely had FOMO for your event. I've never been to Vermont before. If you invite me next year, I'll come. I'll invite you. I know I know a guy. I can get you I can get you a code. That's great. Actually, I don't even care if you go. I don't really care if you go, but if you tell me that you you have FOMO, like that basically counts. (03:12) 100%. Absolutely. All the photos like Jen Ellen Cuth and Devin like two of the OGs like love seeing them and yeah there's something really special to I think we're feeling with our event is because it's built from a community like an online community where people feel like they know each other. (03:30) Now one of the challenges as we grow this is like it can be kind of like clicky if you already know a bunch of people then like how do you welcome in outsiders? But I think that's that's kind of like the format that we're working with is like we're doing a bunch of excursions and hikes and and mixers and we're doing these roundts and I just the vibe in person has just been awesome because I think we're I don't know if it's because we're all having this like deep down existential crisis. (03:55) I think the first wave of it was like postco everybody was like I cannot wait to travel again. Like I was so burnt out on business travel and then I'm like all right I got to get out. I got to go I got to go do something. And I think now we're all having this kind of like existential crisis. Like I'm literally walking through the woods, you know, talking to my chat GBT, like brainstorming. It's like I just talked to her actually now. (04:13) Yeah. Oh, yours is a her. That's interesting. I have a I have a British Mine's a British guy. Mine's British, too. It's a marketing thing. Makes me feel like I'm really smart and creative and talented. But I don't know. There's just something there's just so much nuance to like hanging out in person. (04:30) And it's made me kind of rethink a lot of not rethink, but I'm trying to figure out like making space for the AI stuff, but then also in person. And I I don't know if as I'm getting older and caring about this stuff more, but I found like even in my personal life, I'm trying to like meet up with friends I haven't seen in a while, go hang out, like there's just that good feeling of like talking and banter and hanging out in person that is very tough to replicate, right? I mean like we were secounded you know and we're like trying to still figure out how to how to come back into like (04:55) the human era and you think about what life was like before the pandemic for sure. I get tired really easy now too. It's like I was always an extrovert like last you know first one in last one out and I'm like uh Irish goodbye like see you. (05:14) Do you follow like a corporate bro or corporate Natalie at all? I I've I have she has this one video that it's like it's like her I forget what the exact caption is but it's like her walking back. It's like going back to my hotel room for 15 minutes before like after an all day after all day team activities before the 15 minutes of team dinner and she just like collapses face first onto the bed. (05:32) I have to do that especially if I'm presenting it takes too much out of me now. But I was gonna say though on on your community thing, um I remember back when I was at Jive running customer marketing and we were it was a community platform. So we got to bring in like like customer marketers running communities that and and that was that feeling like it because they knew each other because they were in the community together. (05:56) But one thing that um you might think of is uh to do a buddy program like and so like your first the first you know activity night or whatever put a newbie with an OG. Um and that could be a nice way to like get the blending to happen from the get-go and then that newbie will know one person. I love when people come on my podcast and give me great advice and I'm like immediate Slack message. No, that's great. (06:20) Hey, we were thinking we that that's a totally good way to do it. I think when you when you're there under like the guy like it's a a professional setting, it would be so easy to pair someone like you know Sydney is a newbie and she is in content. Let's pair her with you know TS who's a OG who is also in content and then you have that like kind of shared thing which is really cool. (06:41) You mentioned like you do these road shows, right? So, as a CMO, it's clear as a person you get the value of doing events, but like from a from a business standpoint, like how do you think about I guess everything always does come back to measurement at some point, but and I kind of want you to say the answer because I know I feel the event ROI is harder is harder. (06:56) It's it's mushier than just sales, but where do they fit in like the marketing strategy for for G2 to go and do four 250 person road shows? A ton it's a ton of work. There's no such thing as an easy event. So, um, how do you like why do you do that and how do you think about it? Yeah, I mean, I'll be completely blunt and transparent here, right? Like G2 is not its own platform. (07:22) We only work when we're integrated with other people's stuff and and so in order to tell the story like because I believe we're in this massive shift between like marketing of the past and marketing of the future and AI is such a central part of that that the bold idea is that you just kind of toss what you built and start over. it's going to be easier than trying to re, you know, retrofit your marketing automation system to the new way. And so that was the kind of the idea about about AI in action is to like a clean blueprint. (07:48) It was a blank page and it was really important for me who we told this story with the quote kids, right? So, you know, we we got you want to put yourself in good company, you know, so bringing in Clay and Qualified and Six Sense like was super intentional. New Breed um and HubSpot partner and then we used Infuse in in the UK. (08:14) Um and and so we got to tell the story together and it was important for um for us for me uh to make sure that we were having that conversation with the right person. So we called them the hands-on decision makers. the people that you know we didn't want seues we wanted the people that are actually design the systems and can implement it and give them the power of like what that looks like how do you actually think about taking a signal connect connecting it to a an agent taking action building you know AI orchestrated workflows like imagine you don't you don't have to worry you just get to (08:44) start fresh and and so that was the premise of it um and the reason I think that it worked really really well it worked really really Oh, I was very pleased. Um, is because we spent a lot of time ahead of time building our story together with our partners. So, the first presenter absolutely knew what the last presenter was saying. We rehearsed three times before we got on site. (09:07) We still adjusted on site. I tried to keep the presenters the same um because then the dynamic gets more and more personal over time. Uh, sometimes you couldn't make that happen, but most of the time we could. And we kept it fast-paced. every presentation was 15 minutes and had some kind of interactivity. (09:27) And so in at the end in the middle like a three, you know, take the three minutes and do this at your table, take five minutes and do this at your table. So beginning to end, they started with a blank slate and they left with a drawn out blueprint of their their orchestrated workflow and a prompt that we pre-built that then they worked on that they could use right away. Um and and that was the last session. (09:46) So, it was like high high intensity, high value, hands-on, go. I have a couple event specific follow-up just cuz this is uh top of mind for me. So, I think you mentioned they they did three three rehearsals. This is a lesson that we're learning with our events. I think pushing harder on the like let's really prep the content for this. (10:07) And I'm trying to balance the like once you get to like a inbound dream force stage like they're like super militant. They're like, "Nope, we don't have your slides need to be like this format. They need to look like this. They need to be due on this date, you know, 6 months before the event. (10:23) " And then like we're trying to like build an event from the beginning. And so I'm trying to like have more flexibility and that there there is so many things that I'm learning that like not all events are not equal. And if you do spend more time on the content, that is what people are going to remember. I I get in this obsession over like was the sandwich good enough? Was the food good enough? And it's like the content needs to be really good. (10:43) You know, I always like to start with the end in mind. What is the one to two things that you want them to learn and what's the one to two things that you want them to do? There's actually a really cool framework I was taught uh back in the day by Lisa Steel. (11:02) Uh she was my CMO at the time and it was a a 3x3 and so it was uh what do you want them pre during post? So that's the top bar and then the side uh the rows are think, feel, do and it's really and and and for the bigger events you can do it by persona. So you could do one for VIPs, you can do one for developers, you can do one for your champions. (11:23) Like so for each persona that you're serving, what do you want them to think they'll do before, think they'll do during, and think they'll do after? Um and and that's where kind of I like to start with the planning. And so for us in that example, it's like, you know, we want them to think they're not too far behind, but you got to get going now. (11:41) You know, so you want them to feel a sense of urgency, but also empowered. Uh, and then what you want them to do is you want them to go back with their blueprint and run a similar workshop with their team. That was it. Um, and and and then post is like make sure they have the followup, you know, like we sent out additional materials. (12:00) Um, and so, you know, you kind of build that framework out. And then collectively, I mean, I I I was the MC, like you're probably the MC at yours. And so, you know, it was my job to make sure that the dots were connecting and and so in our pre preruns where they did go through their slides, if somebody had too many slides, I told them they had too many slides. (12:21) I'm like, dude, you need to cut 20 slides out of your 12 minutes, right? Um, and pick three, six, and two, and you say this, this, and this. like you can imagine me but I do it nicely. That's already said like you say you give feedback so nice. You know it's like but I'm very direct. (12:38) Um and you know like the you know this you know this this needs to blend to that one. You guys are saying the same thing. Who's going to say it? Um you know or like where's the call to action? You know let's write a stronger question. Like I'm just kind of trying getting it through and then the event day of like I'm roaming around. I'm sitting at the tables. (12:56) you know, we put um a facilitator at every table and they were trained as to what their role was and, you know, they were responsible for the prompting session. They had to have it pre-loaded. They needed to kick off, you know, the uh the the the topics. They needed to make sure that one person didn't talk the whole time, right? All those things were thought through. It's cool to hear you talk at this level. (13:16) clearly you've you've done this a bunch and have so much experience in running these because I think like I'll see someone you know post in our community or whatever like ask about like the the ROI of doing events and it's like we did an event and it didn't work and it's like what I'm hearing from you even just in a couple minutes is like oh there's levels to this like there's so many different plays and how much you can make the details better and it's like why do people go to this webinar but they don't go to that? Is it that webinars are broken? because of that events are broken or is it like no did you did you put in a level of work (13:46) to make all of the things better and I love when things happen in marketing because they they're good you know what I mean like I love when things work because they're good not because we found some like shortcut or hack and it's like oh no we put in a ton of work to like we care about this craft and we want this to be amazing and that actually ends up being the growth hack. (14:10) It's not that, oh, you sent, you know, these three reminder emails at these specific time intervals leading up to the event. Like, I feel like that the 8020 of it is is in this stuff. And two other things. So, one was like when the sales reps were doing their pipe genen Tuesdays, marketing did ours and we took responsibility for directly inviting people. (14:27) I mean, Palmer Hutchkins as you mentioned earlier, like you know, he was the highest recruiter, but you know, I was I was DMing. Like, I already know like I have a model. It's like send an email, send a LinkedIn post. If I have them on text, I text them, you know, like working hard to get the right people in the room because that matters too. The table you're at matters. (14:45) And like when I'm up like introducing on the stage, you can see in the first working session who's really there to learn and who's not. And like it kills me almost when I go and go, "Hey, here's your swag bag. you know, I know you were taking time off from work, but you know, and you know, just because it not having the right people at the table fully engaged actually ruins the experience for the rest of the table. Um, and and so you kind of even have to manage that dynamic. (15:09) There's always that one guy who like snuck in cuz it's like I call him the bagel guy, the bagel snatcher. Yeah. But um the I forgot one of the other things that we did, we asked people their experience levels and put people with the same experience levels at the same table. So they were assigned tables uh just by experience level. (15:27) So we had like a little code and so all noviceses sat at the same table. All experts sat at the same table. So when they were having in the conversation they were having it with people at the same level they were. So it wasn't a waste of time for the super smart people. (15:43) But we made sure that the the table facilitators um you know knew how to prompt. Is that awkward when you have to tell like all right the dumb people are going to sit over here. The smart people are going to sit No. I mean they self we didn't tell them they were smarter than them. They they were the ones they were the ones that said it for them themselves. (15:59) It and it was interesting how it changed um you know city to city uh and and I I don't think it was actually the cities. We started in New York, then San Francisco, then Atlanta, then London, and it shifted and it was like every other month, every month. Uh, and then we we waited like over the summer, but the the audience got more and more um you know, the shift of novice to intermediate to expert. Um, but I think it was because of time. I don't think it was because of location. (16:24) I think people are just getting more and more um akin to prompting and using the tools. No, it's moving really fast. I've noticed a shift even like people in my personal life that had no interest in hearing about the nerdy ways I was using chatbt like 3 months ago are now like passing me. Yeah, you get into it. But you did ask a couple you asked a question twice and I haven't answered it yet, which is the ROI. (16:47) So ROI um of events. Uh I have a favorite concept and I call it revenue in the room. Um, so revenue in the room is how much prospect revenue and how much retention revenue because that's engagement and it's as important for your existing customers to attend these events as your prospects. That's I think how you justify it. (17:12) And when you're thinking about event strategy, you always want to have that mix because your happy customers are going to sell your prospects on the value otherwise they wouldn't be there. And so you could definitely I think our revenue in the room in New York was like six million, right? And by the time we were done with the road show, we had touched over 20% of our um our our revenue. (17:32) Uh and then we did a like a VIP event at after in each city with like you know sometimes it was seuite they didn't attend the event. Uh sometimes it was people that attended the event but that was how we kind of went deeper on the strategic accounts. Um uh and and we tested what worked better. I thought that was interesting. (17:54) So, we did like a sporting event, a dinner um and uh a a concert and um the sporting event was actually the most successful in recruiting and overall experience in my opinion because I did What was the sporting event? Uh Giants baseball game. Pretty good. Don't you feel like there's a there's a bunch of um maybe like intangible ROI, you know, percentage points from events? And I'll just tell you what what I I think they are and see if see see if you can relate to this is like it's back to the inperson thing. (18:26) The when you have your ICP prospects and customers in the room, you know, for every dashboard and spreadsheet we look at like man, how valuable is it to have like four conversations? I'm like writing in my phone. I'm like I just talked to this person. They they like I like to test little like bits of messaging. I'm not like hello Sydney. I would like to test my messaging on you. (18:45) But you it's like a stand-up comedian, right? You're trying to like you have a message you're working on. you try to work it in or you you're telling some a story to someone and you realize that that analogy really hits there's something huge about about that that is like harder to quantify but when you can when you can be out there kind of socializing stuff I call it the other one is like shaking hands kissing babies like I think there is just value in like knowing people and connecting on a personal level that cements something stronger online and then the other thing (19:08) is like just um the the perception of it like I think the picture like having amazing looking photos from the event having FOMO uh recording all of the content, having that all be stuff that you can then use in your marketing later. Like that that's, you know, worth some some dollar amount. (19:26) Like I we're going to be here, we're going to do all this work to get this event. Like we better film all the content and like use it as a big chunk of our marketing in the future, right? I would say um for us like we were testing out a new product offering, so we do AI voice reviews. So we had like a handful of people um that uh got to experience the beta of giving a voice review. (19:50) Um, and we had the product manager uh for that at all all the events. We could have done more and I want to say I can't remember the name guy that runs the CIO community and um it was it was like Ivant um but for for CIOS back in the day and he had like this awesome like you'd come off stage and you'd immediately be swept into a small room where you know you got interviewed and I just think that's so smart. We do it at our larger events, but not the the smaller ones. (20:17) But I think that's really great to get like, you know, really good onetoone content created. Uh we'll do that at our advisory board. We always like put up a video crew for for for that and that's happening. But you're right on the socials and uh if it's hard, but if you can convince your photographer to turn around at least 20 um 20 photos within a day, within a day. (20:49) This is not two or three days later because it's too late, right? So, you want the next morning to be able to send the thank you note with the link to the library of photos that have your brand on them that then they can share and then you get that high quality visibility. You know, the other option is like you do it and then people pull pictures off of your stuff. (21:09) But I like the like we're doing this we do like a kick I consider the kickoff party for Dreamforce. Um so it's like sea level people on Monday night, you know, Dreamforce kicks off on Tuesday and we do that. So, we'll have the the the photographer there, but like that night even like we put it out and then we're like front and center of people like sharing that they were at our party the night before and you know, so we get that extra air time. Um, and so I I think that's key. (21:35) If you wait a week to send the the pictures out, then it's too late. I'll tell you another interesting thing that we that we learned. This is the first first big event. Well, second year, but this one was much bigger. You know, events are a ton of work, super stressful. a bunch of the people on our team that worked really hard in the event. We said, "Take take the week after the event off. (21:52) " And that was a huge mistake because and I I've already had this conversation. I'm a toxic manager. Put clip someone clip this. Dave doesn't give people time off. Clip this. No, but what we realized is that like the long tail like running an event, there's so much the followup through the next couple days and like we were like, "Oh, shoot. (22:09) lesson learned like we for this operating system you should work maybe till like Wednesday of that week and then then go take all the time in the world you want off but I think how much of like the the postevent stuff bleeds into that like sending out the recording sending out the pictures the the NPS the thank yous the hey do you have the slides for this there was just a lot left over and I just was kind of sitting there like at my computer like I don't have the answers to any of these things that's why post is so important right and so all too often people think about (22:34) the event as the event not a marketing program and the value is in the follow-up and and you know that happens all the time like event leads get followed up on like I like the I like the leads to drop immediately if not end of night to have the follow up the next day because again the first person people like well they're not back yet I'm like I don't care they're still checking their email you know and and if we're the first to respond that shows that we're on it um and and so I 100% agree with you this is interesting like I will have conversations with sponsors at event and it's like what's the what's your plan (23:04) for follow-up for the event we'll figure it out after and it's like no know to do great marketing we have to think about go back to your little matrix it's like you could have you could run this for all the exercises like pre- during post what do we want them to think feel do and it shouldn't be like the morning after the event we're like okay now let's switch to think about what our follow-up strategy is going to be that that should be connected to the experience from the beginning yeah and the feel is like wow that was quick they're on it like that's the kind (23:30) of partner I want to work with not somebody who sends me a vanilla email two weeks after the that I want to spend a a little segment on on talking about AI. You know, you just have done this whole AI and action thing. (23:48) So, I'm sure your your knowledge of AI has continued to grow, but the lens that I want to ask you this question from is basically just what do you think is different and and and are things different about being a CMO in 2025 2026 because of what's happening in AI and what's different than maybe it was in your last job or or 10 years ago. What's changing? I I know for you know I talked to a lot of CMOs. (24:06) I I know things are different but I'm curious to hear how you articulate like what the what's going to be different in the future. 100% it's different. I um Carrie Lou Dietrich and we started a CMO AI club last January just a handful of people so we could learn together what's working, what's not, what tools are you using, you know, and so that's been super super helpful. (24:25) And so, you know, I think there's been these defined eras, right? Like I I I started before the internet, so I've been around a while. um you know I was like oh the internet we can talk to people digitally like there's a form what do we do with it so you know there's been big shifts in marketing over the years and this is another one and I I mentioned at the beginning like you know marketing automation was a huge time for marketers like we could finally you know digitize our experiences and get more sophisticated the science of marketing was way more than just the (24:57) creative side of marketing with brand um and then everything could be measured which I don't know if it was a good thing or bad thing to be honest. And so now we're back at the starting line and what's cool about it is everybody has an equal shot except the ones that have been investing in brand all along. (25:15) I think we have to go back to the basics and you know really figure out who we are. Establish the brand which is like the narrative consistency. How do you want people you know what do you want people to think and feel when they hear about your company? You know how do you show up? That's why it's important for me like high quality, right? Like I want every single experience to like hit the five senses. (25:38) Even if it's digital or if it's in person, it doesn't matter. But that a G2 event, it always feels like some something just above and beyond. So the next time they have a choice to come to our event or someone else's, they come to ours. Like when I got here a year ago, we didn't do launch events. (25:56) And so it's like, okay, we if you build something, people got to know about it. you don't want them just to discover it, you know, and so we started launch events like this last one like, you know, we just keep raising the bar. We had a production like, you know, like it was just great. Um, and you know, we use Goldcast like I know you're a fan of Goldcast and so quality matters. (26:15) Um, and so, you know, what do you want your brand to stand for and then how do you uphold that is point number one. Um, then you know with AI it's disrupting everything. Here's some fun facts. We do a lot of buyer re research at G2 and in a we do an annual survey at G2, the buyer behavior report. We decided to do it twice this year because things are changing so fast. (26:40) So we did it in April and in April it the responses said that uh four out of five people used uh some kind of LLM in their entire buying process and 29% started with an LLM four months later. So, we decided to do it in August. The report's coming out next week. And that number went to 9 out of 10. And 50% of people starting in an LLM. 50% up from 29. (27:09) That's a 71% increase in 4 months. It's just like what you said, like you were at the forefront, now everybody's passing you. As soon as people get in there, and here's what's crazy about it, right? Like they ask a question, they get an answer, and they're trusting the answers. (27:27) And the answers are way more than a keyword, right? The answers are complex. Not, you know, what's the best software for running marketing programs. They're saying, here's my ICP. This is my current tech stack. Tell me where I've overlap. What integrates with this? Do I still need like it's levels of questions that are super deep, and you have to understand now what people are asking and write your content for the answers to those questions. (27:52) It's a total shift. The version of this like 10 or 15 years ago was like your marketing team would just basically write an article that's like if you sold a CRM, you'd write an article that was like the 10 best CRM to use and you'd put like yourself like number three on the list or whatever or do some kind of benchmark study that you know was wired. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's wild. (28:12) I mean, that's the stuff that like really makes you have to have some fundamental questioning about what does the future of marketing look like? Because uh I'm just going to I'm I'm not great at brainstorming on the fly, but you mentioned a bunch of companies and I have them in my notes and so you said Clay, Qualified, Six Sense, New Breed, right? Let's let's just say that those are four companies that all sold the same type of widget just for thought sake, right? Yeah. Well, if I need to buy that for my company, let's say they make accounting software for small businesses like mine, (28:45) this is how I buy today. I'm going to go I'm going to go to my chat GBD and say, "Hey, my business is a $3 million revenue." Da da. I've run a small business. We have a team of five. I don't like complexity. I have this much budget. I have this this this this. Here's my ICP. I'm considering Clay versus Qualified versus 6ense versus New Breed. (29:02) Can you please do the initial research on this and tell me uh the pros and cons of each platform and make a recommendation about what might be great for me? Then it's like, you know, thinking for 7 minutes or however, it's insanely fast and boom. Is the buying process over? No. (29:18) But now I've done so much work where, you know, as recent as like 3 or four years ago, the process would have been like go to each person's site, fill out a form, wait to hear back, have to go to some, you know, like you're Sydney Sloan, man. You're like a a gangster like CMO. Like you have a ton of credibility, an amazing resume. There's something broken about the the people reaching out to you are 22-year-old BDRs fresh out of college. (29:37) And I'm not like, you know, pooping on that as a profession. I'm just saying like there's just no way that person is going to be able to know as much about marketing. And so we got to like rethink some of that. So these are the things I'm like, "Huh, that's interesting. Well, what does that mean? What this is what I lay in bed at think about like what happens to sales? What happens to marketing? How does this change? How does this change?" just like if all this stuff continues to play out at this rate, there is going to be a lot of (30:00) change in how we market and sell products, right? 100%. Right? like this the shift I would say you know the biggest shift since then was like the whole idea of a digital strategy when everybody moved from you know the sales rep you had a rolodex and you know you you'd like run events and then it was like oh no there's a digital experience and they're going to come to your website and you know how do you design an immersive website and then connect that website to a form that will then send that lead to (30:33) a sales rep who will ever called them. Well, like honestly in the early days of all those games though, like you could win like just by having a website. I'm trying to find a piano in my small town. I'm trying to find a piano teacher for my son and like there's only one person that actually has a website that works that I could like fill out a form and like get a response back from. (30:52) So, she's probably going to get our business and and that's how it used to be. Or you go to Yelp, right? and and and so I think that's the thing that's what the data says too is that th those 50% are starting you know on an LLM and then they'll click into the citation and thankfully you know G2 is one of the the inputs. (31:12) Now, the reason I was having a conversation with my chat GPT uh partner who speaks in a British accent like yours, uh I call her Rain as in the queen. And I was like before this podcast with Dave, I want to make sure because all of a sudden, you know, Reddit influence is going down Wikipedia because guess what? They made an algorithm change just like Google used to do to us all the time, too. (31:29) So, I want to stay at the forefront of like what is influencing the answers in these LLMs. And thankfully, Rain said that G2 is still an influence. We know that too because we have the data to prove it, but I was just double-checking before this. And so, you know, you have to understand what those influences are, which are the citation links. (31:47) And there's technology out there now that people are calling it GEO or AEO, answer engine optimization or generative engine optimization, and they'll show it to you. So then you'll get to see, okay, where is my brand showing up? What questions are being asked? And what is influencing the answers? which is going to give you insight in then to kind of what content do I now need to create and where do I need to put it in order to influence those LLMs because it also looks for confirmation by going to multiple sites. It's an advantage that G2 has. Sorry, I'm going to G2 uh prompt for a second. (32:19) But because we syndicate our reviews to multiple sites like AWS, Azure, ramp, like all these different places, those reviews get confirmed citation, which is why we also have higher influence. So you want to think about that with your content strategy, the brand story you're building, the answers that you're drawing in for your personas. (32:42) How do you make sure that they're published in multiple places so it's looking for that confirmation in order to deliver the answer that's asked? Um, and I think that's where we're at now, but it's still going to radically change. You're new at I mean, relatively in the history of G2, you've been there for a a year and a half. (33:00) There's probably a lot of like existential or company strategy questions that that are happening because of, you know, G2 and SEO. We were built on SEO. We've been we've been at this for a year and a half. Like, we started seeing the changes a year and a half ago to our traffic and what content was influencing. And you know, we've been in the depths of this for a while. (33:19) The good news is, yeah, the traffic's rebounded. We understand it. We can show influence now. So, we just launched um a partnership with Profound that will show our customers how their categories are showing up. Like our partnership is a category level. If you want more depth, you can go to one of the over 100 products that are now listed on the AEOG on the AEO category on G2. (33:43) In April it was seven. Now there's over a hundred. How do you stand out? Because it's a gold rush. It's like everybody follow the money. Follow the money. Nobody knows where how the search is search is changing like and all you need is like a you know prompt engineer and a curs license a cursor and you can build a product. (34:01) That's why I like what you said about quality. Like we've got we so much of the narrative is like just you can hack it together. You can hack anything together. You can vibe code anything. And it's like, man, I've made a lot of bad things with AI. Like, we can quality quality does matter, you know? Like, does this change? Are you going through like a a company strategy shift and you're having to like reinvent what G2 is in this world of AI? What does it what does it mean at like a a leadership level? We did rewrite our vision last um (34:33) December, January to be the most trusted data source in the age of AI. and we made a conscious decision to put G2 everywhere. And so, you know, to give it to the LLMs, not gate it um like some of the other analyst firms have done. They, you know, they they've suffered for that. (34:52) Uh you can see Gartner stock price, right? And so, we made that conscious decision. It's like, no, we want to syndicate. We want to put G2 everywhere where the buyers are and build our brand through still being that trusted source. And that's kind of that's what we were doing last year. And then we've tried to make it easier now for companies to generate reviews. (35:08) And so we've made I mean because we had the same like survey form for a long time. Um and now it's like AI voice generated review. So you can be interviewed. You can take transcripts and have it curate a review from the transcript. So you just send it if you're getting off a a gong call or a Zoom call. (35:27) We've embedded it into customer uh exper or customer marketing platforms, you know. So, we're just trying to like figure out all the ways to make review capture a lot easier um for our customers and kind of modernize it as well. And then I would say the other thing that we did was if you haven't been on G2.com for a while um go and then and interact with G2.ai. (35:48) You'd be amazed what you could learn uh because we trained it on all our data. And uh so you could go to the LLM and ask, but you're going to have a more credible source by asking G2.AI. So our goal is that you'll always get better answers from it than from the LLM. Um but you know, the LMS are good. (36:07) That's interesting that the strategic decision to like essentially make that information public because like hey we have such a stronghold on SEO and we we have so much good data why hide all these Gartner analyst reports behind the payw wall right it's also the the the DNA of our founders want to support every startup right they're founders through and through and so we want to have high quality offerings from you know every single startup founder to build their brand on G2 too. (36:37) So, we have like starter packages all the way into like building out like how do we help large companies like Adobe that have like 500 products, you know, how do we showcase them and and so I think, you know, we're also making innovations there and and like the first goal is like building your brand on G2 and how do we make that that experience great for our paid customers because that is the second place they're going, right? they're going from there to our site. And so the more that they can craft the experience on G2, you know, the better educated the (37:11) customer will be, the more showcasing they can do. And so that's our campaign right now is building your brand in the LLM era. Like how do you build your brand and how do you use G2 to do that, which we do help customers do. Like this is this is how you start. (37:28) There's an interesting play on trust there, which is like even though I get answers from an LLM, like I think if I knew who the answers were from, if it was like, "Oh, this is Mary, a marketing manager at a similar company to mine. She says this thing is legit." Like that that holds more weight in in some ways, you know? It's like when I when I look for something on Reddit and I'm trying to be like, you know, my left ankle is bothering me from running. (37:52) What's the issue? and like I find I want to know that that person is like similar body type or height to me or there there's something there on like the and you can ask for the citation, right? Like you can either click on the citation or you can say list your sources, list your top three sources and then they they click into that. People really leave voice reviews. (38:10) They're longer and they take less time, too. Hey. Yeah. This is Mark from Boston. I just want to tell you I really love Gain Sight. Like they talking into their phone like Yeah. Or you could test it now if you want to go leave a review for your favorite platform. (38:26) What do you think about your role in running a team changes? You know, everyone's quick to say, "Oh, in the age of AI, you just need a a CMO and a chatbt subscription." But like that's probably not true, at least not yet. Um, no. Are you rethinking org structure team, how you do things, who you hire? So, it's a good question. (38:45) That's going to be one of our deep dive topics at our executive advisory board because I think that is kind of where we're at as CMOs. It's like first of all like ah what do you do with it? How do you get trained? What are the use cases? And now we're at the okay how do I how do I design this into my processes? How am I thinking about the technology? I think it's you know there's three levels in my mind when you think about AI. There's AI that's built into the platforms that you already own. There's AI builder. (39:10) uh that's a category where it sits across the top and you can orchestrate across the systems with a builder or there's the the LLMs themselves and so it's like we just wanted people to embrace it at first now we kind of need to say okay what is the path we're going to take here like what is the right architecture for us what are the systems we trust where do we want that you know basically agentic orchestration to happen um so I think you have to think about that across the go to market team and so that's the process layer and then you go That's technology process. Then you go people. And I do think h you and Katie (39:43) Shravasian uh had a a podcast recently uh that I that I saw and she's at you.com or something like that now. She was at like Wait, you listen do you listen to my podcast? I do. I have FOMO from your events, Dave. And I listen to your podcast. Attribution, baby. Okay, there you go. And so you and Katie were having this conversation. It really got me inspired. (40:09) You played it right before HubSpot and I think I mentioned it to like every other person I talked to because I was like, "Oh my gosh, how do we think about reimagining marketing and our org design?" What's interesting about her though is like she has the she's the benefit of like she's starting at a newish company. It's like I think it's going to be harder for the G2s to it's harder to like unwind than it is to like Yeah, of course, if you're starting from the beginning, it's I So, and I'm saying that because I think it's just so easy to like online people dunk on like fire (40:35) the whole team. It's like that's just not realistic in most companies like and you see too the the org charts that are like your standard org charts and then you've added all these agents which are like task level agents and I understand why people have done it but I'm not sure that's the right way and so based on that conversation it got me thinking and so I'm like okay this is really cool let's think about outcomes and I've done pod-based workg groupoups before like the The reason I was doing it back then was like trying to foster crossf functional collaboration because (41:09) everybody was like working in like the brand team was working and the demand gen and they weren't talking to each other and they were telling us that and it's like all right well let's create projects because that then crossunctional teams can work on and that will facilitate collaboration. Now I think it's different. Our product team has already done this. (41:26) They've moved to like outcomebased dev schedules. So they're picking a problem to be solved and orchestrating the team around that and like going after the problem. So if we looked at it in that way then what would we do? And so I I my starting thoughts here are we would have a team focused on building the brand relationship like what does it mean to be engaged? How do you influence people where they are which includes LLM expertise? What are those industry influencers we want to have relationships with? How do we educate them? And so the outcomes in this team (41:58) would be influence and signals that connect to agentic workflows, right? And so then I'm thinking like in that next layer, it's like what are the people skills on this team? What are the agent skills? And like let's get more specific on the KPIs of the outcomes. So that would be team one. (42:18) The team two would be on relationship building. I love this one because like I hate I absolutely hate that we have teams that are focused on, you know, top of funnel to closed one and then a separate team that's focused on closed one post sale. It's one customer. (42:38) Let's just have people that are responsible for relationship building that are persona based, right? And so it could be an account building team that's like a mix of deep research AI agentics and personalized communication which is AI and people in coordination with the account owner which is the rep right and they could focus on new customers but also existing customers. (42:57) This is where community lives and so you know their outcomes is like meaningful connections, account engagement and like the facilitation of those those topics where a KPI could be uh referral right so that's the second team like engagement referral the last team I'm looking at is um product delight is kind of the working thought for this one and their their job is to connect customer challenges to product capabilities So they're responsible for launches, building out education flows, right? Like an AI co-pilot for every customer kind of concept. They create these viral hooks that drive everyday value for users. So they're in with the (43:37) product teams, but also surrounding them and their outcome is product usage and shared value. really understanding what customers value because a lot of times too if the product teams are going to be broken up, you still have to have someone that's looking at the overall customer experience and what they value, not the features or capabilities and being honest about that and how to track it. (44:04) So like PLG people would be super experienced in this area, but why not have that same concept for nonPLG customers? Like that's where I've stopped so far. Like I'm literally reading my notes on my uh you know that I've taken on the concept, but it's like I'm teasing it out because I think it's really interesting and then it's like you know we have different skills but you don't have a product marketing function. (44:20) Like we break it apart and get to reassemble and that's the beauty of like being able to restart. We're given the invitation to restart. The problem is if someone says that if someone hears you say there's no product marketing function, they instantly jump to at least online boo. You're wrong. Like you still what are you talking about? You still need product marketing. It's like, hey, you're you're doing the job functions. (44:38) I I actually really I wrote this down because I really I really like it. Something that I've always hated about work is job titles. They matter because people need them. Like look, I needed it as a status. Like trying to grow my career. Like it mattered when I got promoted to from director to VP for the first time. Like that title mattered. (44:57) But so many things inside of the company are there's just so much nuance and they're just so blurry. And so like what is social media manager? What does that mean? customer life cycle marketing manager like but I love this idea of like let's let's steal from product and it's like products always had this concept of like jobs to be done I'm thinking can we what are the jobs to be done well we want people to um in my business I want people to subscribe to our newsletter so there should be someone who owns that that's the outcome so they're they're writing the newsletter they're promoting the newsletter they're curating like the (45:30) topics they're they're seeking feedback from people who read it like that is what they own which is you know your primary method of of communication and I think then people feel ownership of the outcome and and I think of it as um you know you always talk about the customer journey and and and if we're putting customer front and center and in this world we put customer front and center we put product front and center um and we put brand front and center so there's still like these ideas that are the the the basics and foundations of marketing (46:00) but you're you're asking them to rethink how we work designing in where the agentic capabilities fit and what are the skills that the people need to have and I want it to be a blend. I love this idea of like having a growth person and a a product marketer and with you know like like let's see what that pod looks like and what they can accomplish. (46:25) It'll be hard but you don't get great value if you don't take great risk and we're all going to do it anyway. It's much easier to continue to do the same thing than it is to like try to rip it up and and try something new. You mentioned jokingly before um starting your career in the pre- internet days and look amazing. You're doing great, so don't don't worry about it. But are there any comparisons? Like I was young. (46:50) I was I'm old enough to like have had the internet and not but I was in like seventh and eighth and nth grade. So I wasn't thinking about it in a work capacity. I was like, "Oh, I can use this internet messaging tool to talk to the ninth grade girls in my high school." Like, it wasn't a serious business business thing. (47:07) Can you think back to that point in your career? In my mind, I want to say this has got to be what it was like. People saying like the internet is overrated. It's never going to replace it. Are there comparisons to what we're saying with AI now to to that era of work? I think it's similar in that it was new things and we had to figure out how to embrace it and use it to our advantage. (47:26) And so I remember like it was 1998, Brunell Chowen was my my boss. He was kind of a cool dude. He was at Netscape in the early days too. And my friend Steph had the website. We were just implementing Onyx, the CRM system. And you know, I was I was running events. Um and and my friend Nikki, she was my wedding. These Steph and Nikki are still two of my best friends. (47:50) Um Nikki was running the STR team, but we called it telemarketing. Sorry to go on a complete tangent, but what you just said, this is my this is like such an important thing. I'm trying to think about like my kids and work and jobs and whatever. It's like you make so many so I feel the same way. So many of my closest relationships are people that I worked with like post college and I hope we don't lose that. (48:11) It's like yes, you go to there to learn, but like you it's just you're in your 20s. It's a certain point of life and like that's cool to hear that you're still connected cuz I think that's a like a back to the people stuff. That's like an irreplaceable part of this. Yeah. I mean, and and we were in the trenches figuring it out because there was no playbook. And so that's what I worry about. (48:30) I was I was doing a a session yesterday uh that Pepper was running on GEO and was like, there's a reason I didn't give a playbook at the AI and action road show and that it was blank because I don't think we have one yet and I don't think we're going to have one for a little bit, right? Because innovation is too it's too fast. (48:47) And so I I don't think we should be building playbooks, right? I think we should be testing, iterating, like and and just be super agile and ex and and and set our teams up for that. Um, and you know, maybe before when it was a 702010 model, like now we're going to do like you know, 60 2020 like where experimentation lives so people aren't afraid to um, you know, to take risks and and try new things and not get wedded to them um because it's going to continue to change so fast. (49:18) And that's the difference, Dave. that that is the difference is the speed at of this of this change where before like you know it took three years like to you know I don't know how to build a CRM oh you want to connect it to the web it's like you know like someone has to build the the wiring to make that happen and like what there was some bus like enterprise services bus or something like you know like super techy yeah the thing you shared at the beginning about the data from uh April to August is is eye opening Sydney this was great I'm reminded of why I enjoyed our our conversation in (49:49) the past. Um, if you enjoyed this episode, uh, go find Sydney, Sydney Sloan on LinkedIn. I don't care about any ratings, reviews, whatever. I want you to go to her LinkedIn, send her a message like, "Hey, man. I Well, hey lady, I heard you on I heard you on Dave's podcast, and you were awesome. I got a bunch of notes. (50:08) I love your events, playbook, thoughts on AI, and um, I'll probably see it at an event or or talk to you in the future. It's always great. You're a great energy. Great to be around. I appreciate you giving us some time and coming on the podcast. Thank you to uh Palmer for for for floating this idea of having you on and and and coming out and uh I'm sure I'll see you soon. Awesome. Thanks, Dave. (50:27) [Music]