ABM Leaders’ Webinar: AI-Powered ABM/ABX Marketing: optimization and cautions

all right

hello everybody this is Bob Samuels from Tech connector uh we’re we’re a B2B Legion solution provider um also co-host of today’s show it’s a great opportunity to introduce you to some of my favorite marketers as we talk about ABM ABX and the effect of AI which is a super hot topic these days so thank you for joining us um if everybody can and then I’ll give a fun fact fun fact about me is that I’m a fairly recent uh grandfather and an avid pickleball player so those are my those are my big loves these days besides ABX um so if we go around the room Jeff if you can do a little introduction and fun fact sure hi everybody I’m Jeff pedowitz I’m president and CEO of the pedowitz group it’s a fun fact my kids and my wife learned that I actually can cook so I was kind of holding out on everybody all these years but uh yeah I’ve really been able to pick it up over the last couple months made a lot of good recipes so everyone’s excited thank you Leslie all right everyone I’m Leslie Laura I’m the global vice president of growth marketing at Avanti we’re an I.T software company and I have to apologize in advance for my voice it’s only just returned to me I had I lost my voice for six whole days like nothing so I’m not sure if that’s a fun fact but here’s one I cannot play Pickleball but I would love to learn how and I actually write recipes as a hobby all right we can collaborate thank you Leslie John hey folks John Miller currently the CMO at demand base I’ve been a marketing uh entrepreneur I you know joined demand base when we merged engagio the company I was the co-founder and CEO at with demand base before that I was a co-founder at Marketo so a long time in sort of the martech space uh my fun fact is I have become sort of known for telling dad jokes uh in my presentations so I’ll try off a new one for everybody today which is okay so I had a sweater and had too much static electricity on it so I decided to return it the good thing is they gave me a new one free of charge yes all right I love science jokes thank you the intersection of dad jokes with some science is my favorite oh good that’s that’s tough to be um uh hey everyone I’m uh Brian law I’m a CMO at uh at Zoom info uh Bob good to know you’re an expert so we actually have a team outing and in a week that’s going to be pickleball and I’m hoping not to embarrass myself uh uh in terms of fun fact uh maybe something that’s just top of mind is uh we launched our first uh brand campaign uh this week at Zoom info so uh something I’m really excited about having done yay thank you Brian all right I’m gonna do start off with a quick poll just to see where people are at as far as that acclimation to this whole AI thing and introducing that to your marketing efforts so if you can um be prepared you’ll go and start answering these questions and then um I’ll uh hand over to uh Jeff and go ahead and and start the panel questions awesome thanks Bob so today uh we were really fascinated about coming up with this topic ABX has been very popular for the last few years and of course all three of these analysts had a lot to do with that uh but for many marketers ABX can still be Elusive and now as AI takes the World by storm we thought it would be really good to explore that intersection of how can AI be used by marketers to improve their ABX initiatives so for today we’re going to ask our panelists a set of questions in four major areas specifically related to Ai and abs the first is going to be around targeting messaging the second is going to be around segmentation the third will be around analytics and performance and then the fourth one will be around data management and then in between each section Bob referral the bolt just to kind of see where where the audience is so let’s get started with targeting and messaging and uh we’ll start off with you John how can AI improve targeting and messaging for an actual ABS strategy yeah so when we say I mean let’s start by defining I mean so like tart when I hear targeting you know what I really mean is and I think our definition that we had here is you know which accounts should we pursue and which members of the buying committee should we pursue so you know what for me I always like to fall on what I call the fire acronym for targeting fire you know you know F stands for fit I for intent R for relationship and E for engagement you know and I think AI plays a really big role especially in those first two you know like just hey it’s just does this look like my best accounts That’s a classic look like model and the I intent kind of who who’s showing uh you know intent I mean all the intent providers use AI to kind of get the data um now you did also ask about kind of not just the counts but which you know members of the buying committee we should focus on this is an area I’ve been really interested in recently because we all know you know that the buying group is really the sort of the core object even more than the lead or the account but it’s been really hard for sales people or marketers to identify the right members of the buying group and I think that AI is the key thing that can unlock can unlock that right if we can actually look at our prior opportunities and see who are the people and the members that have been associated with that opportunity we can learn what personas tend to be associated with that kind of opportunity and then AI can help us find more people that look like those at new accounts good Leslie what are your thoughts yeah so I agree with everything that John just said and I would take it a step further and say that um I also think about AI in the context of being able to really really activate in in against those Target accounts because not all of your target accounts are going to be in market for what what you have to sell at any given time so using tools that help you understand okay who’s showing signs that they’re actually in Market to buy the thing that I’m selling right now and being able to precisely um funnel your marketing activities particularly your paid media dollars against those will really help you with you know cost management but also create great customer experiences and I’m hoping to see more um more capabilities of AI and and human use of AI and marketing that allow you to us to get even more precise not just with the targeting side of things but also the message that you deliver in a dynamic and bespoke way okay Brian sure yeah so I mean two things I might start with so um I mean at the end of the day AI whether it’s sort of more predictive or generative AI I I think it allows you to do three things one it sort of lets you connect the dots because it can just process like massive amounts of information that we as individuals can’t do and so that’s really important it lets you automate sort of uh predictive tasks so just sort of get busy work out of the way and then it potentially allows you to personalize at scale uh so that’s sort of like the framing that I would use and then I would say foundationally in order for AI to work you have to feel really really comfortable with the data that you’re using because uh if you’re if you if you do those things on bad data you’re just going to be doing a lot more ineffectively and so relative to the targeting piece uh I think in many ways uh what you just heard from Leslie and John but sort of the addition that I would make is how do you leverage all that data real time in a way that you wouldn’t have been able to do before so that you understand who to go after what they care about and what’s the best way to connect with them and that’s sort of like the targeting piece and then I think then you add on that within what do you do and how do you execute against it

so I just want to test it out a lot yeah I was just gonna say um I I totally agree that the whole the whole value and the ability to use AI in a valuable way is predicated on good data and and the other thing that I think we all have learned but maybe some of us need to mature our business processes around is the fact that what constitutes good data is constantly changing right buying a database once isn’t going to do you any good because you know that’s that data is gonna it’s gonna change people change jobs people change responsibilities what a company is focused on changes and so you need to also evolve your thinking around what is good data to be what is good real-time data um just if we could just stay on data for one second longer there’s one idea that I’m also really excited about is the opportunity for AI to help us get better data right we always talk about good AI needs good data but good data can come from good AI also in particular I think AI creates the opportunity for us to unlock data out of all the unstructured information you know that’s out there whether that’s you know emails or tweets and you know all that kind of stuff so as we start thinking about how do we build models you know to sort of predict the right targeting you know a good example that is technographic data you know where we start to learn what what technologies companies have installed you know the sort of classic way to do that is you just read JavaScript on the website to see what tags are there but that doesn’t tell you most Technologies right it doesn’t tell you who’s on AWS versus Google Cloud it doesn’t tell you who uses snowflake versus mongodb and things like that but we can start to mine that information by reading job boards and resumes and Linkedin databases so that’s a perfect example of how AI lets us create new data which is incredibly valuable for targeting you know by mining all this unstructured information maybe just two additions are a really good point so um the potential of AI to do that I think is really really great there I think as we all sort of have seen so different examples where people were testing the different sort of uh chat Bots that were out there or chat gbt or whatnot like current hallucinations of data so whether you are presented outcomes that appear to be correct uh but but are not is something I think we still need to solve for but then to John’s Point uh I I agree I think that’s really really exciting one of the things I think I I as a marketer I’m most interested about now is you know you always think of like your scaled digital efforts are sort of great they reach a lot of people but they’re not getting you sort of the level of information and insight that you would want and so many times I think a lot of us are now going to like smaller events we’re getting a lot of goodness from that but sort of The Next Step Beyond that is sort of like one-on-one Communications and I think as marketers we don’t always leverage sort of the sales person talking to our our customer the CSM talking to the customer and so those those conversational recordings that you can extract and leverage AI AI to pull the key themes and then use it to inform your sales and marketing I think is really exciting and powerful and exactly what John was just talking about so from our practical standpoint we have powerful tools out there whether it’s bambora or success and demand base and others that that can track all this Behavior data but when we look at a CRM model it’s still primarily a single content that gets associated with with an opportunity or gets added to a campaign and and so when you’re trying to establish attribution in these very Advanced and Rich you know John you had talked about identifying the buying Center together how will AI help us get better models better architecture within our systems because I know from a lot of us marketers we’re constantly chasing a holy grail and trying to get multiple people attached to to the opportunity so that we can do a better analysis how can AI help with that well there’s already kind of simple ways that people are doing simply by mining the emails back and forth between a company and the meeting invites you know and just like you know if if people are copying either co-workers on emails about the purchase you can start to assume they’re probably part of the buying committee if they’re being invited to meetings and demos they’re probably part of the buying committee um I don’t know if that needs AI though to be honest right I mean that’s mostly what you need is just access to that data stream um you know it’s more than taking that data and learning the personas and finding new people that match those personas where the AI comes in I think but people you should be doing that you should be mining the emails and and the meetings to sort of see the full buying committee not just the one contact that happens to get out attach the opportunity and tools like people AI do do that right they they you can argue whether how much AI is involved in those types of engines but certainly there are tools um that that are doing that trying to make those correlations and adding people onto the opportunity um and and we’re using that today I think with pretty good success actually in most most places there are some data privacy considerations in parts of the world worth noting but that’s a good point about the data privacy yeah I mean certainly sort of what’s Loosely being termed is AI those capabilities have been around for quite some time I think what sort of enhances the ability to process information at a greater scale and then taking a lot of strong reference sort of that unstructured data and doing some of the same processing that we weren’t doing as Pat in in the past but like NLP and natural language processing is it’s not like a new thing um I think it’s just getting a lot of additional attention and then I think John something that you mentioned that I agree with is in order to do the attribution it’s about getting the right data to then be pulled into your models and then leveraging those models to um to action against them but it but sort of the actual like sort of the algorithm or the math behind it hasn’t meaningfully changed it’s just sort of what’s the data that you’re pulling in okay um and then why I ask the next question uh if Bob you want to throw up the poll let me just share I’m going to share the results of the initial poll which was where are people at as far as uh getting acclimated to this whole AI thing and and people are partially there um for folks I don’t know if if you guys can chime in who you are you’re well equipped that’s kind of great um and then and then somewhat some are somewhat limited but it’s mostly people are just partially there not not quite there um which poll do you want to try now it’s uh targeting messaging one here’s here’s the sharing targeting messaging okay okay uh let me see something I think that’s still the same one yeah oh yeah targeting and messaging okay can I just make a reaction to sort of the results on yeah one of the things that’s sort of interesting to me in a few of us we’re chatting about this and prep for the call um sort of back in sort of 2015 2016 uh sort of it seemed like the the solution to ABM was like let’s throw a ton of Technology at it uh and it seems like in many ways people are now saying like let’s throw a ton of AI at the problem and I think foundationally you still need to have a sense of like how do you want to think about your accounts how do you make sure you have good data how do you make sure you have good processes in place and then you should layer on top of that AI to then make sure that you do it more effectively um but sort of AI and of itself I don’t think is necessarily the the solution is so it’s a way to sort of maximize and get more value out of the things that you’re trying to trying to do yeah so why we have everyone filling out this Poll for targeting messaging and then we’ll move on to the next section I you know this phrase personalization at scale has been around for a long time now um now for many marketers I could just mean to your first name and insert a couple pieces of content fragments but within the realm of ABX how does AI truly help us achieve these bespoke one-off personalized campaigns for for Enterprise targets so that’s when you want to start yeah I have strong opinions on this one actually because um I I actually hate the whole like dear first name let me tell you about what’s going on at your company you know type of thing that’s not that’s not personalization and we actually do very very very little of that type of thing I actually think of better personalized experiences more about reaching people in the places they’re going to educate themselves with a message that’s very relevant to what they’re looking for in the moment they’re looking for it so personalization is more about the relevance of the experience that you create as opposed to being able to say hey I know your name because I’m creepy um so so I the the the marketing Mecca and my world my view is to be able to create an experience that feels incredibly specific and relevant and it’s you know and unique to that person without it feeling personal like being personalized is not the same as being personal right uh and and doing achieving that at scale which is very much the type of thing that a good sales team or a good bdr team would be doing they’d be doing manual research they’d reach out to somebody in a moment because they were doing a thing and present them with an interesting piece of information that they know to be relevant or suspect is relevant um and we just need to to take that same type of experience and scale it what’s that Brian um yeah I I like the idea of uh sort of being relevant um so sort of a just an example because it was something we did recently is we sort of pulled down the earning statements from you know all the companies that are out there and sort of what were the key themes that came out of them and then we use that to sort of inform an Outreach play um relevant because you now know what are the key priorities for the company you can then sort of speak to them in science or you’re offering um and it’s not just about um as long as they said sort of the like the words being personal it’s it’s you can see based on sort of all the data that’s out there these channels tend to work best for these individual people they’re more likely to respond to this versus that here are some real-time information you should reach out now and so I think those are really key and important things and then tied back to what I had mentioned um earlier AI again it helps with the repetitive tasks and it helps with actually doing some of that personalization um but I do think you need to have the foundation of like what are the key messages you want to get out into Market that are sort of aligned with the general problems that are out there and sort of what we’re Your solution can be valuable and then how do you sort of tweak and customize uh based on that leveraging Ai and one of the things for ABM that I think is nice is I think a traditional ABM was like you know sales had their their static list marketing had their static list and then you went and did sort of these very bespoke one-off things I think sort of the future of ABM or ABX is much more what are sort of the key criteria that we care about from an account in sort of an individual point of view and then how are you allowing sort of the data and your sort of systems and tools to take Ai and allow you to then reach out at scale and adjust and automate um based on sort of the the guidelines that you provide and John

um yeah so

yeah I’ll start by saying I would say I’m generally bearish on using AI to create personalized content um I mean I’ve seen every one of like the major sales engagement tools you know release like hey you can now have ai write the emails for you uh you know I just got access to the built-in Google uh AI in my Gmail yesterday you know and I like played with it to see like it can write emails and they’re kind of garbage you know so far and and I don’t know if that technology is going to get that much better you know there’s a lack of voice you know that’s just inherent I think in that in that kind of content so I think that that is overhyped is the let’s create all these personalized emails at scale uh side of things and I’m much more in um Leslie’s Camp here you know where you know the single most important thing you want to personalize on is where is that person in their Journey you know like if somebody is not looking to purchase right now and you start hitting them with all these you know buy buy messages that’s like proposing on the first date whereas if somebody is actually in market and looking to buy there’s definitely things that they want to know and if you’re all like hey check out my best practices ebook that’s also doesn’t you know resonate so just you know not so much on the mass creation of content and definitely on the be more personal personalized it’s not personal good uh Bob why don’t we see the results then from the poll all right the answer is um so targeted messaging uh how effective is your AI currently being utilized uh 26 not at all slightly effective uh 39 moderate 24. oh um very effective four people that’s good and one is extremely effective and and again if someone out there is if that’s you if you if you want to chime in on your chat or raise your hand or something like that I’d be interesting to hear what you’re doing but uh but most people are are slightly effective

yeah very interesting any comments from the panelists on these results any surprises maybe just in addition um the leader of Wharton’s Neuroscience uh initiative he uh with someone else published some research that found uh but at the end of the day Brands you’re actually wanting to create like a collective perception of your brand uh and so there’s actually some like potential drawbacks if you’re too specific in how you sort of targeted message to individual companies and there’s actually some value and actually that consistency of perception that it’s sort of reinforcing across so you can tweak within that and that’s why I think sort of your overarching messages are um uh are important but uh yeah I I thought it was an interesting maybe Counterpoint to some of the over focus on personalization I was surprised I can’t get back on the uh survey the the poll response about the level of sophistication around targeting you know I expected this audience people who would join this webinar to be maybe more average more sophisticated on average um but it really actually does connect I mean we ran a survey recently um about this the state of go to market and one of the things we found is only 37 percent of our responders said they were even using intent data today so you know I tend to think you know maybe as a vendor I’m living this world where I I think this stuff is just like well of course everybody is using this data and this AI to sort of Target their accounts and I I think like what the poll just showed is actually what is actually out there which is that people are not as sophisticated as we maybe sometimes assume Leslie yeah well first I’ll address that which is of course like everybody’s gonna be at different stages of maturity when it comes to the adoption of all of these things due to many factors you know the size of their business the state of maturity than of their own go to market motions the the level of autonomy their marketing teams have to try these things that might be new um and and oftentimes uh how uh the marketing and sales teams interact with one another and how tightly integrated they are can impact all of these things um so the results do not surprise me at all with respect to using AI to generate content um while I am hopeful that we will someday get to a place where we can generate bespoke-ish content kind of in real time in response to what I call the Precision demand marketing model which is kind of like reach the right people in the right watering holes at the right stage of their Journey being able to also address that with custom messaging might have a might have a future maybe I do I also agree with Brian that there’s also value in consistency um and messaging so you don’t want to go too far afield there however where I do think there are immediate current day opportunities to leverage generative AI with respect to content is just in your ability to scale the production of content in its many many forms um so when you think about all the content that needs to come out of a marketing organization there’s long form content there’s uh you know there’s what you might call Anchor content there’s blogs there’s content to support email marketing and social media and you know prospecting emails all of these things are things that take a lot of time if you are not just creating it really well and thoughtfully but constantly curating it and optimizing it over time and so I I hope to see and we’re we’re starting to Pilot this now with Avanti is that all of these use cases um that I just described can be ways to really scale the creation of of actual copywriting um there needs to be human intervention and then I would in an Ideal World we’d see that go a step further and not only does that engine initiate the content the first time but it also gets integrated into your content activation channels like you know if you’re sending emails through Alcoa or Marketo it’s seeing how people are responding to those and it’s using that to learn how to do it better the next time I I guess maybe a test uh question um relative to the to the comments within my team we write emails on behalf of sales we have sales right a lot of emails as an example um those are not always well written in their written by individuals uh many times sort of our CEO will see something he’s like how did we get let that get out the door uh and so it’s it’s it’s not always a perfect state that you’re comparing AI to I think there’s a practical reality that not everyone actually generates wonderful content um but I assuming we we definitely do um so Henry our CEO he has a very strong voice like a a very particular voice and we have tried to train our model on Henry’s voice and try to draft content and then we tweak uh from it and and we’ve actually found it to be pretty effective at capturing his voice um and so I think there are ways to do that or from like an ad perspective getting you started on hey this is sort of the you know the messaging pillars we’re trying to work within can you help us create some ads obviously you don’t want to just necessarily put them directly into the wild yet but I I do think to what Leslie said it can give you a really good starting spot to build from understanding on that on the content generation topic I’ll share the advice that I’ve shared with my team ad nauseum right which is you know GPT the T stands for Transformer it’s a Transformer and not a creator which means it works really well when you give it something and you say transform this make it shorter make it punchier turn this into a LinkedIn post turn this into a social like you’re transforming it’s really good at that right when you say write me a blog post about X you don’t give it anything to work with you’re going to get crap because that’s not transforming that’s creating so I think it’s the more we keep that in mind the better results we’re going to get in the content creation side

um Bob maybe we could throw up the poll for segmentation as we bridge to that

all right so while our audience is answering that and by the way uh but for those of you who are there asking yes this webinar is be recorded and will be available for replay uh within within the next week or two so as we think about segmentation um how do you think AI can help us in automating the process of identifying high value accounts are there things that we don’t get that are available today with software that AI might help us find some additional information I mean John you had mentioned that in your own survey for example people aren’t even using intent data so how can AI help with that all right well I think you sort of two questions there one was I think segmentation and the other one is sort of finding high value accounts um but they are connected for the exact reason that Leslie just shared which is perhaps the most important attribute to segment on is Journey stage right where where where is the count in that journey and AI can be very effective to predict where an account is in its Journey stage because you know we can actually start to learn the pattern of behaviors that accounts tend to exhibit when they move from one stage to the next not to over generalize but probably the single biggest behavioral pattern that the AI tends to find is a sudden increase in the number of people from the account of the buying committee that start doing something you know whether it’s visiting your website even if they’re Anonymous or reading articles about your industry out on the open web which is what is known as intent data but the the thing that tends to signify this account is moving from the awareness stage into the consideration stage is when you see a spike in the number of people you know doing that AI is really good at learning that and AI is really good at finding that you know kind of at accounts and then you can use that to segment your your messaging so that you’ll be more relevant lots more we could say on it but I definitely wouldn’t you know but that’s named Brian and Brian I agree with uh with with John and uh I mean many ways it’s just sort of taking the conversation we had on targeting a step further which is sort of adding in a little bit maybe more information or looking at a little bit differently to figure out sort of like now that you’re knowing who you want to go after like what type of Outreach do you want to do and we talked about sort of the content piece I think it’s kind of in between the two conversations we just had is how do you take who you want to go who you’re thinking about as your entire pie and then like the the what you want to do on the output and it’s then informing sort of what collection of Outreach do you want to do um so it’s I think similar things just uh looked at a little bit differently and Leslie before you answer everyone that is putting your questions in the general chat thank you so much if you wouldn’t mind if you could put it in the Q a area it will allow us to track it a little bit easier so thank you for that but it’s a great question so we’re gonna try and get to them soon uh go ahead Leslie yeah I mean um let’s just kind of throwback to what we talked about a little bit earlier which is exactly what these guys have said now in our world in Avanti’s world and I assume this will be true for some people um it’s not just about identifying the new new companies we might want to pursue at any given time in fact the majority of our focus is actually on our install base we have about 40 000 customers and about 66 products in our portfolio so we have a huge opportunity to cross out within our install base but it’s really overwhelming for our sales people to figure out how do we target what do what do we cross sell to Any Given account or set of people with an account at any given time and so using um machine learning tools that help you learn patterns of behaviors that are indicative of in-market signals for one solution versus a different solution even within a install base is really really valuable for us right now Bob can we see the results from the segmentation poll

pretty split between moderate and not involved at all yeah even even less uh sophisticated than on the targeting yeah probably no surprises there I would imagine

tools around long enough that they would have become more deeply integrated into the account based prioritization and segmentation motions well thank you Brian Express I mean I think it it goes to the earlier conversation and I think and we we talked to a lot of our customers about this as well uh um relative to really leveraging data across channels in an automated fashion uh most are sort of still in The Fairly nascent stage of trying to figure out how to get all your data in the same place and then start to use it across channels uh and so yeah not not particularly surprising I think a reflection of where some of us from a sort of a software and services point of view are a little bit ahead in in painting the North Star which is great for some customers but a lot of people are just trying to get the basics up and they need help on sort of the initial steps all right so why don’t we move on to analytics and Bob if you could put up the survey for that

um so while we’re putting that bill up we’ve talked a lot already where AI can help analyze customer Journey stage and and where people are at but what are some of the other ways that AI can help in understanding and analyzing either account or customer behavior that will be more helpful for marketing and sales organizations um that’s what you want to start

sure so um I kind of think of this of an analysis analytics and a few different ways there’s a few different ways to slice and dice this there’s Predictive Analytics which is more of the kind of machine learning stuff that I just talked about and we’re using that to kind of feed our real-time Precision demand engine um and you can do that to run static analysis too like look at okay within within the accounts we’re looking at how what’s their profile fits and you know if you’ve got look-alike analysis near in your Predictive Analytics that’s all useful um then there’s kind of another flavor of analytics which is comparing what your what your business model is saying like you know what your CRM tells you is going to happen versus what uh what a machine learning model thinks is actually likely to occur those would be things like you know forecast predictability and stuff like that with tools like Clary and whatnot and um and we’re kind of we’re we are doing that ladder bit of it but it’s kind of running as a shadow too it’s it’s not currently driving the the decisions that we’re making around our business but but we’re looking at how those compare so what actually plays out if that makes sense yeah right yeah um so building on what Leslie said so certainly uh What I Hear in in talking to customers is uh most uh companies uh uh or as very few companies have sales and marketing across their channels working together in concert with their sort of customer success motion and everyone is basing their activities on the same data sets and and working in concert uh and so there’s a lot of sort of division of like the data that people are using the actions that they’re taking um and so I think the opportunity for going after customers with AI is it’s high requiring you get all the right data in sort of a consistent spot but I think the opportunities are some of the things that that John and I were chatting about earlier was there’s a lot of unstructured data in the interactions you have uh and so you can start to try and take those and pull those and better inform your activities that you couldn’t do prior to AI just because it couldn’t take those large sort of data sets so like the things like listening to conversations and trying to automate on those uh and then less AI but more just analytics is how do you just take large amounts of data and be able to sort of identify Trends and I think there’s still a lot of opportunity there again being able to have all of your data in a similar system or connected systems so that you can understand all the touch points what’s working and what’s not John those are really good answers so I’m going to sort of go in a slightly different direction um and just like two areas where I’m thinking AI will sort of indirectly affect us and and kind of our analytics you know the first one is today you know if you’re an analyst and you want to run a report you have to go into the tool and use the graphical user interface to sort of structure the report and you know get the dashboard you want or or however and we’ve already seen companies you know in creating kind of chat style interfaces you know HubSpot had a great demo of a chat spot you know where they’re sort of you know like hey you know don’t use the CRM UI just type it in what do you want give me a report that shows you know codotainment by territory you know segmented by high intent versus low intent boom you get the report so I think that’s one thing where we’re going to see AI you know change is really just the user interface that we’re on the other one is just mostly a little you know out there but um I think we’re at the very earliest stages where buyers are using AIS to support their purchasing process we’ve seen examples of this in consumer already people going to chat GPT and say hey I’ve got two days in Naples Italy what should I do you know and it comes back with a list of recommendations that are not half bad right you know we’re not that far where people are going to also go to chat gbt and say hey what’s the best ABM software out there you know so what this does is as marketers we’re going to have to start thinking not just about search engine optimization where we learn how to hack the Google algorithm we’re going to actually have to start thinking about AI optimization right so that we can start to tune the AIS that are out there to rec you know give the information recommendations we want where possible and I think just like SEO launched a whole set of Analytics I think we’ll see kind of this kind of AI optimization creating a whole set of analytics as well right I could not agree more I can see J GPT is like the next G2 crowd

that’s a good quote uh that’s I’ll put it down too I think the audience says so if you can see it uh analytics it’s it’s again early on the uh on the curve uh never is never is the highest ranking at 44 rare 23 and sometimes at 26.

um yeah I think I probably piggybacks on some of the other things you saw earlier with people uh using the intent data to to track some of that stuff so a lot of opportunities for sure I think for people to just Embrace AI at some very basic pragmatic ways uh fourth and final topic for today is data management we did touch on it briefly with some of your early comments but would love to get the survey up for that

and the question I’d like to ask the panel while the audience is taking the survey is what would you say are some of the best practices for managing and utilizing data with AI and your ABX approach Ryan you want to start yeah I mean so something you can a couple of ways you can leverage it so um and this was brought up earlier you can use say I as part of sort of your data cleaning and deduping and actually sort of looking at your data at scale to sort of recognize an anomalies and either highlight those or potentially potentially fix them so I think that’s something that that you can uh do and then as part of that uh sort of collapsing data together I think one of the things that a lot of companies struggle with is they have such disparate data sources and and there’s just a lot of work to try and pull them together and figure out the rules for what does what what governs uh and then that’s another area for um for AI to play a role John

um yeah I mean I think you know we’ve already hit you know the sort of um you know augmenting your data you know from unstructured um I think another one which we sort of briefly touched on you know is the ability to find net new contacts uh that you should be adding to your buying groups um that’s a very manual process today that AI I think can streamline for you and lastly yeah I think it’s a lot of what we’ve already discussed frankly um you know there’s this balance between uh using AI to get your data to a state where it can fuel good AI all right um it’s kind of it’s kind of the cyclical effect um and and I think that the value in using a tool like AI as opposed to these kind of one-time really big manual lift efforts is um is that it is allowing you to keep up with what’s constantly changing um and and that’s probably the reason you would do it that way as opposed to investment in an AI based tool that allows you to do that as opposed to um as opposed to kind of like a one-time cleanup effort and then you have to do it again next year

uh Bob let’s see the results

a little bit more distributed

yeah getting more into the high impact than the other ones

I think this has been around longer to be honest right using using these types of tools to to clean up and de-duplicate your data is something that’s probably been you know it’s more tried and true it’s a space people are more comfortable with and it’s also one that is less often owned by marketing just in reality um it’s more often owned by like a revenue Ops or an I.T team a good point all right we’re gonna bridge to the audience questions now the first one is from Melanie Kennedy and this has been a subject of a lot of debated voice with the rise of LM is uh you know is AI gonna actually become sense you know replace human beings and marketing teams and how quickly might that happen so I don’t know Ryan I’m going to start

I I think my hope is it shifts away some of the mundane repetitive tasks so that we can focus on more value-added activities um I’m gonna sort of over time what technology has has done certainly in the long term is shifted where we focus our our efforts um so there could be sort of a near term where it makes some of the jobs that we have redundant uh but over time it allows that sort of capacity to shift into other areas and then accelerate productivity um so I think that’s my long-term perspective

uh two thoughts um the first one is just about Haze I a I going to take our jobs um Chris Penn has a line that I really really like which is that you know AI is not going to take your job but some other marketer who knows how to use AI better than you might take your job so make sure you’re learning to how to use this tool now that’s separate to me though from when you said AI becomes sentient I’m extremely bullish and excited about Ai and its opportunity to help us in marketing and I’m terrified about the prospect of AGI you know artificial generalized intelligence um and so you know there’s all these calls out there for we need to sort of regulate and monitor you know I think we we need to really be really worried about like fake fake content and you know you know there needs to be watermarking on AI created images so we can know what’s fake and not fake and we do need to really be thinking carefully about you know AGI but that’s getting way out of the realm of just marketing and into kind of you know existential human race stuff yeah you know we’re supposed to be change agents and marketing anyway so why not right uh go ahead well I’m not gonna I’m not gonna touch that at the AG I think but I will say that I totally agree that the question isn’t we’ll replace our job but how will it change our jobs and how does it change the skills and capabilities that we need to have I mean a really really good marketers are good at writing really good briefs right uh because you need to be able to brief the people who are helping you make that campaign possible be uh you know chat gbt prompt is the new campaign brief and you need to know how to do it and you need to know how to do it well and you need to know how to do it from multiple different tools because they’re the the way that they those tools are going to be able to receive and process information that you put into it will be different so there’s definitely a whole new set of skills that marketers need to learn and I think it’s going to be a combination of every marketer needs to have a certain amount of generalized skill and there’s going to be an emergence of specialized marketers kind of like how marketing automation emerge this specialty role I do think that there’s going to be marketer marketing Specialties that are focused on AI okay thank you next question is from Deidre Hudson what tools can specifically be used for segmenting the audience uh John well again we have to Define you know there’s lots of Dimensions you can think about segmenting your audience um you know to maybe overly simplify here you know I’ll just give a couple right so we’ve talked about Journey stage you know where are they in the journey I think that’s the most important one to segment on you can use demand based that you can use other ABM platforms for that um firmware Graphics is a great you know I mean just in by industry and by size those are you know good tools to segment on so there’s lots of vendors where you can buy your fromographic data we talked earlier about technographic data what what technologies they have install base you know or do they have installed right you know that’s going to be another segmentation right when we’re marketing we’re going to Market to somebody who uses Salesforce differently than somebody uses Microsoft Dynamics um you know and it kind of goes on from there um so I mean it’s you ask tools I’m answering data but I think that’s probably actually more relevant here

so how about I answer with tool data since These Guys these guys can’t without introducing their bias demand base definitely one of a great tool Zoom info also a good tool six cents is another tool you’ve heard bombora mentioned there’s plenty of Technologies out there um and the one that’s right for you is going to kind of depend upon the state of your business and what you need because they all bring different strengths and players to it so since I since I don’t have uh a horse in the that particular race I thought it would be best for it to come from me very politically correct of you yes um Brian anything there I think Wesley did a good job okay uh next question is from Gary burster how are we actually defining AI for ABX are we assuming that a model which back is in data sets intent engagement Etc is AI or is it much more than that

uh again I’ll start by reminding everybody that you know AI is you know applying any kind of learning technique that mimics the way humans learn to help a machine learn right and in particular machine learning is a subset of AI so when we’re talking about you know any kind of machine learning including Predictive Analytics right that is a subset of AI and and and that’s what we’ve been using for years you know in ABX whether it’s to find intent you know or in market accounts or to set bids for you know ad Impressions and so on so yeah I mean I I am defining AI here as any use of any sort of generalized learning approach to support our ABX efforts and and and I I agree with John’s definition and I would say that AI is used very Loosely uh to largely Encompass analytics um and and so I think one of the things that um I do think some people probably get intimidated by the idea of why we have to create this really complex AI model if you’re not already sort of leveraging data and doing analytics on that data to help you inform decision making like you should definitely start there and then either if you’re building it or leveraging other platforms and capabilities to do true AI then then you can sort of Advance beyond that um but but yeah I I do think there’s sort of a liberal usage of AI at the moment yeah I I I agree I think we should be careful AI for ABX is not a thing it’s not like a A specialized model or particular baked methodology that is simply a a way in which we might leverage a variety of tools that have a wide range of AI capabilities to further our account based objectives to make our B2B marketing better yeah something Gartner just recently put out some research that I thought was interesting and they were talking about ABM but actually the top channels they talked about were sales channels using sort of marketing data and so I think it’s really important for us to think about holistically what are we doing across sales and marketing to effectively identify and then go after accounts and not just limit it to sort of ABM true marketing activities but across across departments okay next question from Keith Caskey do you foresee marketing organizations having an AI specialist on your team that is tasked with prompts and such and if so what do you anticipate will be their job role content segmentation Etc

well I kind of alluded to this already I think that there is a future that this may where this may exist I I think that a a first stage for companies that are just stepping into this space and this is true of us too is to identify a small tiger team of people who have a a an interest or an affinity in this type of area that represent different parts of your marketing team so they can kind of represent different potential use cases um you know and and learn and then as you get that you get a handle on what does it take to be successful here you’ll get a much better sense of whether you need truly dedicated people or whether this is a capability you can democratize across your team yeah it’s say just building on what Leslie said I think if for any type of capability in organization many times when you uh it’s a scarce resource or you don’t have the competency you start with a sort of limited subset that is potentially centralized that helps figure out how to do it and standardize and then over time hopefully if it’s a valuable skill set you then figure out how to distribute it across the organization so you’re not dependent on just a select feed to try and do something

uh I’m going to answer that yes and um you know and as much as you know as I said earlier every marketer needs to be learning how to use this stuff you know this is a tool and like you know you don’t graduate from even junior high without sort of knowing how to use a calculator to help you in your math right and so you know I think you know you wouldn’t or spread you know and then later on in your life you learn how to use a spreadsheet to help you with your math right so I think every person in every company is going to be using these tools right and then you know there will also be the subset that is like how do I apply this tool to specialized problems like scoring accounts and and that might be more of center of excellence yeah next question is from adarsh palai um well human touch be eradicated and custom buyer Journey with the use of AI in any other feature

I don’t think so yeah yeah I I don’t think so and I would say we have seen a general Trend to people are doing more and more sort of research prior to interfacing with a person and then interfacing a person with a person when they then want to I don’t think that’s necessarily like an AI based reality that’s just a function of people like to be able to access information on their own their own progress uh without having to necessarily be sold to right away um and I might facilitate that a little bit but I I don’t think it’s AI is the driving Factor I would agree with that I think in in purchase processes that would be that seamless where they don’t require true human intervention those are the kind of things that are already being answered through e-commerce type Solutions when you’ve got true Enterprise sales or things that require you know proposals to be delivered in quotes and you know working through a negotiation process might even have a partner involved I don’t see how AI will replace that

uh Jennifer Shannon asks do you guys have suggestions for resource hubs or vendors who are offering training and education for ABM teams and AI

I wish I did thank you well well in fact I’ll just have one thing which is and then you know perhaps you know say something more useful to say this is moving and changing so fast you know like I decided one day I was like um you know I write these definitive guides you know um I was like I’m gonna write the definitive guide to Ai and B to B and after about a day of working on it I realized I’m not going to do that this is moving and changing too fast that by time I wrote anything it’s going to be outdated so you know again there may be courses that I want to hear from Leslie but but I would at the same time say like right now we’re in the phase where like you’ve just got to be like staying on top of this stuff you know um because it’s moving so quickly yeah I mean if you’re looking for something truly centralized I actually do subscribe to the um make on or the marketing AI Institute um newsletter they’ve got some interesting stuff and they have a podcast um and and I have found that to be pretty interesting stuff um what it’s not going to give you is the real tactical practical Hands-On here’s what to do it’s more about Trends in the industry and and you know what’s coming and and policy what policy makers are doing and things um really I think that this is going to come down to just Grassroots get your hands on some things and try some stuff and find communities of people who are doing the same that are like you and your business that where you can bounce ideas off of and share yeah they’re actually having a complex again this month in Cleveland yes now I institute um so for those of you that can get out to Cleveland that’s a good agenda there’s a lot of training on it and some good words about that other kind of thing so um I think my business partner is planning on going so check it out uh Brian any suggestions there um nothing to add to the to the concert um so ashata Fernando has a question does AI help improve deliverability and optimize email Outreach

it can it I mean you need a tool that is specifically designed for that I mean that’s that’s the bottom line there right you need a tool that’s designed to analyze your email performance your the deliverability of it and and and can can give you that type of insight yeah I mean never bounces one there are others that are out there but you know it’s definitely a capability that exists all right um so as we saw from a lot of the surveys the attendees today are predominantly in early stages uh of of on their AI Journey as well as even Seminary ABX Journey what advice would you give a company that’s looking to integrate AI into its ABX approach for the first time

okay I’ll go first um I think this the the your goal shouldn’t be how do I use a AI let’s start there what you need to do is you need to look at what are the goals and priorities of my business and where do I potentially have gaps and that might be able to be solved by different types of AI and remember there’s lots of different types there’s you know machine learning models there’s generative AI you’ve got a whole range of things so don’t look for don’t look for a problem for a piece of technology you want to get your hands on look first so problems your business has that might conceivably be solved by apology and then start small

well said yeah strategy before technology yeah but John anything else you’re going to say sorry no go ahead uh just tied into what we said uh earlier so agree you need to figure out what you’re wanting to solve for then I would recommend making decisions based on data so you want to have robust data and try and pull it together as much as you can and then use that data through analytics and potentially AI to inform decisions um and then facilitate processes that you’re already wanting to to run but yeah you shouldn’t start with hey I want to leverage AI how can I do it right um and the final question comes from our host Bob uh he’d like to know uh with regards for our vision of where this is heading and any final words of wisdom um so for me personally I I agree I think it’s changing rapidly um let’s not make the same mistakes we made with all the other automation waves you know over the last 10 or 15 years AI is just another form of technology I think if we’re going out to buy technology in the hopes that we’re going to AI our business or pick something then we’re already going down the wrong path right I think it still comes back to people process you know and figuring out what are we trying to accomplish what do we need to do and how can AI help improve those areas as evaluated tool not as a replacement for it but uh I do think the sky’s the limit I think we’re going to see innovation in ways that we can’t even possibly imagine I mean this is once one of those once in a generational type of things that we saw with the internet that we saw with the smartphone

um Brian your thoughts um maybe you tied to where where I started my comments is when you’re trying to figure out what are the problems you’re trying to solve I think you should consider what types of data did you wish that you had in the past used to inform that decision making and could you pull that data structured or unstructured together uh using AI in ways that you haven’t in the past are there things you’re doing that are very repetitive that you would like to be able to not do and I think Ai and and can be helpful and then where it makes sense where do you want to try and personalize and can can it help you at least with the initial stages of that and then potentially over time uh take on a on a bigger role maybe the last thing that I didn’t mention as much is I do think there’s opportunities for prescriptive uh Direction so hey focus on these accounts think about these on contacts that should be something that comes out of sort of this evolution yeah John for me I would just you know just to say something different just remind everybody that you know AI is just the broad field of computer science that aims to mimic human intelligence you know anything that sort of you know looks to learn from data you know recognize patterns and so on and as such AI is not new here you know and we’ve been we’ve been we’ve been using AI for years uh we just call it machine learning or Predictive Analytics you know and so you know like don’t be afraid of it and yeah I’ll leave it at that and lastly I I don’t know that I have much more much more to say that these guys haven’t already said I mean it’s it’s here I don’t think it’s going anywhere it should be making our jobs easier it’s an extension of that which we need to do as a marketing team so think about it in the context of what’s your strategy where are your gaps uh you know and and how might you solve those with AI capabilities and others um and then the other bit I would say is people should not be afraid or resistant to AI because they think it will take their job that’s not the right attitude uh you’re you’re gonna scale one way or another and it’s and it’s going to be here one way or the other so embrace it awesome Leslie John Brian thank you so much for sharing your great wisdom and Bob thanks for putting us all together thank you thanks everyone thank you all thanks all bye