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Award-Winning AI Strategist Shares A Practical Blueprint For AI-Powered Team Success
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If we're talking about embracing AI collaboration for human centric marketing and we need to shift how our business is thinking about this, first and foremost, you have to place authenticity at the center to ensure that your collaboration is reinforcing customer relationships.
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The B2B Marketing Exchange brings together B2B marketing and sales practitioners from across the country to get the latest tools and tips they need to succeed. Now we're bringing the insights from this stage to your ears. I'm Claudia Tirico. And I'm Kelly Lindenow. And this is the B2B Marketing Exchange podcast. Hey folks, we're back with another episode of the B2BMX podcast with a replay from a B2BMX podcast veteran. His name is Daniel Engelbretson and you've definitely heard him on the show before, but he presented at B2B MX east and it's all about AI. And I know AI is a huge topic. So here we are. In today's AI driven landscape, the true competitive advantage lies not in the technology itself, but in how we actually leverage it to enhance the human experience. If you don't know Daniel, he is an award winning AI strategist and the creator of the Rule of 100 framework. So he was obviously the perfect person to have on stage at B2BMX east to share what you and your team can do with AI right now to transform your marketing efforts. In this episode, he will unveil a practical blueprint for empowering your B2B marketing team to orchestrate highly relevant, authentic and contextual campaigns that put the human experience at the center. Without further ado, let's roll the tape in three, two, one.
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So what I'm going to be doing is basically telling you a story of redefining the impossible. And to do that, I've got to give you about 30 seconds backdrop on me and that is that my career was built on helping people build and scale demand generation. And I did this at a couple of Fortune 500 manufacturers and then I went on to tech backed startups and then eventually I started my own agency called Kronos, some of you might be familiar. And I exited that about a year ago and started going down the path of artificial intelligence. And today I teach at a couple of universities and then I help people think about operationalizing AI. So this story is the story of the first real magical moment I had with AI. And I had a client that was a friend of a friend and it was an introduction and they had a really difficult audience they were trying to get after and they Said, we want to do abm, but we don't know if we can find the audience. So, long story short, they had already spent about $75,000 in data. Me, as the owner of my agency, spent another 25,000. It took us three months to go through all this data. It was an extremely niche target audience and I had full time staff on my team as well as an offshore team. And then when we got done, I personally spent 10 hours literally sampling records to see if we'd gotten it. And at the end we didn't have it, we couldn't do it. And this is my friend and I didn't want to launch a program that I didn't feel good about and we couldn't do it. Well, then I said, well, what about ChatGPT? This was back in January, February, timeline, couple months after ChatGPT came out and everybody was still really high on ChatGPT. And I was like, well, maybe ChatGPT can help me do something here. So in one weekend, with no prior experience writing Python, chatgpt wrote a Python app for me. And I was able to visit the website of several tens of thousands of target accounts, look for specific keywords, and then scrape off the site the sentence that came before and the sentence that came after the keyword, and then do semantic analysis. And then turns out we were able to qualify 4,500 accounts overnight. So what I couldn't get done with essentially unlimited resources and unlimited money and a lot of good tech and my own company in three months, I literally did in a weekend, having never done this before. And what this taught me was a few things streamline. I was able to go from something that was three months to something I literally did overnight. Enriched. Not only was I able to finally hit that threshold, but I also got some other data along the way, which I'll talk to in a moment. In Accelerate, I went from what was taking roughly four minutes, and I had C level people weighing in on this data, four minutes to eight seconds per record. So I felt pretty awesome. But gtm, reality check, the BDR turned over three times in eight weeks and the campaign totally failed. Totally failed. So what did I learn from this? I learned that the challenge we face, like so many things in gtm, is it's not actually about the technology, it's about how we're harnessing it. And the question that I want to try to answer here is how can we leverage AI to improve outcomes of the work we're doing while keeping the human touch or keeping the human at the center of what we're doing across all that we're doing. And so this presentation is basically diving into that and how I got here today. So to do that, we have to start by saying, well, what is human centric marketing? And for this conversation, I'll put forth three pillars. The first is authentic. If you want to be human centric and you're using AI, you've got to generate content or make decisions or whatever you're doing that's truly aligned with your values, your brand, what lies at the heart of your company, then it has to be relevant. If you're gonna crank out content or crank out automation or automate your call center, whatever it is, the decisions you're making off the back of this data, it's gotta actually matter and resonate with the actual audience that you're after. And third, it has to be meaningful just because you can crank out a thousand emails or a thousand BDR touches or whatever it might be, if it's not contextually relevant, it doesn't matter, it's just spam. So if authentic, relevant and meaningful are the pillars that we're going to run with for human centric marketing, well, how do we start thinking about integrating AI into the bedrock of your business? And from my perspective, it really is the bedrock. It is a layered approach. And having done this for a couple of years now, you've got to start at the very core or at the bedrock, and you have to shift your thinking. So in this presentation, we're going to take some time to talk about how do you shift your thinking as an organization? And then once you've done that, you have to shift your approach. How do you operationalize this? So we're going to talk a little bit about how you operationalize it. And then, okay, I've got a new strategy, I've got a new approach. Well, how do I actually enable my team? How do I get the capabilities to do this? And for that, we're going to talk a bit about the rule of 100. So when we get to the end, we will have laddered up all three of these layers and you'll have a plan. So let's get started with shift thinking. If we're talking about embracing AI collaboration for human centric marketing, and we need to shift how our business is thinking about this, first and foremost, you have to place authenticity at the center to ensure that your collaboration is reinforcing customer relationships. I think that the biggest thing you're doing when you're trying to enable AI, operationalizing AI is being authentic. So to do that, you have to be thinking about, well, how can I adopt a mindset as an organization or as a team or as an individual, where my AI collaboration is here to empower me to think more creatively or empower me as a human to do what I already do well? And then from that you have to be thinking about, well, what about enhancing human decision making to reinforce and deliver authentic, relevant and meaningful interactions? And lastly, as the leader, whether of yourself or of your team or of your company, you have to be thinking about, well, how can I do this in a way that will stay true to my company's identity while I'm leveraging AI? Because how many of us have seen the ratcheted up number of BDR calls or touches or spam emails or content that's just kind of cranked out on LinkedIn or whatever it is? There's a lot of garbage that's coming out really, really, really fast. So that's not what we want to do. Okay, so if authenticity is the center of the human strategy, what does that mean? Well, from my perspective, alignment is the bedrock of authenticity for your business. And there's two types. There's internal alignment and external alignment. Internal is how well do you think your team really understands what lies at the heart of your competitive differentiation of your distinct competency? What makes you you? Does your team actually believe that and do they know that? And externally, how are the problems that you solve truly experienced by the customer? And are you aligned on that? Does your team across the go to market, across all the teams, does everybody have an understanding of how do you actually solve problems? Why does that matter from the customer's perspective? So to put this into action, the first step here is to start looking for go to market alignment gaps. So internally, that might be something like your ideal customer profile. Does everyone on the team know what makes a good customer a good customer? And do you all have the same point of view? Then you might be thinking about positioning and you might be saying, hey, do we all understand what makes our product our product? And then you might be thinking about the customer experience, whether it's sales or customer success or service or wherever it is along the cycle. Do you guys all understand what makes the customer drives the customer, what drives their problems, what drives their day to day, and why they value your product or your solution. So if that's some of the flavor of internal, what about external? Does your team knows what drives the customer? When's the last time somebody on your team talked to the customer? Is your customer Experience rooted in actual needs for specific people, or is it hypothetical? And do you have a continuous learning effort to learn from your interactions so you can keep learning? Well, what is the customer experience? So if the first thing we're trying to get done is shift our thinking, I would tell you that to really enable AI collaboration on your team or for yourself or for your business, these are the kinds of alignment that you need to drive. But most importantly, most importantly, you can't let tech blind you to the reality that relationships are your competitive advantage. Artificial intelligence does not care about you, your product, your customer. Artificial intelligence doesn't care about anything. It's artificial intelligence, but your team, if it's empowered to collaborate holistically with AI and keeping that human touch, keeping the authenticity at the center, that is where you can really start to make the magic happen. But it can't be done in isolation. What did I learn from the data project? I learned that if I do this really cool thing, it's cool, but it didn't really actually matter because what the customer actually needed was not a data project. They needed a campaign that worked just like many of the things that we find in gtm. Okay, so now that we've talked a little bit about how we can shift our thinking, what about operationalizing this? And this is where I think there's a lot of opportunity. A lot of times when people start using ChatGPT or choose your AI tech, they're focused on can I get reduction in headcount or can I just go faster or something like that. And I think a more holistic way to think about this is with the SEA framework that I put up here. So the first is streamline. If you're going to use AI, if you're going to integrate AI into your workflow, can it actually make it easier for you to do your job? Can it reduce the lift? Can it reduce the mental tax? Can you do that by repurposing what you already know or allow you to put your time onto higher, higher impact, more meaningful stuff for you? The second is enrich. If by working with AI, can you actually get a better outcome than had you not? Can you, can you reduce your blind spots? Or can you reduce having to do the same thing over and over? Or can you get more depth or more quality in your work? And last is accelerate. And this is where I think it sometimes falls down. People think accelerate just means go faster. It's really more about can you speed up your work cycles and learn faster? You know, if you could get your campaigns out the door in a third or half or you know, two fourths of the time, whatever that might be, how much faster could you learn? So streamline, Enrich, Accelerate. That's how I want to be thinking about this. So putting that into the context of reimagining the possible, let's take it back to that data project and let's think, okay, Tapping the full potential of AI collaboration, while the overall program didn't really work great, the independent little scenario here is a pretty good approximation for this. So for example, streamlined. We were able to browse over 10,000 websites, which was previously taking us three or four minutes of people who had to go to the website, read the content, think about it, is this here? And so on. We were able to cut that down to overnight enriched. Not only were we able to finally hit the threshold, but we were also able to scrape other information from the site like LinkedIn, contact profiles or whatever that might be so that we got better outcome and accelerate. What if this program, even if it had had the BDR turnover three times, what if I had had the data project done on time instead of three months late because it took so long to figure it out, how would that have changed the customer's experience? And so at the end of the day, the data project here is a good example of how human led task with AI collaboration. And if you're thinking through this lens of streamline, Enrich, Accelerate, it can get better outcomes. But this is one that took me a long time to really crack the code on. When you're thinking about enriched outcomes, how do you really think about, okay, what does it mean to get a better outcome from my work? And I really like using the Rum seal matrix for this. And if you're not familiar, it's basically four quadrants of knowledge. You've got your known knowns, so you know what your company's name is. Then you've got your known unknowns. You don't actually know what your end of quarter numbers are going to be. You know, you don't know that. Then you've got your unknown knowns. This is like, did you have a conversation with a customer a year ago and it profoundly changed how you view your business, but you never wrote that down. Or what about your whole sales team? Do they have profound experiences with customers and it's not written down? Well, you know these things, but you don't know. You know these things inside of your org and then you have your unknown unknowns. Things you don't know, you don't know your surprises. Oh, I didn't know my customer called it that. I didn't know they thought about like this, whatever it might be. And so enriching outcomes is about reducing your unknown unknowns and reducing the likelihood that you have unknown knowns by being able to use what you already know inside your organization and uncover blind spots as you're trying to operationalize whatever it is you're doing. And then lastly, we've got Accelerate. And I really like the analogy of it really doesn't matter if you could run up and down the basketball court really, really, really, really fast if you make none of your shots. Right. Garbage in, garbage out is another way to think about that. And so Accelerate is really about proper acceleration. It must reinforce authentic, relevant and meaningful outcomes. And what I mean by this is if you're operationalizing AI on your team to do a thing and it's sacrificing one or more of authentic, relevant or meaningful, then you didn't really get out of the AI collaboration what you should have or what you could have. So if you're trying to maximize it, this is a way to think about it. So let's take it out of the abstract and let's navigate this sea of AI opportunity. So if you think about your GTM plan overall, it's got all these puzzle pieces, or if you think about just an ABM program, it's got puzzle pieces like Persona or positioning, ideal customer profile, whatever it might be. And so as you start thinking about the puzzle pieces of whatever puzzle or problem you're trying to solve, you can apply the SEA framework to each one of those. What if you could create Persona documentation that was faster to create, that was more enriched, that was a streamlined process for you. Then you could have more Personas that were more dialed in, you could have better programs. What if your positioning was up to date all the time and you were processing the content coming off your competitors websites, or you had a new product release and you were able to roll that back into your program and so on. And so as you start thinking about operationalizing AI, it can be the Persona document that is the puzzle, it can be the GTM plan. This is a puzzle, but you're thinking about, how do I look at that puzzle and apply this to it. So let's say, how do we put this into action? Let's say I was gonna ask you to go back to your business and find a process that you wanted to try to apply this to. Well, let's put this in the context of this event. Let's say you were coming to this event and it was your job to streamline, accelerate or enrich and accelerate this event. What if all the time it takes you to do the research of who's gonna be here and who should I talk to and what should I say, and maybe after a day or two days, you've been through 100 or 200 names. What if you could go through all thousand names in the same period of time, how many more conversations could you have started? What if when you actually go to reach out to the people who are top of your list, you were able to actually do the research that said, oh, this is what I should talk about. This is what they care about. Here's how my product matches. And today that might take you to do 10 or 15 accounts. That might take you a couple of days. But what if you could do all of the accounts for the same level of effort? How much more meaningful would those conversations be? And lastly, what about follow up? How often do you go to a trade show and you talk to a whole lot of people and it's three weeks later and you still haven't followed up with everyone? What if you could follow up right away? So that's what I mean when I'm talking about sea. And so I'm not going to go through this whole chart, but I put other examples up here. If you are the kind of person who likes to take pictures to kind of put this into perspective across other things you might be thinking about. But what I really want to return back to is problem solving versus puzzle solving. And if you think about marketing, particularly if anybody in here has been involved in like approving creative and it's of the passing of the baton of first we've got our copy, then we got our imagery, then leadership says change this word and then three weeks later it goes to legal and then finally the ad is done. Well, that's how a lot of that's that relay passing of the baton, that's how a lot of human based problem solving works. But in the context of AI enabled problem solving and thinking about this as a puzzle, well, what if as you learned new things as that split test came back, or the CTA test was done, or the landing page was optimized, what if each piece of the puzzle could be refactored automatically based on what you learned? Applying the thinking behind C, that's what we're talking about. You can literally do that. Okay, so now that we've talked a little bit about shifting how you operationalize this idea of C, well, what about what about enabling the team? And to do this, I've created this maturity model that takes you from level one to level five. And you can adopt this or you can adopt something else. But the main point is, how do you measure where am I in this and where am I going? How do I know if I actually am making progress operationalizing AI for myself or for my team? And the first level, in my opinion, it's just about time. Back in your day, could you get to a point where when you sit down with ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever one you like to use or whichever tool, could you actually get to a point where you could get 100 minutes back in your day? This was the first challenge I gave myself. It was actually 100 minutes back in general. And that went to a month, and then a week and then a day. The second is, all right, now I've gotten to a point where I actually have some use cases where I can get 100 minutes back. Well, how about getting more meaningful outcomes? How about running parallel workflows? How about being able to put my time into higher impact stuff? Well, as you start to master your thinking around more meaningful impact of where you choose to spend your time, then you start thinking about, okay, level three repeatable tools. You've got these things that you like to do. You know how you get impact? Maybe you've got a prompt saved somewhere. Maybe you've got an Excel template somewhere where you just change the variables. I do that for LinkedIn ads. Maybe you've got a GPT you wrote. But the point is, can you get it repeatable, whatever it is? And I call this a toolbox. Because think about, let's say you're trying to build something and you have a hammer, and all you're doing is running around with a hammer. Well, now you got a saw, and now you got a screwdriver. Okay, well, you can go from hammering some nails to building a house. And that's really where you start getting in level four, you start stringing these tools together and you start integrating them together, and you can get significantly more complex with what you can get done. So maybe you've got a template for building your Persona and a template for building your blog and a template for building your ads, and a template for optimizing what came back from the ads or whatever it is. But you start putting those together and you can actually crank the whole thing. Boom, boom, boom. And then from there, you start getting into what I like to call the dream, which is really about getting to a level of ability that you just couldn't have done without AI collaboration. This is where back to, there's no way we were going to read 10,000 websites. No way. Not at four minutes a pop and definitely not looking for other information. It would have been 10, 15 minutes of website. It just wasn't feasible. You would never do that. You wouldn't even design a process for that. But with AI collaboration, it's a totally different, totally different scenario. So to put that into a bit different of a context, I put this up here just to think across the GTM applications. Again, I'm not going to read through all these, but just to kind of show you how that might play out. And one thing I might would say, if you do take a picture or if you're thinking about this after the fact, you can take this framework and go to ChatGPT and say, hey, think about this framework. Think about the kind of work I do. How might I do this? And, and that's a great example of how it can help you do it. But whatever the case, the rule of 100 is about exponential gains through AI. How confident are you that your organization is aligned on what drives meaningful relationships at every touch point across the customer life cycle? And what if they were? What would you find if you applied the Rumsfeld matrix to each piece of your puzzle? Even just a simple streamline of rich accelerate, even just small marginal gains at each piece? What would you find from that? And what would you do if you could put 100 minutes back in your team's day? What would you do if you could put 100 minutes back in your day? How much impact would just that alone have for you? That's what we're talking about. Just 100 minutes alone is impactful. But where it really gets, really gets cool is how much better would your business run if you could see the whole puzzle, not just the little blue square down at the bottom that says the abm, but the whole puzzle. And you can think about this in terms of your whole business, your team, or just your role. But the point is, as you start stacking this up and you think about what are the puzzle pieces and how might I apply this framework? And you start to kind of scale out from that. Not only can AI help you identify the missing pieces of the puzzle and give you a better picture on that puzzle, but it can help you operationalize improvements on the work you're doing. But at the end of the day, and I really believe this, the real magic, the real secret sauce is you. Because the problem solving Process, the critical thinking, the outside of the box, the breaking the rules. AI can't break the rules. AI is a probabilistic model. It can only do based on what it has seen. AI can't say something about this doesn't smell right. AI can't do that, but you can. We are all here because we're good at solving problems. And AI is not about replacing you and solving those problems. It's about augmenting your ability to solve those problems. So as you're thinking about operationalizing this moving forward, a few ways that you might attack this are. Well, one, can you find your alignment gaps? Can you look across the puzzle, whatever it is that you're trying to solve for, and look where you might have alignment gaps in how you view your customer's experience or how your own team thinks about the value you drive? And past that, then can you look across that and say, well, how might I streamline, how might I enrich and how might I accelerate what I'm doing? And one thing to call out here is you don't necessarily have to nail all three. You can just get, streamline, enrich or accelerate. But if you do nail all three, that's where you start to get real exponential gains. If I not only streamline my process and reduce that mental text, but I also got a better outcome and I got it done faster. Now we're talking. So the last one being about empowering your team or empowering yourself, if you're not already pushing yourself on these types of this type of thing, you're losing out, you're losing out for yourself. Like, how much do you really want to spend your time on stuff that's not value add? What would you do with 100 more minutes in your day? This is not hypothetical. People are doing this all the time. So make sure you're empowering yourself and your team. So whether you're doing something like the shift OS or the rule of 100 or whatever that might be, that's a way that you might get started. So the last thought I want to leave you with and then take some questions is the beautiful complexity of B2B marketing. This is why I love B2B marketing. Because the problems that you're trying to solve in GTM are huge, complex. They're beasts, right? We're all here are good at solving problems, but sometimes it doesn't work out. Sometimes your data project fails and it just is what it is. But we all know we have to keep trying. And so if you have not yet started or if you have not yet had the experience that you want to have when collaborating with AI. You've got to keep trying and you've got to push yourself to get past some of these thresholds so you can get the value. So that's pretty much what I want to deliver. And I wanted to save some time for questions, if anybody has any questions or anything specific you want me to get into. Yeah, so the question is adoption in the spectrum and where people fit on that. Yeah, well, there's kind of a few ways I see that, and this isn't strictly my point of view, but a very common thing is what people sometimes refer to as cyborgs. You've got people kind of sitting in a department that are really, really good at this and they're doing it off on the side and they're not really talking about it, and they're kind of crushing their day to day and they're doing that. So you've got things like that. Then you've got some places where teams might be running plays. Like, I talked to, I worked with a company that wanted to overhaul their field event strategy, and they just needed a play that would let them run more field events. So they've got plays like that. And then you've got some companies that I work with that are automating the entire workflow from end to end with this kind of thinking to try to go through really complex deliverables. So it kind of runs the gamut. I should also say I teach at a couple of universities and the students that I'm teaching, they usually start out with total ambiguity around this, and by the end they're like, oh, my God, this is the best thing I ever learned. So to echo that, the scenario is somebody who was playing a pivotal role left the company and all that work fell on you, and you found a tool that helped you do that. And now you're questioning whether you need. Need the role in the first place. And one way to think about this, and sometimes this is the abstract, okay, let's say that you do want to have. Let's say you're thinking about, I want to do better blogging and I don't know how to blog. Well, one way that you can apply this is if you have a trusted source of, oh, I go to this blog and read all the time about what good marketing is. Or you go to a conference and you hear a session, you can have the AI read through your version of what is a good blog and then build the standard operating procedure and the template for what is a good blog. And then when you want to create your content, you can interview yourself, get all that in a transcript, and then give the transcript to the bot with the template and the SOP that you created off of material you trust. And now not only is it going to create the blog that you want based on your transcript, it's going to do it the way you want it because it's based off of the template and the SOP that you had to generate. But you didn't know anything about writing a blog when you got started. So that is a great way to operationalize anybody else. Yeah. So who implements AI processes? And I think so. I spent a lot of time in lean manufacturing and there was a lot of kaizening going on. So a lot of redesigning processes. And always we were asked before we could hire or spend any money, it was always, hey, when's the last time you kaizen your process? When's the time you sat down and looked at this and said, is this as good as it could be? And so a great place to do this is by starting with that question, where are we doing it as good as we could be? And if we did apply frameworks like this, could we do it different? How might we redefine it? So some organizations have folks like that on staff, but other organizations, I would say one of the great things about being in B2B marketing is we're all already used to testing and trying and kind of parallel pathing and things like that. And so I would say having someone on your team who's familiar with the concepts of a B testing and streamlining processes is a good place to start. Start. But I. One of the reasons why I wanted this to be tech agnostic is because you don't necessarily need fancy technology to do this. You certainly can, but you can get a $20 a month license to ChatGPT and some critical thinking. And you can totally. You can do everything. I just set up here. So I think it just comes down to giving the team time and setting out some objectives of, hey, where might there be some inefficiencies? That's where I take it back to the alignment. If you're thinking about, oh, we're kind of eroding a lot of trust in this part of the process, or this is a bad experience we're delivering, or this is something we're really good at, that's where you start looking for, where am I to apply this? All right, well, thank you guys for coming.
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All right, big shout out to Dan for sharing his incredible expertise on all things AI with us. I really loved how this session was technology agnostic and really focused on practical, actionable strategies. You can start implementing immediately because you know What? That's what B2BMX is all about. Thanks so much for tuning in today. Don't forget to subscribe to the POD so you don't miss more can't miss replays from our series of B2BMX events. And if you enjoyed this talk, you might want to snag your ticket to B2BMX west in Scottsdale. Our agenda is packed with actionable advice on today's hard hitting B to be marketing topics. Don't forget to use the discount code in our show notes for an additional 15% off your ticket. Have a great day everyone. We'll catch you next week.