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- [00:01]
A
Hey, everyone. You are going to love what we have in store for today's episode. It's probably one of the most impactful guests that we've ever had on the show. But first, I wanted to let you know that we just dropped two YouTube videos all about our GTM Revenue Factory framework and the nine key metrics every B2B SaaS company should be tracking. So these are two incredibly comprehensive resources. We put a lot of time and thought into these. So we'll drop the links in the show notes to those videos, so make sure to go check those out. Now, Amber and I have been wanting to get John Miller on this show for months. So this conversation today was a huge privilege. John co founded Marketo, the platform that in the early 2000s helped popularize and institutionalize the metrics that most of us are still using today. So things like MQL's lead scoring, the demand waterfall. And what is so fascinating is that John himself no longer believes in most of them. So in this conversation, we dig into why and also what he thinks marketing leaders should be measuring instead. I hope you enjoy it. It's an amazing show. And let's get into it. You're listening to gtm live, a podcast by passetto. You're literally one of the most influential people in B2B marketing, having founded Marketo. And admittedly, many of our customers that are in the Passetto portfolio are on Marketo still. They're using tools like demand based. And so what was really interesting to me, John, is that you helped shape marketing automation with Marketo back in 2006 before it got sold. And so I think a huge portion of how marketing teams still measure performance today traces back to that early work that you did in the early 2000s. So I'm privileged that you're spending the time to talk to me about that, but I just want to have an honest conversation around some of those early days and some of those things that you helped popularize, like lead scoring, attribution, MQLs, and just hear how you've seen the industry evolve since that time. Cool.
- [02:22]
B
I love talking about this stuff, so thank you. And I think, you know, I mean, you did say this part correctly, but, you know, I didn't invent marketing automation. I didn't invent MQLs, any of those types of things. I just think I'd helped. I was part of the movement that helped to popularize it, and we can talk about all that.
- [02:38]
A
Yeah. So I think one thing that's like, super interesting to me is that these things that we're talking about that Marketo played a huge role in shaping for our industry have become defaults. But I'm seeing them now, at least with some marketing executives start to question those things. And I was really interested in to even see you start to question those things. In fact, you put out a post the other day and I was like, man, the guy that like had such a influential role in popularizing this notion of MQLS is now coming back and telling us that like the best marketing leaders don't even use those metrics anymore. So I guess kick us off. We saw Marketo start to like institutionalize some of those things like MQLS and lead scoring. Now you're coming in and saying, no wait, we shouldn't be using those things anymore. Help me understand your like your point of view on that. Like how did you come to these conclusions now in 2026?
- [03:34]
B
I think it was a journey to sort of come to the realization that I think a lot of the traditional ways we talked about the playbook wasn't working as well in this decade as well. And I think the journey through demand based actually was part of this, you know, when I was doing the exact same marketing ad demand base that I did back at Marketo.
- [03:56]
A
Right, because you were CMO of both. Right? You were cmo. Okay, got it.
- [04:00]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was doing the same playbook doing the exact same things and it just didn't work at demand based when it worked at Marketo. And that got me thinking like, okay, what's wrong? And there's two possibilities and it turns out I think they're both true. But the first possibility is that something was different about demand based versus Marketo and therefore part of the playbook needed to be applied differently. The second possibility is that the actual playbook was broken and needed to change. And they're connected, right? And I said they're both true. So the first piece, Marketo had a great brand. I mean I was not a branding expert when I was building Marketo, but we just, I think did the right thing at the right time, thought leadership, helped to build a good brand and as we were more successful, that became a self perpetuating brand. We called it the marketing nation where people just wanted to use Marketo because it was the coolest, the best one. And that brand, it turns out was doing a ton of the heavy lifting to make my demand gen programs work.
- [05:05]
A
What were some of those things like if you can recall, I mean this was what, two decades ago, so easy.
- [05:10]
B
I mean first off you know, when your brand is good, you get lots of inbound, inbound converts. The best.
- [05:16]
A
Right.
- [05:17]
B
You know, not surprisingly. And then also when your brand is good, you get better response rates to all your marketing programs. Right. So just my webinars did better, my demand gen did, my email campaigns performed better, you know, and all that kind of stuff. So when a good brand acts as a tailwind to everything you're doing. So when I joined Demandbase, I mean Demandbase is a good company, I'm very proud of the product we built. But I would argue at least when I joined Demandbase I kind of felt like their reputation I called it was like your grandfather's Martech company. It was kind of perceived as older technology, wasn't kind of what the cool kids were using, maybe perceived as expensive or whatever. There were some perception challenges I think that the band base had and I've worked hard to try to change those. But lo and behold, that's part of the reason that my exact same playbook wasn't working. I had a brand that was acting like a headwind and not a tailwind and so led to my first major conclusion of what was wrong with the traditional playbook, which is that we so over rotated into investing in demand gen and things that were highly measurable, that frankly I think we under invested and kind of ignored things like brand.
- [06:28]
A
This would have been close to 2020, 2016, something like that.
- [06:32]
B
I joined demand based in 2020, became CMO in early 2021 kind of. So through the whole zero interest rate period, end of COVID and I left demand base in the end of 2023, early 2024. So yeah, that kind of that period.
- [06:46]
A
Yeah. I guess my question was going to be do you think that the whole like VC landscape would have had anything to do with that?
- [06:53]
B
That's why I mentioned there was the whole zero interest rate period kind of that happened and then the pullback in investment. So I don't want to say that there weren't also macro trends going on. I mean but through that whole period, six Sense, who was, I will say for anybody listening, I think demand base is now starting to pass six Sense. But at least back in at that time six Sense was the cool kid and they were doing just fine. So that shows that it wasn't just the macro, it was more about the
- [07:19]
A
micro and the positioning too and all of the other things that you're talking about.
- [07:23]
B
Yeah, so, so that was, you know, lesson one, like, you know, like brand really matters and it was traditionally massively underinvested in the traditional playbook. And it ties to the second question, right, which is was the fundamental playbook flawed? And what I have come to realize is something that we've realized all along, but just didn't talk about enough, which is that buying is inherently a complex and nonlinear process. Buying committees have multiple members. Buying journeys are often the most important parts are hidden and untrackable. And the net of it is that it is complex and nonlinear. And I use those words purposely because complex and nonlinear systems follow what's known as chaotic behavior. We've all heard about the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil, causing the tornado in, in Japan. Like that is an example of chaotic behavior. Stock markets are chaotic, the weather is chaotic, they're inherently unpredictable. I have increasingly come to recognize that that's true of buying as well. Yeah, now that was true also back in the days of Marketo. Right. But it's not like things dramatically changed. But the old playbook, we treated it like it was simple. We treated it like we could do a simple funnel of prospect to mql, to SQL, to opportunity to close. And that's a single person's journey. We could ignore the complex, the account and we could ignore the all the stuff that we couldn't track. And it was effectively, it was a model. Models can be useful to help you understand the world. And that model was useful back in 2012. But just like the model of the solar system that had the earth at the center as opposed to the sun eventually became a non useful model, I think we're increasingly realizing that that sort of linear, simple model also just isn't good enough to reflect the reality of the way the world works.
- [09:23]
A
Well, I would agree with that wholeheartedly. But I guess my question was, well, one, do you think it's oversimplified? And you just gave me the answer that you think it is. But do you think that maybe it worked for Marketo specifically or at the time when you were at Marketo because you were having a lot of success with brand and therefore the story looked simpler and more linear. And then when you moved into demand base and when you, you know, had more competition with sixth sense and more, you know, things working against you, that model doesn't answer the questions that you needed to answer when things aren't going so well.
- [10:02]
B
I think that's very well put. The model is probably a decent model when things are simple and easy.
- [10:07]
A
Yeah, you know, I definitely see that. Yeah, you know, I see this segment of, of marketing leaders who still defend it And I, I think that they defend it in many ways because they've gotten just really lucky in their roles in their companies. Growth is great, therefore it's worked for them. They've never had to start to poke holes in it.
- [10:26]
B
There's probably a high correlation between those things. Absolutely.
- [10:29]
A
Yeah, for sure. So with that in mind, right, you had, you know, you said you didn't coin the MQL, but Marketo made it the operating system of B2B marketing for like, 15 years. How does it feel to be the person now who is starting to dismantle something that you were such a big part of? I guess that's a part one of my next question.
- [10:50]
B
But I don't know, you know, if it's because I'm not sentimental or not, but it's fine, right? I mean, I'm, I'm a rationalist, and so I really just, I'm very motivated about trying to just help marketers succeed in the best ways I know possible. It's funny, I choose my words carefully, and I chose them carefully earlier when I was talking about whether buying has changed all that. Because my Marketo co founder, he sometimes catches me out if I'm not precise, you know, talking about it. So if I say like, oh, but buying used to be simple, but now it's complex, he's always like, no, no, no, it was always complex.
- [11:25]
A
It was always complex. But I do feel like it's a lot more complex now because we have a lot more channels, especially with so much of what we do has been commoditized by the Internet now. AI right, like, we can go to Reddit, we can go to Slack communities, you can go all these places to learn and to build awareness about a brand and a product. Sure, aren't trackable.
- [11:48]
B
Yeah, I think that's fair. I think the anonymous portion of the buying process, more of the decision is probably happening in the anonymous portion than ever, and that is a real change. But you asked how do I feel about things? And so I generally feel fine about it, although. Except for every once in a while when Phil pokes holes at me for doing it, it's like, okay, let me be a little bit more precise and careful.
- [12:09]
A
But yeah, for sure. But that's. I think that comes with the territory. We definitely get that a lot. But I think it's an exciting place to be, to be somebody who's on the. On the cusp of thinking differently. And I'm personally really curious to know what's next for you and what you're building but we can talk about that in a sec. So I definitely, from my vantage point, see there to be like a lot more pressure on like marketing results as it relates to unit economics because we're now in an age where like money isn't free and we're seeing a lot of companies rely less on VC and things like that. But what would you say, you know, if it's not MQLs and if it's not attribution, like you as, like your experience as CMO, what are the, the KPIs that you think matter most?
- [12:53]
B
Well, I. First off, we'll answer by saying I think a terrible, terrible, terrible KPI is measuring marketing sourced versus sales sourced.
- [13:04]
A
Oh my gosh. Thank you.
- [13:06]
B
Thank you for saying that. First of all, it's never an accurate calculation. The second, you, you understand that buying is complex and nonlinear, like you will not ever be able to say it's. It's like saying, well, that hurricane got caused by that one butterfly flap. Like, of course you can't make those connections, but. But also trying to do that attribution, I think breaks down the very teamwork that you need to make things work.
- [13:36]
A
Yeah, I agree for sure if you
- [13:38]
B
throw MQLs out because for a lot of people, they don't mean anything per se. Sorry, let me be slightly more precise because I see Phil sitting on my shoulder whispering here. The original definition of an MQL was marketing really thinks that this is a sales ready lead.
- [14:01]
A
Mm.
- [14:02]
B
Right.
- [14:02]
A
Drummed up by some sort of scoring nurture.
- [14:05]
B
But it's been nurtured, it's been scored. And we have strong evidence to believe that now is the right time to engage this person and their company. That's not a bad metric. The problem is everybody abused it. And MQLs for most companies became anybody who downloaded an ebook or some other set of things and it became too easy for marketing, if they're using scoring to like slide the slider, to say, well, we didn't hit the goal, so let's just set the threshold.
- [14:38]
A
Yeah, A little more stuff over there. Yeah.
- [14:40]
B
So wasn't that the idea of, hey, this is actually sales ready is a bad thing is I think that the MQL in practice got bastardized.
- [14:48]
A
Yeah. And just models that were way too generous, I think for marketers. Yeah.
- [14:52]
B
Okay, so you asked, what are the metrics? I think first off, I think there are an important set of metrics around. Brand health have historically been ignored in traditional playbook. In the olden days, I. E. Five years ago, you could measure your Brand health, arguably by your web traffic, were people coming to your homepage? What search terms were they using to get there? And was it direct traffic or was it organic traffic or referral traffic? The problem is, as we all know, AI overviews are just destroying website traffic. So you don't even have that anymore. So I think the reality is, I think we do need to go back to the future and do things like brand surveys, as I like to say. Have you defined for your company what is the one thing that you want your ICP to think and feel about you? Yeah, many companies cannot articulate that, by the way, but let's say that they can. And like every single person in the company would sing from the same hymn book. That's powerful. Then the question becomes, okay, what percentage of your ICP actually thinks and feels that way?
- [15:55]
A
How are you seeing companies measure that from a brand? I love this sentiment surveys.
- [16:00]
B
If you can get a hundred responses a quarter, that starts to give you incredibly good directional data. If it's 100 responses, don't say, oh, 47% of our market thinks of us the right way. That's too precise. But to say last quarter was 42, now it's 47 and the next quarter is 54, you know you're going in the right direction.
- [16:23]
A
Right. For folks like a CFO or a CEO who I think are very economics minded when they say, okay, tell me the ROI of what you spent on brand.
- [16:35]
B
Right.
- [16:35]
A
How do you address that with I
- [16:37]
B
don't want to say it's easy. We've over trained. I overtrained CFOs to think of marketing too much like a gumball machine where you can directly say I did this and I got that. We have to re educate that. That is not the way buying works.
- [16:51]
A
It's a big job.
- [16:53]
B
It's why I'm out there.
- [16:54]
A
Yeah.
- [16:55]
B
On podcasts and talking to people. I think it's a critical skill for marketing executives to be able to have that kind of conversation with their CFOs and CEOs and investors. I would suggest doing it Socratically. Hey, when you just purchased your new analyst analyst tracking system, walk me through your decisioning process. Where did you learn about it? How did you decide? What did you consider? Why did you pick them? Right. And I think it's possible to convince people that like, oh, you're telling me you never downloaded an ebook when you were doing that evaluation? Mrs. CFO. Right. You didn't attend any webinars? Huh? Maybe you know, you shouldn't be pressuring me to do those things for our buyers because they don't work.
- [17:36]
A
Right, Right.
- [17:37]
B
You bought that thing because of word of mouth that you got when you were golfing with your fellow CFOs. That's why you're buying. How do we stimulate that for our customers? We should be making those investments. And I will tell you, they will never be perfectly measurable.
- [17:54]
A
Half of those things would never show up.
- [17:55]
B
So do you want me doing the wrong thing that's measurable or do you want me doing the right thing that's hard to measure. But I'm not saying I'm not going to give you metrics. Right. I will give you a quarterly brand tracking study to show that we are moving things in the right direction.
- [18:08]
A
And what happens, though? Just like to throw a scenario at you, what happens when you might start to see a lift in the brand perception survey results, but win rate is going down or pipeline volume is going down? How do you connect the dots then between those things? Because CEO might say, great, those studies are all fine and well, love to see that result. But help me fix my pipeline problem. We gotta ramp up, like the performance marketing again, because this is just too uncomfortable for all of us.
- [18:40]
B
I mean, it's complex. Right? I mean, first off, these things are nonlinear. How long is our sales cycle? How long is the nurture cycle? Like, so do you really expect just because we saw an uptick in brand awareness this quarter that it's all suddenly going to be changing our metrics this quarter? No, that's naive. You shouldn't think that way.
- [18:56]
A
Yeah, that's such a great point of view. Not sure how much you know about Passetto, but one of the things that we often measure is what we would call the engagement stage. It's like that stage between.
- [19:06]
B
Totally. I want to get to that. We're still just on the first metric.
- [19:10]
A
Yeah, exactly. Okay. So when we look at that, sometimes, like, companies are blown away to say, oh, man, like, our prospects are in that awareness stage for 700 days.
- [19:20]
B
Yeah.
- [19:20]
A
Which I think really, like, ties back to what you were saying of, like this notion of a gumball machine, which is just really the awareness and driving awareness into how long somebody might be learning about your brand, becoming aware about your brand, until they enter that, like, 5% decision window that they.
- [19:37]
B
Exactly. So the point is, I think there are a set of brand metrics, including brand awareness, brand health, brand perception, share of voice. There's also a set of metrics that are increasingly important around AEO inclusion and sentiment. That's almost like the new analyst report, right. Did we rank high in garter? Do we rank high in ChatGPT? Like you've got to track these things. And then I think another metric that I'm going to actually put under brand health, not under demand gen or pipeline is account engagement. Right. Which is if we know who our target accounts are, are they spending time with us? Because before somebody spends money with you, they spend time with you, you know, and so am I increasing that engagement from the right people at the right accounts? So I think those are your kind of brand health metrics. So then you do get into your pipeline impact metrics, which are really again, I tried to focus on total pipeline. Not kind of any marketing source or influenced.
- [20:29]
A
Did you guys have source it like for your own metrics at demand based in Marketo? Like did you strip away the source credit or were those companies that also use those internally?
- [20:39]
B
I did for a little while at Marketo until I realized it wasn't working and then I actively forced demand based not to do it.
- [20:46]
A
Cool. Okay.
- [20:47]
B
Including how you pay the SDRs, which was like caused some questions. So for pipeline impact, I think a metric I really like is the account journey, which you were. This is exactly what you were getting at. How many accounts are in the awareness stage, how many accounts are on an engaged stage, how many accounts are in what I would call a qualified buying group stage, like kind of showing active interest and intent. How many are in the opportunity stage, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Those are probably as good as leading indicator metrics as you can get. Just what I would encourage people not to over rotate on is qualified buying group doesn't necessarily mean sales ready. That's an important distinction here. It just means they're showing a set of signals that we think is worth time and attention.
- [21:31]
A
Right? Oh, there's so many tools too, like signal tools now that folks are. That too.
- [21:38]
B
That's all well and good, but these all have to be on a dashboard because you have to look at the metrics in totality. If you over rotate on just one, it's not going to work.
- [21:45]
A
Right. What about win rate?
- [21:47]
B
So then I think you've got the journey. You got to track total new pipeline. Then you got to talk pipeline velocity, win rate by segment, average deal size, and then you do track effectiveness. Right. So what is the. The total amount of pipeline dollars being created divided by the total amount of marketing investment dollars. Those don't go away. You're just trying to break the gumball machine mentality. I think there's a third column around the post sale journey which has historically been ignored. Are my customers engaging? Am I driving expansion pipeline? Am I driving product adoption? First time to value net revenue retention, net promoter score and that kind of thing like those all I think needs to be part of that kind of single CMOS dashboard so that you have a holistic view of what's happening.
- [22:34]
A
Why do you think that's been an afterthought?
- [22:36]
B
For many reasons. Right. I mean, I think that there's been a perception for a long time, Right. That like the hard part is getting new business. So marketing should focus there and once it's a customer. Yeah. All that other stuff like our account managers can take care of that. We already know those people. We don't need to market to them.
- [22:54]
A
Right.
- [22:54]
B
That mindset was literally so pervasive, it got built into Marketo.
- [23:00]
A
Oh really?
- [23:01]
B
Like the product itself and our process, like literally when we were counting MQLs, let's say we would ignore MQLs from our existing customers.
- [23:12]
A
Yeah. Would you still count them though?
- [23:15]
B
No, they were literally ignored because we only were caring about new business pipeline.
- [23:21]
A
Yeah. But you know what the. What's ironic about that is sometimes we see people not even knowing, being able to see which MQLs are actually customers and they count those as MQLs, which totally inflates their like MQL metric.
- [23:35]
B
Well, that's a problem too, you know, to not be able to separate them in the Marketo revenue cycle Modeler. Like the product that actually maps the customer journey, it ends at opportunity. Close.
- [23:46]
A
Yeah, right.
- [23:46]
B
It ends on close one. Like. Yeah, but what about everything afterwards? Like this, it wasn't built into the product.
- [23:52]
A
I think a lot of companies are still operating that way where anything post sale is just a total afterthought. But I think it's a product of like we just. Marketing doesn't get measured on it. Therefore why would marketing spend their time on it?
- [24:05]
B
I also ran into a challenge at Marketo where like I had mistakenly trained the CFO that the way we're going to fund marketing is based on my reverse waterfall. So they would tell me how much new ARR we need, which we could then translate into, okay, that means I need this many deals, which means I need this many opportunities, which means I need this many MQLs, which means I need this many prospects, which means I need to run these many campaigns, which means I need this much budget. That was literally. We had a spreadsheet with all that math and it was great because they could say, well, we're going to cut your budget by 10%. And I could say, okay, well that's going to generate this much less ARR from you three quarters from now. Do you want to do that? Of course not. But the problem with it was, well, many problems with that thinking because it's not true. But also there was zero budget in that model to market to customers because it was all based on this like waterfall of net new business.
- [24:58]
A
Wow, that's eye opening. So aside from the fact that it, you know, didn't support you at all in any sort of life cycle marketing, why else did you think that that was a mistake going about it that way? And like how would you go about it differently now you're to do it all over again.
- [25:10]
B
I mean marketing's gotta be part of the post sale discussion and I think people are coming around to that. I will say the existing marketing platforms like Marketo still make that hard. So I think people understand now that it needs to be part of the equation and how marketing is perceived and measured. But it's still hard for a lot of companies.
- [25:30]
A
Yeah, hard because they don't have a framework. Hard because they don't have a tool. Like what makes it hard. Hard because they don't have buy in from leadership or like all of those things.
- [25:37]
B
All of those things. I mean there's even a tactical reason it's hard which is the air traffic control problem of who gets to mail a customer when. That's a problem for prospects too. But it's way harder for customers. Right. Where if you don't manage this you could easily end up mailing your customers, you know, nine, ten times a week.
- [25:57]
A
Yeah, I've definitely, I've felt that personal challenge and in my own like in house roles for sure, super tactical.
- [26:04]
B
But it's just one of the many problems of why post sale has got its own set of challenges.
- [26:09]
A
Yeah. So we're talking a lot about mistakes, common mistakes and what people should be doing. So let's talk about. I've got a question in here about CMO survival. You alluded to this before but like what in your opinion makes an exceptional CMO in 2026? Not a good one. There's a lot of good CMOs. An exceptional one.
- [26:29]
B
I do first off think it is the, their ability to work cross functionally to convince their peers about what it means to do marketing effectively in 2026.
- [26:42]
A
Yeah. In education. Yeah.
- [26:44]
B
To be a change agent, you know, for how marketing operates and how marketing is measured. I think that the exceptional ones think about Some version of all four of the P's. Historically the especially the B2B CMO is extremely focused on promotion.
- [27:06]
A
Yeah. Do you think we over rotated on that and the era of like demand gen which really had its moment in early 2000s?
- [27:12]
B
Totally, totally. Which is I mean exactly why I sort of said like we've over rotated on that versus brand and a bunch of other things. Chanda part of who is the head of GoToMarket for Workado. He was one of the CMOs at Marketo after me. He actually has this great framework for like what are the new four Ps for marketing? And I may not get them all right. But he's got promotion, he's got perception which is the brand side of things. He's got I think pricing, you know. Cause like that is a really key piece of things that, that are missed. And I'm going to forget his fourth. But the point is like I think the modern cmo, the exceptional CMO isn't just thinking about promotion.
- [27:52]
A
Agree. I always come back to perception because I just like I came up through, you know, I started my career in journalism and I've always said that I think anybody with like a storytelling bone in their body makes a really good marketer because so much of what makes marketing successful is the ability to cut through the noise and tell a good story and create a positive perception of your brand in the market. So like that always it's.
- [28:16]
B
I don't know if that has to be the cmo.
- [28:20]
A
No, not necessarily. But.
- [28:23]
B
Well go ahead and finish your point then I'll make my point.
- [28:24]
A
No, I agree with you but I think any real good cmo, especially now in with a proliferation of AI needs to know that like we are coming back to this notion of perception mattering probably more than anything. That's my opinion. But probably more than anything right now for being really important.
- [28:44]
B
By the way, I did look up John Darr's 4Ps. The other one was positioning which makes a lot of sense. So the point I was just making there, I think the reason I said well do the CMO have to be the storyteller or not? I think the other thing that an exceptional CMO also has to have is an understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses and their ability to hire into their gaps and not their strengths. I always talk about there's no such thing as a unicorn CMO who is great at brand and positioning or let's say brand and creative, who's great at product marketing and positioning and who's great at demand and promotions and things like that, you usually are going to get a CMO who has a major in one and a minor in the other and a gap in the third. But the exceptional cmo, that doesn't matter because they are an exceptional manager and our leader who can hire and motivate and lead teams that can be great at all three of those functions.
- [29:42]
A
I always too think about marketing. Oh man, it's. There's just. It's one of those functions that oversees so much responsibility. In my opinion, which I think is directly relates to what you're saying is that you're not going to be good at all of that. But I often think about marketing as like equal parts in arts and a science. It's hard to be really good at both. But in my opinion, the science component now matters so much because everything we do needs to be, in my opinion, very data driven. So with that said, we have a really big CMO audience here in this community. And so one of the common like complaints that we often get is Rev Ops is a blocker in that it prevents CMOs and leadership from getting their hands on the data that they need to see. And they have a really hard time tying their activities to outcomes and things like that. Have you seen that and have you felt that in your own experience? And do you have any advice on that?
- [30:38]
B
So at Demand Base, I actively resisted forming a rev OPS group because I base was like, I'm not willing to give up marketing ops. I was like, this is too important to me to sort of not be able to directly control that function. Very first thing the CEO did when I left and the new CEO came in is pulled out OPS and made a rev OPS group underneath the cfo. So it's clear that that's a trend companies want to take. I haven't directly experienced it myself, so I don't know if I can give that kind of specific feedback. Ultimately, every CMO I've spoken with who is happy here, regardless of whether the OPS rolls up to them or not fully, they have still dedicated resources.
- [31:23]
A
I think that's the important part is having a dedicated resource for one and having whether or not you oversee it, the function or not, but having a collaborative relationship or partnership with that individual, I think if you don't, in my opinion, I think it can be a really big inhibitor for a lot of companies. And so we personally want to help, help make that more accessible to them.
- [31:46]
B
Yep.
- [31:47]
A
So how much can you tell me about your new company? Because I was going to, I want to go down the AI path and I have things. Yeah.
- [31:55]
B
We're not in stealth because what I'm doing is so secretive I can't tell anybody. We're in stealth because what I'm doing is big and hard and it takes a long time and I didn't want to kind of have this big coming out party and then not have a product for another year or so. So what we're doing is we're really trying to tee into the opportunity that I think is created by the stagnation of the existing marketing platforms like Marketo. I always like to tell people we started Marketo the same month that my son was born and he turned 22 days ago.
- [32:26]
A
Wow.
- [32:26]
B
So it's very easy to keep track of the fact that Marketo and HubSpot are 20 years old, Eloqua is 25 years old, Pardot is 18 years old. With the exception of HubSpot which is still a standalone company like all the other platforms are stagnating inside of their corporate parents and they aren't evolving for the new playing. The way marketing works today like we've been talking about, they aren't account based, they can't handle post sale very well, they can't handle the anonymous portion of the buying process very well and they're also not doing a very good job of keeping on top of like all the new possibilities that come from AI. So what I'm building is a modern AI native alternative to the legacy marketing platforms. So it's not a thing you have to buy to add on to your existing stack. It will replace Marketo or your existing platform, but on a much more modern and AI enabled infrastructure.
- [33:22]
A
That is very exciting. I saw your domain in your email and I did some poking around. Of course nothing exists yet on there, but I assumed it was going to be a very AI forward platform. So that's very, very exciting because I do think that the industry needs that. But on that, how are you seeing AI as an accelerant? I see AI creating a lot of liability. Maybe I'm just a little bit of a pessimist, but I'm very curious to understand your stance on that.
- [33:48]
B
I do these CMO dinners a couple times a year and one of the I always ask people how do they rate their current sophistication of their use of AI and what are the use cases that are really doing. And I will say I've seen a little evolution of the last 12 months. 12 months ago Most people were like using it to create content. Oh yeah, I like gave it my webinar and it wrote me a blog post and the most sophisticated use cases were like, oh, and I made a custom GPT that understands my CEO and so I can like run ideas by my GPT before I run them by my CEO, you know, that kind of thing. So I'm like, okay, so that was the state of the art even seven or eight months ago.
- [34:27]
A
That's crazy to think of that. That was like state of the art.
- [34:31]
B
That's what most at the time. But the reality is like I talked to an enterprise marketer yesterday and her company, they only let them use AI over copilot. They literally can't access any other AI tool. So when you're in an enterprise that's like that, it's maybe not surprising that you're going to be behind. But I was going to say is like the dinner I had just this, this last week. We're moving ahead, you know, I think we're moving beyond just let me generate a blog post to more let me create insights that are useful. And I do see people using different platforms, but kind of playing with the email personalization at scale issue, right? Which is, you know, in some ways that replaces, I think, SDRs more than it changes marketing. And I still think that there is hesitancy from people to truly let these things run autonomously on the important accounts. So that's where I see the state of the art today, but where I think things are going. So I was talking to a large enterprise company yesterday and they said their fiscal year 27 priority, which they just started, their fiscal year 27 is personalization. But to them, personalization isn't. Let me write. Have an AISDR write you a different email than somebody else. To them, personalization is how do I make sure that each buyer, each person, each account is getting their own journey that's right for them across the full
- [36:01]
A
buyer life cycle, end to end. Okay. Yeah.
- [36:04]
B
And it's funny because, you know, so they were initially thinking about that a little bit in more the traditional mindset, which is let me craft seven journeys on my whiteboard and then we can plop people into the right one. You can even say, oh, but we can use AI because there's. There can be a smart branch in one of these journeys and AI can decide should they go left or right in that. I'm like, okay, that's cool. But then I introduced the analogy of a Spotify playlist where you ask the AI DJ to mix you up a playlist and you can tell it. This is what I want and all that kind of thing. And if you go do that, you're going to get a completely different playlist than I'm going to get. That's a more AI native way of thinking. Right. Rather than let me craft these journeys that are still just fancy versions of if this and that, let's actually let an AI curate a playlist that's appropriate for each person that we care about, each customer, each journey, and then the AI will automatically adjust it as that buyer moves through their life cycle. That's where I think things need to go.
- [37:10]
A
I think so too. Especially I'm seeing a lot of at least like in our own wheelhouse, we're seeing a lot of mid market or companies selling a mid market or enterprise where there's multiple buying committee members, super long sales cycles. And one, a lot of them aren't really doing a good job of marketing to them. And two, if they are, they're sending them like blanket messaging. And so I think now there's this level of expectation from buyers that we meet them where they're at and that they should have a very highly customized journey based on who they are, where they're at in the journey based on, you know, their signals, based on how they've interacted with your marketing so far. That would be a very cool world to be in if that was the reality.
- [37:56]
B
And we've been unable to achieve that in the past because both. You can't do it with traditional marketing platforms which are glorified if this, then that based rule systems. You could even do it with traditional machine learning models because the data is just too sparse is the technical term. There's, there's just too many things a person in B2B can do compared to the amount of data that we have to train on. And so traditionally we had to flatten a bunch of the rich data into a smaller set of features to train ML models on. Which is why 6 sense and demand base and lead space and infer and all the predictive analytics companies that have come through B2B, none of them really, really nailed it because the data didn't support traditional ML models. I think what's so exciting about today, you know, is we have AI that can actually reason, like I could give your profile to a human, like a smart human and say, okay, we've got Carolyn here, this is what we know about her. How should we market to her to move the relationship forward? A human can reason and figure that out. And now AI can do that too. That allows us to now Create a truly personalized journey for a million people in the database or 5 million people in the database in a way that just was not possible before.
- [39:17]
A
It's very cool to think about seeing something like that really work in practice. When I like literally just got off a call with a company that's like, we want to do abm, but none of these contacts even live in CRM. We don't know where they are. How can we do abm? We don't even know what their role is in the buying committee. And like, I can definitely relate to what you were saying around scarcity of data and that being preventative, we're still analog in so many ways. At least that's what I've seen. So I think it would be a solution. Yeah.
- [39:50]
B
And that connects back to the other problem with traditional platforms because they don't handle the anonymous stage well. They don't. Marketo doesn't understand accounts. It can't handle any of that kind of stuff. Why should you have to buy two platforms, one for people, one for accounts? And we also talked about Marketo can't handle post sale very well. Like why should you have to buy another platform for that? It's just too complicated. And that's why I think there is an opportunity for something new and modern.
- [40:11]
A
So will, you don't have to answer this if you don't want to, but will your new companies be solving for any of that?
- [40:16]
B
Yeah, of course.
- [40:17]
A
Very cool. What's the timeline for your launch of that sometime Q3.
- [40:21]
B
I think we're signing up beta and pilot customers right now. So if you're thinking about replacing your Marketo, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. But I think we'll sort of come out of Stealth in probably Q3.
- [40:33]
A
Oh, that's so cool. I'm so excited to see what you're going to be doing there. So on that note, we've almost been at it for an hour and I love everything that you're sharing, so thank you. But you know, just like a quick ecosystem gut check, what excites you most about the world of marketing and what makes you just want to flip a table over still, let's end on that.
- [40:54]
B
Yeah, well, I think it's a good way to end because it sort of summarizes some of the things that we sort of talked about. I mean, I, I think hopefully my excitement about finally being able to deliver on the one to one future is what motivates me to do what I'm doing right now. The One to One Future is a book that came out in 1993 by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. I graduated college in 94. In many ways my entire career from epiphany to marketo to engage IO and demand base and now this new one has been pursuing the one to one future and I think we may actually be able to get there with modern AI capabilities. That's assuming that the world doesn't fall apart because of modern AI capabilities. Which doesn't make me want to flip a table, but does keep me up at night. I'm obviously excited about AI and I also think it's a real threat to societal stability that needs to be probably better managed than it's being managed.
- [41:45]
A
Yeah, I definitely think about that a lot too.
- [41:48]
B
Not to end on too down or a note but I think it's important for us to sort of be thinking about not only what is, what are all the possibilities but what does it mean. And then what makes me want to flip a table is when people want to treat marketing like a gumball machine.
- [42:00]
A
Yeah. What would your advice be? So I see that a lot. We see a lot of very capable, very smart VP senior level. I'm talking people who've worked at some of the best companies and still really struggle to get their leadership aligned around something different. What would you tell them? What would be the best advice you could give?
- [42:23]
B
Well one, we sort of talked about how to sort of be Socratic to get people to kind of get there I think two, don't go at it alone. If you and the head of sales and the head of customer success and the head of rev ops are all going to the CFO saying this stuff doesn't work, then it's not a marketing problem anymore or a marketing complaint. It's a go to market complaint and that's very powerful. And then third, if you can't still can't get there, life's too short to keep banging your head against the wall. Maybe there's a better company to work at.
- [42:55]
A
Yeah, I can so relate to that. I actually started that journey when I was in house going it alone and let me tell you, it was exhausting. It'll kill you eventually and really weigh on you from like an emotional very viscerally and emotionally. So I have a very empathetic for leaders in that scenario just through my own lived experience. But I do agree that we spend majority of our life working so I think we should all be doing something that is fulfilling. And I think there's a lot of companies right now that are looking for that level of experience and discernment. So, yeah, I think that's great advice. Thanks for sharing that. Great.
- [43:34]
B
Well, this is a great conversation.
- [43:36]
A
Thanks for being part of it. I really appreciate you taking the time. And I think our audience is really, really going to love listening to this and, you know, listening to your opinion. It's one of those things where we, we talk about this problem over and over and over again. But I think hearing it from folks like yourself, who are just so highly respected and regarded in our space is super informational and helpful for this community. So, yeah, I appreciate you being a part of that.
- [44:01]
B
Great. Well, thank you. Cheers.
- [44:15]
A
Sam.