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Marketing Trends
From Demand Gen to AI: Navigating the New Marketing Landscape
00:37:24
Is automation really the future of marketing, or is it just a passing trend? In this episode, Bryan Urioste, CMO of Redwood Software, dives into the topic of automation in marketing and its impact on demand generation. Plus, he shares a step-by-step approach to building high-performing marketing teams and aligning sales and marketing for maximum impact.
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- [00:00]
A
I am very, very excited to. Lately I've been getting to nerd out on AI pretty much the last several conversations I've had. Epic leaders talking about epic things. But the conversations kind of veer towards AI. Admittedly today we've got another really epic human being who's been deep in that world. I already know this because I know what he's been up to, at least a high level. And so I'm very stoked to introduce Brian Urioste, the Chief Marketing Officer at Redwood Software. Brian, welcome to Marketing Trends.
- [00:33]
B
Well, thank you for having me. I'm super excited to, to, to talk about what's going on in the world of marketing and if we head down the path of AI, that's fun too.
- [00:42]
A
Okay, cool. So I know we talked a little bit about some of the things that you, you, you, you do dig and like to nerd out on. One of the things I want to put a pin in and maybe open up now is, you know, demand gen, right? You, you come from a demand gen world. You' think about specifically B2B demand gen A lot in our world of how we are leveraging our network and how we work with some of the partners. And like, we just love to talk demand gen and we love to hear from thought leaders like yourself who come from that space who very much still do a lot in the space of demand gen. Give us your kind of, you know, state of the industry in terms of demand gen in your world, what are you seeing? What's changed? Like what's table stakes, what's different? You know, I'd love to hear your perspective.
- [01:29]
B
There's, I'm not a big gotta be innovating every day kind of guy. You know, I believe in innovation, but there's so much that works at the end of the day, you know, I care about yield. If it's not something that's gonna present well on a stage at some conference, I honestly don't care. The reason I'm hired is to help grow a company. And you grow a company by generating new bookings, retaining customers and expanding those customers. And so I feel like the science and the innovation comes in finding the things that work best. Right. And so when I think about the world of demand gen, a lot of the core principles like the four P's still matter. That hasn't changed, still matters. I learned that a long time ago and it still comes up. You know, I think the notion of segmentation is still one of the most powerful. You know, before we start talking about cool tech and, and and automation and AI and triggers and, and whatnot. Like man, if you don't know who you're talking to and what they care about and what is an event that is going to trigger them to make a change, then it kind of doesn't matter. Right. So you know, when I, when I think about the world of demand gen there, there are today, there are obviously, you know, many of the tools that have been around for a long time, but there are more tools to, to do segmentation better to get in front of folks in a different and a more segmented way. And so for me it all, you know, demand gen all starts with you know, kind of that notion of finding the right buyer, getting the right message to them when it matters the most. You'll probably hear me say this too many times. It's about yield, right. So you think about the work that you're doing. You know, this is how we, we hold marketers accountable. You know, leading indicators matter for sure. But at the end of the day it's did you generate pipeline that turned into a bookings dollar? It's not that you're not responsible. Your responsibility does not end so far up funnel that it hasn't created impact for the business. Doesn't mean you control everything, of course. Right. But I very much think as a full funnel marketer, as a cmo, my value to the company comes in generating bookings. And so we as marketers have to care about all those things and deploy all the tech, all the tools, all the latest ideas as well as the old ones to get there.
- [04:05]
A
Okay. And you're also, Redwood is also not just serving one segment. Right. You have multiple industries, massive scale. So that, that tells me there's like buckets of, you know, problems and things that you're solving for. These different, these different segments take us kind of a layer, a layer into. Now one talk about the industries that you're serving to give our audience some context. But then like what are the, are the problems vastly different in each segment? Are you like. Actually no. What John in logistics experience is the same as, you know, Suzy and telecom or whatever it is. What are you seeing across the, the different audience voices that you have to cater to and you get to cater to.
- [04:43]
B
Yeah. So first, without being a shameless plug, let me give like the super fast. What is Redwood Software? What do we do? We're an automation company. At the end of the day that is what we do. We automate mission critical complex business process, business and IT processes to deliver outcomes that companies are seeking. And so One of the challenges as a marketer of a company like Redwood is we have a very horizontal platform. One of the things we say out in the market is, you know, know, anything that can be automated should be automated. Right. Okay, so that leaves a lot of stuff. Right. And so the platform itself and think more back office automation than like replicating, you know, some, a user clicking on a mouse. This is, you know, thousands of applications talking to each other millions of times a day in order to complete something like closing the books or enabling an order to cash process at a $20 billion company. Right. You like humanity is sort of not able to do that anymore because we have, we've become so productive and created all this technology that you need technology to, to orchestrate it all. There's sort of this horizontal concept of how do you add value with an automation platform? But I think where it, it starts getting really interesting is when you start solving very, you know, however you want to think about it, more specific business problems. And the business problem could be what I was just mentioning your utilities company, a big utilities company and you have all this tech in place that collects data from a meter on the street and processes through all these applications and ultimately somebody, the business wants to get paid and so strings this all together. And so as a segment, there's a very unique audience there. Right. And their outcome, they're not solving for automation, honestly, they kind of don't care. They're solving for efficiently collecting that data and deliver and delivering, you know, along the way so that ultimately they get paid. And when they get paid faster and more accurately and they're not, you know, pissing off their customers because they're, they're sending double bills or inaccurate bills or late bills or whatever it may be, their business is better off. And we've seen with some of our, many of our customers, it enables them actually to do some things differently. It just provides, not to mention just differentiation in the market. And so as a marketer, that is a much more unique message to, yes, the IT team that is probably at the end of the day responsible for that chain of automation. But at the same time there's a business user there that cares about that meter to cash process completing. And so I could talk automation all day long and dynamic scheduling to the business user and they're going to glaze over pretty quickly. But if I tell them, you know, we're going to shorten the cycle of a financial close or we're going to, you know, whatever, something that they can relate to, then I'm going to get them on the hook and they're going to want to talk to us because it's a, I mean, it's a pain that a lot of them already have and it's something they can, they can resonate with. And so then my job is just getting that message in front, in front of them as efficiently as possible, I.
- [07:55]
A
Guess, considering all of the different industries that you're serving, is it like in terms of the pulse of automate, of the world of automation that you're serving now? Are you finding that your prospects, customers are already down the road with automation, that Redwood's actually coming and just improving what they have already in place? Or is it, hey, look, you're still missing a ton of opportunity because these things aren't talking. And so is it still more of that, like, coming in and connecting layers and synchronizing things like you described? Or is it. No, actually they've got other tools in place. It's just. Redwood does it better.
- [08:31]
B
Well, I mean, I'd be hard pressed not to say Redwood does it better, but it is all of the above. And actually one of the assets that we recently created was an automation maturity assessment, because it's a very real thing. And it's interesting because we interact with enterprises large and small that have no core enterprise automation solution in place. And so they have like, you know, just a dearth of scripting that a bunch of people have to keep up to date is really hard to manage. God forbid somebody leaves, then like, oh my God, how did that work? Right. And so, but, but there's absolute reality there. At the same time, you know, we certainly come into environments where most many large enterprises already have something in place, but it's not serving their need. Oftentimes they will be going through some sort of transformation. And so this is a great trigger for us to think about as marketers. They're going through a cloud transformation. Well, our enterprise automation platform was the first one to go to SaaS. And so we have a lot of credibility there. In other cases, some of the other products on the markets actually do not have a SaaS solution. So they are looking like there is an event there, not driven by automation, but by driven, potentially driven by, you know, something at the corporate level and initiative to get to the cloud. And so, you know, again, we see all varieties of those scenarios where, you know, there's in some cases where we're helping them to move off something messy and expensive and unserviced, and other cases it's a little bit more greenfield and you know, very quickly it's just a better, a better day for, for those customers.
- [10:19]
A
Give me an example, one example of, you know, a project that Redwood has either worked on or working on now of the kind of the scale of the impact that it's having inside of the organization. You give a couple of examples earlier, but is there something that you're just most proud of when you think about the power of Redwood software and kind of what maybe it's a use case or something that's, you know, been really compelling and the impact that it's making at maybe a global scale.
- [10:43]
B
They can be very specific to the use case, for example. Right. So like we did a project with a large, without naming customer names, a large commercial products company. And this was a process where we helped them to significantly, I sort of referenced this before, significantly reduce the time for them of it was basically a supply chain process that they were running. And I can't quote off the top of my head what the improvement was, but to a point where it literally enabled them to make an offer to their customers to shorten the cycle for them to ship to their customers. It was basically like at the end of the day it was automation. It improved a process, but it gave them a new capability that they could offer to their customers because they could deliver more quickly than they could before. And they had the confidence that they would actually be able to back it up because they have data and the process to support behind it. In other cases it's really the cloud transformation one is a very common one. It's their inability to get to the cloud kind of holistically across their company. In some cases it's very ERP driven as well. They've got initiative to take SAP for example. SAP has the Rise initiative which is to get their customers essentially into the cloud, onto the latest instance, get the latest and greatest. Meanwhile, while eliminating all kinds of technical debt that many ERP customers create over time and customizing their solution. And there are countless customers that we have helped make that transition, which again part of a broader mandate for the company to get to the cloud. I think another one, just an obvious one, is we have a solution specifically tailored to not so much industry focus, but more of a use case around the close process. And you can imagine the business implications of reducing the financial close specifically where we, where we support this is in the record to report process and reducing the financial close from 20 days to 10 days or to 5 days. You can imagine, you know, just that the visibility just makes a tremendous difference in Your ability to deploy capital.
- [13:03]
A
Wow. Another, another side of this that I'm curious about, if you're seeing any of this at all, is just kind of the, the democratization of automation, right? I mean you've got a lot of low code, low code, no code tools out there. You've got a lot of businesses just choosing to kind of, you know, do we build, do we buy? You know, where are you seeing a ch. Are you having a challenge, you know, in that, in that way where some businesses are just doing this on their own and building their own kind of automation solutions based on kind of how fast things seem to be moving? Or do you still see the TAM is just so massive that that's not even a concern.
- [13:38]
B
The TAM is massive and just kind of continuously expanding. But I would say less of that, especially in the enterprise because there's so much complexity. But I mean the trend though is actually pretty, is absolutely real. Look, you know, 20 years ago it was, you know, we had very technical people, you know, this is back in like the batch scheduling days of automation. You had to have, you know, a pretty technical capability to deploy that over time. Especially as we're serving more of a business need. You really want business users in there, right? And so this I think also is where even more so AI will play a role, right? Like so, for example, a business user could come in and say, know I want the automation to do this, right? And then instead of them having to script, use custom scripting or you know, do, you know, very complex configuration of a, of a, of a, you know, a job flow of all these different systems, you know, the AI has the, you know, the intelligence essentially to build it for them. You know, another way where that's coming to life is not so much from a building perspective, but a business user's ability to understand what's going on. Again, many of the automation tooling that's been around a while, it's pretty cumbersome. It's not the prettiest thing that you'll see. And so if you want to answer a question, I'm running a financial close, I want to know where it's going to break because stuff happens, there's always stuff going on. You can ask the question to the AI and it's going to tell you, you know, you can start by saying, hey, over the last 36 days, what part of the job, of this job flow aired out the most? It'll let you know. And then you can, you can course correct if you don't. If the AI actually hadn't already found a way around that issue to begin with, but it just, it just makes the information so much more accessible and actionable. So I think, you know, that's, that's a big part of sort of the democracy democratization, like the low code, no code I think is part of it. You know, make it more drag and drop and all that kind of stuff. But what if you didn't even have to click and drag and drop and you just had to ask the question.
- [15:54]
A
Yeah, yeah. Nick, wow. Are AI agents already kind of being enabled on Redwood's platform? Like, is that kind of. I think I hear so much about it now. Like they seem to be everywhere already.
- [16:05]
B
Yeah, let's just say we have, we have a lot of work underway, but we're, we are taking a cautious approach with it because it needs to add value. I mean, I'll tell you, for the most part customers aren't, it is not a key reason that they are looking, it is not like the number one reason that they're looking to buy an automation solution. Today. They're first trying to solve the problem. Can we make the experience better, easier, more transparent? All that kind of stuff is really very much where we're heading. And I think for Redwood in particular, you'll see some announcements in the next, during 2025 in particular around kind of how we're stepping our way through it. We're getting a lot of customer feedback right now on is this valuable? Take for example one of the things that we're testing with clients is around documentation. We have massive amounts of documentation. Very simple thing, help me find the answer. Think about how you find stuff on Google these days. You can provide the information in a much more consumable, less searching around. You can aggregate information into something that is very concise and punchy and really answer the question without having to assemble six different documentation articles and then understand what they mean together.
- [17:22]
A
Where do you see the puck heading here in terms of automation, specifically in your space? Bring us, bring us into the future a little bit. From what you've seen, where does this get to go for businesses in solving their, their complex challenges?
- [17:37]
B
I mean, I think the first thing I'd say is I'm a marketer, I'm not the product guy, product visionary. But you know what I would say is if there was a word, maybe it would be augmentation. And look, I think the same thing in my world as a marketer, there's a role for humans to play. But how do you make that role more impactful and I think that's sort of like kind of a principle that you can think about and I think a little bit where the puck is headed. How much value is there in somebody writing, scripting for an automation workflow? Obviously it's got to get done. If there's an easier way to do it, then great. And so it's empowering the people that you have to be. Superpowered AI can become that enabler of one person feeling like, you know, they can, they can leap a tall building because they've got way more information. They can do, you know, 10 times as much in a day because they, they've got a tool that helps them to, to do that. And then over time there's sort of the notion of agentic AI where it becomes more, more than just, you know, the, the sort of the, the chatgpt stuff that most people are familiar with. Hey, you answer this question or and draw me a picture of something because I can't draw or something cool. It becomes more decision making oriented. Humanity plays a role in that for sure. And there's some things that the data will be more inclined to enable AI, I think, to make those sorts of decisions, but things that have massive amounts of data that you can take off somebody's plate and flag an error when there's some, when something comes up that you need a human to put the human eye on it, that's somewhere down the road, probably not that far down the road.
- [19:26]
A
Are you seeing like your team leveraging AI, like using it in their roles? Like. And how, how are you? Yeah. What's the impact of that? Like I, Yeah, you know, across, I guess many functions. I imagine a tool like GPT or Claude or Perplexity or one of them could probably be a really cool, you know, a cool thing to add to their tool belt. What are you seeing from just. Yeah, like team and dynamics and how they're using AI specifically? Is it like blowing your mind? Like, I mean, is it blowing their minds? Like, what's the, what's it look like?
- [20:00]
B
Yeah. So I'll tell you a couple things. I think we're testing it like everyone else. We're both understanding the implications of how we can use it as well as what are the impacts to us. You know, obviously like the world of search engine optimization is a little different these days. Right. Your experience is a little different. So what does that mean? The trend is not always going to flip things on its head. At the end of the day, Google's looking for the best content, the most relevant, the most recent Those sorts of things and whatever the front end is may not really matter if they're optimizing still for the same thing. Right. Maybe they've got a better way to find the best thing and so you need to be even better. But you know, within the team, you know, we certainly went through the, what felt like the gold rush of I now have ChatGPT or whatever platform and content creation is I think where a lot of people started. Right, okay. And you know, we went through the iterations of and you know, running things through it and looking at it and saying, is that good? Does that sound right? And you know, we've sort of made our way down the path to it's a tool. Everything with that, every piece of content that we run through it gets human reviewed. There's a process for that and also kind of checked for factual accuracy and copywriting and that sort of thing. Some content naturally lends itself, I think, more to the medium and kind of the approach we're taking is more fact based, informational type content fits that well. Whereas stuff that's more point of view, not so much. We've created some bad content that was intended to be more like a blog with a perspective through some sort of AI tooling. And we said so in that case, use it more as an enabler. I've got an idea for this sentence or paragraph. Help me to craft it in a way, get my seed thought into something more concrete and then maybe copy edit it as well. But you know, we're, I think we're scratching the surface there. As we're entering 2025, one of the things we're doing is we're identifying AI champions in the company and specifically in marketing. So people that just dig it naturally, want to learn about it, have passion for it, are reading stuff out there and you know, we're coming up with ideas whether they're feasible or not. What are the different places where we think there's a play? Salesforce has their agent force concept. Okay, is there a play for AI with an SDR BER role in some capacity? That's interesting. There's a role I think it probably is not ready to play, but there's a volume component to it. There's some repetitive things in there. We're already using tools like outreach to sequence communications. And so we're coming up with a long list and we're going to prioritize them and we're going to experiment like crazy in 2025 based on what we think will have the most impact and go from there, let's talk a little.
- [23:05]
A
Bit about team dynamics. I know you mentioned that earlier in the prep and I want to kind of click into that about just how you think about team dynamics, how you go about building high performing teams. Let's touch on that and get your opinion and experience around that stuff.
- [23:19]
B
It's pretty important in my role as a cmo. Uh, and you know, one of the things I tell people that I mentor or, you know, anybody that asks, I suppose, and since you sort of asked, I'll tell you is, you know, as you develop as a marketer and kind of into more and more leadership roles, I mean, I think a lot about the fact that I need to over time become a better leader than I ever was a marketer. Right. Like now I have to remind my team, hey, I'm still a marketer. So, you know, let me, I have opinions and a little bit of experience. I can probably still weigh in.
- [23:56]
A
Right?
- [23:56]
B
Like the skills are still there. They're not all quite as sharp or latest and greatest, but, you know, there's still something there. But yeah, like, I think that part is essential. I think you have to be curious as a leader and develop that skill set, you know, and it is a, it's a skill to develop over time. I spend a lot of time thinking about team dynamics. And you know, that all starts with hiring, right? Like, hiring is pretty much the, you know, my, my team has all heard me say this. It's the most important thing that you have to do as a, as a manager. So I'm sure you feel the pressure of, you know, this campaign or, or that campaign and it's its performance. And I get it. I'm probably the one asking you about it, right? But when you take, tell people to pause and think about the impact of having a rock star on your team, man, it's like, okay, now I totally get it. And so if you're not, if you've got an open wreck and you're not in LinkedIn, bugging your network, sourcing every day, like, we've got amazing recruiters at Redwood, but look, they're hiring other jobs. We're not the only ones. And so while we get plenty of their time, at the end of the day it's on you. So, you know, just having a, you know, A, caring about it, B, using your network and C, having a process for like something programmatic. And you'll hear, this is another thing that we could kind of spend some time on. Having a playbook matters. It matters kind of across everything that certainly. That we do at. At Redwood, I mean, across the business, but certainly in marketing and hiring is. Is absolutely part of that. From how do you think about your interview team? What does that look like? What do you want each one of them to talk about? Do they know that? How are you going to step your way through the process so that you can give real clarity to every candidate as to what they're in for? And then what's going to get you to the answer about whether there's a right fit or not? At the end of the day, who gets to have a say and stop the bus if they think it's the wrong candidate? And who doesn't? Just all those kinds of things. There's probably many different ways to get there. But having a playbook so that when you make 15 hires and we're going to do a bunch of hiring and marketing over the next 12 months.
- [26:16]
A
Amazing.
- [26:16]
B
Yeah. It makes a big difference. And that applies, again, that concept applies to how we think about search engine marketing. Or our SDR playbook is like. I think it's like 28 pages long or something like that.
- [26:29]
A
Wow. Speaking of kind of the SDR sales marketing alignment, I know you talked about that before and just how much you value the alignment of sales and marketing, it's obviously a big one. It's actually come up a few times this week. I was chatting with Allison Wagenfeld earlier this week. She's the CMO over at Google Cloud and was talking about sales and marketing alignment as well. And I know you have experience in aligning these two worlds. Speaking of playbooks, like, what's in your playbook when it comes to aligning these two really important functions of the business?
- [27:02]
B
The word I would use is funnels. And so when we, you know, I spoke earlier about I have to care about bookings. Right. Bookings are ultimately a big part of how I evaluate my own success and the team success. And so at Redwood, we think of the world as a bunch of funnels. There are people from sales, there are people from marketing. There are, um. But at the end of the day, success is when, you know, we get to that. We drop to the bottom of the funnel and something spits out the bottom. So, like, you know, we have a cadence of. Of a weekly pipeline review meeting, and we go pretty, pretty detailed through multiple different funnels that we have. And a funnel can be, you know, it could be a product line at your company. We have a new logo inbound funnel, a new logo outbound funnel. You could have a channel funnel you could have an expansion funnel, you could have renewals funnel. There's a funnel for everything. Right. But when you operate, not. I mean, obviously we're functional. We have functional skills. Teams are, you know, I'm the cmo, so, like, I have a marketing team, but the team is, you know, is operating as part of that funnel. And so when we have that Thursday pipeline review, if we see that opportunities are stalling between, you know, sort of a demo phase and getting into negotiation, that generally sits squarely in the realm of the account executive. Right. But I'm not off the hook. You know, I want to know. I mean, I really want to know why stuff that deep is not moving forward. And it could be something enabling. And so, hey, product marketing, there's probably something that we can help from a messaging, from a content perspective. And, you know, so, you know, your job for the next four weeks is to figure out how to improve conversion from 50% to 70% at demo to negotiation. When you look at it holistically and then look at the data at that level of granularity, then you've got this. There is no. Sales isn't doing this or market. It doesn't matter. The funnel's either failing or it's succeeding. Yes, you divide and conquer in the work in ways that make sense based on the skill sets, but we have a ton of alignment because, again, at the end of the day, my CRO and myself are failing if we're not getting the performance at the bottom of that funnel.
- [29:18]
A
I was going to ask about the CRO as well. Like, in terms of accountability, are you both sharing accountability? Like, hey, we're both accountable for essentially pipeline and revenue. Or do you have separate metrics that you're both driving?
- [29:31]
B
Yeah, I mean, practically speaking, at the board level, for better and worse, for glory and pain, you know, like, he's talking bookings, and so he's got, you know, kind of the overall accountability there. And probably the most direct accountability I have is at the pipeline level. But again, we're looking at the world as a funnel, and so we're looking at both of those metrics together as we're solving for bookings.
- [30:01]
A
All right, here's a lightning round. This will be fun. And these, I encourage you, just answer kind of from the heart, from the gut. Don't take too long to think about it. Just what comes up first. Number one, what's a recent marketing trend that you are tired of hearing about?
- [30:16]
B
This is not that recent, but this is more of a pet peeve. I hate the Word Omnichannel. Hate it.
- [30:21]
A
Oh, okay. I love that one. I haven't heard omnichannel in a little while. So you brought it back a little bit.
- [30:27]
B
It's making its way back. It sounds like a word a marketer would come up with to say something smart. And the reality is you pick the channels. That way it goes back to yield. Pick the channels that work. It doesn't have to be all of them. Of course you're going to meet your audience wherever they are. That's, that's obvious. We don't need a special word for it.
- [30:45]
A
That's great.
- [30:46]
B
That's so good.
- [30:48]
A
Which, which marketer or marketing book has influenced you the most?
- [30:53]
B
The books that I typically recommend to my team, like an oldie and goodie, is don't make me think. Like the concepts there are just timeless. It's a web design book as much as anything. But like it's such a basic concept for marketers. We, we, we have such a tendency to overthink things. And then the other one that I love is Hacking Marketing by Scott Brinker.
- [31:16]
A
Oh, that's a great one.
- [31:17]
B
It's such, it's such a good one. And so like we didn't talk much about this, but we take a very agile approach to our business and, and, and marketing as well. And we could talk how we think sprints and we get very micro as we are thinking macro at the same time. But like that book is a great primer for that kind of thinking.
- [31:36]
A
If you weren't in marketing, what would you be doing, Brian?
- [31:40]
B
Well, I started my career as a developer and I was really bad at it. So not that.
- [31:45]
A
Okay.
- [31:46]
B
Probably some, you know, honestly, probably something customer facing, go to market, maybe I'd be on the sales side. Um, I, I'm, you know, I grew up as an athlete, love to compete, love being close to the action. Um, so probably something over there. And unfortunately I don't have any hidden like painting skills or anything. That would be a different, totally different profession.
- [32:07]
A
What's the best piece of marketing advice that you've ever received?
- [32:12]
B
It was from my CMO and it was really more about how to be a great marketing leader and how to think about your career. So if you'll take that as an example, think about your career and what you do, your current job and the next job as a stool. Right. And as you're thinking about your next job, if, if you can, if there's three legs of the stool and you can do all three of those legs walking into the job, it's a great job for them and it's a terrible job for you. And if you can walk in the job and there's one of those stools that you're like, oh my God, I don't know what to do. Pit in the stomach, fear. That's a, that's a really good opportunity for you. And if you can handle the one for. There's just one stool, one leg of the stool. And you know you're probably going to fall flat on your face at some point. Then you know that you're really, you're really going for it. And you need to make sure that you've got somebody that's supporting you to pick you back up when that, when that happens. And in my experience it tends to be earlier in career, that's a little bit more achievable. I think I'd probably get fired if I fell on my face that, that hard in the CMO role. But it's a, I think it's just a very simple way to think about career and how to think about the skills that you want to develop as a, as a marketer or really in.
- [33:27]
A
Kind of any angle, Apple or Android. And why.
- [33:31]
B
Oh, Apple, Apple all day long. I'm an ecosystem guy. I love that my watch can both check me in at the airport, pay at my grocery store and control my, my tv. It's the best.
- [33:45]
A
It's the best. Okay, last one. What is your biggest marketing prediction for 2025?
- [33:53]
B
Oh, you know, it's. It's going to be tough not to just follow the trend here. I mean, I believe AI is going to have an impact. I don't think it's going to be like as, you know, kind of, we talked a little before. I don't think it's going to be. Turn the world completely upside on its head. But I think the way we think about it's going to get smarter. And so we're going to find better ways to utilize what's already available. We're going to find the things that didn't work and stop making those mistakes. And I think the tooling is going to get more integrated into things that we're already doing. Like imagine if your predictive analytics platform or abm, whatever the platform, whatever they're called today, ABM is a whole other topic we could talk about. I got some opinions there.
- [34:41]
A
That's another one as well.
- [34:43]
B
But imagine if the prediction capabilities and how you engage those accounts and those contacts could get even smarter. Like that would be. I'd like to see that, you know, bidding algorithms, you know, all that kind of stuff. I think we're just going to see it maybe 2025 is a year that we see more integration because, you know, we're all trying to make stuff up when it's sort of just this standalone interface of what do I ask the AI versus integration, where, you know, the, you know, whoever's building that application is thinking about how do I make the experience better? Which back to our conversation earlier, like, that's a lot of how we're thinking about it with our own products.
- [35:23]
A
Mm. Okay. Now there are many people that listen to this show who are either, you know, Fortune 1000 CMO or aspiring marketing leaders. So speaking to the folks who are aspiring, kind of eyeing the CMO role.
- [35:38]
B
Right?
- [35:39]
A
Eyeing the role that you're in and doing quite well at. What's one piece of advice you would share to those aspiring marketing leaders?
- [35:46]
B
First, make sure it's a job that you want. So I get the aspiration and I love it. It is definitely a great fit. Kind of, you know, going back to a point I made earlier, your job as a CMO is first about being a great leader and hiring great people and to some degree inspiring them. Hiring great people. They tend to be self inspired, you know, if you hire the right people. So, you know, I think really understand the role first. You know, that would probably be the one nugget because the best quarterbacks don't always make the best coaches. There's probably a million technologies out there, right?
- [36:30]
A
Yes. I love it. Awesome. Well, Brian, thank you so much, man. You were at an interesting intersection of the world that you and the Redwood Software team, I mean, you're there, you're on the cutting edge of where businesses are going to be moving and where industries are going to be moving using automation. It's ridiculous and impressive. So I've been nerding out on this since 2022 when GPT first came alive. So now I'm paying attention to the world that you're serving. It's very fascinating. So thank you for making time to come on the show. We're very grateful and a big shout out to you and the whole Redwood Software team.
- [37:04]
B
Yeah, well, I appreciate it and I wholeheartedly agree with you. The challenges are out there. The world needs automation and AI to solve some of these problems. They're becoming too big for our own heads to handle independently. So great technology is going to be a great enabler.
- [37:25]
A
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