D (6:04)

Great.

B (6:07)

All right, real quick, let's just go around the horn. Let's go. Sarah, Jenny, Tara, quick intro who you are, who are you, what's your company do? And then just set context of the stage of the company for people so we can get a sense of where you're coming at things. And then, you know, I actually got some killer prep for this. I got a bunch of questions that I want to go through. I did this myself. A little help from the AI machines, but I got some good questions here. So Sarah, kick us off please.

E (6:30)

Awesome. Yes. Hi everyone, I'm Sarah Jamie and I run the branding and communications department at Sochi. We're a hundred million dollar ARR late stage enterprise AI platform for local marketing. Mouthful, but we offer a suite of local marketing solutions. Our company is about 5, 600 people, primarily based in North America. Our marketing team is about 40 to 50 people and that encompasses demand gen product marketing, SDRs and then my team which I oversee branding, creative content and social communications and PR market research. But I partner broadly with our full marketing team on really our integrated marketing plan.

B (7:12)

Okay, I'm going to ask you, I come up with this on the fly, but I'm asking each of you, at this stage in the game, based on where we were two or three years ago, has AI met, exceeded or under delivered on the expectations that you've had for it for your company?

E (7:26)

Can I go with an all of the above?

B (7:30)

Sure.

E (7:31)

Yes.

C (7:31)

Yes. Good.

E (7:32)

I think ChatGPT has exceeded my expectations. I think there are some new tools like lovable that are meeting them that I'm eager to try and I think there are some things that have fallen short, particularly AI video with avatars. Like I'm still not there yet.

B (7:48)

Yeah, I hear you. Okay. All right, good answer. Jenny, you're up next.

D (7:51)

I'm with you. Can I plus one to that too? Yeah. Hi everybody, I'm Jenny Delavonte Mullen. I am the chief Marketing officer at nac. Love the intro, Dave. I've been at NAC for four months now, so still fairly new at nac, but previously I was NAC obsessed customer and I have held CMO and demand gen leadership roles at SaaS companies. NAC is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada and we focus on North America. I'm based out of Stanford, Connecticut, so just right above New York City. And I'm not going to go into it too much, but as Dave said, like we're an AI powered, no code creation platform. Really excited that we're bringing creation back into the hands of the marketers so our team can create those emails and landing pages fast on brand, ready to send without touching code or relying on agencies. And we're at a growth stage, so we're a growth stage SaaS, AI company. We're roughly about 120 people. We're serving large enterprise marketing teams that are in high tech, pharma, financial services, insurance, retail, like B2B and B2C. And my role spans all of marketing from brand to product marketing, demand gen, you know, really focused also on obviously pipeline and revenue growth in our marketing operations. So really excited to be here. And yeah, AI has exceeded in most areas too. But when it comes to video, when it even still comes to image creation, I think there's still ways to go but I see it changing literally by the minute. So I'm really excited for this discussion today.

B (9:26)

All right, we'll get into the meat of it. Ms. Tara. What's up girl? Good to see you. Tara and I are Vermont friends by the way and we've officially, after two years of avoiding each other, we're actually going to go for a hike in two weeks. I'm excited for that. So who are you? Tara.

C (9:40)

Which we strategically planned this morning. So go us.

B (9:43)

Yeah. Well, you might want to wait till I get the lice out of the system.

C (9:45)

Oh, I do. Well, I think you're okay.

B (9:48)

I think I'll be okay.

C (9:51)

Well, hi everyone. So nice to be here. Thanks for including me in the in the non webinar but my name is Tara Robertson. I'm the chief marketing officer at Bitly. I see some Bitly marketing team members in the chat and also some friends. So hi to everybody that I know and hi to everybody that I don't know. Excited to connect. Who is Bitly? Bitly is synonymous with links if you know who we are. But we are the world's leading connections platform where we essentially drive links, QR codes, landing pages and robust analytics for mainly marketing professionals. Bitly is a fully product led business. We're roughly around 130 million ARR. But we, we drive a lot. We have two main website properties that bring over 4 million new users on a monthly basis. We drive roughly 1.4 million. Yep, that's our most recent number. Signups between trials and signups on a monthly basis which then bring roughly almost 18,000 new subscribers. So we've got 600,000 customers worldwide and continue to grow. And I have the absolute honor to serve and work alongside the amazing marketing individuals. Roughly about 30 people that are doing all the crazy amazing work that I'll be talking about today. So if you're on, thank you. If you're listening, thank you.

B (11:06)

We already got some love for your marketing. Kimberly. I'm a huge fan of Billy's marketing emails lately, someone on your team is crushing it. And Amanda says the same thing.

C (11:15)

That is Devin. And I will say as we get into AI, Devin and Joanne on our Lifecycle email team, they actually do not use AI. We get a lot of questions when we send out the emails of like, oh yeah, AI conversation. You're just, you know, not a human behind this, but actually incredible creative team.

B (11:31)

So that's a perfect, that's a perfect example, by the way. Like, those are the things that like, yes, every company has a newsletter, every company sends out emails, but the way that you're standing out is actually by putting like the human in the mix and spending time to write. Okay, I got my questions over here. So let's go in reverse order or, you know, feel free if someone's super passionate about this to jump up. But I want to get right into the, right into the what's not working. So we all, we all have examples of AI and it's so great and how it's working and everything. But give me the most overhyped AI use case, something that you've tried, a tool you've bought, vendor you've worked with, a, a thing you did that you saw online that some LinkedIn influencer wrote about, something you tried but actually didn't, didn't deliver.

C (12:15)

So reverse order, I guess that's me. Honestly, it's all over the map. And so I would say the number one thing that's not working that is the biggest challenge is this expectation that overnight AI is going to fast track our ability to do all of the things there's probably through everything that I've already heard Jenny and Sarah and Dave, you two talk about, it's taking us time to learn how to do it. And I would say that there's these expectations that like, oh my God, AI video or oh, wow, there's all this that we can do with using these LLMs and then you go in and you start to have a conversation. You got to learn how to prompt and you got to learn how to do all the different things. And we're doing some incredible stuff. But it is all taking us a good amount of time, energy and training in order to become proficient, in order to become and get to some of the results that we'll talk about. Probably the most recent one that's not working, but I'm really excited for when it does work. I saw Sam, who's our VP of acquisition on the call, is doing a tremendous work job working right now with one of our analysts on the marketing team and building out essentially an AI chatbot that will be able to give us visibility into our acquisition performance insights. And so rather than me going into a million dashboards or Slack and Sam, I can go in and have a conversation with this really incredible chatbot agent that Teva, our amazing analyst, has built.

E (13:35)

But we're still working through it.

C (13:36)

And so this week I'm playing around and I'm like, hey, how are trials working out? And it's like, your trials are super off. You need to start working on things right away to fix all the things. And it took me five times to get to how the trials were actually performing, which is ahead of goal. And so I think you've got to learn how to use the tools. You've got to trust in the process that it takes to actually become proficient, and then also recognize that you still need that human strategic element to layer in before you trust the stuff that you're doing without assuming that you'll get to 10x right out of the gates.

B (14:08)

Jenny, we want to build on that or share with something that's not working for you.

D (14:12)

I'm going to share something that's. That's also not working for me. Because what I'm also curious is I'm genuinely looking to see if others have cracked this code, this buyer signal intent, and then, you know, personalizing the outreach to meet the buyer where they are. That I felt we've fallen into tools, we've fallen into platforms that promise so much to, hey, we're going to learn about your buyers, we're going to watch their behaviors, we're going to see what those signals are. We're going to, you know, then feed these warm opportunities to you and your team. And we're going to work with you to actually, you know, develop the personalized content that's going to go out to that buyer so that you could get them in your cycle really quickly. That has not worked. And there's been a lot of, I feel like tools and companies and, you know, tools eating together that promise a lot of that and turning that into, you know, whether it's ABM programs, I have not found that to match reality yet. So I love that I'm seeing, like, we are working with clay right now too, which, you know, I think that's fantastic to see that they're the best orchestration that looks like someone on the chat says. So I'm open to this because that's one that I'm so passionate about. But really, where the buyer intent AI has been, I feel like, right now, it's been a lot of promise without the proof so far.

E (15:31)

Yeah, I'll jump in and build on both of those because I think they're connected. So, Terry, your point about doing it all and kind of the time and training it takes, and then Jenny, your point about personalizing. I think a lot of what we've done is sort of skipped a couple steps with AI and just gotten to the end result and kind of missed the strategy and say, okay, AI can do these things. So, like, here, take the output. But for the point of personalization specifically, and I do think Clay is. I'd also agree with that. They're doing a great job on the orchestration front. There are nuances to humanity that only humans can pick up. Right. So only we can know that somebody just posted something on LinkedIn about their kids. The time it would take to feed all of that into some type of AI tool, to then spit it out is complicated. Right? Like, it takes too much time. Or you could just go person to person and say, hey, this isn't a big deal, but I saw this about you and it resonated because of why can we talk? And you see those Examples proliferated on LinkedIn over and over again. Human touch, the reality of it, kind of that interpersonal connection. And then to the time and training. If the tool works really well, then great, put the effort in, spend the time, Give your team the time and latitude to try and test, because that takes headspace. But if not, let it go. We don't have to use all the tools. It's okay to use one really well and not try 17 other things.

B (16:51)

It's so funny because I feel like I. Because we're at the forefront of this, and whether it's through, you know, running, running tools for our own business, or we have companies that sponsor us, or we have members that suggest using tools. Like, I feel like my company because of what we do at Exify, we're at, like, the center of, like, the marketing nerd, you know, tech. Like, let's use all the tools. And it is. There's a lot of good stuff out there. But I'm also surprised by, like. And sometimes I give myself this kind of, like, imposter syndrome. I'm like, man, I kind of only use ChatGPT. And that's okay because I think that line that you had, I tried to type it in the chat and then I was got distracted talking to producer Dan behind the scenes. But the line you said about the nuance is like, I don't know if you've seen this at all, but there's this movement of, like, the younger folks, Gen Z, they're making videos with like the old school cameras. You know, you've seen there's a movement where, like, analog is back, analog is coming back. And the things that feel like, almost messy or messed up or not perfect. Right. That stuff is like, really working really well. And so it's like, I wonder that in this quest for, like, trying to automate everything and like, cool. We can automate the shit out of our marketing. That's amazing. But what. Exactly what you said, Sarah, that line about the nuance and like, humans understanding the nuance, like, maybe that is going to be the differentiator. And it's like that homemade, you know, why is a homemade chicken parm gonna be better? No offense if you love the Olive Garden, right? But like the, you know, Matt's mom's chicken parm. I don't even know if they eat chicken parm. That might be like real weak Italian stuff. Sorry, Matt. But whatever they eat, right, that might be the Olive Garden meal is going to be not, not, not as appealing to everybody. I think there's something there where, like, we gotta. How do we keep that human touch and nuance in marketing? I really like that, sir.

D (18:38)

Yeah, we talk a lot about the noise and rising above the noise and that true human element.

B (18:43)

Chicken parm is not Italian noise.

C (18:47)

Yeah. And you know what a funny one is one thing that's not working, and this is just thinking back to yesterday. So I don't know if everyone's been following along with the have AI Roaster profile picture. I tried it out. It was hilarious. But then, then ChatGPT was like, hold my beer. I got a better one for you. And the picture that it gave back of me was awful. Like, so awful. And those are the kinds of experiences where those are the things you just can't rely on.

B (19:14)

Like, did you all see the Will Smith concert thing?

E (19:17)

I haven't seen that one.

B (19:18)

No, no. Chad, where you at? I know Chad has seen it. Will Smith got roasted because he posted this video of like, him at a concert. And it was like, sold out. 10,000 people in Miami at the Will Smith concert. And it was like someone zoomed in and it was like an AI generated video. And like, everyone in the crowd has like, you know, fingers like this and like, faces are melted. It's amazing. You gotta, you gotta look it up if you. If you haven't seen it. Okay, so, so that's fair. I would say if I had to summarize that it's not necessarily one tool, but it's kind of just like maybe like falling for this mass adoption of just like just press the AI button to our marketing and it's all gonna just be a. And we're good.

D (19:59)

Exactly.

E (20:00)

Yes. I think we fall prey to that both as sort of marketers of the craft and also as marketers to. To audiences.

D (20:07)

Right.

E (20:07)

You know, if you look at the, the past year in particular, and for our marketing at Soci as well, we made a lot of conclusions. Oh, everybody's going to jump at the speed of us because we're pressed to try AI, we're adopting it. Everybody's, you know, looking for efficiency, but then you forget on the other end that, you know, there are industries, there are whole swaths of people that just aren't set up to do that or they're not testing at that store speed and they're still at the education phase. So I think some of that has allowed me in particular, my team to slow down a bit to say, okay, to your point, Dave, of just using one tool, it's okay to only use ChatGPT for a while and get it fine tuned really, really well to do a couple of use cases. We don't have to boil the ocean here because not everybody else is either.

D (20:48)

Yeah.

C (20:48)

And Dave, I think something that you said is really powerful is so important to say, and I would say for everybody on the call is I don't think there's one person that I've talked to, especially over the last six months to the last year, as this has been rapidly growing, that doesn't feel some form of imposter syndrome when it comes to AI. None of us know what we're doing. We're all in this and learning together in various beads. And I've found that one of the best things for me has been just absorbing and learning and being okay with you don't know what you don't know and just making sure that you can continue to learn from each other and everybody around you because everyone's doing something a little bit differently. But no one's got it right. No one knows this playbook. There isn't a playbook.

D (21:30)

I agree with you, Tara, and you're not going to either, because tomorrow is going to be different. I mean, this is the fastest moving tech we've seen. And what was happening three months ago is obsolete now in some cases. So keep that in mind too. You have to be curious, you have to be agile, you have to be okay with changes. You're not going to master something right away because, again, it could be very different tomorrow.

C (21:54)

Totally.

E (21:55)

Yep.

B (21:55)

I will say, though, speaking of that chatgpt, you're not going to. You could pry that thing out of my cold, dead hands because you're not saying that for me. And I think I heard Dharmesh talk about this. He's a founder of HubSpot. He was talking about this on a podcast recently. But what I'm super interested in is I think that beyond the little use cases and examples, I'm really bullish on, like, the chat GPT or whatever, your AI for your company having memory, and the memory being, like, the killer feature because, like, as an example, we've been growing our team here at exit 5. And what's amazing with. With onboarding, like onboarding a new teammate, right? I can now create a custom GPT or whatever, use whatever tool, right? And I can say, like, here's our icp, here's our pain points. Here's the history of our companies. Here's the best, you know, 10 best webinar, not webinars we've ever done. Here's the 10 best emails we've ever sent. Here's the 10 best customers we have. Here's the 10 best, worst customers. And now you can onboard someone with this, like, amazing brain of knowledge. Imagine that over the lifetime of a. Of a company, right? Imagine you could chat with something at Bitly and you're like, yeah, Tara, you've. You've been there for a couple years now, but like, hey, did we ever try this growth experiment, like, you know, back in the day? Have we ever tried changing pricing to be da, da, da? Like, imagine having that level of context into a. Into a company. I think there's something really powerful there that will hopefully be available to all of us. And then if you're able to plug in, like, the conversations from your team's, you know, Slack and email and have some way of leveraging all that stuff even now, like the AI features in Slack, I did it the other day. There was a prompt that said, like, hey, what did I get done last week? And I kind of feel like I had, like, a weird, unproductive week. One of my kids was home sick. I go into Slack and I'm like, what did I get done last week? And it's like. And it showed me the 15 things that I shipped. And I was like, oh, yeah, you didn't do so bad. I think there's a lot of stuff like that. It's not just like the sexy like AI video editing tool, you know?

E (23:50)

Yeah, I love that. I'll just say one thing that I, I do with my team is like, especially if we're stuck so to your point about like the compiling the knowledge in the brain, I say, okay, hold on, let's just try something. I'll pull up ChatGPT and I'll say we're talking about this. Here's the problem. We're stuck on this point. I know we've talked about this before. Pull up some things and we kind of use it as that sort of third party brainstorm and it lets us show some value. So one example recently we're talking about spinning up a competitor takedown landing page. My content marketing lead had written a copy. We were going through it. I said that's great. But you know what? We haven't looked at the competitors page for us. So let's look at that actually. Let's throw this copy into the GPT. Ask it, what are we missing? What are we not seeing? Like what can we pull up stronger? And, and it was eye opening. And so I've used it in that way a little bit to my team to teach them, give them feedback but not make it feel like I'm putting too much on their plate. And you're just constantly adding to that brain power. I think is pretty fun.

B (24:52)

Kimberly in the chat. The chat is amazing right now, by the way. Like this is so fun. I'm sorry, this chat is so good. Kimberly in the chat said my chatgpt. I love how you say my chatgpt. My chatgpt thinks I'm obsessed with REO Speedwagon because I quoted it one time. I love that. All right here now. Next. Next question on my list. Now let's flip us over. You can only pick one and you have to give me a specific example. I want to know is it could be something on your. On your. Some. Something someone did on your team. A specific example. Give me your best use of AI right now. In the last few months. Whatever. I can think of one off the top of my head. Like oh, we, everybody that bought a ticket to Drive, for example, our event, we asked them what their biggest pain points are in marketing and then we analyze all that data. We use Chat GPT to then match people together and do breakout groups. That's, that's a cool one. Give me one specific one like that. Let's go. I'm not going to call you. You just get off the mic if you got one. Go ahead.

D (25:51)

I've got one that my team created that I know we all absolutely love. They created an LLM powered basically a content research engine. So basically we run these like query fans across LLMs like Perplexity ChatGPT, we analyze their responses, we're storing that, we scrape the citations that come back from that response. We analyze and store that in a database. And they built a custom agent that literally identifies our content gaps, compared. It's really looking at NAC contents, NAC knowledge files, and it's comparing not to our brand and saying, well, here's what you're missing. And then it's even helping us, like giving us ideas on content and writing that content. We really look at this as like our AI research workflow. And we can run a competitive analysis on every query, every response and come up with ways to leverage that on how we can rank better. So like essentially helping us with topics, helping us, you know, kind of seeing us like, what are our competitors even missing? And the results that we've been looking at have been really strong just from like we're focused on if we're quantifying this success, like, how are we growing in that organic reach and getting new inbound demand that didn't really exist a year ago and giving us that insight to do so. And so we've seen like impressions on Google like go sky high, but also just from our handraisers that are coming in, how many now are saying Web Search or ChatGPT as how they heard about us? And so it really unlocks something that we don't even say, like saved us time, like we couldn't do, we couldn't achieve prior to this. So my team really worked hard on that and it's been incredible for us.

B (27:32)

Just to build on that.

A (27:33)

Where did that question go?

B (27:34)

Man, there's so many right now. Daniel in the chat says, do you have, did somebody help you build that? Is that a AI specialist that did that? I work for a small company that seems unattainable.

D (27:43)

Our teams, actually, yeah, we, we have AI experts in house. But so we have, you know, we've got marketing operations and then we've got AI developers in house that work together with my team to build it. We're a small team, but they are, they are mighty and they figure it out.

B (28:01)

Where does the content engine live inside of ChatGPT? Where does your team access insights and access the insights and adjust the model?

D (28:07)

Yeah, we even. So they access it in ChatGPT, but then we, we also push these out into slack channels for Us as well.

A (28:18)

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B (29:51)

Nice.

A (29:52)

Who else?

C (29:53)

I can jump in with one and this is really hard so I want to cheat a little bit and then say how I got to my one. So one thing that we've implemented on the Bitly marketing team, which is probably my favorite internal use case and then I'll talk about External is essentially a weekly show and tell series where we call it How I AI. And what we do is every single week someone in the marketing team, they don't need to prepare anything, they don't need to do a presentation, they just present back to the rest of the marketing team. No one else interested on what they're doing in their day to day. Because every single role in marketing for the most part is generally different and we're all using different tools, we're all trying different use cases and I am learning so much from the way that my team is also leveraging AI in the day to day kind of to the question, we don't have people that are specialized in AI at Bit Ly. We're all on the journey of learning it together, but we're trying to enable how do we learn together in a place where, as we mentioned earlier, everyone enters in with some kind of imposter syndrome. So how do we make it less scary, but also recognize that we have to learn this, we have to do this as we grow in our careers, not even just within our organization, but for ourselves. And so I'll speak to one of the ones that I'm probably most jazzed about at this very moment because it's unlocked an opportunity for us. And so over the last few years, we know that Bit Ly is a global organization, but we've always really struggled with localization at scale because it's expensive, it's challenging, it's something that typically it would take a lot of time, energy and effort to be able to do a true global execution. And so we implemented a tool called Freeze. And it was roughly about a year ago, along with Claude, we use Claude, we use ChatGPT, all sorts of different LLMs for different use cases. And our localization team has done just a tremendous job shifting from previously, they were really localization experts in language. They would go in, they would manually do a lot of QA to now they're able to fast track the velocity and the things that I'm learning from them in these How I AI series is truly mind blowing into. Not only are they able to localize in their languages using both PHRASE and claude, but localizing in languages well beyond their own capacity. And what we've seen already is in the first four languages that we've gotten into market a 16x increase in overall signups. And now these were areas we knew we needed to do. And so it's not about just these efforts have achieved those results. It's more about how quickly can we get new markets out and move at a faster velocity. And so our acquisition lead and I were even talking this morning about new markets we want to enter into and suddenly we've opened up this door, leveraging these different tools and these different strategies that the team has really just dived in and rolled up their sleeves and figured out to be able to say, all right, where do we go next? And to start to unlock what was previously. I think for anybody that's ever tried to live within a global marketing background, it's hard. And so it's not that it's not hard anymore, but we're able to move at a much faster rate and as a result drive stronger signups.

B (33:00)

That's a great one. There's a bunch of people plus wanting that in chat, particularly as a company scales using AI for localization, is there a similar nuance? There's obviously a nuance in language. Maybe the AI localization services are good enough. But is there still some element of you would want a human to go and just gut check all that stuff?

C (33:22)

Yeah, and that's the part that we're building that playbook. It's the old building the flame or flying the plane while you're building it. Building it while you're flying it. That's it. So we are figuring that out in which markets are critical, global markets for us, that we need to make sure that quality is always at the utmost. And so you've got that extra final QA process in place. And this is part of the element of. And I think you've got this in a future question, Dave, but how we're shifting roles and how we're thinking about defining the change management for the team. Previously everything was qa. Now it's strategically thinking about in market and then layering on QA and being able to just do the same level of work but in a completely different way. And what markets do we need to have a very strategic and critical eye into quality and what markets, you know, is it better for us to just kind of grow and be okay with being 94% accurate and then putting that playbook in place so that we can scale, do it smart, but also do it strategically and not over engineer, essentially the process.

B (34:24)

Nice. Sarah, you got one on the brand and comms side of things?

E (34:28)

I do, but it's more internal to the team. So we are doing some of the same things. We started an AI council. We have some AI teams organizationally, but something that stuck to me and Terry, you just said this. The point of doing the same level of work in a very strategic way. So one of the best ways that AI has been helpful for my team, particularly on the brand side, is a lot of brand and comm centric teams aren't as data driven or don't know how to get access to the data that say a growth or demand team does. So a big part of my role is helping them to think that way because I'm a huge believer that if you can speak in a growth language, then you're really a fully shaped marketer. So we've used it Again with just chatgpt in a way to where I've got my team uploading their Q1 reports, their Q2 reports our BI weekly performance data for social to help teach them how to be data driven marketers. So asking it questions like okay, what are the three things that might have changed this week based on what you know about our high performing posts or low performing posts and our engagement drops based on this, what are something that I could try. Here are some trends based on that and the way that people are responding to our content. How might this help me think differently about our plans? But the other thing it's done is given them a level of confidence in reporting back particular to particularly to our leadership and creating structured plans for other teams. So that point of you know, doing the same level of work but in a very strategic way I think resonates a lot for me. On the back end standpoint of like the hidden side of AI that really benefits people.

B (36:01)

No, I love that. So just because it's not like some sexy like we made a, you know, AI avatar of our CEO doing backflips or whatever, like that's a perfect use case. So much of marketing over the years I found is like about training the, you know, team training, internal marketing enablement and your use case is a great one. I've had a hard time hiring like content creative social type people because I found that typically what I want is growth. I want results out of those business results out of those channels. But typically the person who might be great at video social creative is not necessarily thinking about the metrics in that same way. And so that's a perfect example of like, hey, help me analyze all of the things that we've done on social. Let's understand what's working, what's not. Like be my analyst. That, that's a great one. I, I connected our marketing automation system to Claude and said hey, it looks like our email list has really grown a lot in the last 90 days. Can you tell me why? And it was better than any report I've gotten from, you know, anyone other than like a director level ops person in the past which I would have had to like submit a request for, would have taken weeks, whatever. And it was like, okay, great, here, you know, here's what's going on. Like these three lead magnets that you have are really performing well. The conversion rate on this one is really high. It must be because, oh, this is your salary report that you did. Your audience really loves insights about salaries. It was amazing. And that's a perfect example of like AI being our assistant in marketing. I'm not using it to like replace a lot of the creative work, but can you help me analyze like, hey, hey, our website traffic is down in the last 90 days and like it's impossible to understand. GA4, can you tell me what could I, what could I give you to help me understand that? I think that that's a great use case.

E (37:48)

Yeah. I also just add in our to the point about growth metrics and board reporting to the point where you can and you've got obviously sort of AI safeguards from an enterprise standpoint and your security team. But you know, so often teams look at that and say, oh, I don't get this data. Or I understand MQLs, but I don't understand how we added value to that. And it's not perfect, but it's a great place to start to ask questions because I think sometimes, you know, a lot of times you might not even know the question to ask. But I'm a, I'm a big proponent and it sounds like people in the chat are excited about that too, particularly the idea of messy data like, okay.

B (38:23)

Here'S my next question. This is going great. There's no chance we're going to get to all my questions, but lesson I learned back in the day being a podcast host was you want to over prepare. So if the conversation sucks, then you have lots of questions to ask and if it goes great, then you just kind of let it go and that's exactly what's what's happening right now. So I want to hear from each of you in your role as a marketing leader a personal example of how you use AI. It can be just chatgpt in, in your everyday workflow could be like I use it to prepare for a board meeting. I use it to do X, Y and Z. Do you have a killer or just how is AI become a part of your personal workflow as a marketing leader?

C (39:03)

One recommendation I would say to everybody on this call. The AI Driven Leader is a book that I would highly, highly, highly recommend. Some of the things that have helped me in my day to day and my workflow I actually took as strategies from that book as I kind of went down my own journey. And so I would say I'd answer this twofold. The first, Dave, is when everything really started to escalate and we're like, all right, we all got to do this. We're leaning in. Everyone's got to learn is rolling up my sleeves and doing it myself. And so my first step was every webinar or live event or any kind of article or anything I saw, I would sign up, I would attend, I would try the thing out and I would build it myself. Because who am I as a leader to go in and say we all need to be doing AI and not know how to build a custom GPT on my own? And so first and foremost, it's just being a spongebob and learning. And in some ways I'm pretty excited about it because I feel like I haven't learned in marketing like this in years. And so we're learning how to be new kinds of marketers. And in marketing leadership, you don't always get to do marketing. So it's actually really fun to go in and try to figure it all out together. But the strategy I would say to the original question of what do I do as a leader? Is something I pulled out from the AI Driven Leadership book that I just recommended, which is essentially using AI as your thought partner, building on what Sarah was just sharing on. I do use AI when it comes to board prep, when it comes to strategic prep, by essentially going in and saying, hey, Claude, chatgpt, Gemini, whatever, LLM, you're in for the day. I'm the CMO at Bitly. I need you to be my strategic thought partner. I want you to ask me one question at a time. This is the problem that I'm trying to solve. Do not give me any solutions. Ask me these questions so we can get to the output, we can get to the answer before we can start to build out the strategic direction I'm working on. In my most recent board meeting, we were presenting an updated strategy. We wanted to get buy in from the board. I'm not going to go into the deep details on what that is because I'm not allowed to. But what was actually really eye opening and honestly, like in a lot of ways humbling is AI would come back and be like, cool, Tara, that sounds great, but what does your board actually care about? They care about revenue. Okay, well then how does this tie to revenue? And then would start to really ask the questions that typically my board members would ask or, you know, my CEO would ask that in those meetings, if you're not prepared, you're like, oh, I'm sweating. And it really kind of helped get through. How do I set up the presentation in a way that maybe I wouldn't have done on the first draft before?

B (41:38)

And so that book, is it the.

A (41:40)

AI Driven Leader by Jeff woods or is it AI Driven leadership by Molino.

C (41:45)

I think it's Jeff Woods. I will verify as we're talking through. Yeah, but yes, that that prompt of ask me one question at a time and go through before you actually build the actual output has essentially changed the way that I can leverage a lot of my presentations, a lot of my communications and I do it probably almost every day.

D (42:04)

I love that I plus one to that as well. I think that, you know, even as I was coming into NAC and we were going through positioning and it really did support and help me there. There's also, you know, as I came into NAC about four months ago, learning it helped me to get up to speed a bit quicker and even understanding our customers and our prospect trends. We have a corporate chatgpt so I'm able to load, you know, some sensitive data and information. I know, you know Sarah, as you're talking about loading performance data metrics caveat, just make sure you're doing that in your, you know, secure corporate environment. But we have GONG and we record all of our sales calls, our SDR calls, our calls with our customers with CSMs. And so I'm able to actually learn and find trends. You know, why have we been losing specific deals? Why are we winning? Is there a trend that keeps coming up in terms of pain points or is there something new that's surfacing that we can learn? And we're actually even creating some custom GPTs that represent our customers as well. So we can even see like would this positioning resonate? Would this message really, really work well? So it's been great in, you know, understanding and identifying trends for me as well. And I use that for competitive intelligence too. So especially as somebody new coming on board to a new company, you want to get up to speed as, as quickly but also, you know, as deeply as possible. And it's really helped me in that as well.

E (43:35)

Yeah, I'll, I'll plus 100 to both of those.

B (43:38)

I think it's plus one you can't.

E (43:40)

Do plus 100 plus 1000 plus 1000. Support those both immensely, I think. Two other things too. I continue to talk about the way that I use it to sort of help my team because that's truly been beneficial to me as a leader who doesn't have a lot of time. But I have some, you know, junior to mid level team members, particularly on the, on the comm side and the writing side where they do need that collaboration and partnership. But I don't often have an hour to sit with them and say, here's what I would change and here's what I'd move around. So sometimes I'll take their submission, I'll just throw notes in. And my own GPT has gotten to the point where it's like, okay, I can read Sarah shorthand, but it will structure my feedback in a way that helps me coach the team without rewriting their work. Here's why I made the change. Here's what you need to think about. Here's a draft that starts it. Do you see why I made a B and C decision? And that's been like a light bulb moment. So they were like, oh no, I see it. I see the thought process, I understand. But the second part is like, I try to break my GPT sometimes too. So if someone gives me something, my first question is, why? Like Tara to your point about the question, no, don't get too far ahead. Let's come back here. Why would we do it this way? Okay, that's okay. But I'm not convinced on that. Here's another parameter in this. Why would we do it this way? And I saw someone once sort of use the AI in that way as a decision making tree to try to see, okay, can we get to a source of truth or distill this down into something really simple and kind of eliminate the fray. It's not been perfect, but I find that to be just a fun, interesting exercise for me personally.

D (45:18)

I want to just allude to something that we also talked about a little bit earlier because you could easily get discouraged. We were talking about how it takes that time and effort and you've been, you know, when, if you're building a custom GPT like it can break. I have an example of this of like my creative director, Peter, shout out to Peter. He worked for days on building a custom GPT for, you know, building images on brand and it was, you know, and then he iterated probably for weeks on this and it was incredible, incredible. When he showed it to me, I was blown away. And we were, you know, just about to be like, great, everyone can use this internally. You know, then, then there was an update and the whole thing broke. And so I mean again, just to go back that you might, you might get there but just it is, you're going to constantly iterate. We had to then talk with our internal AI, you know, experts to see if they can help us. We realized that we just had to change some things for, you know, to speak kind of the GPT5 language. And we're getting it back up and running. But if we didn't have that access to our AI experts, Peter might have just been like, oh, my God. All that work, all that time, all that effort. It was fantastic for a second and now it's gone. He might have given up. So just keep in mind, like, there's still going to be those frustrations. It might not be perfect. You're going to put all this time and effort into it. And tomorrow with an update, it could, it could get a little hairy. But, you know, keep going and keep trying because it's, you know, but there's a lot of time and effort put into it and just understand that it could be not so smooth of a road.

B (46:56)

Rachel in the chat said that, you know, there's a concern about how agreeable these LLMs are. Like, you say something and they think that you're awesome. And I would just push back on that because there. It's the only time in my life as a marketer that someone inside the company actually cares about my work and understands and thinks I'm awesome. So I'll take it. I want that.

C (47:14)

One thing I would add to that, though. So one, one trick you can do, you can set up your rules within them, but I actually sometimes will go in and ask Claude or ChatGPT to you take truth serum, tell me like it is and don't do actually right. You actually say take truth serum, just took truth. You just took 12 milligrams that take truth serum, tell me like it is. And sometimes it's be like it is mean when it comes what it is, but it's not wrong. So it is helpful if it's me too agreeable.

B (47:46)

No, that's good. And look, I, I do think it's. So I think it's super important to remember that, like, this is something that I learned at our event a couple weeks ago.

A (47:54)

Like, I think most of us, the.

B (47:56)

Thing that we love about marketing is the marketing stuff. It's the creative, it's the storytelling, it's the, you know, creating campaigns. It's launching something, it's getting attention and getting people to buy the thing that you created. And it's like that, that stuff is. That's the fun part. And so let's like, how can I push on that? It's not so much like, look, if all my competitors, if everybody wants to just like blindly follow whatever this, like, Chat GPT is suggesting to do, like, honestly, my response that is like, hell, yes. Because that means that I'm not like my new. The nuance here and like the way That I. An example of this is, like, I write all my LinkedIn content and sometimes I'm like, completely, like, ratchet. I'm sitting. I'm just grumpy, and I'm just firing off things with like, you know, misspellings and typos and weird, you know, like, lowercase letters. And that's what works. Right? And so I think there's a lot of that. There's a bunch of questions here that I think are probably worth diving into. I just want to just cross reference.

A (48:53)

My list one more time.

B (48:55)

Okay, let's. Let's just do like a. Just a rapid fire, this one. I just want to hear a pulse check. Like, as leaders in your respective companies, is there pressure from the CEO, from the board, from whoever manages the company? Is there pressure from them? Like, for you all to, hey, you better adopt AI. Like, you better use AI. Tell me about what you're doing AI Just. I'm curious to hear, like, you know, maybe behind closed doors, is there. Are there forces that are kind of also. Also pushing this beyond the fact that, like, we think it's cool as marketers and we're genuinely curious, but is there another factor here? What's happening at the leadership level?

D (49:29)

We absolutely have it happening at the leadership level, but it doesn't feel like that kind of mandate. I think that. And I think Sarah and Terry, you talked about this as well. Like, we've infused it into the business, both with our products and with our teams. Like, when we say we're an AI company, it's not just that our product is AI, it's our whole company is AI. And I think that NAC has done it in a great way where we have an AI committee, we have AI champions that are on each of our departments, and we encourage them to have discussions and think, like, how could we do this better? Or what do we wish we could always do? And you think of AI almost like we say copilot. You know, it's a skill set. So, you know, as you're thinking about your marketing or, you know, any other areas of your org, like, how can it support and help your team? And. And then we encourage the teams to test it out and try it. Like when I talked about Peter building his own, like, they, they. And then we share it, and we share success stories. We share things that didn't work. And I think that that's kind of infused in our culture. So it doesn't feel like we've given everybody the ability to be curious. We've given everybody the ability to test and try and learn and iterate. And I think that's, you know, it's why I, we're not, I don't feel like we're having a problem with adoption. It's really, you know, we're encouraging it and it is coming though from the top down all the way to our board. Our board is very, you know, invested in it as well. And it's all for like, again, how do we, how is this going to help us to grow the company, you know, faster, at greater length? And so everybody is really just encouraged and supported to do so.

C (51:04)

I would plus 1,000 for that. I would say there's probably two things that are happening. Yes, there is pressure from CEO, from the board for a various number of reasons. One, you see externally a lot of companies are talking about like as you think about hiring, as you think about teams, well, why, why do you need this person to do this job? And what can it do that AI can't? Like, those are the kinds of questions you have to be able to answer, I think in this new age that we're in. But I think the pressure for us is really twofold. One, it's the internal and I would say that, you know, we do have a mandate, but the mandate, I hate the word mandate because it feels so like there's a mandate versus I feel pressure on myself as a marketing leader in the current environment that we're in, it is our job to go in and serve and build up the people that work within our organizations. And we really wouldn't be doing a good job at that if we weren't preparing our team members and ourselves for what this new way of working is going to look like. Because as you look at new job descriptions that are showing up, everything. I saw some of this in the chat. It's like you need four years of experience in AI. Well, that's not a thing. But you do need to be experienced in AI. You do need to be good at prompting. You do need some experience having worked with these different tools. And I think there is that internal pressure that we all need to have, whether it's coming from the tops down or just the pressure that we bring together on how do we all ride this wave in a way that feels supported but it also feels necessary because that's the way this is going. The other part, I would say that we're on this early stage, I would say with our board, with my CEO, with other CMOs that I talk to. We are a product led business. I shared some of the Data points before and where we're driving. 1.4 million signups on a monthly basis. We've got 4 million users in new traffic from two different websites. Well, the entire industry right now is going into this complete unknown space of what is SEO versus GEO versus AEO versus whatever, eo. And we've got to learn what these new strategies look like, how to optimize for the LLMs, how to optimize for zero click conversions. And we have to protect both on the offense and the defense. Our funnel, 70% of those numbers that I shared comes from organic. And it would be silly of us to just assume if we don't do the work that that's going to maintain. And so we are measuring this proactively. And I would say part of my job right now that I've been working very closely with our leadership team on is to bring that to the board before the board brings it to us. And so I've added slides into our board presentations that just say, like, hey, no issues right now. Everything's stable. Here's what we're monitoring, here's what we're looking at, and here's what we're doing to make sure that we kind of get ahead of that before this pressure comes down on, like, what are y' all doing? And I feel very lucky that. And I think we're all in this boat. We're in a product LED space in where you kind of have to like, people I talk to that are in industries outside of SaaS right now, which I'm sure there's people on this call are on various different journeys of what this will look like for me and what does this mean for my traffic, what does it mean for my content? But it is kind of this. Like, I think I saw a post on LinkedIn yesterday and it stood true for me. Like, we're in the era of working harder, not necessarily working smarter. We're going to get back into this, like, work smarter, work harder, or both of them. But there's a lot to learn and a lot to figure out. And I think that that pressure not only needs to come from the top, but it needs to come from everywhere because it's fundamentally changing how we do our jobs.

D (54:39)

Yeah.

E (54:41)

Yeah. I don't have anything else to add to those. I think we feel the same thing. But to me, there's an excitement that underlies all of this. To get back to sort of the core reason of probably why a lot of us got into marketing to begin with, like, to be able to test, to Be able to try to be able to think creatively and not everything be stagnant. And I think this has given us that opportunity. Finally. I mentioned it before, like headspace to dedicate time to test and learn and try new things and see what works in a world that's constantly changing. It's really fun.

C (55:13)

Yeah.

A (55:14)

Yeah, well said.

B (55:16)

Okay, I just want to hit on.

A (55:17)

A couple of these quickly.

B (55:18)

In the, in the chat, Liz said in the Q and A, how do I convince my company we need a business team chat GPT account? Right now our teams just have plus individual accounts and besides sharing custom GPTs, they don't think it's worth it. I put this one in ChatGPT. I think you should just do that. There's benefits around security and compliance, centralized knowledge, the cost and roi. This is where like I know that there's some companies that are have to, you know, budgets are tight and they're cutting costs right now. But man, the cost of these AI tools and particularly ChatGPT, like I don't know, we have six people on our exit exit five team right now. We probably spend 2500, I would say less than three grand a year on ChatGPT as a team. That seems like an insane ROI on that. And I think you just need to be thinking, you know, offensive minded and so like most of these tools are, you know, 200 bucks a year per person. Can you think about abundance?

A (56:09)

Can you have a growth mindset here.

B (56:11)

On, on some of this stuff? Curious to you all. Where does the AI stuff this is from? Alexandra. How are you incorporating AI in the budget? Is it a new line item? Does it fall under your tech stack? Anyone have an opinion on that for us?

E (56:24)

I can just jump in. It falls under our tech stack but we've been, you know, mindful of that. We have a corporate mandate essentially that any tool we bring on has to have some component of AI so we have to use it. If it doesn't, then it kind tracks us from Jenny's earlier point about being an AI company that embraces AI internally. So we actually did a whole audit of our tech stack earlier this year and every decision now when we go through the procurement process has to include both a business case and a team need as to why that tool and then how it either connects to our tool stack or sort of is additive to something that we don't have already.

C (57:00)

I would add same. Ours is also in our tech stack right now. We don't have a mandate that it has to have AI. However we are going Through a full overall go to market tech stack, not just within marketing, but as we think about marketing, sales success, product, what does our tech stack currently look like? And how do we need to modernize that tech stack with the way that these tools are advancing? And so it sits within the tech stack budget, but we're also evaluating the entirety of our tech stack as we kind of go through this transformation. I would say, and I do feel very lucky that we've kind of set aside budget also for learning within AI. We do have strong security clearance that we need to go through to bring on any tool that we need to test. However, right now we don't have a mandate of, like, you can only have one LLM or you have to have budget to do this. It's like if there's a tool out there that you can have a business case for, that you can show some kind of roi. And so I think, Dave, kind of to what you were saying with ChatGPT, the way I would recommend looking at it is it's not the cost of the tool, it's the savings that you get from leveraging these tools is as we look at our teams, we're looking at these as enhancements to taking out the stuff that previously we were doing that was mundane, it was repetitive, it was challenging that you can start to automate and then opening up our ability to move faster on strategy. Going back to our very first question, what is the thing that AI would disappoint you on? It's strategy. AI can't do strategy. They can be a strategic thought partner to you, but you need to own that and you can do so much more. It's the number one thing we've heard for years, how do I get to do more strategy? It's now you have the opportunity. And so if you can put together the business case that says, you know, I spend $200, but I'm going to get 2,000 more hours back in order to reapply to these other things. That's the way to really think about talking to your CEO or your cfo, Right?

B (58:50)

Like, what's the. What's the ROI of us getting, like, a faster Internet connection in our office? You know, it's like, it's hard. Okay. We're trying to roll a poll for feedback. You all should see it right now. If I. I don't know if I can see it, but there's a poll. Feedback 1 through 5. We rate every meeting.

A (59:07)

Internal, external, public.

B (59:08)

There we go. Rate today's session one through five. Five being the worst one. No, I'm just kidding. Five being the best. Five being the best. It's amazing. That. That was awesome. A lot of fives, a lot of fours. Any of you have a quick takeaway from today, like, just based on the. What you saw in chat? Any. Does it change how you think about AI or. My takeaway is. And we're trying to get to. Is like, I think there's a lot of smoke and mirrors on there. I think the LinkedIn stuff is like, everyone's doing all this cool, sexy, crazy stuff with AI And I think you come in this live session and I think there's a. There's a big gap between what's, what's being talked about and what's actually getting done. Did you all feel that? A little bit.

D (59:45)

Yeah. And I think, you know, I keep hearing it's that, you know, it's also your mindset too, right. So there's not, There's a lot of shiny tools out there. Sometimes that shiny tool is not going to be your breakthrough. Right. That it could be, you know, you sitting as a team, spotting that you need to completely overhaul or reimagine a workflow, and that's where AI can really come in and support you. So it's that having that constant curiosity, asking, I think Tara, or you were saying, like asking a lot of questions, right? Asking a lot of questions, understanding more and building that. Those habits around that kind of mindset, you know, in thinking as AI, as your co pilot, as your accelerator, but you as a human, you're still in the driver's seat, you're still setting the strategy and it's there to help and support you. I feel like that was coming through a lot. And I think that that curiosity is going to be critical for anybody that's looking to grow and learn. And, you know, that's what I would suggest. And that's kind of what I've heard coming out of this as well.

B (60:44)

Cool. All right, awesome. Thank you all for hanging out with us. Appreciate you hanging. For this Exit 5 live session. We'll do more of this. I saw a comment in the chat about some more specific, very tactical use cases and examples. Quick plug for our community. Exit5.com we have a couple thousand members in there. That is where we do things. Like actually last month Matt ran a share your custom GPT contest and everybody shared kind of how they're using AI in very specific and tactical ways. For this session, we wanted to do more from the leadership level, what's going on with AI and I think the three of you over delivered. It was awesome. Enjoy the rest of your day. We'll have this out. There'll be a recording, podcast, clips, video, all that stuff for anybody who may have missed it. Appreciate you all. Send me a note. Davidxa5.com Connect with all of these speakers on LinkedIn. They're all active there and I guarantee they'll respond to you and I'll see you soon. Tara personally, I'll see you in two weeks. Sarah, Jenny, I'll see you on the Internet and enjoy the rest of your day. Okay, bye bye.

C (61:40)

Thanks everyone.

D (61:41)

Bye bye.

A (61:46)

Hey thanks for listening to this podcast.

B (61:48)

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A (61:50)

I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because.

B (61:53)

I don't really care about that.

A (61:54)

I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on.

B (62:05)

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A (62:48)

You over there in the community.

B (62:58)

Hey.

A (62:59)

This episode is brought to you by our friends@customerio. Do you remember? I'm old enough to remember this.

B (63:04)

You remember when a personalized message meant.

A (63:06)

Slapping someone's first name into an email? Hello David or hello Gerhardt. Yeah, well, those days are long gone in marketing. AI has raised the bar for lifecycle marketing because now you can deliver smarter context aware communication that actually feels personal and you can do it at scale without hiring five more content people.

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Personalization today doesn't just mean using my name.

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It actually means having context about any previous interactions.

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But the problem here happens because even though this sounds great in theory, most.

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Teams aren't actually doing it. They're stuck with broken reporting, siloed data and outdated stacks. It's often easier just to keep doing things the way you've always done them right? Isn't that kind of the the norm? Default to the status quo.

B (63:48)

So customer IO they did a survey on this.

A (63:51)

They surveyed 600 marketers just like you and me to figure out what's actually working and what's broken in. This is what we call lifecycle marketing and they detailed how the best teams are actually solving these problems. The report breaks down 2025 priorities, where budgets are moving and how to tame the measurement mess. Real world examples from brands like Notion and Monarch Money that use AI personalization experiments and understanding the next chapter of AI what's on marketers Wishlist right now and how customer journeys can get smarter, not just faster.

B (64:20)

It's packed with examples, data and strategies.

A (64:22)

You can put to work right now. If you want to get smarter about lifecycle marketing.

B (64:26)

This is a great free resource, so.

A (64:28)

Go check it out.

B (64:28)

You can get it@customerio exit 5 and.

A (64:32)

You'Ll learn how to build lifecycle marketing that keeps up with today's expectations. That's customer I.O. exit 5.