← The Marketing Millennials
The Marketing Millennials
How Your Brand Can Show Up On AI Search in 2026 with Tifenn Dano Kwan, CMO of Amplitude | Ep. 377
00:45:54
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- [00:02]
A
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the up.
- [00:27]
B
Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. Today, I really cool guest. It's Tiffan. She's the CMO of Amplitude. Fun fact, I used to use amplitude at Service Titan. So I've been a previous customer and excited to chat. But Tiffin, I'll let you get into how you got into marketing and then also describe what amplitude is for people who don't know.
- [00:53]
C
Thank you, Daniel. I'm really excited to join your podcast. I am Tiffan Danuquan. I am originally from the west coast of France in a place called Brittany, and I have been living in the United States since 2011 and literally spent all of my career in tech and B2B SaaS software, to be more specific. And I am thrilled to talk about amplitude and all the things that you bring to our marketers and audiences.
- [01:34]
B
Amazing. I want to. First, let's just describe what amplitude does so we can get that out of the way because I think it will help shape this conversation.
- [01:44]
C
Of course. Of course. When the founders, there were three founders created Amplitude, it was based on a simple observation. They were working with a lot of product teams and the rate of failure of products was outstanding. In fact, 95% of products typically failed. And they wanted to change that. And it was at the time, and it was about 14 years ago, where the digital engines were starting to pick up quite a bit and they wanted to help product teams build better products and digital experiences. It took off. It took off so fast that the company actually went public at the end of 2021, early 2022, and since then, it' been a journey to help companies grow through the power of digital products and experiences.
- [02:42]
B
That's a, that's a good explanation because I want to go into a topic that everybody's thinking about right now, and I want to first start with the question of what do you think is the simplest way to explain AI search to a marketer who is so focused on Google first right now.
- [03:03]
C
Oh, it's a great topic. I mean, if CMOs don't look into this topic right now, I think they have to. This is a very critical one. Historically, to your point, all the marketing teams in the world have been focused on capturing traffic, Web traffic. There's multiple ways to capture web Traffic, you do it through either direct traffic, which you can do as an outcome of activities you run, multiple activities you run, and the awareness that you're driving, you can do it also through search engine optimization. That was, I would say, the more default typical way of going about traffic. There's typical ways to drive search engine optimization. There is an organic way and then there is a paid way way. And that is because Google created an algorithm that actually created this process, right. And they built a moat around it. So the more you pay, the more you get ranked and then people can find you. And that as they find you, they go on your website and then you drive click throughs and hopefully you're optimizing your conversions. That was the way to go until LLMs came into the picture and disrupted it. So one of the things I've heard a few times this year in particular is SEO is dead. Well, guess what, SEO is not dead at all. In fact, when I look at the data, and I literally looked at the data just before our conversation, Search Engine optimization accounts for 80% of my team's traffic, literally. And LLMs account for a mighty 1%, maybe 109 depending on the day. 1.09%. The data doesn't tell me that LLMs or AI search is actually taking over the world yet, but it is growing. What we're seeing basically is a diversification of search. There is the traditional, I would say search engine activities and then there is the AI search. It's called also AEO or aio, depending on who you talk to. Where I see the market going is just an opportunity to expand on our channels of acquisition. It's a formidable way for us to just test and experiment this new channel of acquisition. And we're seeing interesting stats. So of course we're seeing some declines in traffic because a lot of the audiences are just using this channel to do some research. But they don't click necessarily. So where do they go if they don't click? Well, they go and they research and then they end up going back into your website, but probably at a later stage when they're ready to sign up for something. What I love about the way we're going with this is that it's pushing our teams to do much more thinking, analysis on what's working, which channel of acquisition is going to become more critical, others then we are observing. We're observing also what I call the LLM wars and the SEO wars between Google and various LLM companies. I would say that we need to watch that space. Google isn't dead, not even close. They're actually fighting back and just making sure that their algorithm is winning over the moat and preserving their mode. I love what I'm seeing right now is just super exciting. Many CMOs like myself have conversations and I'm sure are just staying close to their digital and growth teams for that reason.
- [07:23]
B
Yeah, you know what, it's so funny, like when people say SEO's dead, the question I always go back to is where do you think these AI is looking for getting the content to be fed in the LLM? They're looking at your blogs, they're looking at your website. And it's exactly the same as what you were doing with SEO is optimizing your website, optimizing your site, optimizing your blog, answering questions. So you show up. It's just how you show up is different. And it's just funny how people think that, okay, now SEO is dead, but these, these AI agents or AI bots or AI are looking through your website trying to figure out if this person is typing in this prompt. Does, does it answer your question, the question on your website or not?
- [08:09]
C
That's right.
- [08:10]
B
And that's what it's really doing. And if you're, that's how you should, you should. We should have been optimizing our site to answer these questions anyway as marketers for the longest time.
- [08:20]
C
That's exactly right. So I think, first of all, I think that citations is going to be the way to just look at the world right now. Where are you cited? How often? How good is your ability to be cited? So it's based on the prompts that you are generating and more importantly, it's based on the content that you're generated. So you have to be sighted. But the web is a vast environment, it's a universe, right? So you have so many opportunities to be cited in so many different third party sites and places. But the key in my view is to optimize for citations. And it means that the content that you're creating through its various forms, it could be blogs, it could be interviews, podcasts, like today, it could be articles, it could be FAQs, it could be all kinds of content. It needs to be cited and needs to be positioned in the places that matter. And what's going to be very interesting here is that it's going to help us identify the places that are just really growing and maturing. Reddit, for example, is a clear place where conversations happen, where a lot of content gets exchanged with a lot of opinions, get really captured. So that is a very clear area. G2 is also a great place when you have a lot of reviews, especially if you're in the world of software. G2 is a fantastic place where we see a lot of conversations, so we want to be cited there. But there's so many other places. LinkedIn, of course, X, all those places truly matter. And of course your website, I want to know.
- [10:10]
B
So you've been talking to a lot of CMOs. You've been. It's a small part of your traffic, but not a big part of your traffic. But it's going to start eating a little bit more as as this year goes and next year goes. So when you're planning your marketing strategy for 2026 and marketers planning their strategy, what are some things that you should, they should be thinking about to be optimized to show up in LLMs. What are some things that they should be not missing out on doing?
- [10:43]
C
I think that one of the things that's going to become critical is the content that you fit to the LLMs. Right? Why? Because LLMs are powered by content that feeds research. People go to LLM to research, they do a lot of research on it. They ask questions, the questions give them answers. The answers are part of a big element of research that they do. And because we see a declining clicks, we have to make sure that we diversify. The way we get cited, the way the content is created, which means that the amount of times your company's brand is mentioned and cited is critical, which means that it's putting now the emphasis on brand awareness. It's one of the biggest shifts that I'm seeing right now, which is fascinating and incredibly exciting for all the CMOs right now, is the power of the way your brand gets really referenced and cited. It's a complete reinvention, I would say the function, if you think about it, especially in the world of SaaS, all of the CMOs were mandated over the last 10, 15 years to focus on performance and pipeline. That was the number one, still is the number one goal for a lot of us out there, just making sure that our marketing team is an engine of growth, profitable growth for the company. And you could see, I would say, a lot of big differences between the brand CMOS and then the performance CMOs. There's a lot of those conversations happening. Those functions are getting blurred right now. The focus on brand. Brand is becoming a performance engine finally, which is really incredible. For the longest time, you could hear a lot of founders or board teams questioning investments in brand why? Because we could not measure the actual impact of brand on revenue. It's been the same conversation for now, a couple of years. It is the first time now that we have the ability to actually track the impact of brand. And we do it through critical tooling right now called AI visibility. Everybody is talking about AI visibility and the reason for it is that AI visibility gives an ability for CMOs to track the impact of brand and to actually show it and compare it to other competitors. That is an incredibly powerful tool. And I can tell you, just looking at our own recent AI visibility launch, that there is massive, massive demand for those kind of tooling. So I would say the content is critical, the infrastructure of your web is, and equipping yourself with an AI visibility tool will be critical because it gives you an ability to track how your brand is getting cited and mentioned out there.
- [14:02]
B
Yeah, and I love this shift of the pendulum because it always shifts the plunge. And like 15 years ago, the pendulum was brand because performance, the trackability of performance marketing was just coming up and now the pendulum shifting back to brand. But I think we need to go back to the middle where all marketing is performance marketing and brand is performance marketing. And perform like demand gen is performance marketing. And how. And having a tool like AI visibility, where you're tracking how you're mentioned. And the only way, like you said, the only way to track mentions is people talking about your brand name and your brand name showing up in conversations, like redhead, your brand name showing up on social, your brand name showing up on blogs. And you could do it for multiple ways. You create great content that's shared on multiple blogs. You create a great product that is getting shared by a lot of people. Like gt you mentioned, all this stuff matters even more now, having a great product showing up in conversations, which I think is super cool. So AI visibility. Could you explain a little bit of what it's tracking and what are some new metrics you're looking at when you look at, like, what are some new metrics we're looking at when we're looking at AI visibility?
- [15:18]
C
Of course. Of course. So when you have an AI visibility tooling like amplitude, it gives you an ability to quantify how often your brand appears in AI responses. And that is done across all the most important LNMs out there and literally hundreds or thousands of people prompts, so it actually creates a score that compares you to others in your own space, in your own category. So that's incredibly powerful because it's literally based on prompts that are out there. In the market. So it's literally aggregating that and it's creating a score. So if you make this a North Star metric for yourself and you incorporate this AI visibility score into your ability to track the performance of your brand, then you become credible, you have a seat at the table and you're able to say on a regular basis, this is how we're scoring against our competition and why we are scoring. So you have an ability to track traffic and ROI more easily. So it means that you have an ability to track your AI driven visits. Those are driven by LLMs to conversions and revenue outcomes a little bit more easily. So it's just another a tool in your arsenal to just build, I would say that sort of funnel visibility all the way down to revenue.
- [16:50]
B
And I think what you said too is now it's giving you the ability to put investment into doing more brand stuff, doing more content stuff, which was hard to really quantify. I mean you could do it a little bit with SEO, but now you can quantify it more by saying we show up here. And also another thing that's going to happen, you, you mentioned that like Google search is not gone and all these search is not gone, but a lot of LLMs is zero click. So people are going to search amplitude in an LLM and then they're going to go to Google and go to the website and search amplitude. So brand search, you should look like, start tracking like our brand search mentions going up over time if I show up.
- [17:37]
C
And that's right, I would say because the conversations are happening outside. You see, you have to find a way to correlate it back. So the question is, how do you do this? If your traffic's going down, should everybody panic? Well, the answer is no because everybody's traffic is going down. What I think matters is how you convert in general. So one of the things you should start to create is a sign up mechanism. Just create a mechanism beyond your web traffic to ensure that you capture that you capture your top of funnel. It could be a free trial, it could be a starter offer. Find a way, a mechanism to drive a signup mechanism and check if you're seeing an increase in signups. That increase in signups could be an indicator that actually people out there are talking about your brand and your company. It doesn't mean that they're going to go necessarily and visit every single webpage you have, but if they sign up for your offerings, that should be an indication that it's working. So the AI visibility is just an indicator that you have enough content, you're part of clear conversations, you are being cited and those citations create an ability for your company to be of interest. Cite it for research for customers who are looking for your company's offering and you have to find a mechanism to capture that interest. What matters most is that sign up mechanism that you need to create or that caption mechanism that you need to create. So it's pushing, I would say the impact further down in your funnel. You don't just look at web traffic, you look at signups and capture mechanisms.
- [19:34]
B
Yeah, so what I'm hearing too because this has been happening for years. Besides LLM, word of mouth has been happening for years. Conversations that you could not track have been happening for years. It's happening on social and DMs. It's been happening for the last few years now. LLMs and just other conversations, just you talking to a machine, not to your friend. But people are still going to talk to their friends outside of it. So I like that. So what I'm hearing too is like marketers should start thinking like how can I make my website as frictionless as possible, as scannable as possible as to get people to the finish line faster than other people are doing. Because like, and it always been the thing that we should be doing, but now it's even more important because people are at the end of their their phase of when they come to your site, not at the beginning of the phase. A lot of the time now too.
- [20:33]
C
That is correct. So I would say you should scan for your web vitals and just make sure that you have a very strong head of digital and web who is going to just re architect the WhatsApp capabilities, that you have very strong engineering support also for your website. So you make it not only LLM ready but SEO ready. I'm one of those who believe that you have to actually invest in both at the same time. Don't account for Google's power to bring their moat back. They're not dead, they're actually fighting really hard to get it back. And you have to trust that there's a lot of money behind this company to figure out how they're going to fight back. At this point I'm just looking just at the data and the data tells me that SEO still accounts for 60, 70% even sometimes 80% of my overall traffic. Even though the conversion rates are going down and LLMs have much higher conversion rates, it's still a significant part of how I'm able to capture demand. That part is not going to go away if it still is. What companies need to do. The CMO and the marketing team is to just really monitor how each channel of acquisition is responding to it and have the appropriate strategy in place to capture the interest from those channels.
- [22:05]
B
I think it's also pushing us marketers to rethink how we thought about metrics. Like five years ago we used to care more about impressions and all that stuff. And now like what is quality coming to our side? Are we showing up like with quality instead of like quantity? Like quality is going to be matter even more now than quantity.
- [22:26]
C
That's right. I'm going to put it out there for your audience. I think there is a business to be made around the way to score brand, period. Not just AI visibility. AI visibility is one aspect of it. But one of the things I'm discussing right now with my CMO peers. I literally had a conversation with the CMO of Daxco yesterday about it is how do we score the health of our brand. It's not a simple answer. You have multiple, multiple ways of, I would say tracking this. The way we do it today is we have a composite score. We have a brand health score that is made of multiple metrics. We have a PR metric, we have an AI visibility metric, we have a traffic metric, we have a social media metric. We have a lot of different ones that get weighted to create a composite score. There's a business to be made out there for whoever is listening because this is what's going to happen next is that when you diversify your channels of brand and awareness at the very top of the funnel, how do you know across those various channels, social web LLMs, SEO and whatnot, what's working, what's not just putting it out there. But this is a conversation that I'm having right now with my CMO peers and I'm just inviting the conversation which is.
- [23:56]
B
I love that conversation's happening because that just proves even more why like to invest in brand and. And. But it's also like what levers are we do we need to invest in how are we investing? And then different stages of company needs to like amplitude has pretty well known in the market. I would say in like the martech space, like if you're a challenger brand, it's a different animal of how to get your brand in the market versus someone who's been that strong force in the market for a lot of years. So I think that's. That's super interesting. I also want to, I wanted to go into like what are Some signals that you have been seeing that matter Most for like LLMs when deciding LLMs are deciding which brands to surface in their prompts. Like what are some things that signals are you seeing?
- [24:52]
C
I think that you have to look first of all on making sure that you are sighted consistently. I think it's the quality of the content that you have. AI driven content is phenomenal. This allows your company to drive those citations at scale. And actually I'm seeing in the data that the conversions are actually fantastic coming out of it. So whoever just gets stay skeptical about AI driven content, I would invite them to lean in more and test and see how you can drive this. So that is strong signal in my view that AI driven content is going to very rapidly increase to do it. So what kind of content, what kind of elements of content work best? What we're starting to test is FAQs work a lot because whenever you develop your own point of view with very clear answers to questions being asked by an audience, this is where you have the best chance of differentiating, cutting through the noise. So test the format of your content. A lot FAQs work great. Blogs continue to work very well. A lot of video content is coming out there and this one is also really great. Virality is also a strong signal of interest. The question is more like how do you convert virality into those LLMs? But virality sends people, right? Sends people to do more research. So those elements are also very, very critical. These are the signals in my view, that speak to a healthy brand. Is it a brand that's going viral that gets cited? Is it creating authored content through formats that work and that are repeated and consistently out there.
- [26:50]
B
One thing you were saying about the FAQs, which I think is great, is if you go look at a great D2C or E commerce site, they have like, they have to be great at FAQs, they have to be great with reviews, they have to be great. And if you go look at, if you do product searches, a lot of things that come up are reviews and questions answered of like for example, I have a baby. I was like searching what is like the best highchair for longevity for a baby in my LLM. And it came up with a brand. And then I went on the Internet to just like verify if the LLM's correct. But I still like, if you could show up and it showed me like five reviews of people talking about this, I could use this. From zero newborn to nine years, I could use this. So just like you saying the FAQS the reviews sites, the way people are talking about you matters so much when it comes to AI search.
- [27:48]
C
So test the content. Evals work really well. Benchmark tooling works a lot as well. People want to try, people want to benchmark themselves, they want to see how they compare to others, they want to have very quick answers to their questions, which is obviously the most important. And it sounds obvious what I'm going to say, but you get what you feed into the LLM right? So the LLM is going to be only as good as the content they're going to scan for. So the more you experiment with content at scale, the more chance you have to actually teach the LLM your own language. So you got to have a very clear, opinionated voice so that it becomes your language.
- [28:38]
B
Question for you, where in the current like buying journey of customers you've been seeing, do you think AI will have like the, the biggest impact? When you think of like in a current buying journey, where, where would AI have the biggest impact for that for a buyer?
- [28:57]
C
Huh, that's interesting. It also depends probably on the type of business. Are you an enterprise business or are you a small size business? I actually think that the research happens typically at the top, top to middle of funnel. People research your credibility as a company. They research the tools that you have available. That's why evals, trials, all those things really matter and they formulate that decision. And I do think that this is happening very much at that stage. In my view, if you go into a more complex sales cycle, which is an enterprise sales cycle, and you have to speak to humans and you have to have proof of value, proof of concepts, all those kind of things, that becomes a little bit more complicated and that you probably need the human in the loop at this point. But if you do some, I would say first stage research on who the company is, what the product is about, what kind of typical features and capabilities a product could offer, you can find all of that information through LLMs right now.
- [30:08]
B
And I one thing so I wanted to ask too, so you, you using the AI visibility tool, you see like we're showing up in these prompts and what are, what's like the next step, like if you see all these prompts like what is your next step to as a marketer? To be like I need to tackle this, this and what should I do next? Do I go after like the highest like queried prompt? Do I go after the next one? Like what, how do you think about as a marketer? What, what should I do when I See, I'm showing up here, but not here. I'm showing up there. This branch, my competitor is showing up way more than me over here. How do you tackle that?
- [30:54]
C
That's, that's a really, that's an actual interesting question. I don't know that we have the answer for it. We're all testing right now to see which are the channels of conversations that matter most. So if, for example, we say we want to make sure that we feed Reddit as much as possible because that's going to be a feeder for a top citation is going to work. I think the strategy my team is having is that we want to be cited in LLMs, we want to be cited in AI overviews from Google. We want to be cited everywhere. Right. Like we are really working on the algorithms of all of those places. So that's why I'm saying don't discount Google, don't. That'd be a mistake. Like you want them to cite you. Their AI overview is incredibly powerful. Not necessarily everybody is going to the ChatGPT or the Cloud. You just need to keep being diversified and learn the type of content that works best for you to be on the top. On the top ranking in citations. I think that what we're going to see with our audiences is that they typically have multiple tools at their disposal. If they really want to compare, they're going to go to Claude and then they're going to go to ChatGPT and then they may end up on their mobile phone directly into a Gemini. So you got to have to make sure that you cross pollinate and triangulate. It's a triangulation in my view, exercise at this point until you know where your key strengths are and the type of content that you need to feed into each of them.
- [32:37]
B
Yeah, it's like going back and it's basically going back and doing like redoing market research and figuring out hey, our buyers are doing XX and Y to like X, Y, Z to research our brand. They might be going and you can have it through like first party data where they, that you actually talk to them and say hey, I actually found you through going on Claude. And then I researched this and it's, it's just an interesting game and I think if we, if you can get ahead of figuring out where conversations are happening for your brain because I think you, what you said some audiences are different. Some audiences might only use chat GPD to figure out how to fix their oven versus do research. Some people are on the bigger end of the scale using AI agents to do their buying decisions for them. So there's such a spectrum. There's a spectrum of how people are using AI right now.
- [33:40]
C
That's exactly right. And I think it's, you're going to be as powerful as how much you know in terms of the questions that are being asked, asked. It's less about the answer, it's about understanding which questions are going to be asked by whom and when. It's like if you can predict the types of questions that your audience is going to ask and that you know the answers to those questions and you win, you win at search, right? You win at AI search and you win at the more traditional search. What are the questions that they're looking for and how do you infer the next level of questions that they're going to have so that you keep them connected to you and to your brand all the way through the moment they're going to click or the moment they're going to sign up for your offering?
- [34:30]
B
A couple more questions. One question is, what is something that you're adding to your plan for 2026 that is AI related, that people should think about adding to their plan? Like, what are some things that you're telling your team that we must do is whether it's, hey, you should be using AI first for this, or we should be thinking about creating more content to show up and like, what are some, what is like one of your, like number one or number two goals when it comes to AI in 2026?
- [35:04]
C
So we have so many. So I, I don't know that I would pinpoint, I would say element. What I would encourage rather Is founders or CMOs to just really ask their functional leaders, whether they are their brand leader, their digital leader, their product marketing leader, to really understand which workflows are going to be AI driven versus those that are going to be AI assisted or the workflows that are going to remain completely human driven. So you have to let your functional teams do a lot of their own research. You ask them to really identify the key workflows, where they're going to see AI come in and be a powerful tool to drive more automation, less manual effort, and then come back to you and say, these are the top tools that we need in order to drive better content, do better launches, do some competitive research. I mean, everything here matters, right? Competitive research is critical. You want to make sure that you have it. The web capabilities around AI are critical. So AI visibility is the number one, in my view, that you need to get two Global chat capabilities, personalization at scale, account base, I would say an intent, signal optimization are really, really critical. And everything around content, content at scale, AI based, AI driven content, whether we love it or we don't is critical. If you are going to work with LLMs and you want to win at AI search, you have to feed your LLMs with content because this is how research is done. Right, through content. It's scanning through a lot of content. So you've got to prioritize an ability for your content to be multiplied. You need to scale your content. There's not many ways to scale your content. There's only so many contractors you can get in your team and so many headcounts you can get in your team. So you got to find a way to create a factory of content. That's the answer. And I think in my view you should focus on your AI visibility capabilities and your AI content capabilities.
- [37:41]
B
And I like those buckets that you have of what is AI driven? Completely driven by AI? What is AI assisted? What does humans need to support? But it's still our workflows. And then what is just completely human driven? And analyze all those in your business and figure out how, like are we going to make it more AI driven? Are we like, do we need for content? It's probably AI assisted. You need humans to come and analyze. Is this our voice? This is our tone? Are we saying this right? Are we. Is this not sounding like our brand or not? Because as much as you feed, I think AI is not at the hundred percent point of creating amazing content. So we need a human being who knows to bring it from 80% to 100% through editing. And which I think that's why content marketers are so valuable right now. Yeah. And lastly, I have a question for you and I asked everybody in this podcast, but what is a marketing hill?
- [38:45]
C
You would die on the marketing hill. Yeah, I would die on pipeline. That's the number one goal, always has been. The one thing that I protect at all cost, that drives my entire budget exercise, whatever I do is how do I protect my investment to really focus on pipeline generation and whatever very clear business outcomes I have. Everything that is related to hard ARR numbers and pipeline numbers is non negotiable for me. I would die on this anytime. This is something that I have been through for too long that I would never compromise on.
- [39:38]
B
I like that because even all the things you are saying right now, even though you're saying brand is becoming important, it still has to be. If you're going to invest in it, it still has to come back.
- [39:50]
C
Not at the expense of hitting your number every quarter. And you know, when you're a public company, you can't afford not to do it. Right.
- [40:00]
B
You're scrutinized more. You're under the microscope more than anything.
- [40:03]
C
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's not negotiable.
- [40:05]
B
Yeah, I love that. I think that, I mean I think any marketer, even whatever level you are, you should be thinking about like how am I driving that number and how and how that number is calculated and how they got to that number and how finance thinks about the number, the CMO thinks about that number. I think like even if you're a junior marketer, you should be thinking about that number when you're planning your own goals and what impact for sure.
- [40:34]
C
I mean, don't get me wrong, brand and to some extent all the conversation we just had around top of funnel investment is a long game and you got to be smart enough to make room in your budget and your decisions for it, but it cannot be done at the expense of your hard numbers. So you got to find always a good balance. You got to build enough consensus with your cfo, with your CEO, with your head of sales to just be super clear about how much you can afford to dedicate to awareness and top of funnel activities and how much you need in order to meet your demand gen and pipeline and AR goals. And it's the constant tension that I would say a high performing marketing team and CMO have to deal with. Right. Is how much are you going to put there? What do you need to absolutely meet your performance goals no matter what and do you have enough to build the long term?
- [41:38]
B
Yeah, I think that's the, that's the hardest thing to balance is. And that's the tension you said is okay, I could probably do under invest in this quarter, but is it gonna Q1 next year? Is, is it going to affect me that I didn't invest in brand and I is it going to hit my future number? And I think that's where like a lot of people mess up. That tension is like they figure like, oh, I'm going to keep under investing, under investing. And then the next year pipeline's even.
- [42:10]
C
Harder because that's exactly right. And you need, as you know, you need to have a very consistent flow of demand every single quarter because if you work in a space where you have, I would say a sales cycle that is longer than a quarter or two, if you drop even a quarter in your demand, it's going to have an impact in your coverage 1, 2 or 3/4 down the line. So you cannot afford to drop the momentum. You have to constantly do it, but you have multiple ways to achieve it. There's not just marketing as the only channel of acquisition. You can work with partners, you can work with your direct sales team, you can work with your SDRs or BDRs. There are other tools and this is where a good partnership and work of influence within your company matters. And that's one of the critical roles of a cmo, is to make sure that you have trust and you have an ability to drive negotiations and trade offs with your partners. Especially when you have to tell them I can't drive all of the pipeline numbers. I have to dedicate a portion of my budget for top of funnel and acquisition and awareness and reputation. They need to deeply understand this to have your back and not put you in a situation where you have nothing left for awareness because you have been set with the wrong expectations on what you should be doing from a demand gen standpoint.
- [43:42]
B
Yeah. And I think the way you just said that you just had to speak kind of speak the language. I saw a lot of time where certain GEOs had stronger brand awareness and those STRs and AES were dominating. But they, the other GEO, like if you don't. We don't invest in Midwest for example in air coverage for that we're gonna lose in the Midwest. Even though we're crushing in California, it doesn't mean we're crushing there. And you need to like you speak in the terms of how much harder is it for an SDR to get a call and say amplitude is calling.
- [44:16]
C
Right.
- [44:17]
B
And someone says what's amplitude versus oh amplitude. I've heard of it. You guys do X, Y and Z. It's like easier conversation for sales.
- [44:25]
C
It's always, it's hard trade offs but that's where a good partnership across an organization is a very critical skill to have as a, as a marketing leader.
- [44:38]
B
Lastly, where can people find you and what you're doing and all that good stuff?
- [44:43]
C
Well, the teams can find me on LinkedIn and on X Tiffin Danuquan. I'm happy to connect with you. You can go to amplitude.com or amplitude AI. Whatever you type in it will point you to Amplitude and discover the world of AI analytics.
- [45:05]
B
Well, thank you so much for coming on and I think this is a very important topic and you really dug deep into why it's so important and thank you for your time. I appreciate it.
- [45:17]
C
Thanks for having me.
- [45:20]
A
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.