← The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
SaaStr 819: Swapping Notes on the AI Revolution in Marketing with G2's CMO Sydney Sloan
00:31:50
SaaStr 819: Swapping Notes on the AI Revolution in Marketing with G2's CMO Sydney Sloan Welcome to Swapping Notes, a new SaaStr podcast series where we cut through the AI hype and get real about who's doing what with AI in B2B. Amelia LeRutte,...
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- [00:01]
Harry Stebbins
Welcome to the official Saster podcast where you can hear some of the best Saster speakers. This is where the cloud meets up today on the Saster podcast, the fastest.
- [00:12]
Sydney Sloan
People to switch are enterprises. Usually enterprises aren't the ones that adopt it first, but that is what the data showed us is that enterprise were first movers here and they were doing it because of the productivity gains. You absolutely have to be able to add AI and AI capabilities to existing platforms. And then there's the part is that the use of AI is part of the buying process and that people are going to LLMs first, which is then changing the marketer's world of how we have to think about marketing in the age of LLM. The new LLM buying process.
- [00:52]
Harry Stebbins
Hey everybody, it's Saster. Fin is the number one AI agent for resolving complex queries like refunds, transaction disputes and technical troubleshooting, all with speed and reliability. See how FIN can deliver the highest resolution rates and highest quality customer experience at Fin AI Saster. That's Fin AI Saster. The biggest B2B and AI event of the year is back. It's the Saster AI Summit in the SFB area, aka the Saster Annual. It'll be back in May 2026 with 36% of everyone coming CEOs. It's an incredible AI first professional event. The very, very best S tier folks will be there talking about sharing and learning how to scale AI and B2B in this new world. But here's the reality. The longer you wait, the higher ticket price go up. They're really cheap in the beginning and then, you know, just a few days before they get kind of expensive. But you've been warned. Early bird tickets are available now and I want to see you there. Once they're gone, you'll pay hundreds more. So book your spot today by going to podcast.sasterannual.com. that's podcast.sastranual.com. get your exclusive disc accounts for Saster AI SF 2026. We will see you there.
- [02:07]
Emilia Laroot
Hey everybody, it's Saster. I'm Emilia Laroot, the Chief AI Officer here, and together with my co host Guillaume Kaban, we're launching a new podcast series in Sastra called Swapping Notes, where in every episode we'll sit down with the top AI readers in SaaS and B2B and we'll swap notes on what's actually working and what's not moving the needle in AI. So whether you're a founder trying to navigate your AI strategy or go to market leader Implementing AI features and frameworks yourselves. This is the show for you. So without further ado, let's swap some notes. Hello everyone. Welcome back to Saster. We're here on a new series we're doing. I will introduce my co host. First, this is Guillaume Kaban. For those who don't know you as G G, tell folks a little bit about yourself.
- [02:52]
Guillaume Kaban
Yeah. Hello everyone. I'm super excited for this new series that I'm joining with Zaster. So I've built a couple growth teams in a number of like successful companies. Segment and Drift and gorgeous and more recently, I led all of marketing at Ramp, a great fintech company out of New York. And I Advise companies in B2B. I've been doing that for the past 10 plus years and I've been lucky enough that has worked and I've built a little entity around it. And so at Happy Growth Partners, we advise about 20 of the best companies per year and we help them grow faster.
- [03:32]
Emilia Laroot
Amazing. And G knows a lot about AI and marketing and just disaster. And so we thought we'd bring him in for another perspective of boots on the ground. And our inaugural guest needs no introduction, but we'll do one anyway. The incomparable Sydney Sloan. She's the CMO of G2. Sydney, you've got such a great career already. Other companies as sales law, Adobe.
- [03:55]
Sydney Sloan
Right.
- [03:55]
Emilia Laroot
So give the folks who maybe don't know you a quick intro to yourself.
- [04:00]
Sydney Sloan
I'm currently the CMO at G2, which was another company that GE advised for. And so I've been here just a little bit over a year. Same thing. Like I love advising companies and founders. I'm part of Stage 2 Capital as an LP. I'm part of the Scale Ventures Network and stay involved in that. So blending time between my daytime operating role but also enjoy just helping founders and helping teams figure out how to crack the nut of growth. And today it's everybody's at the starting line. Right. Like we are. We get to hit a reset button and. And so it's like exciting times.
- [04:45]
Emilia Laroot
It's exciting times. One of the things we recently covered on Saster that will help us kick off here as a good transition is in your guys's latest G2 buyers behavior report. You put it out right before Sass Re Annual, I think in May we.
- [04:56]
Sydney Sloan
Covered releasing Ancestor Annual.
- [04:59]
Emilia Laroot
Okay.
- [05:00]
Sydney Sloan
That's our release party. Yes. Unplanned.
- [05:02]
Emilia Laroot
Yep. It's a great release party. It's just in front of a live studio audience in person and live streaming.
- [05:08]
Sydney Sloan
But all good there. Yep.
- [05:09]
Emilia Laroot
You guys talked about one of the most interesting learnings was AI. We all talk about it now. AI for you guys at G2 now means always included. I agree. We saw that a lot at SAS. For two, you said 88% of people won't even buy or think about using software if it doesn't have AI. Let's start there.
- [05:28]
Sydney Sloan
From your perspective, like where you've been.
- [05:30]
Emilia Laroot
At G2 for over a year, but you've bought software for a long time now. How have you seen that pattern change of how people buy software with the advent of AI?
- [05:41]
Sydney Sloan
I think there's three questions in there. We can unpack them. So the first of the always included is that is people are looking for AI capabilities in the platforms they're buying. And surprisingly in that same report, the fastest people to switch are enterprises. Usually enterprises aren't the ones that adopt it first. But that is what the data showed us is that enterprise were first movers here and they were doing it because of the productivity gains. And you absolutely have to be able to add AI and AI capabilities to existing platforms. The second is that people are now at the point of setting their agentix strategy and then trying to determine which platforms they want to use to build out their agents. So you've got this really interesting time of, you know, AI is being added to platforms you can build now with AI. And so we're going back to like bespoke workflows and what can I augment with AI? What still needs to stay people based? And what's your strategy there? Do you want it to go hybrid? Do you want to go copilot? So I think everybody's in the process of figuring that out right now. And so that's why I said it's like super exciting times. And then there's the third part is that the use of AI is part of the buying process and that people are going to LLMs first, which is then changing the marketer's world of how we have to think about marketing in the age of LLM. The new LLM buying process and PPC is no longer the way that we can buy our way. We have to figure out a new way. So I think there's like we can go deeper at each one of those things, but it's impacting all of it.
- [07:30]
Guillaume Kaban
Yeah, I think I'm really curious about the last one here because obviously the buying process is changing, which means you, I and all of us marketers, we sit on the other side of that. Like it's the selling processes. If the buying Process changes, changing the selling process has changed. Right, but you uniquely seen it, you see both sides of it, right? Because you can see because of G2 in the platform, right? You see the buying and the selling. And so I'm curious, what are you seeing that's changing in the buying process and how are marketers adjusting and how are they adapting their selling process?
- [08:08]
Sydney Sloan
They're going to LLMs first. So that, that has been a significant shift. What they do is they first they go to the LLMs for their research process, their discovery process. And what we're seeing is that they really do trust it. And so when they cite the sources, the second place they go is the source. And lucky enough, we allow our information to be indexed by the LLMs. And LLMs love user generated content. So sites like G2 and Reddit, Wikipedia, like you're seeing these as the main drivers of the source of content. And the next place they come is the peer review sites to do that like fact checking. And then once they've done that and they get down to a smaller list, then they'll end up potentially at those companies, websites or third party marketplaces. Gee, you mentioned ramp, right? So ramp is trying to transact in their own marketplace. So like our G2 reviews are also in the marketplaces. And so all of these, the process that buyers are going through, they start with the LLMs, then they go shortlisting in the LLM. They might even build their RFP template in the LLMs and ask for sources. And so now we as marketers have to figure out what's the best way to influence the LLMs. Gee, you and I had a conversation about this. So how do we think about influencing the LLMs where SEO was looking for clicks and links, that was our whole strategy. What we're calling Geo Generative Engine optimization is looking for answers. So we have to reorient our content strategy around what are the prompts and what are the answers that people are looking for in the way that we're thinking about our content. So I learned this from giving is think about your Personas and their jobs to be done and start writing your content around the jobs to be done and then thinking about what types of content are the LLMs indexing on. They love listicles, they love like user generated content. And so how do you start to build that content?
- [10:21]
Guillaume Kaban
Yeah, I, there's something that you said, you brought up trust. You say people trust LLMs. And I think that is a very important thing. I agree with that. I think it's very obvious and it's clear that the trust is moving right towards LLM. And I think that is a core challenge for us marketers because us marketers from the consumer's perspective have never been worthy of trust. Why wouldn't you be worthy of trust? We've been trying to like, cue the perception there's some soft lying that has been happening forever. And so now like all of that, so we're getting disconnected, we've lost some of that trust and that trust has. We're de intimidated. And so that presents a unique challenge for us. And the other thing that you said, you said people like the AI agents are like, they like the UGC very much like humans because that's what they model after. Right. And so I think the way that I think about it these days for marketers, I'd love to hear how like you hit this result on how you reinvent yourself. Right. But the way that I've been thinking about it and I've been training people on is there's really two broad categories. Things that are AI proof, right? The AI resilient. So that's going to be like social proof and influencers. It's going to be like some of the UGC stuff, a lot of that, the webinars in person, the events, the dinners, all that, that is going to work for a while. Like people like being in like in social connections. If Cindy sends me a mail about something that she cares about, I know that it is important. I'm going to read it, I'm going to trust it. So I have trust there. Okay. But then the rest is influencing the agents, it's influencing ChatGPT. Right. If I can't have that trust relationship, then I can fluent. So it's AI proof versus like full AI and there's realistically nothing in between. Realistically, they get the other channels that in between they're going away. But I'd love to hear how you hit that reset button.
- [12:29]
Sydney Sloan
Yeah. I think the things in that question trust starts with brand. And so it's like people need to be starting to go back to think about the fundamentals of brand building and how do you build a trusted brand using your voice of the customer, using those influencers, thinking about those, the other influence sites are like, what are the trusted sites that the LLMs are using that then you need to build your brand and influence on. And I think that even though we're talking about the buying process, when you go back and you talk about the Personas and the jobs to be done, you can still be delivering Great content for things that are not related to your product. If I'm, let's say I'm a salesperson and we're selling, let's say contact data for salespeople, maybe they, that's a challenge. They have to go research, have to go off all these things. But if you think about their entire jobs to be done, they also want to know negotiation skills or they might want to know other things. You can still build content for that. You can still add value to the, to every single question that they're going to go for. The LLM. And as you're seen as that source reference, that's going to still build your brand. So you can't stop thinking about brand building and building relationships with your audience. I think people are going to still leverage LinkedIn. We know our buyers are there. They're still going to get influenced from within that and that's part of brand building. And so trust, I think, and brand are equal. The other thing is that it's giving you the answers and accelerating your productivity, the LLMs. And that's also what we saw. If it can give you a better answer than when maybe you searched before or it gives you insights that you never thought I GPT a hundred times a day. Right. I'm like, oh yeah, that's an oh, I didn't even think about that. And so that extra insight is also adding incremental value to the end user and that's why they're going there. You're getting better answers, you're getting more than you asked for. That's crazy. So I think the, that that is why we're seeing the LLMs take off so fast. That is why people are trusting it. And I don't see it ever going back.
- [15:06]
Guillaume Kaban
Yeah. And I think what's interesting, you know, some of the things you said double take on is that I think it's coming from the consumer that the B2C of us are consumers in a way. We buy people online. Yeah, yeah, we're people. So we buy stuff and in this day and age, we buy stuff online a lot personally to buy more. Right. Also there are purchases on which I was agonizing over for months because I couldn't spend the time to figure out which of the products I wanted. And now but friction, that effort is going away. And so I can buy arguably a product that's a better fit. Right. And every time I do that, I'm seeing that it works well, the outcome is good. Right. And so I'm learning my brain, I'm Training my brain to recognize, hey, like this cycle of like purchase is the better one, right? I start trusting Hip and everyone that I know is doing that brings us to something interesting, which is do you think that not only like the research process is gonna is moving more and more towards GPT, do you think that the web itself is moving to GPT? Is the purchases starting from the consumer? There's something that I brought up. We discussed a bit about it. But don't you think that E commerce, for example, purchases will be done entirely in the chat window without opening a tab and going through a cart and just, hey, option B of this carousel, this is the one I need. Go for it. You have my credit card details, you got my address. Deliver it in Palm Springs. All right, yeah, done.
- [16:48]
Emilia Laroot
You brought up this notion, G of basically sell by chat, right? Like, why can't an LLM just tell me, okay, I'm already asking it for reviews, for its opinion on what I'm going to buy at a much faster rate. You trust the lm? We've seen this a bit in how we're using AI for sales and somebody actually coined this phrase as we were using it that said, oh, I love being sold by chat. Like our AI is basically selling tickets to future disaster events all via email, all automated. There is a human in the loop, right? We are orchestrating it. We put in the right data, we make sure the links are right, we make sure it doesn't hallucinate what speakers are going to speak it faster. But it's such an interesting thing where it's totally changed how people buy from us. Like they used to just come to the website, buy a ticket disaster. And many people still do that. But we're literally seeing it 5050 now. Some people prefer to buy this via chat. We call it sell by chat. And I think it's interesting to you bring it up from a LLM perspective. Chat perspective, Sydney, you have the buyer marketplace perspective on it. But I think we are not so far away from seeing it in both of these instances, right? Like, I think we're not far away from seeing it in something like a ChatGPT where you ask it for something and it can sell it to you at a lower price point, right? I think we're not far away from sites like G2 turning into chat agents of. I know you already have a chat agent on the site now, Sydney, but I think you're probably even just a few months away or maybe closer on, you know, that agent being like what you were looking for ramp. Let Me hook you up to the RAMP team or hey, actually, I know how much RAMP would be for you. Let me just sell it to you.
- [18:36]
Guillaume Kaban
There's something very valuable, what you're saying here, Amelia, which is the value of the conversation, the perception of the value here from the recipient standpoint is more important than the medium.
- [18:48]
Sydney Sloan
Yeah.
- [18:49]
Guillaume Kaban
And so it doesn't matter that the web's going away and we might not use browsers and tabs, because why would we? It's only a format. Right. It's very weird to have to open so many tabs, go through the entire page of all the things to figure out what you want. And if you haven't tried audience, if you haven't tried one of the new AI browsers, DI or Comet, do try it out. It's not ready yet, but it is an interesting window to the future. Right. But like, in the end, what matters.
- [19:17]
Sydney Sloan
Yeah, it doesn't matter.
- [19:19]
Guillaume Kaban
What matters? Can the recipient get the answer that is the most valuable and can get to the endpoint? And I think you're right. What's shifting is that and the Milia's example is great. What's shifting is that people used to, and they worked at drift a while back. The perception of chat was bad. Okay. Because the experience was bad, arguably. Right. And just when you were trying to call a United Airlines or whatever because you had issues like the phone tree was terrible. Okay. Now the experience, arguably, and we're seeing that in some of the phone AI agents, it's better than when you're calling it a outsourced or waiting.
- [20:03]
Emilia Laroot
Right. Or they're closed at certain times now, the AI is always there. You can call whenever.
- [20:07]
Sydney Sloan
Yeah. And it just works.
- [20:09]
Guillaume Kaban
It just works. And the email exchanges just work and we get there. Right. And so that I think is what matters. The value is that you're delivering the value. Right.
- [20:16]
Sydney Sloan
So here's the conundrum. So I 100% believe. And like we were talking about it today, like we're. We are desperately in need of a website refreshed for sell G2, which is where our buyers come. We just launched G2AI in June. If you come, it's more of a AI based experience for buyers to be able to do their research. But the point is that if everybody is starting in an LLM, they don't want context switching.
- [20:47]
Emilia Laroot
Right.
- [20:47]
Sydney Sloan
They're going to want that same kind of experience when they hit the next site to be able to continue the conversation. We'll see if they can be able to do it with context. Like where the LLMs decide to go if they allow for context to be there where they can get like a better experience. So that's where I'm pushing my team is we need to change the entire thought process of our web experience. And I'm putting web and content like to be able to be that same answer engine. So somebody should be able to land there and ask a question. And so therefore it's like, what is the future of websites? And we were customer qualified. You could just ask the qualified agent a question and she'll deliver the right content to you, she'll book the meeting for you. We can continue on that transaction. We have to think about agent handoffs. And we talk a lot about that in my kind of CMO circles. But I see us being at that point in the next eight months like people are going to re Ex. Reimagine the experience and build for that. Here's the conundrum then. Where do you put the content that the LLMs get trained on? You're still gonna have to have it somewhere, right?
- [22:00]
Guillaume Kaban
Yeah. So two things on that. I don't know if I'm right, but what I'm seeing, one, I'm seeing more and more companies build hidden websites completely hidden to the humans. It's an entire other index, an entire other like web tree. Right. For the purpose for AI agents to scrape. That was not allowed in a Google centric world because Google wanted to see exactly what the humans were going to. And you were penalized if you were doing that, you're not being penalized. You actually have positive incentives to do that and have completely different set of content for the purpose of answering questions and like training the models on. And some of the companies I work with have done it and it has worked. So the content goes there under anything. The second thing is MCP is coming around. Okay? MCP is coming around. And so a lot of the value, if you go back to this example that you had, of course then is selling like contact data and doing transactions, right? You can expose in the MCP all the products, the descriptions about the products. And maybe there's a transactional layer or not. Right. Maybe you could. It is not hard to imagine that the front end of the web disappears. Like the idea of having a database of the content and a website and then rendering that PHTP into HTML and then having a browser interpret the HTML and then having a human read like the this visual version and then it's nonsense. You can just have the LLMs connect to the database and like, hey, like what do you sell? What's the product description? Oh good. Yeah, much better.
- [23:33]
Sydney Sloan
100% agree with you on that G as to where things are going. I know exciting times. Right. It's where we're going to be a year from now is and it's just getting faster and faster.
- [23:46]
Guillaume Kaban
CMO is going to do if the first project they would used to do which is redo the website. What's it going to be now?
- [23:54]
Sydney Sloan
Make the you continue to make the experience. Build the brand. Continue to make the experience great. Think about delighting your users so you know they like you. We just have to lean into users and audience users. Right? Yeah.
- [24:11]
Emilia Laroot
That's bring it all.
- [24:13]
Sydney Sloan
Yeah. And users it's not accounts and so that is like world is marketing. Then extend into the product experience or extend into the user experience to continue to build that the trust in those brands.
- [24:25]
Emilia Laroot
Okay, I'm going to move us to the end rapid fire question because I know we're running out of time here. It's gone by very quickly. Okay, rapid fire questions. First one. Sydney, I know you use a lot of tools. We all use a lot of tools that are AI focused. Are there specific tools or for you categories of tools and AI right now that you couldn't live without even two months ago.
- [24:54]
Sydney Sloan
For work, I would say there's two things we have really started to build up like our Personas and content. And I think that's transformed the way that we test messaging, we help write messaging. It's just like significantly improved it. The other area that we're diving deeper into is the conversion rate. So once once we have a signal and the time it takes to like book a meeting, like I'm just trying to tackle that one to the ground. And so yes that does have an impact on certain types of leads and who follows up on those leads. And I'm pushing those more and more to to agents. Be that like a six sense intelligent workflow. Now they call it the qualified agent. We're definitely getting you know, lots of incremental value there. We haven't gone all the way like you have Emelia but those two areas are can't live without, won't turn back.
- [25:55]
Guillaume Kaban
I agree personally voice AI has transformed how I work. Like on a very personal level. Like I use a whisper flow on my phone, on my computer. I didn't think I would get there in like in my life. But like I'm much faster like speaking to like my device than typing on my device. And I don't think my kids who are like 7 and 9. I don't think they're going to be proficient at keyboard. Right. Hitting their hands on a slab of plastic will be like a weird relic of the past. So I think that's a shift of the past few weeks and months, really. All right.
- [26:30]
Sydney Sloan
That was going to be my personal one. I just have. I'll say you're an expert. It's helped me get strategic thought down on paper so much faster. And so I'll give it the Persona it needs to be. You're a product manager trained in this model. I'm thinking of a new product idea prompt for the interview, and we just go back and forth and it takes an hour. What would have taken me, I don't know, maybe eight or 10 hours to produce in the past? And so that's my, like, personal hack. The other one is a product called Granola. I don't know that one yet. Oh, my God. Like, I no longer take notes. It's on my phone. Like, it's impersonal. It's everything. Everything is written and summarized. And I'm just like, yeah.
- [27:15]
Guillaume Kaban
And so going down that path quickly. One of the tools that I recommend these days and the changes I'm seeing is around content. Right? Because, like, we say small things. We try to say small things in, like, many different settings. And so we have a lot of, like, prompts. Right. And the things that we say. I've moved a lot of my content from having rewriting sessions, Right. To, like, having a AI workflow on a. A goal text lab on an air ops, for example, that takes that recording snippet and turns it into a fully fledged article. Right. And so that has changed my approach to content. And I'm now encouraging CMOs to, like, have much leaner content teams and just a few people that can run content workflows at scale because the output is just as good, if not better.
- [28:08]
Emilia Laroot
Yeah. The rise of AI orchestration as a job role is going to skyrocket. I think it's already taken the place of AI GTM ops. Like, we already need one. It's Astor. We're hiring for one. I just thought like, like Jasper Artisans hiring for one. Like, this role is blowing up. And it's because as we use more and more of these tools that we all been mentioning and use day to day, they all take time. They all take time. They all take tuning, they all take training, they all do take oversight. To build that trust that we've been talking about, it requires humans to build that unironically. Last question for both of You, Sydney, we could start with you. What's one parting piece of advice you'd want to give to founders and CMOs on this AI journey right now?
- [28:50]
Sydney Sloan
Just force yourself to use it every single second of every single day. I changed it in my browser, so I just. Everything starts with GPT and it's really just taken me further into the rabbit hole faster. And so just force yourself.
- [29:06]
Emilia Laroot
Good advice though. It's true.
- [29:08]
Guillaume Kaban
Yes.
- [29:08]
Sydney Sloan
Yeah.
- [29:11]
Guillaume Kaban
I would say humans are extremely bad at estimating log changes, algorithmic changes, and this is exactly what we're seeing right now. And so as a founder, as a cmo, you got to look at the trend and say, where are we going to be six months, 12 months from now? And how do I change my investments right now? And I've been in multiple CMO rooms and settings lately where I've asked who is spending 25% of the budget and headcount? Unlike LM appearance, no one raised their hand. And that doesn't make sense because that's where we're heading 12 months from now. There is no question.
- [29:54]
Sydney Sloan
And the sooner you get there, the more influence you'll have. It's going to be outsized. Yeah.
- [30:00]
Guillaume Kaban
So you got to shoot for like intersection point of 6 months from now, 12 months from now. Right. You got to put out your own beliefs. I write like my own beliefs at the top of my docs. I believe we're going to a webless world. I believe GPT is going to be like a quarter to a third of the traffic and nine months from now. All right. And thus my actions, my. I think all of what I do, my predictions, my projects are in light of that. You might disagree. Put out your own predictions. But we have to. If you're not transparent and clear about your predictions of the impact, you can't run a good process.
- [30:35]
Emilia Laroot
Lots to unpack here, guys. We'll do a follow up very soon just to see where all of us are at with all of our tools over LLMs. But thank you both for joining and we'll see you guys again at Faster.
- [30:47]
Guillaume Kaban
Thank you.
- [30:48]
Emilia Laroot
Thank you.
- [30:49]
Harry Stebbins
Hey everybody, if you're serious about B2B and AI, if you want to know how to deploy AI SDRs, how to get AI to qualify leads to your site. How to use AI to manage your RevOps, how to use AI in GDM, you have to be in London this December, 2nd and 3rd with us Saster AI London is bringing together more than 2000 leaders and founders for two days of practical advice on scaling with AI into the new year. That's all we're doing this year. How to use AI to grow faster and how to make this stuff actually work at your startup and your company. We'll have speakers flying in from around the world from OpenAI, Wiz, Clay, Intercom, all your favorite B2B companies, including yours truly and Harry Stebbins, for a live 20 BC and Zastor podcast. It'll be fun. All right. In the heart of Saster London with me and the entire Sast team. You've got to be there. So get your tickets with my exclusive discount by going to podcast.sasterlondon.com. that's podcast.sasterlondon.Com. see you there.