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Marketing in Progress is a spinoff of Work in Progress that digs into what’s moving the needle in B2B. We feature marketing leaders, sales leaders, and agency owners sharing real stories, smart ideas, and no-filter perspectives—so you walk away with practical guidance to help you do your job better.
Cari Jaquet (00:00):
If salespeople come back and say, "The market is signaling that that's not compelling," or, "I don't find that compelling, and when I talk to people about it, it's not resonating," put the ego aside. Break up with that campaign. Stop doing it. There is nothing precious about marketing.
Gayle Kalvert (00:17):
Welcome to Marketing in Progress. I'm Gayle Kalvert. This show is for B2B marketing leaders who are under real pressure to deliver results without a clear roadmap. Each episode is built to give you practical insight you can use right away. We focus on what actually matters, how success is measured, and the decisions and trade-offs necessary for success. If you're trying to cut through the noise, do better work, and build credibility inside your organization, you're in the right place. Let's get into it. So today, I am thrilled to have Cari Jaquet as our guest. Cari is a full stack marketer. She's done it all with 20 years experience taking B2B companies, particularly in cybersecurity and data, from early stage chaos to category leadership, unicorn valuations, etc. She has a track record of walking into companies early and helping define entirely new product categories. She helps shift the language and the narrative for these companies that ultimately the market adopts.
(01:24):
So Cari, let's just dive in. Let's go. All right. Being a CMO today means a lot of stressful things from delivering pipeline, aligning with revenue teams, we're navigating AI. Can you just start us with, from your perspective, what does being a CMO look like and feel like?
Cari Jaquet (01:43):
I think I'm an operator first, and like every other marketer, we're always being asked to adopt new technology. And I know we're going to talk a lot about AI, but I want to take a deep breath and say we've always been the ones who've adopted new technologies, not because it's fun necessarily, but because we have to stay ahead of the market. And so we adopt early out of choice and the AI wave is no different than many others we have seen. And I think as long as we maintain sanity around the fact that we are capable of embracing new technologies and using them to make us better and make our work better will be good.
Gayle Kalvert (02:26):
Not everybody is as, I would say, comfortable, right? Maybe using AI as you are. I said when ChatGPT was the first thing on the market, you were like, "Gayle, you got to get into this and you got to use it and I'm using it in every part of my life." Can you give one or two examples of how you are personally using AI to help you?
Cari Jaquet (02:48):
Sure. I would start by saying, here's how I categorize AI. I think there are tools and platforms today we use every single day that happen to have some AI capabilities in them. They're coming up. So if you think about LinkedIn, there's a whole new way of using LinkedIn data to see what's happening in your community, engagement, connections between people, etc. If you use Canva, you see now that Canva's got some AI capabilities built in. So these are tools you're probably very comfortable with and they're introducing AI capabilities. Don't be afraid of it. Try it. They're testing things out too. So look at it, don't assume it's going to be good right off the bat, but there are definitely some really good enhancements being made to platforms you use every single day that you can comfortably within the existing workflow, just start trying AI. Then there are general purpose tools like think about Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT.
(03:50):
These are not specialized. They're there to help you create and understand things, but they're not experts at a specific function. And so use them to brainstorm with you, use them to get some ideas and then narrow those down and refine them on your own, build outlines and then fill in the copy yourself, things like that. And then there are purpose-built tools. Those are the ones that are for video or specifically for forecasting or specifically for design work. Those are a little bit tricky because you have to make an investment. You have to usually buy them or at least try the freemium and then convert. Be careful of those because they require you to bring something into your organization. And I'll preface all this by saying, make sure that your IT team is on board with what things you're trying. All of this comes with a layer of risk that the business teams don't usually think about.
(04:44):
So we need to think about that. And then the fourth category, so I said existing tools and platforms, general purpose tools, purpose built tools that you need to go explore because they do a very specific function. And then agents. The Agentic world I think is what everyone is mostly afraid of. The Agentic world is where you train an AI system to do something very specific for you. It could be around automation, could be a Copilot, could be a workflow, maybe QA testing. And so that is a little bit more sophisticated. And I would say if you aren't yet playing with AI in the other tools, the general purpose tool, the existing platforms, maybe that's a little bit advanced. But you'll quickly come to a place where you recognize how to give prompts, how to iterate, how to take what you get and not use it verbatim and then start advancing into the purpose built and the agents.
(05:49):
But honestly, I think we screwed things up early on. I probably was one of the people who used AI. I used ChatGPT, I call him Chad. I used Chad early on and I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about his output. And now if you look at LinkedIn, there are telltale signs that people are just picking up content and dropping it in. And it's that one-liner, pithy one-liner, catchy, and then sentence, sentence, then gap, then sentence, sentence, and big M dash and lots of emojis. And so I think with the mistake was that in our experimentation, we gave permission to this young intern named Chad to just take over my LinkedIn or take over all the data sheets I was writing. Don't let him run wild. That creates, I think, a loss of trust. It does make us stupid, and it's not the right way to use the tools.
(06:46):
So anyway, there's been a whiplash on that for sure.
Gayle Kalvert (06:50):
For sure. Yeah. I think we're all seeing that. And for up marketers, we're probably, thank God. Thank God that more leaders are realizing that AI can't replace marketing as a whole. When it came out, it was like mass panic and now we're seeing how things actually work. This relates a lot to email campaigns. Companies are obviously still using email. AI is making email more difficult to cut through because of everything you talked about. It is so much easier to quote personalize at scale, but it's not actually personalization. In general, when you're looking at your B2B marketing strategy and plans, how do you think about conversion? Are you looking at one channel? Are you looking at many? Ultimately, at the end of the day, we need to convert. How do you think about bringing your audience around to that conversion step?
Cari Jaquet (07:48):
I don't think anything has changed in terms of having a surround strategy, whether you are selling to a VP of security or you're selling to the HR team or whatever. The reality is that no one thing works. It's a combination of staying top of mind for people in ways that matter to them and then timing and the timing of a really good offer, whether that is in an email or otherwise. Going back to the AI world for just a second. Back in the day, you would do an email to try and drive someone to your website or try and drive someone to register for a webinar or try and drive someone to this new offer that you've got. And now what's happening is that people might read their emails, but they're going to go to an AI-aided search engine to do their exploration, to do their research.
(08:49):
They're not coming to your website anymore. What they're going to do is ask questions that they use ... If I think back, our old way of asking questions was, who are the top three vendors that sell modern identity security? And you'd get the list of vendors and you'd go to their website, you'd look at their pricing, you'd look and see if they had customers, right? Okay, that's great. Now the AI-aided search capabilities allow people to say, tell me the top three vendors and compare them in terms of pricing, who their customers are and what their messaging is and how they differentiate. Now, if you have not addressed the content strategy around AI-aided search, I don't care how many emails you do, you will probably never hit the person during their research point. So what's super important is that where we used to have a surround strategy that included, be it events that they go to, do content syndication in the publications that they read, join the associations that they're members of, send them emails, inviting them to webinars and offering them customer case studies, etc.
(10:01):
Now, the big one is make sure your content strategy is informed for LLM content and feed the beast, feed the machine. Not in the dumb way we used to do SEO, like, "Oh, I'll put some tags at the bottom and Google will pick it up." This is not that. If you do not tell the machine what it needs to know, it will return results that say, "This company does not have transparent pricing, but this company does, or this company seems to have 17 customers on their case study page. This company does not. " And you will be eliminated by virtue of not thinking through what you want the machines to know. I know it sounds super sketch, but I'm saying your content strategy now needs to be even more comprehensive and take into consideration a reader that you can never meet or see, and his name is Chad or Claude or Gemini or pick your poison.
Gayle Kalvert (11:04):
We're buyers. I know we're talking about B2B, but each of us goes through this process of buying in our life and what do we do? We go to our Chad or Claude or wherever to do that research. B2B buyers are consumers and they are using those same activities to figure out what they're going to do on the business side, what they're doing on the consumer side. So you can use yourself as a guide is my point, the way that we all go about purchasing decisions.
Cari Jaquet (11:32):
The topic of, do you as a CISO still use Gartner for anything? And the answers I got back were really interesting because what they said was we absolutely still leverage Gartner to give us vendor recommendations or nuances. So we absolutely still use them, but we go in more informed or at least with some notion of what we're trying to validate with Gartner. Whereas before we'd say, tell us who are the players in this space or show us the Magic Quadrant. Now, because we've done all this research using our LLM superpower, we are coming to Gartner and saying, "What we're seeing is this, this, this, is their pricing model really that bad or whatever." And so I think what's important is that everyone is more informed, even if it's not accurate. They believe they are more informed. So just be aware of that as well. Don't break up with the analyst strategy you have or the typical things that you think you have to do.
(12:35):
Just know that they're going to go to those people with a lot more questions that are informed.
Gayle Kalvert (12:41):
We could do a whole half hour on feeding the beast. I would just call it feeding the beat because I would love to dive into that, but I want to make sure we talk about what we promised. And this one, I love your experience here around sales. Marketing, you can see it in just the titles and how hiring is changing in marketing. The titles are growth marketing. The titles are ahead of revenue marketing. Every marketer we talk to is focused on, or should be, in my point of view, how marketing is a growth engine and drives revenue and pipeline, just be really tactical for people. How do you do that?
Cari Jaquet (13:19):
Well, first, I try not to do marketing for marketing's sake. If you're doing something and you can't point to the direct bottom line value for doing it, I would say don't do it. Often we work so hard on marketing plans and we get really tied to a campaign or to a program. And sometimes the sales folks are assholes and it's really hard to figure out how to be connected to them. But the reality is that if they're not successful, marketing is not successful and the company will not be successful. And it's like, why are we doing that? Well, it's because we want to expand our TAM. It's because we want to demonstrate velocity around a particular topic because our salespeople are out there talking about it and we need to prove that we've committed innovation and engineering time to doing that. So again, something might seem frivolous, and if it is, stop.
(14:20):
And if it isn't, tie it back to, why are we doing this? We're doing this because we're trying to help the sales organization, be good partners to sales. Don't go off and build your own nurture database. Make sure it's the database that if you get an engagement, you get an MQL from it, the salesperson wants to receive it. And so often that break, if you can fix it, leads to magical things. And so my superpower is absolutely about getting along with sales and making sure that I'm a good partner to them.
Gayle Kalvert (14:56):
Say more about that. You said if you fix that break, what is the break that you're
Cari Jaquet (15:02):
Talking about? There's a couple of breaks. One is saying no to sales. Not tell me more, what is your objective? Maybe we can do that. Or not this month, but yes, next month I can add that to the thing and we can stop doing this other thing that wasn't useful. So saying no to sales is just like, get that out of your vocabulary. That's just not okay in my mind. Again, there's lots of other answers that may yield a no, but the bottom line is we are not going to exist if we don't have a successful sales team. So just stop with the no. The second is that oftentimes, like I said, we get buried in our own thing. I've been working on this campaign for so long. You can ask people on my team, we get so excited about a campaign. Oh, it's not your grandma's PAM.
(15:47):
I'm so excited about it. But if salespeople come back and say, the market is signaling that that's not compelling or I don't find that compelling. And when I talk to people about it, it's not resonating, put the ego aside. Break up with that campaign. Stop doing it. Do not think that just because it took you four months to tool it up, don't hang onto it. There is nothing precious about marketing. And by the way, if you become super precious about your work, those AI tools that we just talked about, every person in the company has access to them. If you're not going to help the HR team with a blurb they need for their job rec template, they will try to do it on their own. So just be aware that suddenly marketing can be done by lots and lots of people. If you are not serving your stakeholders, they will find a different way to do it.
Gayle Kalvert (16:42):
You've said start, stop, continue, sort of decide. If you can simplify, it's like make sure that you have that mindset where it's like, should we start doing this? Should we stop doing this? Should we continue doing it? Do you set up checkpoint? Do you formalize or put any process here to make sure that you're always checking in with sales or this is just for you top of mind and you do it?
Cari Jaquet (17:05):
Oh, absolutely. We do it methodically initially and eventually becomes part of our DNA. Because I think one of the things that at least I try to do is say, let's fail. Let's fail fast. Let's fail often. Let's try lots of different things. And I do repurpose things that worked before. And if it works again, great. If it doesn't, we break up with it. But why start from scratch every time? I do think the important thing is that you do it in a way that eventually you don't have to have a meeting that's the start, stop, continue meeting. You're thinking about it every single day. I hope that Yaj, for example, on my team is waking up and thinking, "Why am I doing this thing? Okay, I'm going to break up with it, " without us having to have that meeting. That's the sort of thing that becomes part of your logic, part of your operational wherewithal.
(17:58):
And before we, and I would encourage you to rethink the old ways of SEO. There are now, and I've got a really definitional document that talks about the different LLM content types, explainer pages, core pages, etc. They are similar to your old SEO way, but there are some nuances. For example, yes, it is important to put FAQs at the bottom of some pages so that the machine can pick up the types of questions or answers to the types of questions it is receiving and get to know the different types of content, the long tail content, etc, and reimagine what are the questions being asked. And it's not who are the top three vendors in the cybersecurity space of blah, blah. It is way deeper than that. And if it is way deeper than that and you aren't answering those questions, it will either make it up or it will not include you.
(18:56):
So I would say absolutely get aligned on the content strategy for the new world of AI-aided search. And then yeah, we don't talk about it enough. You're right. I started off on the sales relationship piece. The reality is that there are ways to show quick wins with what you're doing in marketing as long as you're staying close to sales. And I've had experiences where reps will come to me and say, "Hey, nine months ago or 10 months ago, that thing you did, that little thing, we sent a basket to that guy, I just closed that deal." And then I'll say one more thing and then close. Make IT a big partner as well in your journey. I remember we used to talk about shadow SaaS and shadow IT and businesses moving faster than IT could keep up with. AI creates a danger that people don't realize, and it's different than just saying, "Oh, I'm going to adopt this SaaS application and upload my customer list into an app that I don't even control or manage with a company who I only have a very simple click agreement with.
(20:01):
" AI is different because you're actually feeding that thing information, potentially confidential information about your company, about your launches, about your marketing capabilities. And so just where possible, include your IT team in your decisions about what you're building and what you're using.
Gayle Kalvert (20:20):
It's good advice. Cybersecurity, Cari, I like it. For anybody who wants to find Cari, obviously on LinkedIn and in the Marketing in Progress community. So if there's anyone that you want to be a part of this conversation next time, just reach out and let us know. And we'll
Cari Jaquet (20:34):
See
Gayle Kalvert (20:34):
You soon. Connect with me
Cari Jaquet (20:35):
On LinkedIn and I'll send tools. I'll send ideas if anybody's interested.
Gayle Kalvert (20:39):
Amazing. Thank you. Thanks. Bye. If this episode was helpful, please follow Marketing in Progress and tap like. It helps other marketing leaders find the show. And if you know someone who's navigating similar challenges, feel free to share this episode with them. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.