GTM with AI

Join Aptitude 8's Connor Jeffers as he talks AI in the sales industry with Nina Butler, head of marketing at Regie.ai. Learn how generative AI platforms like Regie.ai are changing enterprise sales by personalizing content and improving engagement strategies. From hospitality to high-tech, the growth of sales templates to AI-driven prompts, and how Regie.ai's technology is shaping future sales processes.

#SalesTechnology #GenerativeAI #ArtificialIntelligence

🔗 LINKS:

https://aptitude8.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/aptitude-8/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/connor-jeffers/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nina-pascal-butler/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/regie-ai/

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What is GTM with AI?

Connor Jeffers, CEO of Aptitude 8, interviews marketing, sales, and customer success leaders about how they are using artificial intelligence to innovate, optimize, and scale their go-to-market operations.

I see that prompts are

becoming the new templates.

And by that, I mean, for the past

10 years, 15 years, ever since

Outreach, Salesloft, Apollo these

sales engagement platforms hit the

market, junk in is junk out, right?

And so the quality of these

sophisticated systems are incredibly

reliant on the quality of the

content that goes into them.

And so for the past 15 or 10 years, folks

have been developing these high performing

templates to make sure that they could

reach the amount of people they need

to reach to with minimal intervention

or edits along the way, right?

So you're trying to balance the

personalization and the reach scales.

Hello and welcome to Go To Market with

AI, a podcast for sales, marketing

and customer success leaders using

AI to scale their growth operations.

I'm your host, Connor Jeffers and

in today's episode, we are talking

to Nina Butler, head of marketing at

Regie.ai, a generative AI platform

for enterprise sales teams that

personalizes content using data

unique to your business and prospects.

Nina, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Connor, for having me.

Happy to be here.

Likewise, I have, okay so in your

bio at the outset, no one knows this,

but we had originally from Martha's

Vineyard in it, and then you were like,

no, I have this big bio, but it's not

in there and like we'll pull it out.

What is the, give us the big bio.

What's, what's the big bio.

How does that get in there?

The big bio!

The big bio.

Yes, I'll expand on it.

So I actually was born and raised on the

island of Martha's Vineyard, a little

island off the coast of Massachusetts.

A lot of people don't think folks

are actually like from there.

Yeah.

Yeah, we don't know that Martha's

Vineyard is like a real place.

They're like, it's like just..

Or they're like, you don't

just take a day trip?

Like you have grocery

stores and electricity?

These are real questions, these

are real questions that I've gotten

and yes, we have both of those.

But the point being is I grew up in a

very small, very tight knit and hyper

dependent on each other community.

And I actually think that that's shaped

a lot of my personal and professional

track that I've taken because I am

an incredibly relationship motivated

person, and I'll get to it a little

bit like, how did I end up at Regie?

But I feel like it's

all kind of culminated.

We have start back at your birthplace

to like truly understand the journey.

That's exactly right.

That's exact from the Oak Bluffs

Hospital, we will go all the way back

in time, but I do think it's had a

profound impact in terms of how I move

through life and how I think about

creating connections with people,

cause I think I had a bit

of a unique upbringing.

Amazing.

Well, you can start as

far back as you want.

We can then start with like,

we went to high school.

We, we made connections with people, but

how did you find yourself

leading marketing at an AI

business now of all times?

Yeah.

So a bit unconventional.

I, I actually do a lot of

mentorship in my free time.

And I particularly like to seek out

people seeking, you know, tech and

marketing and SaaS careers because

I'm like, come one, come all.

You do not need a, you know,

a linear journey because I

certainly didn't have one.

But growing up in the vineyard, I, I

spent actually the first about 12 years

of my career in food and beverage and

hospitality, event design, production,

wedding planning, you name it,

I've had almost every single job

you can have when it comes to

the broader world of hospitality.

And I think doing that is one,

I really got to cut my teeth

on on customer obsession.

Like the customer is always right in

that world, and I think that that now

motivates me and a lot of what I do is,

how do I do right by the customer and

furthermore, how do I put all my effort in

to create a memorable experience for them?

So whether it's their wedding day, whether

it's an anniversary dinner whether it's

a family reunion, you name it, right?

Like, these might be the most

important moments in somebody's life,

and I love to be a part of that.

And so when I, when I kind of left that

world a mentor of mine you know was

like, you, I love the highs and the lows,

call me masochistic, I love the highs

and the lows of the hospitality world.

And a mentor of mine was like, you might

get that same level of satisfaction

in the startup world, and I was like

Or stress, let's say it's the level of

raised cortisol levels at all times.

That's right.

And I was like, I watched Silicon

Valley, but I really had no idea

what like a tech startup was

right, but I had the opportunity

to join an early stage tech company

back in 2014 in Boston, and and I've

been in tech and SaaS ever since.

But it actually It was on the B2C side.

So that's where I really started

to get introduced to, like, the

formal marketing discipline.

Meanwhile, a lot of what I had been

doing in the hospitality world was

marketing just with a different title.

So I felt like it wasn't too

far of a stretch in terms of my

experiences and what I like to do.

But eventually Connor it was interesting.

I felt like I got farther and

farther away from the customer.

Like I was mass marketing to millions

of people in a database and we

were optimizing for our cart value.

We were, we were like a, a B2C company

that, you know, sold, it was a two sided

marketplace that had both business users

and then customers at the end of the day.

And I felt like to my earlier point, I was

getting far away from like the neighborly

connection and actually getting to know

my business and my neighbors one to one

and the same mentor was like, well, maybe

B2B is going to be more exciting and

more interesting to you because instead

of marketing to millions of people,

you actually only market maybe to 2,000

accounts, right, at best case scenario?

And therefore the care and attention you

have to put into those experiences is

a whole heck of a lot more important.

And so I moved into the B2B world about

six years ago, I've been here ever

since, and I've kind of directly chosen

marketing, sales, rev technology

that one, I see value in, but two,

I think continues to perpetuate this

overall hypothesis of mine, which is

like we are better together, right?

Like, how do we bring

people closer together?

How do you create more meaningful

business relationships?

How do you like break the convention?

I think a lot of the bad habits

and bad experiences that have been

perpetuated by technology and so

that's how I ended up at an AI company.

I actually chose to join

before the chat GPT craze.

So I like to say I was an

early

trend

setter I like,

I like the AI OGs that are like, I

was here before this was cool.

I've been here for over a

year which is like so funny,

that makes you an OG, but you know,

the the company I'm now at Regie.ai,

we've, we've been working on this

problem for about four years.

So we didn't wake up nine months ago

and decide to hop on the bandwagon, but

you know, the co founders have really

committed their recent life work to,

to solving some big problems with AI.

So that's how I got here today.

Amazing.

I love people with hospitality

backgrounds in general.

I think that anyone who has a hospitality

background is just like extremely

tough, super empathetic, you have to

understand those customers and like

you just have to get, you have to be

so gritty because you just get kicked

in the teeth everyday all the time.

And that's actually interesting, I

mean, this could be a whole other topic.

whole other topic sometime.

Topics on

I feel like there's so much parallel

too between hospitality, you know, let's

say a restaurant for instance, and the

friction between marketing and sales.

Like I often think of marketing as the

front of the house in a restaurant,

sales is back at the house.

You only win if you're both, you

know, hyper compatible and team

oriented at the end of the day,

but there's like so much built in

friction between those two worlds.

And so I actually feel like I excel now

in these areas because I've like had

a predisposition to figuring out like

how to make sure the chef likes you.

We use so many with Aptitude8 in the

services business, we use so many

service, and I don't even think anybody

has like a deep hospitality background,

everyone's kind of done some of it.

You'd outpace all of

us in terms of breadth.

But I think we use it really

often of like, okay, you're an SA

you're taking orders at the table.

But like the kitchen doesn't need

to know everything, they just need

to know like burger medium rare.

But like if you give them things

that aren't on the menu, they

don't know what to cook and

it's not because they're stupid.

Like you have all these things

and we do them all the time.

That's exactly right.

So anyways, I digress,

Tell me, tell me about Regie.

What, what is Regie What, how

should people think about it?

Where does it fit in the thing?

What are you excited about?

And then we'll kind of

dovetail from there.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, we are in the ever topical AI

space and I'll give folks just a

bit of a background in terms of

our journey because I help, I think

it helps give some credibility in

terms of the problem we solve today.

Actually was an early Regie customer

many, many years ago, and we first

got known for a sequence generation.

So when content generation was just

becoming accessible to the pre ChatGPT

worlds you could actually start to

use it to think about, well, how do

we take some preset value props and

messaging for your website, read some

of your sales engagement data and stitch

it all together to create a really

performant piece of outbound content.

And that was like hyper novel

when it first hit the market.

I don't know about you, but, I never want

to write another sales sequence again.

Like it is the bane of

my marketing existence.

Sales never likes it, so then they

go rogue and then it like, you know,

just pains me as a brand marketer that

people are writing their own things

and, you know, targeting whoever

they want so we solved a big problem.

But interestingly enough,

there's not a lot of sustained

value in the middle, right?

Even the best of organizations,

maybe write sequences once a

quarter, once, twice a year, right?

And so what happens in the middle?

New head of marketing starts.

Oh my God, all of this is terrible.

We need to rewrite all it.

But then it goes stale really quick, and

you just don't have the capacity to keep

up with optimizations, most organizations.

And so the next iteration of

the product was actually helping

to unlock personalization for

frontline sales reps, right?

So any given sales rep, maybe 60% of those

sequences are templatized, they click

the button or it automatically sends.

But the other 40% requires actual human

to human connection and personalization

and you got to do your research and your

homework and you got to think about,

well, how do you catch them with the

perfect subject line and opening line?

And so we were able to take the

same type of operating principles

of our platform, but apply it to one

email instead of multiple emails.

And, and customers love that because

it, you know, you take what's maybe

a 15 minute process to write a great

cold email down to less than a minute.

But the interesting thing

Is that like, is my experience,

am I, is it mad libsy?

Am I like writing something

and you're fixing it?

Like if I'm the end user, I'm a sales rep.

What, what do I experience

if I'm doing that?

So there is a decent amount of

set up on the backend to then have

minimal set up on the output, right?

And so what I mean by that is

you know, I see that prompts

are becoming the new templates.

And by that, I mean, for the past

10 years, 15 years, ever since

Outreach, Salesloft Apollo, these

sales engagement platforms hit the

market, junk in is junk out, right?

And so the quality of these

sophisticated systems are incredibly

reliant on the quality of the

content that goes into them.

And so for the past 15 or 10 years, folks

have been developing these high performing

templates to make sure that they could

reach the amount of people they need

to reach to with minimal intervention

or edits along the way, right?

So you're trying to balance the

personalization and the reach scales.

But people are getting hammered

right now on deliverability,

especially with the changes from,

from Yahoo and Google and others.

As of Feb 1, if you're sending

templated messages, you are

ruining your domain reputation.

You're probably not even reaching

your buyer's inbox, let alone creating

compelling enough content for them

to open, you know, reply and engage.

Yeah, that used to be

the primary struggle.

Now it's like 3 struggles down.

That's exactly right.

And so prompts are, are similar in that

you give direction for how you want

these AI models to create content and

it's, and it's mad lib in that it will

understand the rules of the game that

you're giving it, but it has enough

flexibility and enough freedom to

actually generate a unique message that

fits those confines every single time.

So you can start to now use AI to

create the same volume if not more, of

messaging but every single one is going

to be unique and relative to the buyer.

But it's again, only as good as the

data sources you feed it and the

prompts that you coach it around.

And so there's similar styles set

up on the backend, but then as

a rep at the end of the day, all

they do is click 'Yes send' because

all that work's been done for them

right?

And they give it a quick read and they

make sure that it's, you know, good to go.

But the point that was really interesting,

I mean, not that I've held you know,

held a bag on a sales team, but I've

worked with a lot of sales reps.

And

10 years ago, people would have tripped

over themselves for this level of

accessibility and ease of use, right?

But now, you can't get reps to click

the button, which is really interesting.

I don't know how many sales

leaders I've talked to.

There's actually an interesting stat from

Gartner that 77% of sales reps say that

they're falling behind on their tasks.

Like, they just can't keep

up with the work required,

they can't get through all the clicking

of the buttons, and it's bottlenecking

their ability to reach their buyers.

And so now when we think about the real

implications that has for people, we

needed a new solution that actually blows

past the human bottleneck and allows AI

to start owning more of the work outright.

So the product today of Regie, this

is a long winded way of painting a

picture, is think about it almost as

if it's an autonomous or a virtual SDR.

When you think about all the

repetition that plagues sales

processes, you have to find your

ICP, looking at data in your CRM.

You then have to go out to

some sort of third party data

provider and build a lead list.

You then got to get your leads

back into your system of record.

You then have to think about, well,

shoot, what do I say to a head of

RevOps, which is probably different

than a head of marketing, which is

probably different to my third persona.

And then I have to create a sequence

for them, and then I have to put all the

people in the sequence, and then I have

to actually click the buttons now to

send all the emails and make the calls

and connect with them on social media.

And so when you think about all

these failure points and like what

I like to think of as the outbound

assembly line, it's no wonder that

folks are finding it incredibly

challenging and incredibly expensive to

operationalize an outbound motion today.

And so we automate that fully,

and it gives capacity back to your

talented human sales reps and SDRs

to hit the phone on people that are highly

engaged or to spend the effort on social

media to make InMail's and connections

happen where they're going to see the

highest reward and payoff on engagement.

So we're now playing in the in the AI

space when it comes to autonomous SDRs.

It is amazing to see how quick this this

transformation has happened in terms of

how quick the tech's evolved and the real

life problems that we're solving for,

for many enterprise sales organizations.

Is the autonomous SDR, a fake

LinkedIn profile, fake name person?

Is it, is it an impersonating

sounds like a very bad word, but

like, is it impersonating my real

rep or like, what is the experience

for how that actually manifests?

Maybe the people that

I'm I'm prospecting to.

That's a great question.

There are solutions on the market

that are fake by nature, right?

It's like, here's my

virtual SDR, Susie Q, right?

And everybody knows Susie Q is

not real, but, and maybe people

care, maybe they don't right.

And maybe it all comes out in the wash.

We instead are the workhorses that

are doing all the work on behalf of a

real life human that is on your team.

And so think about it you know Connor,

if you're an SDR and you know you need to

make a hundred personalized emails a day,

you know, a thousand phone calls a week

and connect with 50 people on social media

you can now tell your agent, you can give

your agent these parameters, the agent

will do all this work on Connor's behalf.

And now you, Connor, as an SDR, wake up

every day and you open your task list.

And now you're only humanly calling into

the accounts that have high levels of

intent as warmed up by these agents.

You're only going to LinkedIn and making

these connections on high levels of intent

that have been warmed up by the agents

and all the email that was happening

from your domain, from your name, and that

way when you start to bubble up interest

and intrigue, those replies go right to

you and now you, human Connor, can hop in

and say, "Yeah, Tuesday at noon is great.

Here's my Calendly you

can book time here".

So we pull you into the loop when it

matters most, and we keep you out of the

loop when it doesn't matter, and it's, and

it's actually a low expenditure of reward

from, from your, your capacity standpoint.

Do you have customers, and I'm curious how

intentional of a design decision this is

right of like, are there customers like,

well, I don't want you to be Nina Butler,

I want you to just be like like give me

a thousand SDRs, like I want an infinite

number and just replace all of it.

And is that something that you're

like, we don't do that because

the technology isn't there.

We don't do that because we think

that that doesn't make sense.

Like where do you sort

of land on that scale?

That's another great question.

You know, and I often get asked,

like, what are best practices?

What are pitfalls?

Like, this is this is like flying

cars, like give me the roadmap.

And one of the questions I get asked

is something along these lines.

And our directive back is, it's

actually hurtful to overproduce

for your organization if you

can't keep up with the demand,

right?

So you give this instance, well,

I want a thousand of these virtual

SDRs, you know, going hog wild on

the weekend and working overnight.

But it actually does you no good to

burn through those lead lists and

potentially, you know, overfish your

pond if you don't have the SDRs or the

reps that are able to make the phone

calls and do the social work at the end

of the day, which is why we help you

with that sales math is what I call it.

Like what's the minimum level of

volume you actually need to put through

this to make a noticeable difference.

And then what's the maximum volume

you don't want to exceed because

you actually don't have the human

capacity today to accommodate it.

Cool.

So the end rep experience is I get plugged

into Regie, the people that I talk to

are folks that we've, I have already

been prospecting into with his account

on LinkedIn doing some of these different

pieces, and now I'm reaching out to them

being like, Hey, I've been trying to

reach whoever here's what we're doing,

here's what's going on.

And I sort of have those conversations

at that point but it is pre warmed and,

and serves to me, it makes it sound

like an airline meal or something.

More delicious, I promise.

Higher end, higher end.

cold.

Something you said that really resonated

with me previously it was sort of

like prompts of the new templates.

And what's really interesting we just

did this acquisition, we were going

to wait on the announcement staff.

Our director of marketing is on vacation

this week and I was like, Hey, by the

way, we might actually do it next week.

And what he gave everybody and I don't

know, I didn't think that much of it

and then what you just said really, I

don't know, made me kind of think about

it more, which was that instead of giving

everybody, here's the social posts that

everyone should use, it was, "Hey, I

made these prompts for you and you can

put them into GPT and tell it this, and

everyone will get their own response

and everyone gets a unique,

organic post that you can write."

And I was like, oh, that's cool but

what you just said sort of thing

takes that of anywhere you're using

a template for anything, being able

to provide somebody with here's how

you should interact with the AI and

then it'll give you something that's

different for you than anybody else.

And I think in some situations, the

AI that's cited as a bug, right?

Like anybody interacts with it gets

something completely different so you

have no consistency, but that lack of

consistency actually becomes a huge

value prop when you're trying to.

Cool.

create kind of unique, not unique,

but unique enough at scale.

That's exactly right.

And, you know, to, to have your cake and

eat it too, the way that we've developed

at least our own product, and I've seen

similar efforts in the market is like,

what are the non negotiables, right?

When you think about compelling outreach

that's on brand, reflective of your

value prop, you know, relevant for

your buyer, chances are, if you have

a very strong value proposition and a

very strong pain point on how you solve

that problem, and it's laddered up to

the appropriate persona in terms of the

different people that are part of your

buying committee at the end of the day.

That is enough to feed an AI

for the rest of its life, right?

Its belly is full, it knows how

to mix and match and reword and

rephrase, but never lose the

intention of what your message is.

And that's how you actually get to have

that personalization at scale, which I

think many pieces of tech have promised

for multiple decades, but you've never

actually been able to deliver on it

until recently with the advent of AI.

And so that's how you kind of

preserve and protect the brand,

but still allow for flexibility

and customization on the output.

I talked to a lot of founders and

CEOs and people doing kind of these

arenas on, on the show, and I think

they're all very excited about it.

And they're like, Oh, everyone

loves it it's amazing.

What do you find when you're thinking

about whether you're talking to

buyers or thinking about messaging,

like as people are looking at

Regie or maybe AI solutions generally,

what is their hesitation, objection?

Like where are you focusing your marketing

efforts that I think then translates to

people in market for these solutions?

What are they afraid of, thinking

about, skeptical of that you guys

are sort of trying to overcome?

It's great.

And, you know, the, I will say, I

think for the better, some of the fear

mongering and the and the paranoia and

hysteria has calmed down a little bit

because I think a lot more people have

actually got to touch, feel, manipulate,

massage a lot of these AI solutions,

whereas 12 months ago, it was like,

Oh my God, it's coming for our jobs.

know, we're have we're gonna have to

move to the moon.

I saw,

I saw a clip of Sam Altman like a day

ago that was hysterical, where he was

just like, he's like, "When we release

these things, everyone's like, oh my

god, it's the end of jobs, and they're

gonna take everything, and everyone's

gonna be employed, and he's like, and

now, everyone complains it's too slow".

And he's like, that happened really fast.

And I think that that's like, a

really beautiful observation on

technology generally of how people

sort of experience that curve.

It's

exact.

Well, actually, interestingly enough,

so when I kind of broke down the

three chapters, if you will, of

Regie, we had the sequence engine,

we had like the personalization at

point and now we have these agents.

We thought about and knew that

the capability was possible with

agents back in the sequence days,

but we thought that the

market wouldn't be ready.

We were like no way will people trust

this, relinquish the process, take the

human out of the loop to that degree.

And then when we got to the middle

stage, they were like, can't you

just press the button for us?

Right?

They

Yeah.

Like why, why do I have to do

it?

Let's

go literally.

And so you're like, okay, right?

So hypothesis disproven, and I think

that that is Sam Altman's point, which

is, you know, once once thingss start

to get socialized, people have very

high expectations for performance.

And actually, that's one of the, whether

you call it a challenge a curiosity, you

know, one of the best practices that I

try to coach anybody is demonstrating

patience with the tech, right?

For some reason humans expect

far more accuracy, even if it's

a really nascent piece of AI tech

than they do a human standard.

And so what I have to coach people around

is like, if you don't take the time to

really massage those prompts in a way

that you love the output 99% of the time,

which granted is higher than how much I'm

sure you love your human output, right?

But

It's like self driving.

It's like, oh, it crashed once.

You

You know people crash like all the time?

That's exactly, a perfect example, right?

And then you have one you know,

moment in time and you're like, Oh

my God, we're pulling it back right.

And so people have these incredibly

high standards so I really encourage

people, if not for their own

education, to get really familiar with

prompt development and engineering,

and what if you move that up here?

How does that impact

that output every time?

And so that's one area that I

get lots of curiosities around.

I think the second thing that I hear

most often is there's uncertainty

in terms of where to, to apply

these solutions to first you know.

Their content's a dime a dozen now

in terms of you can use it for top

of funnel, mid funnel, customer

engagement, everything in between,

and I think some folks are kind

of paralyzed by the opportunity.

And I often think back

to my B2C days, right?

You make a bad purchase in

B2C, you just return your pants

to Amazon or whatever, right?

Like, no harm, no foul, maybe

you lose out on a shipping cost.

You make a bad purchase in B2B

and people lose their jobs.

So the stakes are a lot higher

and therefore it's a lot

more of an emotional sale.

And so people don't want to bet

on the wrong horse because then

their role could be in jeopardy.

And so what I like to tell people is think

about the different areas or opportunities

in your business that have the lowest risk

but the highest reward potential, right?

And that's actually why

we started in prospecting.

When you think about most B2B

organizations have hundreds of

thousands of leads in their CRM,

their marketing automation platform.

Marketing has spent good money to

acquire those folks, and maybe only a

sliver is ever engaged with by sales.

Sales cherry picks off the folks

they think they're gonna get the

quickest wins with, and everybody

else is kind of in this graveyard.

And so if you think about deploying,

MTLs are trash.

I hate them.

That's right, if you think about

deploying these agents against you know

greenfield, untouched, never engaged or

worse, just like spam cannon parts of

your database, there's very little risk

that something will go terribly wrong

and a tremendous upside when you think

about all the engagement and pipeline

you can actually start to build when you

start to shake the gold pan a little bit.

So, so that's kind of my

recommendation when people are

like I don't know where to start.

Go to the place that's lowest risk,

potentially highest reward in your

business and, and test and iterate often.

That resonates with me so much cause

I think we we're like a big HubSpot

co-seller, so we talked to all these

people in CRM decisions and everybody's

like, do you have the AI stuff?

And they're like, Yeah

we have the AI stuff.

And they're like, Oh, that's really good.

We were told that the AI

stuff is really important.

And I get asked by analysts and

all these people all the time,

like, of like, Oh, is the AI

functionality like moving the needle?

Is it doing it?

I'm like, look.

It comes up in every conversation, but

no one knows what they want to do with

it, and no one knows where to start.

And then when you give them the

ability to execute on some of that,

they're totally paralyzed and have

no idea what they should do with it

so they're like, ah, this really

freaks me out, I'll do nothing.

And I really like the framework

of there are lots of areas in your

business, in your strategy that are

low risk and potentially high yield.

And you might as well throw something

at that and see what comes out

the other side versus putting

it into some existing function

and you know, there's a lot of

downside if, if it goes awry.

That's totally right.

And you know maybe you have all these

website visitors and you don't have any

way to, to engage that audience on web,

you know, like, think about all these

different pockets of where you're like,

man, we either do nothing today, or we

potentially provide a very bad experience

today that we'd love to improve.

And like, those are the natural

places in which you should, you

should test and test often with AI.

What, what is something

that your team is doing?

So let's pivot out of, and it could

be, Hey, here's what we're doing with

Regie, it could be here are other

tools we're really excited about.

But what are you doing or embracing

as a GTM leader in an AI organization,

theoretically on the bleeding edge

of, of using AI in your own GTM

efforts that you're really excited

about or, or is, is working?

Yeah, it's I feel like it's, it's a bit of

a cop out, but we drink our own champagne.

We are the most aspirational

customer in our portfolio.

Our entire go to market strategy

is built around the efficacy of

these agents or, or lack thereof and

we're the first to figure that out.

And so I've been with the

organization for about 15 months now,

and we've been utilizing these agents

for, let's call it you know, 7 or 8 of the

past 15 and it's completely transformed

every element, every element and I'll

kind of go through those in detail.

One, validating our

ideal customer profile.

It's actually fascinating

how many organizations I

speak to that are just like

we sell to enterprise SaaS companies.

And it's like, okay, let's get

a little more scientific, right?

Like, where's the data?

Where do you have the

highest quality of revenue?

You know, what is your NRR look

like in different segments?

Like, let's get really scientific with it.

And even with that level of inspection

there's still biases that infiltrate

your determination of who makes a great

fit customer and who maybe doesn't.

And so using something like an agent

that can actually go into your CRM

and start to verify some of these

assumptions to say, like, Hey, Nina,

call me crazy, but you're booking a

lot of meetings with RevOps personas.

And meanwhile, that's not a persona

that was ever in our line of sight.

It can actually start to help keep

you honest in terms of where you're

going to have the highest rewards.

So it's, it's helped us rethink

the definition of our ICP.

Two, it's completely changed

our dependency on contractual,

excuse me, contractor resources.

So, you know, we're early stage, we

don't have full time rev ops, sales

ops, any of that fun, great stuff.

We used to have to rely on people

to help us build lead lists,

we used to

Yeah.

There's ton of orchestration

Really pay for pricey data providers

that maybe we get like 10% of,

of functionality because we just

don't need everything else right.

And now it's completely

eliminated that for us.

So one, it tells us who to go

after and two, it just goes out

and finds those folks for us.

And then the third biggest thing

is completely consolidating

that content creation workflow.

You know, again, in my career, I've spent

it's actually embarrassing, but I have

spent months trying to get just a new

sequence and market by the time everybody

has an opinion and preference and an

edit and you go in and it's just like

it's just a nightmare, right?

And now these things happen

completely human free.

The AI is smart enough to understand

not just what content to put out

there, but actually what the next

best action for the buyer is, right?

When you think about some of the

the plagues of of legacy prospecting

and sequencing It's arbitrary.

You just decide that email,

email, social, phone call is

like the new hot touch pattern.

Put it on a slide and it

seemed really compelling.

Or you like, go to one webinar once

and you're like, I don't know, that's

what they're doing, like, we're

just gonna take that framework.

Whereas now you completely challenge

the convention of static sequencing.

And now the AI agents can listen for

actual engagement and actual intent

and say, Hey, listen, Connor hasn't

opened your past two emails, why keep

hammering him now with a phone call and

a LinkedIn message and another email?

Let's instead cool off Connor

and go back to Connor in 30 days.

Maybe he'll be in a different headspace,

maybe he'll have a different

level of interest in our offering.

Conversely, maybe Connor's opening

every email and is on our website

and is downloading our content.

You best believe we should be calling

right into that person, right?

So it'll, it'll fluctuate up or down

based on the real behaviors and habits

of your buyers, which again, I think

is just a beautiful challenge to how

many of us have had to market and sell

for the past two decades, which is

through this idea of static sequencing.

if you guys are doing a lot of these

different Regie agents, what is your

level of, I don't know, how has it changed

the way you think about where you're

applying effort at which point in that

sort of production stack and then how

you're thinking about the not necessarily

staffing, just how many SDRs do we need?

But what sorts of folks do you need in

your GTM team to execute on that play?

So when I think, so when it kind of

changes, like my my particular role, like

when do I come in and maybe what type

of mental bandwidth do I now get back?

I can actually now start thinking about

experimenting with new verticals and

new personas and new territories at a

speed in which I've always had a, had a

hindrance because it was like, okay great

now I have to go get the data, now

we have to write all the content,

now we have to like AB test, which

like is always never accurate, right?

Whereas now I can literally today

Conner be like, Hmm maybe we should

start selling into sales enablement.

And I could just put my agent

and start to work that persona

with some specific content.

And literally by tomorrow morning,

I'm going to have instant results in

terms of how this, how this content

is performing with that persona,

which is a marketer's dream, right?

Marketers have never been able

to know what's actually driving

engagement outside of like vanity

metrics of opens and clicks on your,

on your your sales engagement, right?

When I think about now, well, what

does this mean for how we continue

to grow as a high growth company?

We can now think about not necessarily

a reduction in our head count, but

a redeploying of that human capital.

And so, you know, if we have four SDRs

today, where our agents are actually now

driving 42% of their meeting contribution,

well, that's pretty tremendous.

The SDRs are still working a 40 hour

work week, but now we're getting

to our goals a lot more quickly.

And when you get your goals a lot more

quickly, doors start to open for you.

Maybe you have more funding opportunities,

maybe you have the ability to get higher

profiled marketing opportunities, right?

Like it propels your, your entire business

forward at a speed in which you may be

predicted that wouldn't happen for a

couple of quarters or a couple of years.

So it's less a job replacer and it's more

a job augmenter or a goal augmenter, so

now you can start to get to the goods

quicker as a, as a go to market team.

Do you have, like, how do you respond

to somebody who looks at this and says,

wow, we're just scaling up outbound spam

of, of volume and everything else here.

And people are going to be all tuned

out to it, those channels are going to

go away or, or that sort of shifting.

If everybody sort of says,

oh, wow, and eventually this

becomes somewhat prolific, right?

In terms of the volume and the cost to

access it, that people just tune out to

those, those layers of messaging entirely.

Here's what, here's what I

would say and observe for that.

One, I actually think that automation has

proliferated this spam inundation, right?

Like more does not equal

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