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Back on T-R-A-C-K (formerly Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders) is where founders learn how to build a true marketing growth engine — one that runs smoothly, scales sustainably, and supports the business you actually want to lead.
After hundreds of conversations with marketing leaders on Tea Time, one truth kept surfacing: too many founders are stuck chasing what’s shiny and new instead of strengthening the systems that create consistent, compounding growth.
Back on T-R-A-C-K is your reset. Join me and a lineup of fractional marketing leaders and founders who’ve paved the way — or are finding it in real time — as we share honest stories, practical strategies, and proven frameworks to help you get clarity, build momentum, and stay the course. Because growth doesn’t come from doing more — it comes from getting back on track.
Speaker 2 (00:05.972)
Welcome back to Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. I'm Keri Gardner, hostess with the most assist and CEO of MKG Marketing coming to you from the Isle of Guernsey. With me today is Mike Moreno, a proven leader building the future of GTM with AI. He has a decade of experience scaling SaaS and cloud businesses at powerhouses like Intel, Cloudera, CloudFlare, and ExaBeam. With a background in software engineering and deep expertise in cloud, machine learning, and high performance computing,
Mike has a rare ability to translate technical innovation into market traction. Most recently at SADA, he launched AI driven solutions that generated millions of new revenue. Now he's diving into how generative AI is transforming sales and marketing. So much to unpack and I'm here for it. Mike, welcome to the show. Thank you.
Kerry, glad to be here. Excited.
So glad to have you. A long time no see.
Yes. It has been a while, but it's been a fun ride. I finished up at SADA back in January. I'm currently in the process of growing, prospecting. I have a couple of clients for my own agency focused on product marketing and trying to help small businesses, kind of what we're going to talk about, whether it's a storm or the challenges of AI as it comes to messaging in their products.
Speaker 2 (01:03.256)
Tell me
Speaker 2 (01:27.896)
Look at you go. Welcome to the fractional show. That's exciting. Yeah, so you started your own your own thing. You have a couple clients.
Like, stat.
Speaker 1 (01:35.946)
Yes, I have a couple of prospective clients that we're talking to, so I'm very excited about that. Maybe a product launch I'll be working on here with them, as well as assessing how we can build a better go-to-market digital framework for another client in the healthcare space. So lots of stuff going on. I know I'm one of many in the world of fractional marketing, PMM, digital marketing, you name it, because it's just an exciting time, even though I know it's a challenging time.
Very cool.
Speaker 1 (02:05.656)
many marketers because I can reflect back on last year and just seeing how I went from the year before using chat GPT to the world we are in now and just kind of like assessing that things have definitely changed and things and many marketers need to understand that.
There seems to be two camps in the land of fractional, people who feel like it's a moment in time and a blip given the current market, and others who feel like this is the longevity and the way the world is going in terms of marketing departments. What's your, as you're dabbling here and getting into the mix of it,
What camp are you currently falling on? And I'm not saying you have to stay there forever, but as you go down this journey, where are you feeling like this new fractional world is coming up? Is it here to stay or is it just given this is what people are using right now to get through an interesting time?
I think businesses and decision makers are trying to manage their budgets, obviously, and their knee-jerk reaction is looking at AI as, this is a simple way for me to get more out of less people, which is probably a statement. Yet I do think there may be a disconnect in assuming that you could hire a junior marketer who's using AI tools to give them the same results they would have gotten from
a seasoned marketer who understands the product, understands the market, understands product positioning, understands storytelling. There's a tremendous amount of knowledge that's been accumulated from go-to-market experts over the years. And when you just make the assumption that Chats GPT is going to give you all the answers to somebody you're paying half or quarters as much as you would be more seasoned, I think you're not buying
Speaker 1 (04:12.206)
a little more challenging than you expect because there's just like, I've always branded myself as kind of more of a tech coming to marketing from the technical angle. studied computer science. I've worked at Intel for 10 years. understand hardware and software dynamics pretty well and how these technologies are influencing business solutions. And there's the marketers and product marketers who come from the writing angle. Great at building those stories.
And I think both are very valid, but I think, you know, business decision makers who are hiring, bringing on marketers might be kidding themselves if they think they can just grab somebody who's junior, chat GBT is just going to educate them and somehow they're going to do some magical work. And I think people should be cautious. So that makes me think it's a temporary thing. that maybe, you know, as things change and are by, I need these full-time employees to be working for me, not just.
But I think the idea of hiring, you know, one person to do many people's jobs is a struggle. And so I think the fractional side sort of helps solve a bit of that, where you bring on sort of a fractional team versus a single person. you still need, founders make this, they make this mistake all the time where they skip having a marketing person there, whether it's in-house or even as a fractional,
jump right to working with an agency and then they don't understand why nothing's working, right? And so I, yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see how it all pans out, but I do think fractional is here to stay, but I do think it's going to find itself into a certain niche of what, of where it makes sense and how it helps companies get on the map and start to grow. And then they will need to bring in an in-house team because there's just too much work for a fractional team.
But I think it's going to help those smaller companies who need marketing get marketing faster than just waiting around for the revenue to be rolling in and the product to be finished, so to speak. can get ahead a little bit quicker by bringing in fractional. When I say fractional, I'm talking about those seasoned people like yourself. I think it's going to give them access to people like you who have the experience opposed to having to
Speaker 2 (06:38.21)
go with somebody with lesser experience because they're cheaper and potentially faster, but don't really know what they're doing and relying on ChatGPT to get it done. I, it's.
be an inflection point in the sense that you can bring somebody fractionally like me who has tons of experience, they're using the AI tools and you're really going to get a lot of productivity out of those individuals in a shorter period of time where I think in years past the knee jerk was I need this agency and I think the culture I've seen over the last few years is
in the organizations I've been at is this desire to get this uber professional designed agency that your friend told you about, you're the CMO and you're picking them. And a lot of it's kind of this brand base or perception base. I think things are going to be, there's going to be more of a level playing field where maybe a newer agency who has a niche focus will be able to maybe accelerate
those startups faster than them just having to wait, save their money. Oh, I gotta buy this, this one agency. gotta work with them. And I think that things are gonna kind of balance out a bit in that sense, because I'll be honest, I've seen some of these larger agencies and they're great and they'll do great work. But then at the same time, I feel it's very surface. It's not, they don't understand the product, the positioning, the narratives that need to be said to get the eyeballs and the attention that that.
needs.
Speaker 2 (08:15.15)
that time. I've been sort of designing websites for the last few years now. Thanks to I used to fight with WordPress and CSS and all that and then I quit like rage quit. I was like, No, not doing this anymore. And now there's a new tech stack out there that I use called tailwind with next JS and it's like game changing in terms of never having to touch CSS ever again. And so I got back into it. And the thing that I've learned over the last
two years in doing websites is that it's not actually about the website. It's to your point about the, you know, where do you sit in the market and where is that empty space married to that thing that makes you different and unique that nobody else is really leaning into with the tone and voice of the brand and what are those? And then you put SEO on top of that and sort of bring all that together before you even touch.
website. that takes like, just sitting with a client to even unpack all that takes weeks before you even really start to work. It's been absolutely fascinating and doing that kind of deep level work that you're talking about. I am so I do think this shift is coming where people are understanding that that has to happen. And it's all well and good to have a pretty website. But what it's just a vehicle for
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:45.024)
really the most important stuff, which is what you're saying and why you're saying it how you're saying it. So yes.
And that's where I approach things in everything I do is with that first messaging document. Messaging and positioning. Who is the customer? Those are the first questions I'll ask a product manager, a salesperson. I'll even talk to, when I get the occasion, talk to potential personas. And for example, when I started at XB, I went and talked to the old CISO from Cloudera.
I say, hey, I'm joining this security operations company. Tell me what you're going through. What are the things when it comes to a SIM cybersecurity solution that you're interested in? And really getting to the base level, what is it that they care about? What could move the needle fastest for that company in engaging with you, said Persona. And building the messaging from there, because I think, to your point, like,
We can make pretty things and we can put words on the page and chat to BT can certainly help you put the words on the page. But is it going to resonate at a human level because it's a human who's, you know, who's considering buying your product. And especially when you're talking about inbound leads, I don't know about you, but I mean, what my process for doing vendor research right now is usually start with chat to BT, give me the top 10 XYZ.
widgets, boom. And then after that, maybe I'll say in North America or in the United States. But then from there, I might be going into their websites and I might be saying, okay, validating the thesis that's been given to me. And that's where the action happens, right? The vendor, we've all heard of this as marketers, and this is an old data point. It was 70 % of sales by...
Speaker 1 (11:40.782)
Before a salesperson talks to somebody, 70 % of the research is all they're putting down. And I think that's even higher now. I always like to say now it's over 70 % because these tools just make it so easy. And I can reflect back, you know, talking about Cloudera since you planted it in my mind. I helped Cloudera invest in LinkedIn Elevate for their social media, which is an employee advocacy tool, which allows them to...
all the employees that retweet, repost and link them. And I did the vendor analysis. I looked at them and I looked at some of the other leading employee advocacy tools and have three columns and features, benefits, price. And I can just go to Chat TV, can you do that in seconds? So if you're not showing up there, and this is how my thesis for what I'm trying to drive us as a consultant right now is.
If you're not showing up when I say, me the top 10 vendors, you need to be there. This is in my mind, and you can debate me on this. In my mind, this is SEO 15 years ago. This is an opportunity. I guarantee that chat GPT a year from now or less, two years from now, they're going to go to a paid model similar to what we've seen with Google and Google Analytics.
because us marketers don't want to see the analytics. We're going to want to be able to say, oh, we got attribution because somebody found an article that positions your company or product on Chat GPT. And we could say, hey, look, look, we did it. And so I think things will go in that direction. But right now is such a hot opportunity to really use tools like frameworks like generative engine optimization, where you put the right content pieces out there in press and blogs.
aligning your messaging on your website such that these things get picked up and bringing that alignment back to what we just talked about. The messaging doc. This needs to be the core of how you're to talk about it. How do you think your core audience is going to write a prompt saying, give me the top 10 companies that do XYZ. If you're not saying we do XYZ on your product page or your solution page or even your main homepage banner, you might be missing.
Speaker 1 (14:04.014)
And I've actually seen results where in those top 10 lists from Chad GPT for subset of vendors, there might be Wikipedia, Wall Street Journal article. And I've actually seen ones where the customers, that vendor's website was referenced and they were ranked in. So that messaging alignment is so important right now to get you in there.
my gosh, I don't know where to start. We have to show up in geo, right? And I think it's still a black box of how on earth we do that. What we are seeing is that the standard SEO best practices still work. So to not change what you're doing from an SEO perspective, but to your point, really aligning your SEO strategy to not only how people search, but then that messaging piece of hitting at home, right? Those need to be
in lockstep and the way that I'm seeing AI sort of level the playing field, so to speak, is I'm a great example of this. And I'm sure you're feeling this too, of like being able to build the positioning, the messaging, the keyword research, dumping a ton of information into chat, all in one window and now folders to really build that up into a place where you can just
Now, like when we roll out ad copy, it's like, okay, using the tone of voice and these messaging pillars, we're going after this keyword. You know, let's write 10 title tags and then these meta and then we need just four descriptions to make sure they're in this order, right? And then you're knocking out copy in less than 20 minutes. And the only reason why it takes that long is because we're still being thoughtful and methodical and poking the bear to make sure that it's dialed in, right? So I, I do think that
doing, taking the time to do the research and doing it in chat is like where this is all, where this is all headed. But let's talk about that for a second, because the way that we do the research and what, you know, I said this in a presentation I gave a few weeks ago is that chat is only as good, the output from chat is only as good as the input you give it. And so if you're just scraping the internet and having it regurgitate back to you what it already knows,
Speaker 1 (16:12.856)
Yep.
Speaker 2 (16:19.732)
then you're just going to show up to your point. You might not even show up because it's going to rank you against what other people are already doing in your low-man totem pole in that regard. when you're talking about the research piece and that messaging and positioning, how are you using AI to support that? And how are you making sure that it isn't just an internet regurgitation of what's already out there?
So over last few months, this is what I've been researching specifically on geo and my conversations I've had with other marketers have kind of brought me to my thesis, which geo is a recipe currently. Attribution is the weak spot, but the recipe is authoritative content on authoritative websites. Going to help you get ranked. Wikipedia could be one of them. Reddit can be another one of them.
and then that alignment of message to what is on your website is also very important. Like I just mentioned now to your early point, those, I've talked to his SEO expert last week. He's like, if you're rocking in on SEO right now, you're, most likely you've been rocking it in SEO. You're probably going to come up in those top 10 most likely. My biggest concern and kind of what I'm focused on having been in the startup game for a while or.
sub C, series C companies or series C ish, is that if you're a series, let's say you're a series A, you're smaller, you're relatively new, getting that brand impact, even with SEO is going to be a challenge. You don't have the content out there. You may haven't built the authority or brand authority or product solution authority yet. And so how do I help somebody like that in that situation accelerate to be
ranked and rated by chat. That is kind of what I'm looking at.
Speaker 2 (18:17.986)
Getting authority up and getting those keywords ranking and your landing pages, it does feel so much harder these days. It feels like it takes more time and more effort making progress and really having it all working together. It's not just keywords. It's not just semantics on your website. It's not just internal link building.
It's an external link building. You can't do any one of these things. You have to do all of them.
Yeah. And I will answer this a bit further because the conversation I had with somebody last week, I think it's a bit of a balance on SEO and geo is my view, is that you need to check the SEO box well. But then if you want to get listed, you need to start on the geo recipe that I just talked about. And there is a bit of training in there. You need a trained chat. You need to change the platforms you want to review because I was about to interview for identity access management.
ago and I was doing my research and I said give me the top 10 identity access management companies. Boom. It wasn't on the list. And I go, why is it this company on the list? the way chat responded was hilarious. I'm sorry. Yeah, they should be up there. And I'm just like, okay. And so I validated this thesis as well with other markers. So I talked to a marker
probably about two and a half months ago. And he was managing a bunch of e-commerce sites in India. And he noticed the SEO, he's an SEO guy. And he noticed SEO was not working like it used to through probably about, now we're probably about a year ago, but when I talk about nine months. And so he started researching what was going on. And he realized that obviously the LLMs are taking this kind of no-click situation.
Speaker 1 (20:18.098)
And, and so he built kind of this geo strategy to kind of combat that. But the one thing that I walked away with, and I've also validated this is that he goes, LLMs recognize other LLM copy. So if you're thinking that you're going to just go use chat and just write a whole bunch of stuff and put it out there, that might, you know, that might not get you ranked and rated as well as you.
He said that they are looking for an original thought, a differentiation, something. That's why reviews, reviews that could be in Reddit as well, but reviews like on G2 play so well right now to getting you ranked and rated on these platforms because it's an original thought. It's some human being saying they are the best things in this life, right? And that has a tremendous amount of weight versus chat wrote it.
We're at rank number one out of 10 and chat knows that it was written by itself or by another LLM and you're just not gonna get this.
Let's talk about this differentiation between a geo strategy and a SEO strategy. think they're converging where SEO is sort of catching up to geo. There was a huge update that just happened in March actually that disrupted a whole bunch of folks for this reason where, to your point, the validation aspect of what you're saying is so important. Actually, when you do...
on page recommendation, when we do on page recommendations and we run it through SEMrush to give us on page to tell us like what's wrong with the page. That is actually one of the things that's looking for is client testimonials or case studies or that individual piece that validates what it's saying. If chat gives me content that ever says number one or trusted by, I'm like, no, you got to remove it.
Speaker 2 (22:21.09)
There's no, there's no way for me to sit here and say we're number one or we're the most trusted. Like that, that's unquantifiable. And on us, I can have enough testimonials to literally say those words. There's no point. So stop saying this. And so I do think that everyone's moving in this direction, both search engines, well as LLMs around that authenticity of
validation of making sure that those case studies and those testimonials are relevant and popping. Let's talk about this for second. You said there's this recipe for geo. You talked about relevant content. We're talking about the testimonial piece. Where else does it differentiate in your mind? Where else do you see where you have to lean into, what's different in leaning into geo versus SEO?
Now, I'm not the SEO expert. I can safely say I'm a well-rounded marketer, but not deep dive into SEO, probably as you. But my view would be you're going from a keyword trying to own certain keywords and then trying to build content that integrates those keywords to a world where with generative engine optimization, it's not necessarily as keyword focused. It's a bit more authority.
focus. Like if I'm going to put you, if I'm chat, I'm to put you in the top 10. I need to be able to validate that the review saying that you're great on G2 correlate with the Wall Street Journal article you put up there and the messaging correlates with what is on your website. And so I view it from a product marketing angle of
And I talk a lot about this as well, is that a lot of the messaging we've built for websites and even marketing materials at times can be very forward looking and less focused about what you do. so case in point, two years ago at ExaBeam, I needed to update a PDF that had all our partner integrations. And so I going through this list of 200 different partnerships and
Speaker 1 (24:44.024)
how they're categorized. then I ran into, I'm trying to, even though I know because I've been in tech my whole career, what most all these companies do, I still wanted to validate it. And so like best example I could give is CrowdStrike. So CrowdStrike, the world knows them as an endpoint protection company. You go to their website, we're the AI cybersecurity company. So there was no quick way two plus years ago to like go into chat TBT and say, validate this for me.
And so, um, I recognize that and, I also use Chat to me to help that process. But fast forward to today in the kind of thesis I built back then was there was like a sit, what was it like a two year lag on training data. So I kind of came to the conclusion as a marketer, as a product marketer, I'm like, there might be some value to communicating what you do as a brand or as a specific product more authentic.
So I think we're moving to a world where we're relying on tools like ChatGPT. And I think it behooves us to try and talk more authentically about what we do such that when somebody types in a prompt and says, I'm looking for the best endpoint protection company, give me the top 10, the wording on your website, massive authoritative content, and you're guaranteed that it's going to show up. And that's particularly impactful for the startup who's trying to build that brand.
where it could be so easy say, I got a 12 month roadmap and we're going to the moon. And I go, we're going to the moon. Well, they're not searching in chat. I'm looking for this startup that's going to the moon. They're searching for what you can do.
I actually had a really great conversation with Teresa Roy about this a few weeks ago where she was saying something similar from a product marketing standpoint, not in the sense of AI and how we're talking about it, but in the sense of more product solution. So we've been told for so long to not talk about our products and not talk about our features and people don't care. And to your point, I think you're driving that home of actually they may not care, but the LLMs do. So being very clear and specific on the thing.
Speaker 2 (26:54.498)
the very specific feature thing you have and do and the problem it solves is coming back in a big way. And the more specific we can be, the better chance we have at making sure we do show up from an authoritative perspective for that thing. So laddering up your homepage, sure, to be more emotional and to hit home, but people aren't ending up on your homepage anymore. They're kind of coming in the back door and going deeper, I think is where
to your point like kind of where this is all headed. And the other thing that you're saying that I absolutely love, the consistency that has to go beyond your website. And Google's always kind of said this, especially from a localization standpoint, where you have, I did local SEO a little bit today and a long time ago, where your phone number, like even just the way your phone number showed up in Google My Business had to be exactly formatted as it showed up on the website.
continuity had to be crystal clear. And so that kind of on a bigger stage to what you're talking about of like your continuity around your messaging and the problems you solve based off of the features you have has to be everywhere. And that always felt kind of daunting.
Hahaha!
Because everywhere now is like, it's not just Google ads, a website and a search engine. It's Google ads, it's YouTube, it's a search engine, it's your website, it's social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, I'm still calling it Twitter, threads, right? It's gotta be like TikTok, right? That continuity now.
Speaker 2 (28:47.264)
has to be spread out across so many more channels and teams. If you're looking more from an enterprise, and we've been talking very startup, which I love, but just sort of dipping our toe in the enterprise world, like that poor enterprise team now going across multiple teams and that continuity needed to be so crystal clear feels big. So where do you see what you sort of mentioned it a little bit, like Wall Street Journal, Reddit, are you saying PR has to play?
has to come out to play in a really big way to make this authoritative aspect work.
Big, time. think what my belief is that PR, brand, and product marketing all need greater alignment. And I say, I'll start from the product marketing angle because that's what I'm most comfortable with is to what you just mentioned. Start with the messaging doc. That messaging doc needs to be the core that we're communicating on a given product or set of products or
whatever portfolio this way. And this is the boilerplate to your point, the boilerplates and they go all over even in press. Like, and so the brand team and the PR team, what's the boilerplate? Does that boilerplate align to what we're messaging about our product or our company as a whole? And those all need to be better aligned than ever before. I think in a world where people are defaulting to like chat.
to give me the top 10 vendors.
Speaker 1 (30:26.03)
That's the AI talking to AI. That's the AI analyzing the world and giving you a response. But then once you move beyond that, that's where the human part begins. And I almost view kind of content right now in a certain way is that go with chat GBT or whatever tool cloud, go build your sales enablement materials and PDFs and even PowerPoints leverage that all day long. Don't worry that much about.
Just make sure that it aligns to that messaging. But external content, take your SMEs, take your CEO, your COO, your CPO, get those leaders and get their outlines, build their content, build that human aspect to it. Because I think once they click on your brand, that's where the brand alignment is so important because then it becomes about customer experience.
your tone, your visuals, that all need to also align to the marketplace you're going after. Because I think that's what's going to humanize you. Because I think that even though we're in this world of AI, and AI can do so much for us, I think you want that handoff to feel seamless between the 80 % of the research they've done online to their first conversation with the salesperson.
And that that needs to match. And then that is going then be kind of that virtuous cycle where I recognize the brand, I recognize the brand, I recognize the brand. want to tell people about this brand. then you start.
actually use the sales team as a first stop research tool. So I bring the sales, I always work with really small companies. So I always bring sales and the founder and whoever else I can reel in into the room multiple times over several weeks to unpack who they are, what they do, why they're better, what marketing they've tried or haven't tried.
Speaker 2 (32:34.636)
and really just like ask a plethora of questions and see what rabbit holes I find myself in. even actually, I just did one meeting recently where the CEO didn't show up because he wanted to give the room to his team to be able to speak from their perspective. And then I did a separate meeting with him. And so while I got similar answers, were, they they had different depth to them. And so I love what you're saying. I think,
terms of positioning and messaging in that first step is not just starting with chat or online research. It has to start with the people inside the company who are doing the thing and who are on the front lines of interacting with the customers day in and day out and what they're seeing as the pain and the solution and what's resonating and what's not and what's the language. And then you can build
on top of that. But I agree that that authenticity has to start with the people inside the company and the more the merrier. How I also think that it has to come back to the customer, which I've sort of struggled with in terms of getting in front of given the current client, current clients I'm kind of working with. But I know that from a product marketing standpoint, from a from a B2B tech standpoint, and the work that you've been doing, that's also
something that you rely heavily on. So when you're working with a startup and you're sort of marrying the stuff together, where does the customer voice lend itself for you?
flip back on one situation at Cloudflare where I was doing bit of channel marketing at the time. And we were trying to push out this platform solution. And my lead account, channel account rep is like, Mike, I'm not pushing that. He goes, that product in that solution, lost us a deal with a huge client last year with my primary channel partner. And he's like, we'll focus on this.
Speaker 1 (34:42.508)
And then later on we can try to cross them. And so those are the type of conversations that resonate, you know, because that gives you that perspective. What is truly going to move the needle and then validate the strategy and then come back. And so that's where I usually start. But then like the example I gave earlier, if I have a contact in my network, who's somebody who's the end customer, I'm to reach out to them on LinkedIn and say, Hey, could I get 15 minutes of your time? I'm starting.
this new job or I'm working with this client and I want to understand some of the things you look at. Um, and then the other thing I feel like I do personally is reflect on myself as a customer. think a lot of we're all human beings. We all get spam messages. We all get great, you know, we could all get great email sequences from inside reps. We all see social media. So I generally like to reflect also on myself is like, what is it that causes me?
to go investigate a product, to go research a product, to go buy a product. What were those things? And some of the darndest things that I can reflect on over the last year are just crazy. Like I'll get some inside rep emailing me very little copy on their sequence, very little, but enough to draw some interest. It was a topic that me as a marketer aligned to kind of the goals and objectives that I'm trying to achieve. And I was curious about their solution.
I'm a bit of a nerd, I guess. kind of do like Martex stuff. if it's something like, this is really cool. want to learn about it. but even thing I got the darnedest email and it was a somehow got to my inbox, not the promotion was from Microsoft. And again, very little copy, colorful banner at the top, just the right words on the page to, draw my interest. So I think it's, it's,
You need to think of those three things as me, what would I do if I was the customer? What would I do if I was the chief security officer, right? Knowing what I know about the products or the market. would what would, what channel would I go to to research a given product? Knowing what I know. The other one is actually talking to the customer and the other one is really getting that sales vision of what's happening when they're talking to customers.
Speaker 1 (37:08.322)
what's working, what's not. And those three things help the most.
What's it mean to you and where's that heart of what problem you saw that you wanted to solve? And then to validate whether that's still a thing and still relevant. again, coming back to that, I had a great conversation with Joel Bend a few weeks ago. We were talking about messaging and the heart of messaging and how it needs to speak from an emotional standpoint as much as the technical and tactical one. And so I always find founders are great for that intel.
How are you seeing that? We talked a lot about messaging from that more actionable standpoint, problem solution, feature, function. When you are talking about brand, though, and bringing that continuity across all of these channels from a brand voice aspect, how does heart
play into how emotion play into that? Or are you seeing it go sort of swing the other way where it's like, people don't want that anymore, especially with the way way geo is going. Like it's got to be just very straightforward, this to that. And it's not as an emotional decision as we all thought it was or used to be.
I kind of bring that mindset to when I do my marketing. So one of the things I've learned over a decade ago, it's like, go for the jugular. When you're talking to the customer, what's their core pain point? So I've kind of backed out, like there's the jugular moment and then there's the amazing utopian vision and kind of carrot stick, carrot stick. And I tend to approach things that way is like, what is the narrative that me as the, let's say I'll just pick on myself as the marketer.
Speaker 1 (38:56.43)
What is the narrative as me as a product marketing manager needs to hear that would say, Oh man, I got to go look at that solution. You know, Oh man, if I don't do this now and we can pick on AI, let's assume I'm a marketer. I've been older marketer and I just don't want to change my ways. But you see like you see the story that I'm just picking numbers up in here. 50 % of product marketers who don't adopt.
Chat GPT or LLM tools are going to lose their job next year. Holy moly. I'm like on it. So if I see that message, that narrative, I'm going to jump on it. Then the other one is, let's say I'm a CMO. 50 % of marketing organizations who adopt a platform that aligns tone of voice and branding through AI have increased revenue by 20%.
okay, I want to hear that story. So I think those emotions are really, you know, either from the bad angle or the good angle, you're trying to evoke that emotion and your sales team certainly needs to be doing that. They certainly need to be equipped with not only the customer case stories where hopefully you have some of those narratives built in, but even just the macro level understanding of, I understand CISOs or
on a product, whatever the product is, I understand their challenges and I'm aligning my story of my products or benefits and features and solutions to those problem statements. And that's always in my product marketing, my messaging documents when I build it. And I think every product market needs to kind of view that lens and brand needs that. That's where that, like I was saying earlier, PMM and brand, they need that alignment, especially as
brand becomes more important to stand out in the noise of Hello Imples.
Speaker 2 (40:59.826)
One thing that you did in both of those examples that I find very interesting is that you used a data point, 50%, 55%. And you used it in a way that says it strikes emotion. That feels so tactical to me. I love this because I've been finding in my own posts from a LinkedIn perspective that the LinkedIn posts that do best are the ones that I I lead with data and a data point. I feel like you probably did that somewhat intuitively.
And kind of by accident, because you've been doing this for so long. But is that like, as we think through our messaging strategies and aligning to the messaging points in relation to validity, sounds like data could play a really important part there of doing both the tactical of the thing you do in relation to the emotion that it could bring to that audience. Is that something you lean into?
Or was today just an example of a happy accident?
Every day, all the time. it's funny, Cloudflare management actually requested us to keep track of metrics. So at a macro level, like how many different sites, how many different server sites we had globally, number of customers, you need a whole ton of metrics. And that has markers we would leverage. But generally, when I think of product and...
communicating product value, it's all about the results of the customer. And so you could just go down the basic narrative without metrics and have a story. And it might be a great story, but you might have all the right keywords. But at the end of the day, as a customer, I want to know how much time I'm saving, how much potential revenue I might create, how much pipeline I might create. Some of the core things like paying usually costs is going to cost me more.
Speaker 1 (42:58.476)
Why are things costing so much? How can I reduce my costs? And I can reflect back when I was at Intel. some of the driest, probably I don't know, it was dry, but it might be considered dry content today. We have a CPU launch. I'm training a bunch of customers on these IBM Intel hardware and bunch of basic CIO types in the room.
you know, and I'm talking to them about the benefits of this new processor. And so the new processor with VMware could virtualize four to 10X more than they could the year before. Huge thing. They can consolidate these data centers and save a ton of money. And so that was kind of the nut of the conversation along with greater performance on database. So database consolidation and then, but
what really got them engaged. And I love when you have that audience, because you can see the eyes light up. Because I worked on high-performance computing. So the national laboratories, huge data centers. Now we have quantum computing, of analogous, all these things. But I said, look, you can consolidate, let's say 10x of your data center. And guess what you can do as a CIO? You can go invest in
new hardware and software to go do more product development. You can drive, turn from being a cost center to a profit center. And they're like, oh yes, because here these are guys, or ladies getting hammered like, why is IT services, why is the networking costing so much? And then I'm telling them about the utopian vision of, hey, you can cut costs and guess what you could do? You could say, take a little bit of that budget and say, hey boss, why don't we, I support the product and engineering team.
with this great idea that we have that could be a new product for our organization. Woo, they just loved it. So I think using data and telling them and integrating that into the narrative is so important. And it moves you out of features benefits, it moves you into true business solutions.
Speaker 2 (45:12.398)
to talk to you all day and dig around this stuff. think where we are in terms of how people search in relation to starting with the LLMs and understanding the landscape of what's out there and then going to websites and then looking at elsewhere to validate what they sell on chat. First of all, hats off to you for actually doing the homework of validation. I don't know that everybody does that. is definitely, we all need to be doing that when we're doing our homework.
Absolutely, don't just take chat at face value. Go validate it left, right, and center, and not just on their website. To Mike's point, make sure that you are looking at articles, Reddit, all those things to ensure that what chat is saying is actually correct. And then flip it on its head and make sure that you are building your brand to do exactly that, where you can show up in chat and then everything you say that showed up in chat is validated across the worldwide web.
Mike, any last pieces of advice for us as we sort of wrap our heads around this beast of a problem and start tackling it little by little?
Well, I don't bring it back to fundamentals. I think we can love and leverage AI tech all we want. Do not forget the fundamentals of understanding your customer, building messaging that's going to resonate with them, whether you use AI or not. But let that human piece come through as well. Don't just hang all your hats on chat GPT to do it all for you. Try and have a good balance between what's
using it as a strong tool to accelerate work, but also making sure that you have the anecdotes and narratives that's going to resonate with your eyes.
Speaker 2 (46:54.382)
100%. It's just calculator folks. Still need to know how to do the math. Where can people find you, Mike? They want to learn more about what you're offering and how else to approach their positioning and messaging. Where are at?
Definitely find me on LinkedIn. And then if you want to learn more about what I'm doing on the consulting side, you can go to revgenai.biz, just like spelled R-U-D-G-E-N-A-I.biz and learn more and feel free to reach out.
Before we go, Mike, you are more than a product marketer. You've been on quite a journey for your career. What a journey it's been. But outside of marketing and being and work in general, what is currently bringing you joy?
My little girls growing up and playing with them is number one. Number two, do, even though I don't eat right all the time, I do enjoy going to the gym three times a week and getting my walks in. So trying to stay healthy and fit as long as I can so I can keep up with my little girls, kind of the goals and objectives of my life right now.
I feel that. I feel that they're on the go. Keeping up with them is definitely a full time job. That is for sure. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you, Mike. If you liked this episode, please like, subscribe and share. This episode was brought to you by MKG Marketing, the digital marketing agency that helps cybersecurity companies and other complex brands get found via SEO and digital ads.
Speaker 2 (48:18.414)
This episode is hosted by me, Kerry Gard, CEO and co-founder of MKG Marketing, music mix and mastering done by the amazing Eliza Drown, my podcast sidekick. And if you'd to be a guest, I'd love to have you. Let's have a conversation like this. This is what it's all about. I'm here for it. I'd love to have you on. Thank you all so much. Have a great day.