Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Conversations about marketing and business. Hosted by Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, Former CMO).
If you work in marketing check out exitfive.com
Dave [0:00:00]: You're listening to B2b marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.
Dave [0:00:02]: Alright.
Dave [0:00:17]: Hey.
Dave [0:00:17]: I just wrapped up an awesome episode of the podcast with Sydney Sloan.
Dave [0:00:21]: She's a Cmo at G2.
Dave [0:00:23]: We talked a lot about Ai of course what's changing with Ai, but something she told me that's really interesting is how they're rethinking their team and the marketing org around outcomes and pods instead of the traditional kind of jobs and titles and marketing structure.
Dave [0:00:37]: Plus we spend a lot of time talking about events, their event playbook at G2, how they do them, how to think about pre and post event.
Dave [0:00:44]: I, we're doing a bunch of events with Exit Five, and I got a ton of notes from this episode.
Dave [0:00:48]: So if you're in marketing, you wanna hear from an awesome Cmo, talk about events and Ai, you're gonna love this episode.
Dave [0:00:53]: Here's my conversation with Sydney Sloan.
Dave [0:00:56]: Okay.
Dave [0:00:56]: Hey, everybody.
Dave [0:00:57]: Welcome back to the Exit Five podcast.
Dave [0:00:59]: I'm your lovely, friendly, kind host, Dave Gerhardt, and I got Sydney Sloan back on the podcast.
Dave [0:01:04]: He's a bunch of years since we've had her on, Palmer Mu on your team was, like, you gotta have her back on.
Dave [0:01:09]: You gotta have her back.
Dave [0:01:10]: Was like, I'll see what I can do.
Dave [0:01:11]: Obviously, and, Sydney is the Cmo at G2.
Dave [0:01:15]: Sydney good to see how you doing?
Sydney [0:01:18]: I'm doing fantastic.
Sydney [0:01:18]: As I was just saying, off the road for a week.
Sydney [0:01:21]: It's reign reunited with my dog.
Sydney [0:01:22]: So as she knows who I am.
Dave [0:01:25]: That's good like, do you remember?
Dave [0:01:26]: Do you remember this smell like, That's my favorite part about owning a dog.
Dave [0:01:29]: Like, if I when I come home from somewhere the way he investigates me?
Dave [0:01:33]: Like, where have you been and who were you with?
Dave [0:01:35]: Right exactly.
Dave [0:01:36]: So you you just remarked to me before we start recording that.
Dave [0:01:40]: You've been traveling like crazy.
Dave [0:01:41]: Is everybody drinking from the events Cool aid.
Dave [0:01:44]: We're doing this with Exit Five, where I'm still running high off of our event.
Dave [0:01:47]: You mentioned your event reach is coming up as we're recording this.
Dave [0:01:50]: She feel like there's still a a frenzy around, like, yeah, We gotta get together in person.
Sydney [0:01:55]: Absolutely.
Sydney [0:01:55]: I think...
Sydney [0:01:55]: And for us, it's worked really well.
Sydney [0:01:57]: We just wrapped up our road show.
Sydney [0:02:00]: We did a four city road show in the last over the summer, and we was sold out at every stop.
Sydney [0:02:06]: Two hundred and fifty people.
Sydney [0:02:07]: It's not a bad number to get to to register and show up.
Sydney [0:02:10]: It was fun being inbound in San Francisco.
Sydney [0:02:13]: That was different.
Sydney [0:02:14]: But, yes.
Sydney [0:02:15]: I think not only is the in person back and it's all the things around it.
Sydney [0:02:21]: So, like, we have Dream force coming up and break through...
Sydney [0:02:24]: Like, this just...
Sydney [0:02:25]: It doesn't seem like it's ending, and it's this mix of large scale, but also, like, really small and intimate cool things.
Sydney [0:02:32]: I definitely had fo for your, event.
Sydney [0:02:35]: I've never been to vermont before.
Sydney [0:02:37]: If you invite me next year I'll come.
Dave [0:02:40]: Well, I'll I'll invite you.
Dave [0:02:41]: I know I know a guy I could get you...
Dave [0:02:43]: I get you a code.
Dave [0:02:44]: That's great.
Dave [0:02:45]: Actually, I don't even care if you go.
Dave [0:02:46]: I don't really care if you go.
Dave [0:02:47]: But if you tell me that you have fo, like, that basically counts.
Sydney [0:02:51]: Oh, hundred percent.
Sydney [0:02:51]: Absolutely.
Sydney [0:02:52]: All the photos, like, General coop, and Devin, like, two of the Og, like, love seeing them.
Sydney [0:02:58]: And Yeah.
Dave [0:02:58]: Yeah.
Dave [0:02:58]: No.
Dave [0:02:59]: We had a blast.
Dave [0:02:59]: I think there's something really special to, I think we're feeling with our event is because...
Dave [0:03:03]: We were trying to, like, really dig into why, I think because it's built from a community, like, an online community where people feel like they know each other.
Dave [0:03:10]: Now one of the challenges as we grow this is it can be kind of, like, clicky if you already know a bunch of people, then, like, how do you welcome in outsiders, but I think that's kinda like the format that we're working with.
Dave [0:03:21]: It's like, we're doing a bunch of excursions and hikes and mixer mixtures and we're doing these round tables and the Vibe in person has just been awesome because I think we're...
Dave [0:03:29]: I don't know if it's because we're all having this, like, deep down x existential crisis.
Dave [0:03:33]: I think, the first wave of it was, like, post Covid.
Dave [0:03:35]: Everybody was, like, I cannot wait to travel again.
Dave [0:03:37]: Like, I was so burnt out on business travel.
Dave [0:03:40]: And then I'm like, I gotta get out.
Dave [0:03:42]: I gotta go I gotta go do something.
Dave [0:03:43]: And I think now we're all having this kinda, like, existential crisis.
Dave [0:03:46]: Like, I'm literally walking through the woods, you know, talking to my chat like brainstorming.
Dave [0:03:51]: It's like,
Sydney [0:03:52]: I just talked to her actually now.
Sydney [0:03:53]: Yeah.
Dave [0:03:54]: Oh, yours is a her.
Dave [0:03:54]: That's interesting.
Sydney [0:03:56]: I have
Dave [0:03:56]: a I have a british...
Dave [0:03:56]: Mine's a British guy.
Sydney [0:03:58]: Mine's British too.
Dave [0:04:00]: See what?
Dave [0:04:00]: We do?
Dave [0:04:01]: Is a marketing.
Dave [0:04:01]: It makes me feel like I'm really
Sydney [0:04:03]: smart and creative intel.
Dave [0:04:04]: But if they do.
Dave [0:04:05]: I know.
Dave [0:04:05]: There's just something.
Dave [0:04:06]: There's just so much nuance so like, hanging out in person, and and it's maybe kinda of rethink a lot of...
Dave [0:04:10]: Not rethink, but I'm trying to figure out, like, making space for the Ai stuff, but then also in person And, yeah.
Dave [0:04:16]: I don't know if it's I'm getting older and caring about this stuff more, but I felt like, even in my personal life, I'm trying to, like, meet up with friends I haven't seen in a while, go hang out.
Dave [0:04:24]: Like, there's just that good feeling of talking shit and banter and hanging out in person that is very tough to replicate.
Dave [0:04:30]: Right?
Sydney [0:04:31]: I think.
Sydney [0:04:31]: I mean, like, we were conduit, and we're, like, trying to still figure out how to come back into the human era when you think about what it life was like, before the pandemic.
Sydney [0:04:38]: For sure.
Sydney [0:04:39]: I get tired really easy now too.
Sydney [0:04:41]: It's, like, I was always an ex.
Sydney [0:04:43]: Like, first one in last one out, and I'm like, Irish I ball like see.
Dave [0:04:48]: Do you follow corporate bro or corporate Natalie at all?
Sydney [0:04:50]: I have.
Sydney [0:04:50]: Yeah.
Sydney [0:04:51]: Do they have?
Dave [0:04:52]: This one video that it's like it's, like, her...
Dave [0:04:54]: I forget what the exact caption is, but it's like, her walking back.
Dave [0:04:57]: It's, like, going back to my hotel room for fifteen minutes before, like, after an all day, after all day team activities before the fifteen minutes of team dinner and she just, like, collapses face first onto the bed.
Sydney [0:05:09]: I have to do that, Especially if I'm presenting, it takes too much out of me now.
Sydney [0:05:12]: But I was gonna say though on on your community thing.
Sydney [0:05:15]: I remember back when I was at Jive, running customer marketing, and we were...
Sydney [0:05:18]: It was a community platforms.
Sydney [0:05:19]: So we got to bring in, like, customer marketers running communities, and that was that feeling because they knew each other because they were in the community together, But one thing that you might think of is just do a buddy program.
Sydney [0:05:32]: And so, like, the first activity night or whatever, put a newbie with an Og, and That could be a nice way to get the blending to happen from the get go.
Sydney [0:05:43]: And then that newbie will know one person.
Dave [0:05:46]: I love that.
Dave [0:05:47]: I love when people come on my podcast and give me great advice and, like, immediate Slack message.
Dave [0:05:52]: No.
Dave [0:05:54]: That's great.
Dave [0:05:54]: That's a totally good way to.
Dave [0:05:55]: I think when you...
Dave [0:05:56]: When you're there under, like, the got, like, it's a...
Dave [0:05:58]: A professional setting.
Dave [0:05:59]: It would be so easy to pair someone like, you know, Sydney is a newbie, and she is in content.
Dave [0:06:04]: Let's pair her with Ta who's Og who is also in content.
Dave [0:06:07]: And then you have that, like, kinda shared thing with true.
Sydney [0:06:10]: And you have to find the person, so that's the activity.
Sydney [0:06:12]: Right?
Sydney [0:06:13]: Yeah.
Dave [0:06:14]: Feel fucking burp.
Dave [0:06:14]: Oops they're high.
Sydney [0:06:19]: Person, you pull that bat.
Sydney [0:06:21]: Like, if you're this kind, like, put your names on this hat, if you're this side, and then they often go back.
Sydney [0:06:25]: I don't know
Dave [0:06:25]: Oh, no.
Dave [0:06:25]: That's a great.
Dave [0:06:26]: That's a great idea.
Dave [0:06:27]: You mentioned, like, you do these road shows.
Dave [0:06:29]: Right?
Dave [0:06:30]: So as a Cmo, it's clear as a person you get the value of doing events.
Dave [0:06:35]: But, like, from a business standpoint, Like, how do you think about, I guess, everything always does come back to measurement at some point, but And I kinda want you to say the answer because I know I feel the event Roi is harder.
Dave [0:06:46]: It's mush than just sales, but where do they fit in, like, the marketing strategy for G2 to go and do four two hundred fifty person road shows.
Dave [0:06:53]: It's a it's a ton of work.
Dave [0:06:54]: Just no such thing as an easy event.
Dave [0:06:56]: So why do you do them and how do you think about it?
Sydney [0:06:58]: Yeah.
Sydney [0:06:58]: I mean, I'll be completely blunt and transparent here.
Sydney [0:07:01]: Right?
Sydney [0:07:02]: G2 is not its own platform.
Sydney [0:07:03]: We only work when we're integrated with other people's stuff.
Sydney [0:07:06]: And so in order to tell the story, like, because I believe we're in this massive shift between, like, marketing of the past and marketing of the future and Ai is such a central part of that, that the bold idea is that you just kind of toss what you built and start over.
Sydney [0:07:20]: It's gonna be easier than trying to re retrofit your marketing automation system to the new way, And so that was the kind of the idea about Ai in action is to, like, a clean blueprint.
Sydney [0:07:33]: It was a blank page, and it was really important for me who we told this story with?
Sydney [0:07:38]: The cool kids.
Sydney [0:07:39]: Right?
Sydney [0:07:40]: You wanna put yourself in good company.
Sydney [0:07:42]: You know?
Sydney [0:07:42]: So bringing in clay and qualified in six cents, like was super intentional, new breed, and Hubspot partner, and then we used infuse in the Uk.
Sydney [0:07:52]: And so we got to tell the story together.
Sydney [0:07:55]: And it was important for us for me to make sure that we were having that conversation with the right person, We called them the hands on decision makers.
Sydney [0:08:03]: The people that We didn't want these suites.
Sydney [0:08:06]: We wanted the people that are actually design the systems and can implement it and give them the power of what that looks like.
Sydney [0:08:13]: How do you actually think about taking a signal connect connecting it to a an agent taking action building...
Sydney [0:08:19]: Ai orchestrated workflows.
Sydney [0:08:21]: Imagine, you don't have to worry you just get to start fresh.
Sydney [0:08:24]: And so that was the premise of it.
Sydney [0:08:27]: And the reason I think that it worked really, really well.
Sydney [0:08:30]: It worked really, really well, I was very pleased.
Sydney [0:08:31]: Is because we spent a lot of time ahead of time building our story together with our partners.
Sydney [0:08:37]: So the first presenter absolutely new with the last presenter was saying.
Sydney [0:08:41]: We've rehearsed three times before we got on sight.
Sydney [0:08:44]: We've still adjusted on sight, I tried to keep the presenters the same because then the dynamic gets more and more personal over time.
Sydney [0:08:51]: Sometimes you could make that happen, but most of the time we could.
Sydney [0:08:53]: And so...
Sydney [0:08:54]: And we kept it fast paced.
Sydney [0:08:55]: Every presentation was fifteen minutes and had some kind of interactivity.
Sydney [0:09:00]: And so at the end, in the middle, like, take three minutes to do this at your table.
Sydney [0:09:04]: Take five minutes to do this at your table.
Sydney [0:09:05]: So beginning to end, they started with a blank slate and they left with had drawn out blueprint of their orchestrated workflow.
Sydney [0:09:13]: And a prompt that we pre built that then they worked on.
Sydney [0:09:17]: Hey, Buddy, that they could use right away, and that was the last session.
Sydney [0:09:21]: So it was like, high intensity, high value hands on go.
Sydney [0:09:25]: So...
Dave [0:09:26]: Oh, okay.
Dave [0:09:27]: So I have a couple of event.
Dave [0:09:28]: Specific follow just because this is top of mind for me.
Dave [0:09:31]: So I think you mentioned they they did three rehearsal.
Dave [0:09:33]: This is a lesson that we're learning with our events.
Dave [0:09:37]: I think pushing harder on the...
Dave [0:09:38]: Like, let's really prep the content for this, and I'm trying to balance the, like, Once you get to like, a inbound dream force states.
Dave [0:09:46]: They're, like super militant.
Dave [0:09:47]: They're like, no.
Dave [0:09:48]: We don't have your slides need to be, like, this format, they need to look like this, they need to be due on this date, six months before the event.
Dave [0:09:55]: And then we're trying to, like, build an event from the beginning, and I'm trying to, like, have more flexibility.
Dave [0:09:59]: And there is so many things that I'm learning that, like, all events are not equal, and if you do spend more time on the content that is what people are gonna remember.
Dave [0:10:08]: I I...
Dave [0:10:09]: Get in this obsession over?
Dave [0:10:11]: Like, was the sandwich good enough?
Dave [0:10:12]: Was the food good enough?
Dave [0:10:13]: And it's like, the content needs to be really good, you know?
Sydney [0:10:16]: Yep.
Sydney [0:10:16]: I always like to start with the end in mind?
Sydney [0:10:18]: What is the one to two things that you want them?
Sydney [0:10:21]: To learn and what's the one to two things that you want them to do?
Sydney [0:10:26]: There's actually a really cool framework I was taught back in the day by Lisa Steele.
Sydney [0:10:29]: I wish she was my Cmo at the time.
Sydney [0:10:31]: And it was a three by three.
Sydney [0:10:33]: And so it was...
Sydney [0:10:34]: What do you want them pre during post So that's the top bar, and then the rows are think feel do.
Sydney [0:10:44]: For the bigger events, you can do it by persona.
Sydney [0:10:46]: So you could do one for Vip, you could do one for developers, you could do one for your champions.
Sydney [0:10:50]: So for each persona that you're serving.
Sydney [0:10:52]: What do you want them to think you'll do before?
Sydney [0:10:55]: Think they'll do during and think they'll do after.
Sydney [0:10:57]: And that's where kind of I like to start with the planning.
Sydney [0:11:00]: And so for us in that example is like, you know, we want them to think they're not too far behind, but you gotta get going now.
Sydney [0:11:08]: You know, So you want them to feel a sense of urgency, but also empowered.
Sydney [0:11:11]: And then what you want them to do is you want them to go back with their blueprint and run a similar workshop with their team.
Sydney [0:11:18]: That was it.
Sydney [0:11:19]: And then post is, like, make sure they have the follow up, you know, like, we sent out additional materials.
Sydney [0:11:24]: And so, you know, you kinda build that framework out.
Sydney [0:11:28]: And then collectively...
Sydney [0:11:28]: I mean, I I was the Mc, like, you're probably the Mc at yours.
Sydney [0:11:32]: And so, you know, it was my job to make sure that the docs were connecting.
Sydney [0:11:37]: And so in our pre runs where they did go through their slides.
Sydney [0:11:41]: If somebody had too many slides, it told me too many slides.
Sydney [0:11:43]: I'm like, do you need to cut twenty slides out of your twelve minutes.
Sydney [0:11:47]: Right?
Sydney [0:11:47]: And pick three six and two, and you say this this and this.
Sydney [0:11:50]: Like, you can imagine me.
Sydney [0:11:51]: But I do it nicely.
Sydney [0:11:53]: That's I I said I was like, you say you give me back so nice.
Sydney [0:11:55]: You know I was like, I'm very direct.
Sydney [0:11:57]: And this needs to blend to that when you guys were saying the same thing, who's gonna say it.
Sydney [0:12:01]: You know, or, like, what's call to action.
Sydney [0:12:03]: Right know, let's try a stronger question.
Sydney [0:12:04]: Like, I've just kinda try and getting it through and then the event day like, I'm roaming around.
Sydney [0:12:10]: I'm sitting at the tables.
Sydney [0:12:11]: I'm, you know, we put a facilitator every table, and they were trained as to what their role was.
Sydney [0:12:16]: And they were responsible for the prompting session.
Sydney [0:12:19]: They had to have it preloaded.
Sydney [0:12:20]: They needed to kick off, you know, the topics.
Sydney [0:12:23]: They needed to make sure that one person didn't talk the whole time.
Sydney [0:12:26]: All those things were thought through to make a great experience.
Dave [0:12:30]: I think it's cool to hear you talk at this level.
Dave [0:12:32]: Clearly, you've done this a bunch and have so much experience in running these because I think, I'll see someone post in our community or whatever, like, ask about the Roi of doing events and it's like, we did an event and it didn't work, and it's like, what I'm hearing from you even just in a couple minutes is like, oh, there's levels to this.
Dave [0:12:49]: There's so many different plays and how much you can make the details better and it's like, why do people go to this webinar, but they don't go to that?
Dave [0:12:57]: Is it that webinars are broken?
Dave [0:12:58]: Is it that events are broken?
Dave [0:12:59]: Is it, like, no Did you did you put in a level of work to make all of the things better.
Dave [0:13:04]: And I love when things happen in marketing because they're good.
Dave [0:13:08]: You know what I mean?
Dave [0:13:09]: Like, I love when things work because they're good, not because we found some, like, shortcut or hack.
Dave [0:13:15]: And it's like, no, we put in a ton of work to, like, we care about this craft and we want this to be amazing, and that actually ends up being the growth hack.
Dave [0:13:23]: It's not that...
Dave [0:13:24]: Oh, you sent, you know, these three reminder emails at these specific time intervals leading up to the event feel like the eighty twenty of it is is in this stuff.
Sydney [0:13:32]: Yeah.
Sydney [0:13:32]: And two other things.
Sydney [0:13:33]: So one was, like, when the sales reps were doing their pipe ten Tuesdays, marketing did ours, and we took responsibility for directly inviting people.
Sydney [0:13:41]: I mean, palmer hud...
Sydney [0:13:42]: As you mentioned earlier, like, he was the highest recruiter, but I was dm, like, I already know, like, I have a model.
Sydney [0:13:49]: It's, like, send an email, send a Linkedin post.
Sydney [0:13:51]: If I have them on text.
Sydney [0:13:52]: I text them, working hard to get the right people in the room because that matters too.
Sydney [0:13:57]: The table you're at matters.
Sydney [0:13:58]: And, like, when I'm introducing on the stage, you can see in the first working session who's really there to learn and who's not.
Sydney [0:14:05]: It kills me almost wanna go and go, hey, here's your swag bag.
Sydney [0:14:08]: I know you were taking time off from work, but because not having the right people the table fully engage actually ruins the experience for the rest of the table.
Sydney [0:14:17]: And so you kinda even have to manage that dynamic.
Sydney [0:14:19]: And we put...
Sydney [0:14:20]: This is one of the things we did too.
Dave [0:14:22]: There's always that one guy who, like, snuck in because it's, like, He's like, actually not a Vp of market.
Dave [0:14:27]: Yeah.
Sydney [0:14:27]: I call him the Bagel guy.
Sydney [0:14:28]: The Bagel snatch.
Sydney [0:14:29]: Yeah.
Dave [0:14:30]: Yeah.
Dave [0:14:30]: The Bagel snatch.
Dave [0:14:31]: He's like, yeah.
Dave [0:14:32]: You find out he's actually like, the head of sales and you're like, wait, how did this guy get in here?
Dave [0:14:36]: Like, oh, no.
Sydney [0:14:37]: I'm thinking of something different, Like, that...
Sydney [0:14:38]: Charles event.
Sydney [0:14:39]: Right.
Sydney [0:14:39]: What...
Sydney [0:14:39]: I forgot one of the other things that we did.
Sydney [0:14:41]: We asked people their experience levels and put people with the same experience levels at the same table.
Sydney [0:14:46]: So they were assigned tables just by experience level.
Sydney [0:14:50]: So we, like, little code.
Sydney [0:14:51]: And so All novice stay sat at the same table, All experts that at the same table.
Sydney [0:14:55]: So when they were having in the conversation, they were having it with people at the same level they were.
Sydney [0:15:00]: So it wasn't a waste of time for the super smart people, but we made sure that the table facilitator.
Sydney [0:15:05]: Knew how to prompt and and do all the things that we needed to do.
Dave [0:15:09]: Is that awkward when you have to tell, like, alright, the dumb people are gonna sit over here, the smart people are gonna sit?
Sydney [0:15:14]: And no.
Sydney [0:15:15]: No.
Sydney [0:15:15]: I mean, it they sell.
Sydney [0:15:16]: We didn't tell them they
Dave [0:15:17]: were Just made
Sydney [0:15:18]: their they they're the in for them themselves.
Sydney [0:15:21]: And it was interesting how it changed city to city.
Sydney [0:15:24]: And I I don't think it was actually the cities.
Sydney [0:15:27]: We started in New York then San Francisco then Atlanta than London.
Sydney [0:15:30]: And it shifted and it was, like every other month, every month, and then we we waited, like, over the summer.
Sydney [0:15:36]: But the audience got more and more, the shift of novice to intermediate to expert.
Sydney [0:15:41]: But I think it was because of time.
Sydney [0:15:43]: I don't think it was because of location.
Sydney [0:15:45]: I think people are just getting more and more akin to prompting and using the tools.
Dave [0:15:51]: No.
Dave [0:15:51]: It's moving really fast.
Dave [0:15:52]: I've noticed the shift even, like, people in my personal life that had no interest in hearing about the nerdy ways I was using Chat, like, three months ago are now, like, passing me.
Sydney [0:16:03]: Yeah.
Sydney [0:16:03]: You get into it.
Sydney [0:16:04]: Oh, you ask question twice and Haven't answered it yet, which is the Roi.
Sydney [0:16:07]: So Roi of events.
Sydney [0:16:09]: I have a favorite concept, and I call it revenue in the room.
Sydney [0:16:13]: So revenue in the room is how much prospect revenue and how much retention revenue because that's engagement.
Sydney [0:16:23]: And it's as important for your existing customers to attend these events as your prospects.
Sydney [0:16:28]: And so that's, I think how you justify it.
Sydney [0:16:32]: And when you're thinking about event strategy, you always wanna have that mix because your happy customers are gonna sell your prospects on the value.
Sydney [0:16:39]: Otherwise, they wouldn't be there.
Sydney [0:16:40]: And so you could definitely, I think our revenue in the room in New York was, like, six million.
Sydney [0:16:45]: Right?
Sydney [0:16:46]: And by the time we were done with the road roadshow, we had touched over twenty percent of our our revenue.
Sydney [0:16:51]: And then we did a, like, a Vip event at after, in each city with...
Sydney [0:16:56]: Sometimes it was c suite.
Sydney [0:16:57]: They didn't attend the event sometimes it was people that attended the event, but that was how we kinda went deeper on the strategic accounts, and we tested what worked better.
Sydney [0:17:05]: I thought that was interesting, so we did, like, a sporting event, a dinner and a concert, And sporting that was actually the most successful in recruiting and overall experience in my opinion.
Sydney [0:17:17]: Because I attended them all.
Dave [0:17:18]: What was the sporting event?
Sydney [0:17:19]: Giants baseball game?
Dave [0:17:20]: Pretty good.
Dave [0:17:21]: Yeah.
Dave [0:17:21]: Yeah.
Dave [0:17:22]: What time was it night game?
Sydney [0:17:24]: Event ended at one thirty, but people could hang around, so some people like, hang around till two two thirty, and then we would kick them out.
Sydney [0:17:31]: And then I think it started at five, so there was, like, a couple hour window between.
Sydney [0:17:35]: And I would say that of the twelve guests, maybe four attended event and eight did not, but we were going for sea level people for the event and, you know, director level people for the.
Dave [0:17:48]: Nice.
Dave [0:17:48]: I'd like to have revenue in the room it's super useful.
Dave [0:17:50]: Also.
Dave [0:17:51]: Would you feel like there's a bunch of, maybe, like, intangible Roi percentage points from events, and I'll just tell you what I think they are and see if you can relate to this is, like, back to the in person thing.
Dave [0:18:03]: When you have your Ic prospects and customers in the room, for every dashboard and spreadsheet we look at?
Dave [0:18:10]: Man how valuable is it to have, like, four conversation.
Dave [0:18:12]: I'm like, writing in my phone I'm like, I just talked to this person.
Dave [0:18:14]: They...
Dave [0:18:15]: They've...
Dave [0:18:15]: Like, I like to test little, like, bits of messaging?
Dave [0:18:18]: I'm not, like, hello, Sydney, I like to test my messaging on you, but you...
Dave [0:18:21]: It's like a stand up comedian.
Dave [0:18:22]: Right?
Dave [0:18:23]: You're trying to, like, you have a message wearing and you're trying to work it in, or you...
Dave [0:18:25]: You're telling so a story to someone and you realize that that analogy really hits.
Dave [0:18:29]: There's something huge about about that.
Dave [0:18:32]: That is, like, harder to quantify, but when you can be out there kinda socializing stuff.
Dave [0:18:36]: I call...
Dave [0:18:36]: The other one is, like, shaking hands kissing babies.
Dave [0:18:38]: Like, I think there is just value and, like, knowing people and connecting on a personal level that cement something stronger online.
Dave [0:18:45]: And then the other thing is, like, just the perception of it.
Dave [0:18:48]: Like I think the picture, like, having amazing looking photos from the event having Fo, recording all of the content, having that all be stuff that you can then use in your marketing later, like, that's worth some dollar amount.
Dave [0:18:59]: Like, I we're gonna be here.
Dave [0:19:00]: We're gonna do all this work to get this event.
Dave [0:19:02]: Like, we better film all the content and, like, use it as a big chunk of our marketing in the future.
Dave [0:19:06]: Right?
Sydney [0:19:07]: And Yeah.
Sydney [0:19:07]: A hundred percent.
Sydney [0:19:08]: And if that's the answer you were looking for.
Sydney [0:19:09]: I'm sorry.
Sydney [0:19:10]: Didn't say that.
Sydney [0:19:10]: I would say for us, we were testing out a new product offering, so we do Ai voice reviews, so we had, like, a handful of people, that got to experience the beta of giving a voice review, and we had the product manager for that at all the events.
Sydney [0:19:26]: But we could have done more.
Sydney [0:19:28]: And I wanna gonna say, I can't remember the name sky that runs a Cio community, and it was, like Ivan avant, but for Cios is back in the day.
Sydney [0:19:37]: And he had, like, this awesome like, you'd come off stage, You know, immediately be swept into a small room where you know, you got interviewed And I just think that's so smart.
Sydney [0:19:47]: We do it at our larger events, but not the smaller ones, but I think that's really great to get, like, really good one to one content created.
Sydney [0:19:55]: We'll do that at our advisory board.
Sydney [0:19:57]: We always, like...
Sydney [0:19:58]: Put up a video crew for that and and that's happening.
Sydney [0:20:01]: But you're right on the socials.
Sydney [0:20:03]: And if it's hard.
Sydney [0:20:05]: But if you can convince your photographer to turn around at least twenty photos within a day within a day.
Sydney [0:20:15]: This is not two or three days later because it's too late.
Sydney [0:20:17]: Right?
Sydney [0:20:18]: So you want the next morning to be able to send the thank you know with the link to the library of photos that have your brand on them that then they can share.
Sydney [0:20:27]: And then you get that high quality visibility.
Sydney [0:20:30]: You know, the other option is, like, you do it and then people pull pictures off of your stuff.
Sydney [0:20:35]: But I like the...
Sydney [0:20:36]: Like, we're doing this...
Sydney [0:20:38]: We do, like, a kick I consider the kickoff party for Dream four.
Sydney [0:20:40]: So it's like, sea level people on Monday night, you know, Dream force kicks off on Tuesday, and we do that.
Sydney [0:20:46]: So we'll have the photographer there, but that night even, like we put it out, and then we're, like, front and center of people, like, sharing that they at our party the night before and you know, so we get that extra time.
Sydney [0:20:58]: And so I I think that's key.
Sydney [0:21:00]: That's what makes photographer work with it.
Sydney [0:21:02]: If you...
Sydney [0:21:02]: If you wait a week to send the the pictures out, then it's too late.
Dave [0:21:06]: And Thank you for all this free event device.
Sydney [0:21:08]: You're welcome.
Sydney [0:21:08]: Know I started my career events.
Sydney [0:21:11]: So...
Dave [0:21:12]: I can tell the level I knew at the level of detail.
Dave [0:21:14]: I'll tell you another interesting thing that we...
Dave [0:21:16]: That we learned is the first first big event.
Dave [0:21:18]: Well, second year, but this one was much bigger.
Dave [0:21:20]: And you know, events are ton of works super stressful, a bunch of the people on our team that worked really hard in the event.
Dave [0:21:27]: We said, take the week after the event off, and that was a huge mistake.
Dave [0:21:31]: Because...
Dave [0:21:33]: And I I've already had this conversation.
Dave [0:21:35]: I'm I'm a talk sick manager.
Dave [0:21:36]: Put clip someone clip this.
Dave [0:21:38]: Dave doesn't give people time off, clip this.
Dave [0:21:40]: No.
Dave [0:21:40]: But what we realized is that like, running an event.
Dave [0:21:43]: There's so much the follow up through the next couple days and, like, we were, like, oh, shoot.
Dave [0:21:48]: Lesson and learned, like, we...
Dave [0:21:49]: For this operating system.
Dave [0:21:50]: We actually you should work maybe till, like, Wednesday of that week.
Dave [0:21:53]: And then then go take all the time in the world you want off, but I think how much of, like, the post event stuff bleeds into that, like, sending out the recording, sending out the pictures, the the N mps to thank you.
Dave [0:22:03]: The...
Dave [0:22:04]: Hey.
Dave [0:22:04]: Do you have the slide for this?
Dave [0:22:05]: There was just a lot left and I just was kinda sitting there, like, at my computer like, I don't have the answers to any of these things.
Dave [0:22:11]: And, you know, if you started your credit.
Sydney [0:22:13]: Most is so important.
Sydney [0:22:14]: Right?
Dave [0:22:15]: So important.
Sydney [0:22:15]: So all too often.
Sydney [0:22:16]: People think about the event as the event, not a marketing program.
Sydney [0:22:20]: And the value is in the follow up.
Sydney [0:22:23]: And, you know that happens all the time.
Sydney [0:22:24]: Like, why don't event leads get followed up on.
Sydney [0:22:26]: I like the leads to drop immediately if not end of night to have the follow the next day.
Sydney [0:22:30]: Because so, again, the first person People like, well, they're not back.
Sydney [0:22:33]: I'm like, I don't.
Sydney [0:22:34]: They're still checking their email.
Sydney [0:22:34]: And if we're the first to respond that shows that we're on it.
Sydney [0:22:37]: And so a hundred percent agree with you.
Sydney [0:22:39]: Hundred percent agrees.
Dave [0:22:41]: Yeah.
Dave [0:22:41]: The drop leads the same night is a good one.
Dave [0:22:43]: Then this is interesting.
Dave [0:22:44]: Like, I will have conversations with the sponsored at event.
Dave [0:22:47]: And it's like, what's your plan for follow for the event.
Dave [0:22:49]: I we'll figure it out after.
Dave [0:22:50]: And it's like no No To do great marketing.
Dave [0:22:52]: We have to think about, go back to your little matrix.
Dave [0:22:55]: It's, like, you could run this for all the exercises.
Dave [0:22:57]: Like, like, pre during post.
Dave [0:22:58]: What do we want them to think feel do.
Dave [0:23:01]: It shouldn't be like, the morning after the event, we're like, okay.
Dave [0:23:03]: Now let's switch to think about what our follow strategy is gonna be.
Dave [0:23:06]: That that should be connected to the experience in the beginning.
Sydney [0:23:09]: Yeah.
Sydney [0:23:09]: And the field is, like...
Sydney [0:23:11]: Wow.
Sydney [0:23:11]: That was quick.
Sydney [0:23:12]: They're on it.
Sydney [0:23:13]: Like, that's the kind of partner I wanna work with, not somebody who sends me a vanilla email two weeks after the event.
Dave [0:23:20]: Totally.
Dave [0:23:20]: Right?
Dave [0:23:21]: Okay.
Dave [0:23:21]: We could talk about events for so long, but I'm curious, I wanna spend a a little segment on on talking about Ai.
Dave [0:23:26]: You just have done this whole Ai in action things.
Dave [0:23:29]: So I'm sure your your knowledge of Ai has continued to grow.
Dave [0:23:32]: But the lens that I wanna ask you this question from is, what do you think is different?
Dave [0:23:36]: And our things different about being a Cmo in twenty twenty five twenty twenty six because of what's happening in Ai.
Dave [0:23:43]: And what's different than maybe it was in your last job or or ten years ago.
Dave [0:23:48]: What's changing?
Dave [0:23:49]: I I know for, you know, I talked a lot of Emails.
Dave [0:23:51]: I I know things are different, but I'm curious to hear how you articulate, like, what's gonna be different in the future?
Sydney [0:23:56]: Well, hundred percent it's different.
Sydney [0:23:57]: The Carrie we started at Cmo Ai club last January.
Sydney [0:24:01]: Just a handful of people, so we could learn together what's working what's not what tools using.
Sydney [0:24:05]: And so it's been super super helpful, and these items is also part of that.
Sydney [0:24:10]: I didn't wanna not not mention her.
Sydney [0:24:12]: And so I think there's been these defined eras.
Sydney [0:24:16]: Right?
Sydney [0:24:17]: Like, I started started before the Internet.
Sydney [0:24:19]: So I've been around a while.
Sydney [0:24:20]: You know, I was like, oh, the Internet.
Sydney [0:24:22]: We could talk to people digitally.
Sydney [0:24:23]: Like, there's a form.
Sydney [0:24:24]: What do we do with it?
Sydney [0:24:25]: So, you know, there's been big shifts in marketing over the years, and this is another one.
Sydney [0:24:31]: And I I mentioned at the beginning, like, marketing automation was huge time for marketers.
Sydney [0:24:36]: Like we could finally digitize our experiences and get more sophisticated, the science of marketing was way more than just the creative side of marketing with brand, and then everything could be measured, which I don't know if there's a good thing or bad thing to be honest.
Sydney [0:24:50]: And so now we're back at the starting line.
Sydney [0:24:52]: And what's cool about it is everybody has an equal shot, except the ones that have been investing in brand all along.
Sydney [0:24:58]: I think we have to go back to the basics and, you know, really figure out who we are, establish the brand, which is, like, the narrative, consistency, how do you want people...
Sydney [0:25:10]: You know, what do you want people to think and feel when they hear about your company, you know, how do you show up?
Sydney [0:25:16]: That's why it's important for me, like, high quality.
Sydney [0:25:19]: Right?
Sydney [0:25:20]: Like, well hurt...
Sydney [0:25:22]: Like, I want every single experience to, like, hit the five senses, even if it's digital or if it's in person, it doesn't matter.
Sydney [0:25:29]: But it...
Sydney [0:25:30]: That a G2 event, it always feels like something just above and beyond.
Sydney [0:25:35]: So the next time they have a choice to come our event or someone else's, they come to ours.
Sydney [0:25:39]: Like, our last...
Sydney [0:25:40]: Like, we did...
Sydney [0:25:41]: When I got here a year ago, we didn't do launch events.
Sydney [0:25:43]: And so it's like, okay.
Sydney [0:25:45]: We...
Sydney [0:25:46]: If you build something, people gotta know about it.
Sydney [0:25:47]: You don't want them just to discover it, you know?
Sydney [0:25:50]: And so we started launch events, like, this last one, you know, we just keep raising the bar.
Sydney [0:25:55]: We had a production, like, you know, like, it was just great.
Sydney [0:25:58]: And you know, we use Gold cast?
Sydney [0:26:01]: Like, I know your fan of Gold cast and until quality matters.
Sydney [0:26:03]: What do you want your brand to stand for?
Sydney [0:26:05]: And then how do you uphold that is point number one.
Sydney [0:26:09]: Then, you know, with Ai...
Sydney [0:26:11]: It's disrupting everything.
Sydney [0:26:13]: Here's some fun facts we...
Sydney [0:26:16]: So we do a lot of buyer re research at e two.
Sydney [0:26:19]: And so in...
Sydney [0:26:20]: If...
Sydney [0:26:21]: We do an annual survey at G2, the buyer behavior report.
Sydney [0:26:23]: We decided to do it twice this year because things are changing so fast.
Sydney [0:26:26]: So we did it in April, and in April, it...
Sydney [0:26:31]: The response said that four to five people used some kind of Ll in their entire buying process, and twenty nine percent started with an Ll.
Sydney [0:26:40]: Four months later.
Sydney [0:26:41]: So we decided to do in August, the reports coming out next week.
Sydney [0:26:45]: And that number went to nine out of ten, and fifty percent of people starting in an l.
Sydney [0:26:55]: Fifty percent.
Sydney [0:26:56]: Up from twenty nine.
Sydney [0:26:57]: That's a seventy one percent increase in four months.
Sydney [0:27:00]: It's just like what you said.
Sydney [0:27:02]: Like, you were at the forefront everybody's passing you as soon as people get in there, and here's what's crazy about it.
Sydney [0:27:07]: They ask a question.
Sydney [0:27:08]: They get an answer, and they're trusting the answers and the answers are way more than a keyword.
Sydney [0:27:13]: Right?
Sydney [0:27:14]: The answers are complex, not what's the best software for reading marketing programs, they're saying, here's my Ic.
Sydney [0:27:22]: This is my current tech stack.
Sydney [0:27:24]: Tell me where I've overlap, what integrates with this.
Sydney [0:27:27]: Do I still meet...
Sydney [0:27:28]: It's levels of questions that are super deep and you have to understand now what people are asking and write your content for the answers.
Sydney [0:27:36]: Questions.
Sydney [0:27:38]: It's a total shift.
Dave [0:27:40]: The version of this, like, ten or fifteen years ago was, like, your marketing team would just basically write an article.
Dave [0:27:45]: That's, like, if you sold the Crm.
Dave [0:27:47]: You'd write an article.
Dave [0:27:48]: That was like, the ten best Crm to use, and you'd put, like, yourself like, number three on the list or whatever.
Sydney [0:27:54]: Or do some kind of benchmark study that, you know, was wired.
Sydney [0:27:56]: Yeah.
Dave [0:27:58]: Yeah.
Dave [0:27:58]: No.
Dave [0:27:58]: That's wild.
Dave [0:27:58]: Mean, That's stuff that, like, really makes you have to have some fundamental questioning about what does the future of marketing look like because I'm not great at brainstorming on the fly, but you mentioned a bunch of companies and I have them in my notes.
Dave [0:28:14]: And so you said Clay qualified six sense new breed.
Dave [0:28:16]: Right?
Dave [0:28:17]: Let's just say that those are four companies that all sold the same type of widget, just for thought sake.
Dave [0:28:22]: Right?
Dave [0:28:22]: Well, if I need to buy that for my company.
Dave [0:28:25]: Let's say they make accounting software for small businesses like mine.
Dave [0:28:28]: This is how I buy today.
Dave [0:28:30]: I'm gonna go to my chat Gb and say, hey, my business is a three million dollar revenue dot.
Dave [0:28:34]: I've run a small business.
Dave [0:28:35]: We have a team of five.
Dave [0:28:36]: I don't like complexity.
Dave [0:28:37]: I have this much budget.
Dave [0:28:38]: I have this this this this this here's my Ic.
Dave [0:28:40]: I'm considering Clay versus qualified verse six cents versus New breed.
Dave [0:28:44]: Can you please do the initial research on this and tell me, the pros and cons of each platform and make a recommendation about what might be great for me.
Dave [0:28:50]: Then it's like, you know, thinking for seven minutes or, however, it's insanely fast.
Dave [0:28:54]: And boom, is the buying process over?
Dave [0:28:57]: No.
Dave [0:28:58]: But now, I've done so much work where as recent as, like, three or four years ago, the process would have been, like, go to each person's site fill out a form, wait to hear back, have to go to some...
Dave [0:29:08]: You're Sydney Sloan, man.
Dave [0:29:09]: You're like, a a gangster like Cmo.
Dave [0:29:11]: Like, you you've have a ton of credibility and amazing resume.
Dave [0:29:14]: There's something broken about the the people reach out to you are twenty two year old Bd fresh out of college.
Dave [0:29:19]: And I'm not poop on that as a professor.
Dave [0:29:22]: I'm just saying, like, there's just no way that person is going to be able to know as much about marketing.
Dave [0:29:27]: And so we gotta, like, rethink some of that.
Dave [0:29:28]: So these are the things I'm like, oh, that's interesting.
Dave [0:29:30]: Well.
Dave [0:29:31]: What does that mean?
Dave [0:29:31]: What this is why I lay.
Dave [0:29:33]: To think about, like, what happens to sales.
Dave [0:29:35]: What happens to marketing.
Dave [0:29:36]: How does this change.
Dave [0:29:36]: How does this change?
Dave [0:29:37]: Just like, if all this stuff continues to play out at this rate, there is going to be a lot of change in how we market and sell products.
Dave [0:29:44]: Right?
Sydney [0:29:45]: A hundred percent.
Sydney [0:29:45]: I would say, you know, the biggest shift since then was, like, the whole idea of a digital strategy.
Sydney [0:29:50]: Change when everybody moved from the sales rep.
Sydney [0:29:55]: You had a ro a and you'd run events.
Sydney [0:29:57]: And then it was like, oh, no.
Sydney [0:29:58]: There's a digital experience, and they're gonna come to your website, And how do you design an immersive website, and then connect that website to a form that will then send that lead to a sales rep who never called them.
Sydney [0:30:11]: Right?
Sydney [0:30:13]: And that was it.
Sydney [0:30:15]: That was two thousand and five marketing.
Sydney [0:30:16]: Well,
Dave [0:30:17]: was like, honestly, in the early days of all those games, though, like, you could win, like, just by having a website.
Dave [0:30:22]: I'm trying to find a piano in my small town I'm trying to find a Piano teacher for my son.
Dave [0:30:25]: And, like, there's only one person actually has a website that works and I could, like, fill out a form and, like, get a response back from.
Dave [0:30:32]: So she's probably gonna get our business.
Dave [0:30:34]: And That's how it used to be.
Sydney [0:30:36]: Or you go to y'all.
Sydney [0:30:37]: Right.
Sydney [0:30:37]: And so I think that's the thing.
Sydney [0:30:38]: That's what the data says to is those fifty percent are starting on an L, and then they'll click into the citation and thankfully, t two is one of the inputs.
Sydney [0:30:47]: Now, the reason I was having a conversation with...
Sydney [0:30:50]: My chat Ep partner who speaks in a British accent like yours, I call her reign as in the queen.
Sydney [0:30:56]: And I was, like, before this podcast the Dave, I wanna make sure because all of a sudden, reddit influenced going down Wikipedia because guess what they made an algorithm change just like Google used to do to us all the time too.
Sydney [0:31:08]: So I wanna stay at the forefront of, like, what is influencing the answers in these.
Sydney [0:31:13]: And thankfully, Rain said that you two is still an influence we know that too because we have the data to approve it, but I was just double checking before this.
Sydney [0:31:20]: And so you have to understand what those influences are, which are the citation links, and there's technology out there now that's people are calling a Ge or Ae, answer engine, optimization or generative engine optimization and they'll show it to you.
Sydney [0:31:36]: So then you'll get to see, okay.
Sydney [0:31:37]: Where is my brand showing up?
Sydney [0:31:38]: What questions are being asked?
Sydney [0:31:40]: And what is influencing the answers, which is gonna give you insight and then to, kind of what content do I now need to create and where do I need to put it in order to influence those L?
Sydney [0:31:51]: Because it also looks for confirmation by going to multiple sites And so it's an advantage that G2 has, sorry.
Sydney [0:31:59]: I'm the G2 prompt for a second.
Sydney [0:32:01]: But because we syndicate our reviews to multiple sites, like Aws, Azure ramp, like, all these different places, those reviews get confirmed citation, which is why we also have higher influence.
Sydney [0:32:12]: So you wanna think about that with your content strategy, the brand store you're building, the answers that you're drawing in for your personas, how do you make sure that they're published in multiple places, so it's looking for that confirmation.
Sydney [0:32:24]: In order to deliver the answer that's asked.
Sydney [0:32:27]: And I think that's where we're at now, but it's still gonna radically change.
Sydney [0:32:30]: Yeah.
Dave [0:32:31]: You're new at I relatively in the history of Gt you've been there for, a year and a half.
Dave [0:32:35]: There's probably a lot of existential or company strategy questions that that are happening because of G2 and Seo, Seo is a big part of how...
Sydney [0:32:47]: We were built on Seo.
Sydney [0:32:48]: We've been at this for a year and a half.
Sydney [0:32:49]: Like, we started seeing the changes year and a half ago to our traffic and Right.
Sydney [0:32:54]: What content was influencing and we've been in the depths of this for a while.
Sydney [0:32:58]: The good news is, yeah.
Sydney [0:33:00]: The traffic rebounded.
Sydney [0:33:01]: We understand it.
Sydney [0:33:01]: We can show influencing now, so we just launched a partnership with profound that will show our customers.
Sydney [0:33:07]: How their categories are showing up.
Sydney [0:33:10]: So we're...
Sydney [0:33:11]: Our partnership is a category level if you want more depth, you can go to one of the over one hundred products that are now listed on the Ae g on the Ae, category on G2.
Sydney [0:33:24]: In April it was seven.
Sydney [0:33:26]: Now there's over a hundred.
Sydney [0:33:28]: How do you stand out?
Dave [0:33:30]: Because it's a gold rush.
Dave [0:33:30]: It's, like, everybody followed the money.
Dave [0:33:32]: Yeah.
Dave [0:33:33]: All the money.
Dave [0:33:34]: Nobody knows where...
Dave [0:33:35]: The search is search is changing, like,
Sydney [0:33:37]: And all you need is, like, a prompt engineer and occurs the license occurs, and you can build a prod.
Dave [0:33:41]: So I guess so something like that.
Dave [0:33:43]: Yeah.
Dave [0:33:43]: Totally.
Dave [0:33:43]: That's why I like, what you said about quality.
Dave [0:33:46]: Like, we've got we...
Dave [0:33:47]: So much of the narrative is, like, just...
Dave [0:33:49]: You can hack it together.
Dave [0:33:50]: You can hack anything together.
Dave [0:33:51]: You can vibe code anything and it's like, man.
Dave [0:33:53]: I've made a lot of bad things with Ai.
Dave [0:33:55]: Like Quality does matter, you know?
Dave [0:33:59]: Yeah.
Dave [0:33:59]: And so are you going through, like, a company strategy shift and you're having to, like, reinvent what G2 is in this world of Ai.
Dave [0:34:09]: What does it mean at a, like, a a leadership level?
Sydney [0:34:11]: Yeah.
Sydney [0:34:11]: We did rewrite our vision last December, January to be the most trusted data source in the age of Ai.
Sydney [0:34:18]: And we made a conscious decision to put G2 everywhere, to give it to the L, not get it.
Sydney [0:34:25]: Like, some of the other analyst firms have done.
Sydney [0:34:27]: They've suffered for that.
Sydney [0:34:28]: And you can see Ga Stock price.
Sydney [0:34:29]: Right?
Sydney [0:34:29]: Like...
Sydney [0:34:30]: And so we made that conscious...
Sydney [0:34:31]: Decision it's like, no.
Sydney [0:34:32]: We wanna syndicate...
Sydney [0:34:33]: We wanna put G2 everywhere where the buyers are and build our brand through still being that trusted source.
Sydney [0:34:38]: And that's what we were doing last year.
Sydney [0:34:41]: And then we've tried to make it easier now for companies to generate reviews.
Sydney [0:34:47]: Because And so we've made...
Sydney [0:34:48]: I mean, because we had the same, like, survey form for a long time.
Sydney [0:34:51]: And now it's, like, Ai voice generated review.
Sydney [0:34:53]: So you can be interviewed.
Sydney [0:34:54]: You can take transcripts and have it curate a review from the transcript.
Sydney [0:34:58]: So you just send it if you're getting off it, a gong call or a Zoom call, We've embedded it into customer marketing platforms.
Sydney [0:35:05]: So we're just trying to figure out all the ways to make review capture a lot easier for our customers and kinda of modernize it as well.
Sydney [0:35:14]: And then I would say the other thing that we did was if you haven't.
Sydney [0:35:17]: Been on G2 dot com for a while go and then interact with G2 dot ai.
Sydney [0:35:22]: You'd be amazed what you could learn because we trained it on all our data.
Sydney [0:35:26]: And so you could go to the L and ask, but you're gonna have a more credible source by asking G2 dot ai I.
Sydney [0:35:34]: And so our goal is that you'll always get better answers from it, then from the L m's, but L are good.
Sydney [0:35:41]: So
Dave [0:35:42]: that's interesting that the strategic decision to, like...
Dave [0:35:44]: Essentially, oh, make that information public.
Sydney [0:35:48]: Yeah.
Sydney [0:35:48]: Yeah.
Dave [0:35:49]: Because, like, hey.
Dave [0:35:49]: We have such a stronghold on Seo, and we have so much good data why hide all these Ga analyst reports behind the pay.
Dave [0:35:58]: Right?
Sydney [0:35:59]: It's also our...
Sydney [0:35:59]: The Dna of our founders wanna support every startup up.
Sydney [0:36:02]: Right?
Sydney [0:36:02]: Their founders through and through.
Sydney [0:36:03]: And so we wanna have high quality offerings from every single startup founder to build a brand on G2.
Sydney [0:36:10]: So we have, like...
Sydney [0:36:11]: Starter packages all the way into, like, building out, how do we help large companies like Adobe that have five hundred products?
Sydney [0:36:18]: How do we showcase them?
Sydney [0:36:20]: And and so, I think we know, we're also making innovations there, and and the first goal is building your brand on G2?
Sydney [0:36:26]: And how do we make that experience great for our paid customers because that is the second place they're going.
Sydney [0:36:33]: They're going from there to our site and so the more that they can craft the experience on G2, the better educated, the customer will be the more showcasing they can do and so our campaign right now is building your brand in the Ll era?
Sydney [0:36:47]: How do you build your brand and how do you use G2 to do that?
Sydney [0:36:50]: Which we do help customers do.
Sydney [0:36:52]: This is how you'd start.
Sydney [0:36:53]: Yeah.
Dave [0:36:55]: Yeah.
Dave [0:36:55]: Yeah.
Dave [0:36:56]: There's an interesting play on trust there, which is, like, even though I get answers from an Ll, like I think if I knew who the answers were from if it was, like, oh, this is Mary a marketing manager at a similar company to mind.
Dave [0:37:09]: She says this thing is legit like, that that holds more weight in some ways.
Dave [0:37:14]: You know?
Dave [0:37:14]: It's like, when I look for something on reddit and I'm trying to be, like, you know, my left ankle is bothering me from running.
Dave [0:37:19]: What's the issue?
Dave [0:37:20]: And, like, I find...
Dave [0:37:20]: I wanna know that that person is, like, similar body type or height to me or there's something there on, like, the...
Sydney [0:37:27]: And you can ask for the citation.
Sydney [0:37:28]: Right?
Sydney [0:37:28]: Like, you can need either click on the citation, or you could say list your sources.
Sydney [0:37:30]: List your top resources, and then they click into that.
Dave [0:37:34]: Do people people really leave voice reviews.
Dave [0:37:38]: Mh.
Sydney [0:37:40]: They're longer and they take less time too.
Sydney [0:37:42]: Isn't that great?
Dave [0:37:42]: Hey, Yeah.
Dave [0:37:43]: This is Mark from Boston.
Dave [0:37:44]: I just wanna tell you, I really love gains.
Dave [0:37:46]: Like, they talking into their phone.
Sydney [0:37:50]: Yeah.
Sydney [0:37:50]: Or you could try it now if you wanna go leave a review for your for your platform.
Dave [0:37:56]: Today's To
Sydney [0:37:57]: talk back to you.
Sydney [0:37:57]: Tell me more.
Sydney [0:37:58]: Yeah.
Sydney [0:37:59]: So it's interesting good British man.
Dave [0:38:02]: I don't want it.
Dave [0:38:03]: Sorry.
Sydney [0:38:04]: I don't know if we have a and I'll check on that.
Sydney [0:38:06]: I know it's multilingual.
Sydney [0:38:06]: You could do it in German.
Dave [0:38:10]: What do you think about your role in running a team changes.
Dave [0:38:13]: Everyone's quick to say oh.
Dave [0:38:15]: In the age of Ai, You just need a a Cmo and Since chat Subscription, but, like, that's probably not true.
Dave [0:38:21]: Or at least not yet.
Dave [0:38:22]: Are you rethinking org structure team, how you do things who you hire?
Sydney [0:38:27]: Yeah.
Sydney [0:38:27]: It's a good question.
Sydney [0:38:28]: That's gonna be one of our deep dive topic.
Sydney [0:38:30]: At our executive advisory board?
Sydney [0:38:32]: Because I think that is kind of where we're at as Cmos?
Sydney [0:38:35]: It's, like, first of all, like, oh, how what do you do with it?
Sydney [0:38:37]: How do you get trained?
Sydney [0:38:38]: What are the use cases?
Sydney [0:38:39]: You know, And now we're ignore it.
Sydney [0:38:41]: And now we're at the...
Sydney [0:38:43]: Okay.
Sydney [0:38:44]: How do I design this into my processes.
Sydney [0:38:47]: How am I thinking about the technology.
Sydney [0:38:49]: I think it's...
Sydney [0:38:50]: There's three levels in my mind.
Sydney [0:38:51]: When you think about Ai, there's Ai that's built into the platforms that you already own.
Sydney [0:38:56]: There's Ai builder, that's a category where it sits across the top and you can orchestrate across the systems with the builder or there's the the L themselves.
Sydney [0:39:07]: And so it's like, we just wanted people to embrace it at first.
Sydney [0:39:10]: Now we kinda need to say, okay, what is the path we're gonna take here, like, what is the right architecture for us?
Sydney [0:39:15]: What are the systems we trust?
Sydney [0:39:16]: Where we want that, basically agent orchestration to happen.
Sydney [0:39:20]: So I think you have to think about that across the go to market team.
Sydney [0:39:24]: And so that's the process layer.
Sydney [0:39:26]: And then you go that's technology process then you go people.
Sydney [0:39:30]: And I do think, you and Katie Sc and, had a a podcast recently that I saw, and she's at u dot com or something like that now.
Dave [0:39:40]: You list do listen my podcast?
Sydney [0:39:42]: I do.
Sydney [0:39:42]: I have foam from your event, Dave, and I listen to your podcast.
Dave [0:39:50]: Attribution, baby.
Sydney [0:39:51]: Okay.
Sydney [0:39:51]: There you go.
Sydney [0:39:52]: Let's take that clip.
Sydney [0:39:52]: And so you and Katie were having this conversation.
Sydney [0:39:55]: It really got me in fired.
Sydney [0:39:56]: You played it right before Hubspot and I think I've mentioned it to, like, every other person I talked to?
Sydney [0:40:01]: Because I was, like, oh, my gosh.
Sydney [0:40:03]: How do we think about rei imagining marketing in our org design.
Sydney [0:40:06]: And so
Dave [0:40:07]: So what's interesting about her though Is like, she's the benefit of like, she's starting at a new ish company.
Dave [0:40:11]: It's like, I think it's gonna be harder for the G2.
Dave [0:40:15]: The...
Dave [0:40:15]: It's harder to, like, unwind than it is to, like, yeah Of course, if you're starting from new beginning.
Dave [0:40:20]: It's I...
Dave [0:40:20]: I'm saying that because I think it's just so easy to, like, online people dunk on, like, fire the whole team daughter.
Dave [0:40:25]: It's, like, that's just not realistic in most companies, like...
Sydney [0:40:30]: And you see too, the the org charts that are, like, your standard org charts and then you've added all these agents which are, like task level agents.
Sydney [0:40:38]: And I understand why people have done it, but I'm not sure that's the right way.
Sydney [0:40:43]: And so based on that conversation, it got me thinking.
Sydney [0:40:47]: And so I'm, like, okay, this is really cool.
Sydney [0:40:50]: Let's think about outcomes, and I've done pod based work groups before.
Sydney [0:40:54]: But the reason I was doing it back then was, like, trying to foster cross functional collaboration because everybody was, like, working in, like, the brand team was working and the demand gen and they weren't talking to each, and they were telling us that It's like, alright.
Sydney [0:41:06]: Let's create projects because then cross functional teams can work on, and that will facilitate collaboration.
Sydney [0:41:12]: Now I think it's different.
Sydney [0:41:13]: And our product team has already done this.
Sydney [0:41:16]: They've moved to, like, outcome based...
Sydney [0:41:18]: Dev schedules.
Sydney [0:41:20]: So they're picking a problem to be solved and orchestrating the team around that and, like, going after the problem.
Sydney [0:41:26]: So if we looked at it in that way, then what would we do?
Sydney [0:41:29]: And so I...
Sydney [0:41:30]: My starting thoughts here are we would have a team focused on building the brand relationship.
Sydney [0:41:35]: What does it mean to be engaged?
Sydney [0:41:37]: How do you influence people where they are, which includes Ll expertise?
Sydney [0:41:42]: What are those industry influencers we wanna have relationships with?
Sydney [0:41:46]: How do we educate them?
Sydney [0:41:47]: And so the outcomes in this team would be influence and signals that connect to agent workflows.
Sydney [0:41:55]: And so then I'm thinking, like, in that next layer, it's like, what are the people skills on this team, what are the agents skills and let's get more specific on the Kpis of the outcomes.
Sydney [0:42:05]: So I'd be team one.
Sydney [0:42:06]: The team too would be on relationship building.
Sydney [0:42:10]: I love this one because, like, I hate.
Sydney [0:42:12]: I absolutely hate that we have teams that are focused on top of funnel to close one and then a separate team that's focused on closed one post sale.
Sydney [0:42:22]: It's one customer.
Sydney [0:42:23]: Let's just have people that are responsible for relationship building that are persona based.
Sydney [0:42:27]: Right?
Sydney [0:42:28]: And so it could be an account billing team that's like, a mix of deep research Ai agent and personalized communication, which is Ai and people in coordination with the account owner, which is the rep.
Sydney [0:42:40]: Right?
Sydney [0:42:40]: And they could focus on new customers but also existing customers.
Sydney [0:42:43]: This is where community lives.
Sydney [0:42:45]: And so their outcomes is like meaningful connections, account engagement, and the facilitation of those topics.
Sydney [0:42:53]: Where a Kpi could be referral.
Sydney [0:42:57]: So that's the second team.
Sydney [0:42:59]: Like, engagement referral.
Sydney [0:43:00]: The last team I'm looking at is product delight is kind of the working thought for this one.
Sydney [0:43:07]: Their job is to connect customer challenges to product capabilities.
Sydney [0:43:11]: So they're responsible for launches, building out education flows, like an Ai copilot for every customer kind of concept.
Sydney [0:43:19]: They create these viral hooks that drive everyday value for users.
Sydney [0:43:24]: So they're in with the product teams, but also surrounding them and their outcome is product usage and shared value.
Sydney [0:43:31]: Really understanding what customers value.
Sydney [0:43:34]: Because a lot of times too, if the product teams are gonna be broken up, you still have to have someone that's looking at the overall customer experience and what they value, not the features or capabilities.
Sydney [0:43:43]: And being honest about that and how to track it.
Sydney [0:43:46]: So like, P people would be super experience in this area, but why not have that same concept for non P customers.
Sydney [0:43:52]: And so that's where I've stopped so far.
Sydney [0:43:55]: Like, I'm literally reading my notes on my...
Sydney [0:43:57]: You know, that I've taken on the concept, but it's, like, I'm teasing it out because I think it's really interesting.
Sydney [0:44:02]: And then it's like, we have different skills, but you don't have a product marketing function.
Sydney [0:44:05]: We break it apart and get to re assemble.
Sydney [0:44:08]: And that's the beauty of, like, being able to restart.
Sydney [0:44:10]: We're given the invitation to restart.
Dave [0:44:13]: The problem is if someone says that if someone hears you say there's no product marketing function, they...
Dave [0:44:17]: Instantly jump to at least online.
Dave [0:44:19]: Boom.
Dave [0:44:20]: You're wrong.
Dave [0:44:21]: Like, you still...
Dave [0:44:22]: What are you talking about?
Dave [0:44:23]: You still need product marketing?
Dave [0:44:24]: It's, okay, you're you're doing the job functions.
Dave [0:44:26]: I I actually really...
Dave [0:44:27]: I wrote this out because I really I really like it something that accidentally I've always hated about work is job titles.
Dave [0:44:34]: They matter because people need them, like, look, I needed it as a status.
Dave [0:44:39]: Like, trying to grow my career, like, it mattered when I got promoted to...
Dave [0:44:42]: From director to Vp for the first time.
Dave [0:44:44]: Like, that title mattered.
Dave [0:44:45]: But so many things inside of the company are there's just so much nuance and they're just so blurry into, like, what is social media manager.
Dave [0:44:53]: What does that mean?
Dave [0:44:54]: Customer life cycle marketing manager.
Dave [0:44:57]: But I love this idea of, like, let's steal from product and it's like, products always have this concept of, like, jobs to be done?
Dave [0:45:03]: I'm, I'm thinking, what are the jobs to be done well, In my business, I want people to subscribe to our newsletter.
Dave [0:45:08]: So there should be someone who owns that.
Dave [0:45:10]: That's the outcome.
Sydney [0:45:11]: Or team.
Sydney [0:45:11]: Right?
Sydney [0:45:12]: The the team that owns that.
Dave [0:45:14]: That's a pod, A pod of people work on that outcome.
Dave [0:45:17]: I like that.
Sydney [0:45:18]: So they're they're writing the newsletter.
Sydney [0:45:19]: They're promoting the newsletter.
Sydney [0:45:20]: They're c the topics.
Sydney [0:45:23]: They're seeking feedback from people who read it, Like, that is what they own.
Sydney [0:45:27]: Which is, you know, your primary method of of communication and I think then people feel ownership of the outcome.
Sydney [0:45:34]: And I think of it as, you know, you always talk about the customer journey.
Sydney [0:45:37]: And if we're putting customer front and center.
Sydney [0:45:39]: In this world, we put customer front and center, we put product front and center, and we put brand front sooner.
Sydney [0:45:44]: So they're still, like, these ideas that are the basics and foundations of marketing, but you're you're asking to rethink how we work designing in where the agent capabilities fit, And what are the skills that the people need to have?
Sydney [0:46:00]: And I want it to be a blend?
Sydney [0:46:01]: I love this idea of, like, having a growth person and a product marketer and with, let's see what that pod looks like and what they can accomplish?
Sydney [0:46:09]: And, yeah.
Sydney [0:46:11]: It's it'll be hard, but, you don't, get great value.
Sydney [0:46:14]: If you don't take great risk, and we're all gonna do it anyway.
Dave [0:46:17]: Yeah.
Dave [0:46:17]: Well, it's much easier to continue to do the same thing that it is to, like, try to rip it up and and try something new.
Sydney [0:46:24]: We have to start This is one of those moments.
Sydney [0:46:27]: This is one of the moments.
Dave [0:46:30]: You mentioned joking before starting your career in the pre internet days, and look amazing.
Dave [0:46:37]: You're doing great, so don't worry about it.
Dave [0:46:39]: But Are there any comparisons?
Dave [0:46:42]: Like, I'm old enough to, like, have had the Internet and not, but I was in, like, seventh and eighth and ninth grade.
Dave [0:46:47]: I wasn't thinking about it in a work capacity.
Dave [0:46:49]: I was like, oh, I can use this Internet messaging tool to talk to the ninth.
Dave [0:46:53]: Great girls in my high school.
Dave [0:46:54]: Like, it wasn't a serious business thing.
Dave [0:46:57]: Can you think back to that point in your career?
Dave [0:47:00]: In my mind, I wanna say this has gotta be what it was like, people saying, like, the Internet is overrated.
Dave [0:47:05]: It's never gonna replace it.
Dave [0:47:07]: Are there comparisons to what we're saying with Ai now to that era of work.
Sydney [0:47:12]: I think it's similar in that, you know, it was new things, and we had to figure out how to embrace it and use it to our advantage.
Sydney [0:47:18]: And so I remember, like, it was nineteen ninety eight.
Sydney [0:47:22]: B C with my my boss.
Sydney [0:47:25]: He was kind of a cool dude.
Sydney [0:47:26]: He was at Nets escape in the early days too.
Sydney [0:47:28]: And my friend's staff had the website.
Sydney [0:47:31]: We were just implementing Onyx, the Crm system, and I was running events.
Sydney [0:47:36]: And my friend Nikki, she was my wedding.
Sydney [0:47:38]: This Stefan and Nikki sold to my best friends.
Sydney [0:47:40]: Nikki was ready the Str team, but we called the tele marketing.
Dave [0:47:44]: So sorry sorry to go in a complete tangent, but, yeah.
Dave [0:47:46]: What you just said?
Dave [0:47:47]: This is, like such an important thing.
Dave [0:47:48]: I'm trying to think about, like, my kids and work and jobs and whatever it's like...
Dave [0:47:51]: I feel the same with so many of my closest relationships are people that I worked with, like, yeah post college.
Dave [0:47:57]: And I hope we don't lose that.
Dave [0:48:00]: It's, like, yes, you go to there to learn, but, like, you...
Dave [0:48:02]: It's just in your twenties is this certain point of life and, like, that's cool to hear that you're still connected because I think that's a, like, a, back to the people stuff.
Dave [0:48:09]: That's, like, a irr replaceable part of this.
Sydney [0:48:12]: Yeah.
Sydney [0:48:12]: And we were in the trenches figuring it out because there was no playbook.
Dave [0:48:15]: Yeah.
Sydney [0:48:15]: And so that's what I worry about.
Sydney [0:48:16]: I was doing a a...
Sydney [0:48:17]: Yesterday, Pepper was running on Ge and was like, I don't...
Sydney [0:48:21]: There's a reason I didn't give a playbook at the Ai and Action roadshow and that it was blank because I don't think we have one yet.
Sydney [0:48:28]: And I don't think we're gonna have one for a little bit.
Sydney [0:48:31]: Right?
Sydney [0:48:31]: Than because innovation is it's too fast.
Sydney [0:48:34]: And so I don't think we should be building playbook.
Sydney [0:48:37]: Right?
Sydney [0:48:37]: I think we should be testing, iterating and just be super agile and and set our teams up for that.
Sydney [0:48:43]: And you know, maybe before when it was a seventy twenty ten model, Like, now we're gonna do, like, sixty twenty twenty, where experimentation lives, so people aren't afraid to take risks and and try new things and not get wedded to them.
Sydney [0:48:57]: You because it's gonna continue to change so fast.
Sydney [0:49:01]: And that's the difference.
Sydney [0:49:02]: Dave, That is the difference is the speed of this change.
Sydney [0:49:05]: Where before, like, you know, to three years, like, you know, I don't know how to build a crm.
Sydney [0:49:09]: Oh, you wanted to connect it to the web Like, you know, like, someone has to build the the wiring to make that happen and, like, what the...
Sydney [0:49:17]: There was some bus, like, enterprise services bus or something like, you know, like, super techie.
Sydney [0:49:21]: Yeah.
Dave [0:49:22]: The thing you shared at the beginning about the data from, April to August is is eye opening.
Sydney [0:49:27]: You Yeah.
Dave [0:49:28]: Okay.
Dave [0:49:28]: I don't wanna wrap I have to wrap because I need to go.
Sydney [0:49:31]: I know.
Sydney [0:49:31]: You're late.
Dave [0:49:31]: I'm school conference, but that's okay.
Dave [0:49:33]: I'm late because I had an amazing time.
Dave [0:49:34]: Sydney, this is great.
Dave [0:49:35]: I'm reminded of why I enjoyed our our conversation in the past.
Dave [0:49:39]: If you enjoyed this episode, go find Sydney Sidney sloan on Linkedin.
Dave [0:49:43]: I don't care about any ratings reviews, whenever I want you to go to her Linkedin send her message.
Dave [0:49:48]: Be like hey, man...
Dave [0:49:49]: Well, hey, Lady.
Dave [0:49:50]: I heard you day.
Dave [0:49:51]: I you Dave's podcast, and you were awesome.
Dave [0:49:53]: And I got a bunch of notes.
Dave [0:49:55]: I love your events playbook thoughts on Ai, and, I'll probably see it at at an event or or talk to you in the future.
Dave [0:50:01]: It's always great.
Dave [0:50:02]: You're great energy.
Dave [0:50:02]: Great to be around.
Dave [0:50:03]: I appreciate you giving us some time in and coming on the podcast.
Dave [0:50:06]: Thank you to, Palmer for floating this idea and of having you on and coming out and I'm sure.
Sydney [0:50:13]: Awesome.
Sydney [0:50:13]: Thanks, Dave.
Dave [0:50:18]: Hey.
Dave [0:50:18]: Thanks for listening to this podcast.
Dave [0:50:19]: If you like this episode.
Dave [0:50:21]: Do you know what?
Dave [0:50:21]: I'm not even gonna ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that.
Dave [0:50:26]: I have something better for you.
Dave [0:50:27]: So we've built the number one private community for B marketers at Exit Five, and you can go and check that out instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, Exit Five dot com.
Dave [0:50:38]: Our mission at Exit Five is to help you grow your career in B2b marketing, and there's no better place to do that than with us at Exit Five.
Dave [0:50:46]: There's nearly five thousand members now in our community People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers, building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so seeking can have a peer group.
Dave [0:51:02]: Or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest.
Dave [0:51:07]: It's a hundred percent free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk free, and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you wanna become a member for the year, Go check it out, learn more, Exit Five dot com, and I will see you over there in the community.