What are the best brands doing to stay relevant, build trust, and create content smarter?
At Share Your Genius, we have the same questions, so we're tapping the best in the space for their answers—one voicemail at a time.
Join us each week for quick hits of insights from b2b marketers and leaders.
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[00:00:31] Rachel Elsts Downey: Hey, Rachel. David Nour with Avnir, great to catch up with you. I was thinking the other day of your great question of, "What's something about AI that nobody's talking about?"
[00:00:41] David Nour: I want to highlight for your audience, three things.
[00:00:44] Number one, garbage in, garbage stays.
[00:00:47] So I think a lot of people love the idea of the power, the promise, the potential of AI.
[00:00:53] They don't have a clue on what it takes to really extract insights, actionable insights, from it. Because if in our world we focus a lot on relationships and if your contact data is garbage, and I overlay a really brilliant AI engine on top of that, I'm gonna automate garbage. So we're spending a lot of time on data hygiene and data enrichment and data entity resolution.
[00:01:21] So the underlying enabler of AI's promise is, and I think we're all in for a rude awakening, of just how much garbage data or inaccurate data is out there. Two, we're trying to solve some really interesting challenges, and it's because I think at my DNA, I'm allergic to vagueness. We talk about activating the hidden value of relationships. You hear all the time that, "I have a great relationship with so-and-so." I don't know what that means. What I do know is based on these 12 attributes, I can generate a relationship score. And intuitively we all know that some people, we know better.
[00:02:05] We've known 'em longer. We have a deeper, more meaningful relationship with them. How do you teach AI that? How do you automate an understanding of trust, and credibility, and in many ways, empathy? Data'squantifying in many ways, what we've always perceived to be not really quantifiable.
[00:02:26] And number three, I swear, I think some days we're swimming against the current, because social media broadly, and LinkedIn in particular, is really propagating this myth of quantity over quality. And what I deeply believe in, again, at a cellular level is what if we tighten that aperture? What if we focused on fewer, but build deeper, more meaningful relationships? I've got 20,000 plus contacts on LinkedIn. I couldn't tell you how I know half of 'em, and I think that's true for most people. Yet I can tell you my top 10 customers last year.And companies struggle with what I call "new logo-itis." We all want to chase net new, and what nobody's talking about is AI as an enabler of me deepening the existing relationships that are most critical to my success.
[00:03:18] But I wanna leave you with this story that I think might resonate. I spoke with the Chief Revenue Officer who said he had to go into a quarterly business review, and tell the leadership team that they lost a $10 million deal. The mild-mannered CFO has this real visceral reaction, and says, "we should have never lost that deal." The CROs like, "I'm upset too, but what do you mean?" The CFO looks at the deal and says, "that buyer was in my wedding."
[00:03:48] If you've been in business more than five minutes, that story makes you cringe because in every company, there are all these hidden relationships that we don't think about. I have no idea who you went to school with. I have no idea who you worked with. So when we say we wanna activate the hidden value of those relationships, that's an example I wanna leave you with.
[00:04:08] Again, avnir.com is the website. Would love to show you what we're up to. And I hope all's great with you. Take care and we'll talk soon. Bye-bye.