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The secret sauce to your sales success? It’s what happens before the sale. It’s the planning, the strategy, the leadership. And it’s more than demo automation. It’s the thoughtful work that connects people, processes, and performance. If you want strong revenue, high retention, and shorter sales cycles, the pre-work—centered around the human—still makes the dream work. But you already know that.
The Unexpected Lever is your partner in growing revenue by doing what great sales leaders do best. Combining vision with execution. Brought to you by Vivun, this show highlights the people and peers behind the brands who understand what it takes to build and lead high-performing sales teams. You’re not just preparing for the sale—you’re unlocking potential.
Join us as we share stories of sales leaders who make a difference, their challenges, their wins, and the human connections that drive results, one solution at a time.
Jarod Greene (00:00):
Welcome everybody back to The Unexpected Lever, the show where we sit down with some of the best B2B sales and go- to-market leaders to unpack the levers, to drive revenue, the people, processes, and the platforms. This season, we're focused on one of the most transformational levers to drive all three, the rise of artificial intelligence. We're here. So it's not the hype, it's not the theory. This is the real stuff. These are the practical lessons from the leaders on the frontline. What worked, what didn't, and what you do differently with you could start the thing all over again.
(00:35):
I'm your host, Jarod Greene. And today I'm super excited to be joined by one of my guys. We go way back and I'm wearing my Seattle Steelhead hat in honor of another Washingtonian on the podcast.This is going to be a lot of fun. I think we could talk for hours, literally, but you get to spend just a few minutes with us.
(00:56):
This is somebody who brings deep experience in product marketing, content marketing, and is looking at this may be different from the sales lens, but he's always aligned to sales outcomes. Zak spent his career looking at sales process, looking at handoffs. And he is the founding product marketer at KeyShot. So Zak, welcome to Unexpected Lever.
Zak Cherif (01:21):
Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here.
Jarod Greene (01:23):
Thanks for being here, man. So before we dive into your AI journey, I want to start with something we're working on right now. So the listeners who may not be familiar, what are you focused on right now? What is it you say you do?
Zak Cherif (01:35):
Yeah, it's a great starting question. For me, I think it's a variety of things, but at the end of the day, the most important thing is keeping a consistent message across everything we do and being customer first from a product marketing core principle perspective. I know that's easy to say and a lot harder to do, but I'd say pretty much everything I work on day in, day out, strategic execution is all about representing that customer in the room and making sure we're not making decisions that aren't always customer first. We're in a bit of a transition right now, honestly, so that's been fascinating to watch. We're shifting into more of a product-led growth motion. It's definitely more of a hybrid. But within that, I think the beauty of KeyShot today is we do have that option to both have a product-led motion and a sales direct led motion.
(02:22):
We've got resellers, we've got quite a complex system that requires a lot of time and care around it. But on that product-led side, that's where I'm really leaning in and figuring out how can we maximize all the ways that we're trying to get KeyShot in front of customers, meet them where they're at, help them understand how this all works and keep that message the same throughout so that we're always telling the same story.
Jarod Greene (02:46):
Love that. Yeah, you and I, we spend a lot of time on this, right? Context is everything. So that context you said is perfect. And so again, we start every conversation out for context.
(02:55):
What's an unexpected use case for you in AI personally or professional? What's the most unexpected thing the audience is going to hear about how you, Zak, use AI today?
Zak Cherif (03:06):
I feel a little bit weird saying it out loud because now I feel like I'm giving away some secrets, but fantasy football for sure. I have some ideas. I like to think I'm pretty strategic on my own. I've got my core guys I look for every year, but there's so many different people saying so many different things. Go get this guy, don't touch that guy. So I like to kind of use. I've used ChatGPT. I'm experimenting a little bit with Claude, trying to see are they a better GM or should I stick with OpenAI? I'm not really sure, but I'm hoping nobody I play with watches this because I don't need them finding out that I'm farming out any of the strategy.
Jarod Greene (03:39):
They use it to. They use it too. The thing I stopped doing and this is like breaking news. I'm no longer doing fantasy football that I'm on with the engineers. They know AI. So they win every year. So I'm just giving money away at this point. So fantasy football is a phenomenal one. And for submission as Alpharett, a great way to get out communications,
Zak Cherif (04:01):
Oh yeah.
Jarod Greene (04:01):
Tools and guidelines.
(04:03):
It's almost the opposite to me now when I see a commissioner sending a message that I question. We text a lot. I know this isn't how you talk. I have a newfound appreciation for whoever's still typing it out the old way, but I also completely understand why you'd automate that too. So no shame to them.
(04:19):
I get it too. So take me back to your AI origin story. You had a moment where I think the state that you went from, this is interesting and cool to, man, this is mission critical necessary. What moment was that?
Zak Cherif (04:32):
Yeah, honestly, pretty recently for us too. As we're exploring this product-led growth motion that's newer to us, we've always had the ability, at least for the last few years, for people to kind of self-serve and purchase our core product, KeyShot Studio directly through our website, which is great. We want to make sure there's no friction in that experience and people are getting the tools they need to do the job that they need to do. But I think when you zoom out and you look at that sales landscape I was explaining, right? We've got all these different sellers. We've got a bunch of different geographies were available around the world and you start thinking about how do you be more targeted and strategic with who you're going after. For us, I think AI has been the most helpful from a data enrichment perspective, right? Helping us kind of level the playing field versus companies that have dedicated sales enablement teams, dedicated sales data teams that are pulling through all this data, helping put together reports to help you target, this is our ICP, this is who we should be focused on.
(05:31):
We don't all have that luxury. So I can tell you personally on the data enrichment side, AI is an absolute game changer for us. You always want options when you're thinking about your messaging, your positioning. You want to make sure people get a spectrum of things to choose between so they get a better understanding of how we want to say what we want to say. And I can tell you, as you know better than I do, there's nothing worse than coming up with the pitch and the idea and feeling great about it and going, now I got to figure out five or six other ways to say this, maybe not as great. So that's helped me a lot, honestly, even getting things to react to and feeling a little bit more like, what about if we use these words and that words and having AI tools come back with those options to be able to present and honestly, in some cases help your ideas shine, but in other cases give you insight that you weren't thinking about.
Jarod Greene (06:21):
Well, 100%. I remember saying, okay, here's our core message for our ICP. How does this change by industry? How does it change by segment? How does it change by geography? How does it change by maturity? And then pretty soon you're looking at 150 something permutations of the same core thing. And I famously enemy, I slapped my life saying, "Well, this is too many permutations." But now the scales cost a bit, the ability
Zak Cherif (06:53):
To
Jarod Greene (06:53):
Say, "Here's our core and a message." And yeah, I continue to be going away with the leverage product marketers can get from AI.
Zak Cherif (07:02):
100%.
Jarod Greene (07:04):
Yeah. I'm not a hater though. It's not, "Hey, I love to see it. I love-
Zak Cherif (07:08):
I mean, we learn the hard way. I'm here for it. It feels like parents talking about walking uphill in the snow both ways and you don't have to do that anymore. And that's the same vibe I feel
Jarod Greene (07:19):
Now." We walk. So the next generation of product market is your fly.That's
Zak Cherif (07:24):
Fine. So they can prompt.
Jarod Greene (07:26):
They can prompt. That's fine. They're worried. So you start integrating it, you start sequencing things where you kind of, "Here's a problem I have and oh yeah, AI can solve this? " Or were you kind of hunting for problems?
Zak Cherif (07:38):
Yeah, I think for us it was kind of an option on the table. And KeyShot's been around for 20 years, super established business. We've got an amazing customer base all over the world, 30,000 users, 52 of the Fortune 100 companies use KeyShot for their 3D product visualizations. And as amazing as that is, it becomes really complex to distill use cases down to two or three or four. We have some companies that use us to design any product they're building and they never build a physical prototype because of the fidelity they get through the product. We have other companies that use this exclusively for packaging or for print materials or whatever that may be. The wider those use cases get, the more difficult it is to really kind of say like, "Who are we for? " And you don't want to be limiting in that sense because of course every day we're learning of a new way somebody's using our product.
(08:33):
But at the same time, when you think of those more tried and true successful sales motions, you do need to be targeted. You do need to be intentional with who you're going after and where you really play to your best strengths. So for us, the core question was, we look at all these variety of use cases, we want to pick some to really hone in on. How should we go about validating what those are in an efficient way? Like I mentioned, we've got a scrappier team, so we've got to be smart about it. And then also at the same time, not necessarily allow kind of human intervention to rule out things that we might kind of shake our head at or say, "Yeah, we do that, but that's not maybe our bread and butter." So I think the timing couldn't have worked out better. Every week we're seeing new updates in terms of what you can achieve with like more, I'd say real world AI, the clouds and the ChatGPTs.
(09:26):
And then there's AI powered businesses entirely built on specific use cases, helping you achieve X, Y, Z. And for us, we were able to find a couple companies that specialize in AI powered data enrichment, jumping into your Salesforce, into your HubSpot, into all the technology that you use and helping you kind of meet your goal within the data that you already have. And for us, that was mission critical. So it kind of came to us more than helping us find it. But then within that, we're seeing insights surface that we wouldn't have considered without AI giving us some of those insights as well. So it's really been a win-win, but honestly, I think we got a little bit lucky with the timing of it all. I think five years ago, this would've been a whole different story and probably some sort of big headcount consultation, whatever it may be.
(10:16):
But thankfully we get to pull in some really scrappy tools and work a lot faster.
Jarod Greene (10:21):
Let's talk about sales enablement a little bit. So founding PMM, I kind of know what's in your remit. How has AI helped you be a better partner to the sales team? Whether you wear the enablement jacket or not, the team of sales folks that rely on your outputs and your insights.
Zak Cherif (10:38):
I think there's a couple layers from an organization standpoint, keeping track of everything is difficult, right? Different industries, different sellers with different motions. I've got an amazing team of sellers that I work with and they all sell very differently, which I know presents a very unique problem mostly for product marketers. How do I equip them with the right content for their style and their motion and people that love to live in the PowerPoints, people that never open a doc and they live in the product. So for me, it's been trying to utilize AI to figure out how are people doing this well, giving the examples to work off of that make that story a lot more straightforward for each of the audiences that I'm talking to. And that's such a core tenet of what we do in product marketing, right? People are going to receive the same message in very different ways.
(11:25):
And sometimes it's about how you say it. Sometimes it's about where you say it or how it looks. And I think it's the same idea internally with sales. We've got people who have come from more traditional enterprise backgrounds that love their white papers, they love their ebooks, they love their content by the funnel stage, and we've got to equip them as well. And then we've got other sellers who are more like, "Get out of the way and let me do my thing." And we got to make sure that kind of post call or follow up content wise, that they're equipped to keep telling that same story. But throughout that process, I lean on AI heavily. We've talked about this to kind of play devil's advocate in a way and help me think of use cases or content ideas that I wouldn't have thought of on my own.
(12:05):
I
Jarod Greene (12:06):
Don't even want to call it tension. It's just a thing. How do you balance the notion that you have cools you can use to put together the positioning, the messaging, the differentiation, look at the ... There's the role you play and then sales team, they're out there in the field, they're out there seeing it in the real world kind of dealing with it. How do you balance that between you're doing what they're seeing, you're creating, what they're creating in a world where, again, like I said, we all got to be on the same page with regards to what our product done and how it creates value, but we also can't be a bottleneck. So how do you balance that sensor?
Zak Cherif (12:41):
Yeah. For me, it's a lot of, I'll call it therapy, having some sit down conversations to understand. For me, I work very inside out. I like to understand how something works and all the mechanisms within it before I ever try to propose any changes, any additions, any subtractions, anything like that. So what's been helpful for me is just sitting down with as many people as I can across that sales organization. And just, I mean, I know how they sell now because they've walked me through, right? We've got a seller at our company, he's an OG, pretty much the entire 20-year journey. I don't know the last time he showed a PowerPoint slide. And so I know better than to bring him some new things to get the flow because he's been successful. Same thing with the rest of the team, and you've seen this too, right?
(13:28):
For me, I treat it the same way I treat the customer. Understanding your ways of working, understanding what to meet you with that's going to help you succeed further, because even with that success, each one of them have unique notes on what they're lacking or what they're missing. So for me, it's distilling what's helped them be successful to this point, understanding their pain points just like we do with the customer, and then tailoring the output to their needs while keeping the message consistent. At least for me, that's been a lot more helpful than going to a demo seller or a super technical seller and saying, "Let's get you back in PowerPoint," or going to someone who isn't as familiar with the product and saying, "Let's make you an expert in the next week and change everything up."
Jarod Greene (14:11):
Yeah, that guy's going to tell you it goes somewhere. So I understand that. So let's shift gears one more time then. So practical advice for folks. There are folks, believe it or not, I think you're at small percent and just getting started here, what advice would you give them?
Zak Cherif (14:25):
For me, I think it's not running too quickly. Taking your time where you can, taking a step back, feeling confident in the landscape that you're prioritizing that you're going after. I think it's easy to kind of pick a lane and run with it. And I think that's also one of the beauties of having a lot of access to AI technology is you can work through a lot of different ideas really quickly and figure out this would be a better way to sequence the order of what I'm doing. But for me, I think the most helpful advice I've received is making sure you take that step back to really understand the broader landscape, how everything comes together before you come in and start trying to make any significant changes right away. It's almost slowing down first to speed back up. And that's always been helpful for me throughout my career.
Jarod Greene (15:10):
That's great advice. We hear from a lot of folks who share similar sentiment on just start it, but don't boil the ocean. I've people say, "I'm going to go take a class. I'll learn these foundational models or I'm going to get certified and prompt engineering." It's like, that's cool, but just some of the bases and the way we've seen this stuff move so fast, let me ask you this, what's the priority over the next couple
Zak Cherif (15:34):
Of months? The biggest thing for me is trying to kind of expand on that core promise of product marketing and getting back to every aspect being customer first. We've got a lot of really strong commitments across all of our departments to do more research, to get in front of more customers, to really validate where we're going, what we're building. Like I mentioned, we've got so many different use cases. And when we start leaning into one more than the other, there's definitely advantages to that, but at the same time, you're not going to make everybody happy. So for us, it's trying to figure out almost like a utilitarian approach. There are some core things that are going to be good for the greatest amount of people. Not everything's going to feel that way. And even on the topic of AI, we just launched our first set of AI design features within KeyShot Studio around June of last year.
(16:22):
And what I loved about our approach, especially when it comes to a creative customer audience, right? I think there's a lot of fear around AI replacing instead of adding. And I definitely can empathize with that to some extent as a writer, as a creator myself. But our approach, what I loved about it is all the tools that we've built that are AI powered are meant to support your workflows, to automate redundant things. And especially in a time where you can pull up Google or ChatGPT or whatever and prompt an image and see what comes out with it, our customers at the end of the day, they care about accuracy, they care about quality, they care about resolution, fidelity. They're building products that their entire businesses rely on. And as efficient as some of these other tools might be, our promise is that we're respecting that true geometry of your model, the accuracy, the fidelity.
(17:16):
And it's still definitely, we've got some exciting updates to those AI features coming out in the next few weeks or so. So I'm really excited about that. But early feedback's been really positive. Like everything else we try to launch, spending less time on this stuff they don't want to do and giving them more time to be creative and explore what they do want to do. So I think that's the core of everything we're focused on for the next year, two years, three years out, is keeping that mission intact, that everything we do is based on giving more ability for our users to do what they want to do most.
Jarod Greene (17:49):
All right. Let's wrap with the lightning round. Short answers, no overthinking right here in the moment. Question one, if you could automate, augment, or eliminate any part of the go- to-market process for AI, which one would
Zak Cherif (18:02):
I mean, sales content would be amazing, if I'm being honest with you. I know that's not realistic, but that's my lightning answer.
Jarod Greene (18:09):
Question two, what book, podcast, or resources influence your thinking about AI the most?
Zak Cherif (18:14):
For me, I think I listen to how it works a good amount on the podcast side. Anytime I hear AI related content for me, that's always a can't miss episode. And
Jarod Greene (18:23):
Then last question, where can people connect with you if they want to follow up, see the work you're doing?
Zak Cherif (18:28):
I think I'm on most of the networks. I feel old saying that. I don't know if that's the young way to say that. I'm too young to be talking like this, but you could find me on LinkedIn, Zak Sharif, pretty much anywhere on there, but always open to chat. Love meeting new people and connecting and talking tech, talking product marketing, whatever may be sports too, if you just want to ask.
Jarod Greene (18:47):
So Zak, this was fantastic, man. Thanks for sharing your perspective, your insights before you. You really appreciate it. Again, the lessons learned to think I'm around that I am sure I am positive this will better. It's that many people who are listening to understand how to make better usage of it. And for everyone listen, this is why we do the unexpected library. We want to have real conversations, practical, battle tested approaches for the leaders who actually navigate and transition. If you enjoyed this episode, give us a follow, give us a light, subscribe. We'd love to see you. And if you feel so fine, give me a review for some of the conversations you'd like to hear us have, maybe if you want to be a guest yourself. I'm Jarod Greene and I'll see you next time.
Zak Cherif (19:23):
You've been listening to The Unexpected Lever. This stuff gets you fired up and you want to talk about it with other leaders, join the Powerline Slack community. It's a modern, open access community for go- to-market professionals and AI enthusiasts alike. We're all ready to turn buzz into business outcomes. Join by going to vivun.com/community. We hope to see you there.