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Marketing in Progress is a spinoff of Work in Progress that digs into what’s moving the needle in B2B. We feature marketing leaders, sales leaders, and agency owners sharing real stories, smart ideas, and no-filter perspectives—so you walk away with practical guidance to help you do your job better.
Heidi Malden (00:00):
I do think some AI will take over smaller jobs just because it is making things a little bit more accessible to everybody. I don't think that in totality it's going to take people's jobs. I think those that don't adopt AI will be replaced by those who will adopt AI.
Gayle Kalvert (00:19):
Welcome to Marketing in Progress. I'm Gayle Kalvert. This show is for B2B marketing leaders who are under real pressure to deliver results without a clear roadmap. Each episode is built to give you practical insight you can use right away. We focus on what actually matters, how success is measured, and the decisions and trade-offs necessary for success. If you're trying to cut through the noise, do better work and build credibility inside your organization, you're in the right place. Let's get into it. Hey everyone. Welcome to Marketing in Progress. I'm your host, Gayle Kalvert. Today I'm joined by Heidi Malden, head of Americas marketing at Pigment. With over 20 years of experience, she's led go- to-market and demand generation strategies for both Fortune 100 tech companies and startups. Heidi brings deep expertise in growth, ABM, and partner marketing, and is known for turning data-driven insights into real business impact.
(01:19):
In this episode, we'll get real about the unique challenges of marketing an AI-driven company, especially when your ideal customer may not be ready yet to adopt or fully understand the technology. The nuances of marketing across different US regions, whether you're navigating emerging tech or scaling across geographies, this episode offers actionable takeaways you can apply right now. Also, I should let you know that Heidi and I worked together in our past at Qlik, so it is great to have a friendly face and a former marketing colleague here today. Thanks for being here, Heidi.
Heidi Malden (01:55):
Thank you, Gayle. And yes, it is fun to reconnect. After so many years, so good to be here.
Gayle Kalvert (02:00):
Well, I want to jump in right away with AI. Obviously, everybody talks about AI all the time and how do you use AI in your marketing and in your profession? But what is so interesting about your challenge as a marketer is that you're actually marketing an AI-driven company. So you're meeting your prospects and customers to be comfortable and excited about adopting AI in order to adopt your company's technology. Can you talk about that challenge? What does that look like today?
Heidi Malden (02:38):
The company that I work with right now, we basically focus on business planning and performance for financial leaders. Although we have abilities for our sales leaders and our supply chain leaders, when it comes to finance, AI is a little nerve-wracking. There's a lot of hallucinations. People don't really know what it is. People are nervous to adopt. But with everything, the only constant that we currently have is change. And with AI, things are just changing very, very rapidly. Things that we were doing, let's say last week may not be what we're going to be doing in the future. And so you really need to adapt really, really quickly. And there are some companies that just aren't quite ready for AI. So for example, anything in the Fed or regulatory space are usually a little slower to adopt new technologies. Also, East and West Coast is very different.
(03:30):
The West Coast is really open to taking risks and technology is kind of where it's sourced and we have a ripple effect across the rest of the United States. And the East is then following suit. And in the central region, they tend to be a little slower. So when you're marketing, you need to really be aware of who your audience is, what industries you're going to market with, what industries you're trying to attract. And then as well as your ICP, who are you speaking to? Is it somebody in IT? Is it somebody in finance? They might have a different ability to take in AI. And so we really do have to be very careful about how we're going to market. Although at the end of the day, we are an AI company and we want to be known as the AI company for financial leaders.
(04:17):
But at the same time, we need to be sensitive to the fact that not everybody is where we're at.
Gayle Kalvert (04:24):
Are you a marketing leader in B2B tech? Do you want to hear what your peers are actually doing? What's working, what they're ditching, and how they're navigating the pressure we're all under? Well, you're in luck. We just launched the Marketing in Progress community. It's a space for sharing ideas, learning from your peers and having fun along the way. Visit creocollective.io/marketinginprogress to learn more and join us. Yeah. So let's take those two challenges separately for a second because you've got the geographies, which I want to dive into. But first on the spectrum, writers, maybe the maturity curve of people and how do you position Pigment to buyers who are AI enthusiastic, adopters, versus hesitant? Do you actually have different streams and strategies in how you market to those audiences? How do you handle that?
Heidi Malden (05:20):
Don't want to have two different streams of messaging because we don't want to be confusing in the marketplace. But that being said, there are different ways that we can broach the issue when it comes to different companies. So when we're talking to tech, AI is probably something that you really want to focus on, especially if you're looking at tech companies on the West Coast. I don't know if you've been to the West Coast in a while, but if you drive up and down the 101, every single billboard is AI. It's a great opportunity to really lean in to our AI roots when we're focusing on tech companies on the West Coast. But that being said, when we're focusing on the East Coast and maybe it's the companies that have been around for decades and we need to be cognizant of the fact that they might not be early adopters to new technology.
(06:12):
And we are not going to hide behind our AI and not address it. We're just probably not going to promote it as much. We'll focus more on the business planning and performance, your ability to navigate quickly and forecast within minutes with the assistance from AI and what you can do with AI. So we might not lead as dramatically, but we're definitely not going to hide behind it because even though they might not be early adopters, they are aware that the world is changing and that the companies that are moving and progressing the fastest are the ones that are adopting AI.
Gayle Kalvert (06:53):
I think about all the companies that we work with, and lots of times there are two personas, right? Say there's the more senior persona, and then there's the technical person, and you give them names and you talk differently about the product because it solves different pain points for those different personas. You basically have a AI persona and then an AI hesitant persona and maybe tweak it a little bit.
Heidi Malden (07:21):
Very similar to the days that we worked together in data analytics. I don't know if you remember this, but when we first started-
Gayle Kalvert (07:28):
It was only two years ago, Heidi, remember? We were just working together, so of course I remember it. No, but data analytics was new.
Heidi Malden (07:36):
It was new.
Gayle Kalvert (07:36):
Now I'm aging ourselves.
Heidi Malden (07:37):
The challenge for our sales teams back then was that it was considered a nice to have, not a need to have. So they had to kind of sell why it was better to have this nice addition to their platform. Now, if you don't have analytics, you don't have a business. You need to be analyzing everything that you do. Before, they were saying like, "Oh, the analytics is showing that our data is dirty." That's beauty. Understanding that you have dirty data means that you can clean it. If you don't know that it exists, then you're not fixing what you have. So now all of a sudden, analytics is a have to have, not a nice to have. Just like AI. I think about a year ago, people were thinking, "Oh, it's a nice toy. It's fun to play with. " But within days, maybe weeks, people will come to the understanding that it's not a nice to have.
(08:28):
It is an absolute need to have. And those that are going to survive are the ones that are going to adopt it the fastest.
Gayle Kalvert (08:34):
You have to be using AI in your life, in your profession, basically in everything you do. If you want to further your career right now, because basically what we're talking about is the speed at which everything is changing. And so you've just got to be playing with it, using it, figuring it out how it can help you do your job better. And then like you're talking about from a company platform operating your business standpoint, it's absolutely critical like analytics is like back in the day before. It was business intelligence. It was like this very nice thing you could invest in if you wanted to, but now you've got to have all that information.
Heidi Malden (09:20):
There's obstacles. When it comes to AI, not only are there obstacles of like, how do you go to market with companies that might not be ready to adopt and address AI, but then there's also internal challenges as well. We too are creatures of habit and AI is not a habit yet. We have not really adopted it. And change is, although a constant is not always everybody's cup of tea. And so getting dirty with all the different AI capabilities out there, getting your hands into it, understanding it, building can be very daunting for a lot of people. But I will say that although I do think some AI will take over smaller jobs just because it is making things a little bit more accessible to everybody, I don't think that in totality it's going to take people's jobs. I think those that don't adopt AI will be replaced by those who will adopt AI.
(10:17):
I was spending thousands of dollars on vendors to help me profile different companies. I was getting 30-page reports that basically blended their 10Ks, their annual reports, everything that they were talking about to the press, what their goals were, who the main people were. And those reports cost anywhere from three to $5,000 per account. So I was only really getting 10 to 20 reports because it was so expensive. Now I can do that within minutes. Our growth team built an app that plugs into Salesforce that pulls all of that information automatically into Salesforce so the AE can go in and just push a refresh button and all of that information pops up. And so they can have very intelligent conversations. Those reports were dated by the time I received them because things had already happened. Now with AI, one, I don't need to spend the money.
(11:10):
Two, it's timely and all the information is up at the AE's fingertips. Now I could take that money and spend it more strategically into figuring out what I need to do.
Gayle Kalvert (11:20):
That leads me directly to my next question. So thank you. What does the role of marketing look like now? You started it just there with all of the things that you don't need to spend money or time on anymore. So where do you find that it is best to invest your time and energy and perhaps budget these days?
Heidi Malden (11:40):
The biggest thing that we're seeing is definitely brand awareness is the number one priority for any marketing team. And every person on the marketing team is responsible for brand awareness, not just the brand team. And things are changing there too. I mean, we used to be all about SEO and SEM and where do you play on the Google board and how much money are you going to spend for certain keywords? And these days, it's all about GEO. People are bypassing Google and going straight to chat. They're interpreting it to be more authentic and getting the responses from chat. And those are the vendors that we see are landing on our website more, staying longer when they're coming from chat versus Google. They're not bouncing as quickly. So I would definitely say that any company that is worth their wait will be investing in how to show up in searches on chat and within GDO.
(12:39):
Because we're saving money in other capacities, we can reach people at home. That's another beautiful aspect of AI. I could plug in and say, "I want to attract CFOs." And then when a CFO is watching Netflix and an ad comes up, all of a sudden I've been able to attract that persona and target them with my advertisement and hopefully bring them into the fold here at Pigment. So all of a sudden you are really focusing on different ways of spending money in order to achieve brand awareness. And also AI allows marketers to be more relatable because for example, the AI SDR that we're leveraging, instead of just dropping a whole list of people into a nurture campaign, all of a sudden your AI SDR can make it very personal by identifying not only the company, but the person and their persona. And then it crafts a personalized email to that individual based on the nurture stream that you've created and drops them into a very personalized messaging stream, which would just take hours and hours for marketing to do so we didn't do it.
(13:50):
We kind of bucketed everybody. Now you can literally have a very personalized and one-to-one communication, which is more relatable and a better end user experience. So all in all, huge fan of AI, whether I'm using it or I'm promoting it, I think it's something that, again, those companies that are adopting it the fastest are the ones that are going to be able to move farther.
Gayle Kalvert (14:13):
You've talked about a number of things that are better and are going really well. Is there anything that you feel like is kind of hard right now or you're trying to figure out a challenge?
Heidi Malden (14:25):
There are people that might not be at the same place that we're at. Adopting AI is still new. They're trying to figure out what their company's legal rights are to what they can use and what they can't use. I remember when DocuSign was first introduced, everybody was like, "Oh, an electric signature is never going to work. Legally, you can't identify people. " And then the pandemic happened and that was the best thing that ever happened to DocuSign. AI is the same thing. People are still hesitant. They're not really sure how to use it. They're afraid of the hallucinations, which is fair. I think that's a valid comment. But at the same time, it provides information, whether it's real or hallucinated that you can look at, you still need that human touch. You need that human to look at it just like way back in the day when we were looking at our data.
(15:17):
If the data populated something that didn't look right, hopefully it identified there's a problem in your data. So then you were able to go and fix your data. AI is going to do the same thing. If it's hallucinating something, you've got to question it like, okay, where did that come from? Maybe you need to go back to the source and really figure this out, or maybe I wasn't clear in my prompt. It's a learning curve. And I think we're all in that learning curve and that's what's making it challenging right now because people don't want to make a mistake and there's not enough historical data out there for companies to say, "This is the company I'm going to bet on because they historically have proven themselves. AI just doesn't have the history yet." And so selling to that market is challenging. One additional thing, AI is changing so fast that companies sometimes just want to take a pause and figure out, okay, a month ago you said X, now you have X plus Y, and what's going to happen in another month?
Gayle Kalvert (16:17):
How do you deal with the number of tools that you can be using to do your marketing? It was overwhelming before AI, right? Everybody was talking about their marketing ops stack and they had too much and it became overwhelming. Now there are all these tools that are powered by AI that can help us do marketing faster, better, et cetera, et cetera. When that overwhelming.
Heidi Malden (16:43):
I agree. I can't tell you how many different applications we've already sunsetted and moved on to the next best thing. I do love that about Pigment. They're constantly changing and shifting gears based on what is the new best offering out there. But as an end user, it can be daunting because by the time you get your arms around one tool and you finally figure you mastered it is basically being sunset and you're trying something else or you're still working with it, but you're also working with something else in tandem or in parallel so they can test which one is better. So it goes back to the marketers that are going to do the best are those that embrace change and maybe love the chaos because it is a little bit chaotic right now.
Gayle Kalvert (17:35):
Well, and one thing that's come up a lot in these conversations lately is that as marketers, we are actually technologists. I didn't really think about it that way until this discussion I had with another CMO who said, in marketing, we have always been at the forefront of technology. We are always pushed to be more efficient, to be doing things faster, better, and trying all these new tools. We are in itself, by nature of being marketers, need to be technologists. And as you said, sort of embrace the chaos and experiment and try and see what's out there. But if there are any tools that you feel like are great, I'm sure we would love to know. I would love to know, because I am always fearful as a business owner, I don't want to pay for six or seven different tools and you try them out and then are they really great?
(18:24):
So then you end up saying, "Well, we'll just hold off and see how things fucked out. "
Heidi Malden (18:28):
That is the challenge in this market right now is things are changing so quickly that companies sometimes just want to pause, but the downside of that is the longer you wait, the longer you're going to jump in that pool and people might surpass you before you've even dumped your toe in. So at some point you're just going to have to jump, even if that means that you try different things. One of my favorites right now is Letter AI because it is a tool for training. So you basically can put all of your information that you need to learn in LitterAI and it starts training you on the messaging, your pitch, questions to dig into, obstacles to overcome. It's great. And I use that all the time, not only to learn about our own products because we're churning out new offerings all the time and I want to be really well spoken on all of them, but also to learn about other products in the market.
Gayle Kalvert (19:19):
Given all the change and everything, I always like to ask, if you were talking to somebody who wanted to step into your role, I don't mean specifically at Pigment, what would you recommend they focus on in their first 90 days?
Heidi Malden (19:32):
Exposure and experience on the digital side is a must. Historical marketers that have focused on the fields, that's probably the area that they lack the most. And in this day and age, that is the area that I think all marketers need to have some exposure or experience in. For example, I actually went and took a course from UVA in order to be more succinct in my digital marketing abilities because it is changing so much. By the time I finished that course, at that time, SEO and SEM was still out winning GEO and two months later it was different. So definitely I would focus on the digital sides because that is a window into how people are hearing about companies and you really need to understand where people are at because when you do become a marketer and you're trying to reach out to them, knowing where they're at is probably the best starting point.
Gayle Kalvert (20:30):
Can you define digital when you say that? Because that can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people.
Heidi Malden (20:35):
And I probably mean all of it, meaning I think everybody should be really well versed on SEO, SEM, GEO, out of office advertisements, CTV, content syndication, because people are not going to come to you if they don't know who you are. So you need to figure out how to get to them and where are they and how can I get to them? So the best way to do that is on the digital side. Then as you kind of build your way through marketing, but maybe that is the best way to say it, holding on to that expertise is going to be key because at the end of the day, how you build pipeline, and more importantly, how you close pipeline is building relationships. And I think in any company that I've ever worked at, pre-AI, pre-data analytics to today, when it comes down to making a decision, people buy from people they trust.
(21:29):
So your offering could be better, but if they trust the other company, they're going to go with the other company. So building those relationships in order to expedite and build pipeline is key because I've noticed that since the pandemic, it's been really hard to build those relationships.
Gayle Kalvert (21:46):
So sad when I hear that. It's so true. You're not the first one to say it. It's prevalent, right? Across all of us marketers, people want to get out and they want to be in person. And then they're sort of like, "But I don't know. I'm used to being able to just not leave."
Heidi Malden (21:59):
Exactly. So thank
Gayle Kalvert (22:00):
You so much. Tell everybody where they can find you in the digital world.
Heidi Malden (22:05):
Please look us up at Pigment.com. We are a great AI financial planning and performance company, and we welcome you and hope see you soon.
Gayle Kalvert (22:15):
And we'll see you on LinkedIn, right?
Heidi Malden (22:17):
Yes.
Gayle Kalvert (22:17):
You're on LinkedIn.
Heidi Malden (22:18):
Of course. Okay.
Gayle Kalvert (22:19):
Excellent. All right. Well, thank you so much and we'll see you soon. All
Heidi Malden (22:23):
Right. Thank you.
Gayle Kalvert (22:24):
Okay.
Heidi Malden (22:25):
Bye.
Gayle Kalvert (22:27):
If this episode was helpful, please follow Marketing in Progress and tap like. It helps other marketing leaders find the show. And if you know someone who's navigating similar challenges, feel free to share this episode with them. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.