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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Tom Rudnai (00:19)
Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses. I'm gonna get straight into it. So we've got with me today, Eamon Shushan, Eamon is the head of marketing at Internex, where he's actually just joined. excited to hear more about that. Before we go, Eamon, thank you for joining us.
Aimen Chouchane (00:35)
Hi Tom, great to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Tom Rudnai (00:37)
No, great to have you. We've been chatting about doing this for a little while now, actually back to when you were in your previous role, so interested to hear about the kind of onboarding process that you've been going through. I guess before we get into it, do you want to give us a little bit of an introduction into you, your journey, and I suppose always particularly interested in what the steps were that you felt has really shaped you and your career.
Aimen Chouchane (01:00)
sure. Actually, that's good because there is like a fairly long answer to that. Like most people, I didn't go to university preparing for a career in B2B marketing when I left. yeah, but like I guess my journey does kind of start there because I did a degree in politics. I worked for a Labour MP in Cardiff where I went to uni and that set me up for an initial career in the realm of
political consultancy. So the through line throughout it all is that I ended up specializing in tech policy while I was in that field almost straight away. So I was advising the likes of Apple, Vodafone, Virgin Media on the impact of UK government choices, legislation on their businesses and that kind of stuff and went from the more
political communication side of it to the communication side and joined a mostly b2b focused PR agency and one of my key accounts there became LinkedIn's b2b business in the UK and that was really a big pivot point for me in terms of then moving into what I do now. So like I guess the summation of that is that I've become kind of a zero to one
specialist in early stage tech startups. And it was really that experience working with LinkedIn and like kind of learning about the journey, the early stages of the company where it was just an idea and a pitch deck and a dream. And I just became absolutely obsessed with that kind of early part of the journey and I wanted to get involved in that. And so the way for me to do that actually ended up being to leave the PR world.
start working with a friend of mine at a small messaging startup called Yapster. And from there, I've now gone on to be the first marketer into four different tech companies, all in sort of niche B2B SaaS. So that tends to be my specialism as well. And then currently that has brought me, as you say, it's early days, it's week two here at Intellect's Vision, where I'm head of marketing.
And intellects vision is an AI powered image recognition platform that helps security organizations all across the world, whether that's in house for some of the biggest industries, like for all the things from mining through to tourism to critical infrastructure to apply advanced real time analytics to their video image monitoring, cccv, all that.
Tom Rudnai (03:25)
Thanks for joining us for this tour. We'll have to start training.
Thank
Aimen Chouchane (03:36)
good stuff. really interesting tech. It's a series A funded company. And yeah, again, building up the marketing department there.
Tom Rudnai (03:47)
Interesting, I always like it when you get into like the origin story and it's quite a unique one I've not had someone who came from like the political realm before. there a... Like, are there skills that that set you up with that you really feel yourself like using day in and day out today?
Aimen Chouchane (04:03)
Yeah, absolutely. the company is called Portland and the founder is a gentleman called Tim Allen, who was in Downing Street as part of the communications team, his second in command to Alastair Campbell during the Tony Blair Labour administration. And that group was were really pioneers of
the new way of doing political communication and doing PR and really modernize the government communications function at that time. So he brought that approach that had been successful in helping Tony Blair get to power and then subsequently to communicate Labour's policy vision into the private sector and really
it came down to, I'd say really two main things, which was number one, we would start any campaign with a messaging house. So no matter how complex the issue, we always try to distill it down into just a few key themes and a few key slogans that were going to be the real drivers of the campaign. And I think that is always a helpful practice. And I think it's certainly something that's
lasted my entire career and is something that I would like pitch myself as being very good at is being a translator between technical and, and, commercial rights. So taking complex topic areas. mean, we did stuff in the area of like spectrum, which is the airwaves that have become, you know, 4g, 5g mobile phone signal, incredibly technically complex, but you might have to speak to an MP.
who just wants to know why his constituents don't have mobile internet. And you can't explain the ins and outs of like why spectrum is so complicated. You've got to have a message that ties that technical explanation to the real world and an understandable format. And then I'd say the second was just like ruthless focus on discipline in execution as well. The stakes are a lot higher. You're dealing with
government policy, you're dealing with huge organizations, you you miss something small, it can actually have a really big impact. And so your delivery has to be phenomenal. And I think that's a really good discipline to have and to bring that kind of discipline from working with larger, larger organizations and instill that into earlier stage companies where things can just because of the speed of movement be a bit looser. But you want to have that balance between
speed of execution and spot on execution. So I think those are two things that I've really taken with me throughout my career since then.
Tom Rudnai (06:42)
I can see exactly how that leads you into like this naught to one specialist role, right? It's something I often talk about and I'm trying not to keep saying on the podcast, but as a founder, the thing that I find hardest about marketing and messaging and positioning is simplifying what we do. Because as a founder, you're very proud of what you do and you're very proud of all these wonderful features you build and the breadth of how you can help.
where I think I will mostly support from like your first boots on the ground marketer, is telling me which bits people actually give a shit about and consolidating it down to a message that can resonate. The other thing I noticed is like, with internet, it's quite a technical product from the sound of it, and that ability to like translate that through to something much simpler that people can actually digest and understand. I wanna
to
come back to that Probably useful context for the listeners before then is like what's unique or challenging about their go-to-market and the conditions that you need to operate in there that will help frame everything that we're going to hear about your kind of perspective.
Aimen Chouchane (07:41)
I'm still kind of getting under the skin of everything. But there's really two layers of complexity that are particularly like key and need a lot of attention given that I'm in an individual contributor role at this stage.
what you see in the screen is the marketing department for now. And that's the company is truly global from as of now. Right. So we have employees all across the world. We have contracts all across the world. I believe they're already currently active in five continents. All right. So there's obviously you've got then language, cultural.
differences to navigate and you can't just apply a standard one size fits all playbook when that's the case. You've got to really pay attention to those. They're not more than nuances. They're really important differentiators and exactly what you say in terms of collateral is going to change a little bit depending on who is on the receiving end of that. And that's not just going to be which industry it's going to be.
which industry in which country as an oversimplification. And then the other side is that we work with a lot of partners, whether they're systems integrators, whether they're distributors, whether they're technology partners of ours. So it's never as simple as we sell direct to the end customer. again, you're adding in...
goes to market complexity and what you execute from a marketing perspective has to be robust because it's not always necessarily that you are delivering it directly. You might be relying on another party, a third party to deliver your message for you to deliver that collateral to the end customer. So you really have to bear that in mind and everything again, I think it goes back to that excellence of execution point. You really have to
rigorously stress test your processes when that's the case and you can't just go hand to mouth and just be delivering individual bits of collateral to different places because in my position that will just overwhelm me so I'd say those are the things that are sort of front of mind based on the initial onboarding that done so far.
Tom Rudnai (10:05)
So we did a whole episode on globalization, which was really great with something called Lee Deddes. And one thing I was struck by is that there's a lot more that it adds in terms of different considerations than I ever would have realized. It's not as simple as just translating content, for example. You have to understand that messaging needs to differ completely, right? In the UK, larger, certainly the US, everything's about growth and saving time from a productivity standpoint. You flip that and then...
Asia, for example, or in the Nordics, it's a lot more, it's not, it might be the same message, but it's not about productivity. It's about getting away from work and giving you time back to enjoy your life. So there's like subtle changes. That's a lot of complexity for you to kind of inherit,
How do you think about focus versus capturing those opportunities, right? Because what you were describing is more and more splitting of your focus as a one person marketing team, how do you apportion your own time to reach of those channels? And how do you know if that's right?
Aimen Chouchane (11:02)
Yeah, it's a really interesting question.
I think it's like a combination of like focus and leverage. So it's what, what, what are the prior, what is the priority list and where can I get the most leverage and, and as an IC create the most value with the resources that I have and
For me, that always goes down to like impacts on pipeline and revenue, right? So you can't be a marketing leader. You can't have a marketing department that isn't contributing to revenue in a meaningful way. Like you have to justify your existence. you know, I spoke on a previous podcast about modern marketing being a
combination of like art and art and science, right? And you cannot ignore the science part, which is that everyone from day one has the ability to attribute and to measure marketing impacts in a different way than it was possible at the start of my career. And that means that you have to be showing an impact on the numbers. And more importantly than that, think that when you're
supporting a big sales team, then they need to feel, so it's not just quantitative, it's qualitative, they need to feel like you are making an impact for them. So when I think about focus and where to prioritise, it's like, where can we make the most impact in the shortest amount of time and that's on the revenue and pipeline generation side of things.
Tom Rudnai (12:43)
one thing I'm trying to do as much as I can at the moment is take on as much systems thinking as I can,
I think because so much can be automated now. It's actually like I think of constructing a marketing engine more as exactly that. It's an engine of what system can you put in place? There's gonna be some manual parts to do and you need to understand, okay, do I have the capacity to still execute on this system that I've put in place? And then basically they're all
all those individual component parts you can optimize or you can take on new resources and that allows you to expand the engine. But I think what I'm hearing is that there's a lot more scope whereas the traditional thing has been like you need one channel to get from 0 to 1 million ARR you then layer on a second to get from 1 to 10 there's a lot more scope actually to look at okay this is our engine that's our focus what are the highest leverage things that we can do on top of that that might be optimizing within it but often actually is
leveraging the efficiency gauge to broaden what you're doing and kind of build on the engine horizontally almost. Does that, that making sense? ⁓
Aimen Chouchane (13:44)
Yeah, 100%.
And especially, especially this, like the speed at which you're looking to grow, you cannot just start on one channel, wait until it works and then look at a second one, right? You need to be placing multiple bets. Like what you're really looking for at say this stage that like that we're out here is to like find one to two where you say, well, if we pour
more money into this down the line, we know we can expect a certain return on results, but you can't just say, I'm only going to spend my next three months working on this one channel on this one kind of campaign stream and then have, and then if that doesn't work the way that you expect it to have no fallbacks and nothing else to show for it. And like the other side of that is that you have to be discoverable like
everywhere that people were discovering you and in the modern world of like today in 2025, that's lots more places than it used to be. And again, you can prioritize those, but you can't just say, oh, there's only one place that we know our customers are going to come from because you don't know that. Like you're very lucky in a way if you have a business that does that, but then you're also at risk if you have a business that does that because
unless you own that channel, it can be taken away from you. And we've seen like entire business models have completely been washed away by some changes that some of the big social media platforms have made or like taken that functionality in-house. So you have to always be like experiment, placing little bets and then just kind of using your gut.
that's the kind of art part, using your gut to guide you on where to put more chips into the pot and where to dial back a little bit. But then also use the science to tell you actually your gut was wrong or your gut was right and follow the data once it starts working.
Tom Rudnai (15:47)
Yeah, I love that you said that because I think...
There's nothing better for me as a founder's perspective. I love nothing better than the idea that I've got multiple channels that are validated but not optimized. So that's loads of opportunities to go and sell to an investor. Look, you give me.
a million pounds, I'm just going to pour it right in at the top of the machine here and I validated that it's going to go down here but we have not yet reached saturation and the more of those the better position you are in. So it's obviously a balancing act because you also have revenue targets to hit that require you to kind of leverage the validated one a little bit but you want to make sure that you're spreading your bets enough that you're constantly uncovering new ones and it's not this horrible cycle where every time you get some more money you're like right how the hell do we spend this. There's one thing, a few things you said that are interesting but one thing you said that particularly caught me was
was you talked about like the speed at which companies are growing now. I'm quite interested. So you said this is your first time onboarding post, I say post AI because it really pisses some people off, post chat GPT, let's say, when we've seen the explosive growth that like LavaBun and people like that have had.
is there a different pressure in terms of the rate of growth that's being put on you?
Aimen Chouchane (16:49)
No, I wouldn't say that the explosion in AI has changed that growth expectation. The growth expectations that we have are based on the expectations that investors and boards typically have of companies that are designed and built in a way where their payout comes later when they've achieved scale rather than straight away.
So I would say it's no different for us, like based on my early observations than any other VC backed business where the those those stakeholders are just looking for you to prove that the market opportunity that you believe is there. Number one, that it's it is actually there. And number two, that you can capture a significant part of that by by winning with and I believe winning.
today means winning with products and then winning with go-to-market simultaneously.
Tom Rudnai (17:49)
No, that's good to hear. I guess it's something I've observed a little bit in conversations with some VCs and I can understand it because you kind of see the speed of, it's almost like the instant gratification of you back a lovable or you back an AI tool that can do that. You're able to very quickly mark that down as a win. Now let's, I think today's not the day to get into whether that's actually sustainable growth. I think that's a lot of experimental budget being called recurring revenue and what more traditional SaaS companies often is gonna be doing is building in a way that is sustainable and part of the
Benefit of a slower more deliberate decision-making process is it's a deliberate decision, right? It's not a fuck it We'll give this a go for for a couple of days and see what happens you're building on top of it in a way that is Bankable I suppose ⁓
It sounds like your skill set is, it's a portfolio career in the sense that I'm a zero to one specialist. That's the phase.
but it's not a consistent playbook that you're implementing in each place based on that.
Aimen Chouchane (18:44)
Yeah, absolutely. And that's the consultancy element of it, right? Like that's kind of, guess, another advantage of coming in from a background where I was working on multiple clients at the same time. And you have that phase of you need to work out what their goals are and then tailor whether it's a government relations plan or it's a PR plan.
to what they want to achieve. You don't just go to them and go, okay, we're to get you in the financial times. Well, some companies, that's perfect. That's exactly the type of buyer that they want to reach. But for others, it's not. They would prefer to be in the sun. You don't go in and prescribe. It's not formulaic like that. And you have to come in with an open mind. And then you need to also bear in mind, like,
you most of the time, marketing can't execute without the at least cooperation with the other functions in the business, especially sales. So that's the other side. If you just come in and you dictate what you want to do without listening to anyone else, that quickly erodes trust. And then you're stuck because like you're not going to get involved in the things and you're not going to get the insights that are going to help you become better at.
marketing the products or service that you have been brought into market.
Tom Rudnai (20:05)
I'm with you completely there. mean, so I think we have to think of it just as a revenue function. And yes, there's gonna be some level of specialisation, but I think also increasingly the best marketers are the ones who have some sales abilities, right? Because you need to be able to do what you're doing now. Hop on a podcast, talk about it. Like, leverage yourself as a bit of a brand ambassador. Equally the best sales people are gonna be the ones that have some understanding of marketing tactics and can help aid that crossover between the two.
I want to get into so we've talked about it. There's not a zero to one playbook but if it I'd imagine there are certain fundamentals or foundational things that you probably do look to establish each time right so like What would you say the things if you come in at zero that are just absolutely critical to get right at the outset
Aimen Chouchane (20:46)
I'm thinking about really three different areas as the kind of the main ones where I'm going to assess where we are and see where we can either build it if it doesn't exist or
really take it to the next level where it does exist but it needs a bit of love. that's anything to do with the products, so product marketing basically. I think that it's really the case now, and AI has been part of this, but just generally the information age, that you can't win in the same way going forward with
subpar products and really really good marketing. There was definitely a phase where you could out market what your product could do and if you could raise a bunch of money to fuel that then you could be commercially successful. That's not the case. So I think that any B2B product based company has to really do a great job at like communicating the benefits of the product.
enabling the sales team to show that empowering your partners, customers to also be able to demonstrate that. So that's area one. Then area two is discoverability. anything to do with getting your name out there and it's not just content marketing. Content marketing can be a little bit nebulous in that.
where does it actually stop into something else? I discovered ability now includes, you know, LLM based search as well as SEO. It includes PR, traditional PR includes, it can include influencer marketing that's grown in the B2B space. So just, you you can't really grow the same if people don't know who you are. So it's really a case of assessing.
Where are people discovering us? Where are they? Where should they be? But they're not. then putting fuel onto those initiatives and building the ones that you don't have, but you want up from scratch. then I said, it's weird because I didn't ever think that I'd be like a person that really into marketing ops, but I've had the pleasure of working with people that are great at it. And I think as I've taken on more responsibility,
and sort of lead functions and become more, more like just busier, just like having more to do. Like I've, I really believe that you have to have strong fundamentals in terms of your marketing ops. doesn't necessarily mean it has to be really complicated, but you know, I've used HubSpot the last three places.
If you can, I know I say when people are considering and I'm not, I'm not sponsored by HubSpot. There are other CRMs out there, but a question that often pops up with, especially with early stage is always HubSpot worth the cost. I'm like, well, you need to think of HubSpot as an extra half to a full person in your marketing ops team. If you can fully fine tune your automations. And I think that more and more and more.
you need to have robust processes and be really clear on even the simplest things like where the latest versions of branded docs and logos live because every otherwise everyone's first instinct when they don't know where something is or they can't they don't understand how this works is to inbound to the marketing department and you want to
remove yourself, especially as an IC from the situation where you're essentially becoming like a marketing help desk and your job is like support for the things that you've already done. You want to help people self-serve, you want to even take it out of anyone's manual effort as much as possible and every time that you do that you're freeing up time to think and you know, we're only really going to exist as a function in a business.
in a very AI leaning, automated world, if we can think very clearly and we can point the marketing department always in the right direction and not be looking just at the next week or the next quarter, but be thinking very far ahead and planning for the growth of the business into the future, into next year and the year beyond that and thinking about.
wouldn't it be great if we had this resource? Wouldn't it be great if we had the opportunity to do this and planning for that future rather than just running around responding to a bunch of requests?
Tom Rudnai (25:31)
No, I'm with you there completely. It's something that I think my mindset shifted a little bit since starting a business as well, because you start to, there's a distinction between doing stuff and building a business. If it's not, can do stuff and if I do a great job of it, I go and send a load of cold emails or something and get some customers. Okay, great. I'm in the exact same position at the end of that. have a little bit more coming in hopefully and so on. But if it's not a structure, if it's not a repeatable structure that I can take myself out of, then A, I'm never gonna be able to expand the structure.
ever gonna be able to build on the engine in the way that I was talking about earlier. And ultimately, I'm just gonna be stuck working in it. Well, I may as well have not started a business then. It's doing something different. So I think as you move up, it changes your approach a little bit to goals and realizing that if it's not part of a process or part, if it doesn't fit into the overall structure, it's not actually as helpful as you think it is.
Aimen Chouchane (26:20)
100%. You're, you're never gonna, you're never
gonna be perfect on that front, right? But it's about, it's about aiming for a certain floor as of that. like, yeah, especially you can't coming into a new business where there's not been a marketing department before there's you want to capture and you want to, you want to use that excitement and that appreciation that normally exists from the majority of the team that, you know, something that they've wanted, they're excited to see it happen.
but not just become a yes person and end up being all consumed by people pleasing on a day-to-day basis. want to make people to buy into the long-term vision and say, like, you might not get everything from me that you wanted right now, but I'm going to make it better for the future and bring them on that journey and paint the picture of, how good would it be that instead of me creating
a one-pager for you that in three months you can go to a web portal that I've built and you can put in any specification of type of customer that you want and you can have a custom sheet made for you automatically. So doesn't matter if it's 7 a.m. in the UK and you're in Dubai, it's there and it's always on. I think that's the exciting thing about
being like an IC or a senior marketer in the new age that we're in.
Tom Rudnai (27:46)
Yeah, until they tell you it's for a million pound deal and then you're like, well, why didn't you say so? Here, I'll have it done for you this afternoon.
Aimen Chouchane (27:51)
Yeah, and
then I'm online at 7am, that's for sure. As long as they send me something nice once it closes.
Tom Rudnai (27:54)
Yeah, exactly.
It's something I always think about with content teams as well. the best market, like if you're in a sales led go to market, right? Where you're allowing a rep talking to a buyer to sell something, your job is to support sales, right? But there's a difference between supporting sales and being like a support function. And what you're describing here is a very strategic, proactive.
Individual I see whose job is to support them but not just constantly take requests and kind of triage those And fall into that reactive thing which at the end yet. You're kind of treading water at that point There's something else that you said that You talked about perfectionism and I guess that was one of the questions I had coming in it's like in that zero to one phase like how do you think about perfectionism and like get things done in a scrappy way versus almost punch above our weight in terms of the feel of the brand and how
high quality everything does, because it's something I often struggle with, knowing how to pitch that.
Aimen Chouchane (28:50)
Yeah, and I'm a perfectionist, right? So that's been probably one of the most important things I've had to develop on personally during my time going from larger businesses to smaller ones. you know, when you are writing a press release for a large publicly traded corpora, that it's worth taking the time to get it perfect because
the once you send out press release, can't unsend it, right? Like so you that rewards perfectionism, but you're being paid on the end output and you are usually working to longer out time scales and you build those in to give yourself time to do it. So when you're into smaller, fast growth companies, then really it comes down to the mental model that I've
adopted and I coach juniors that report to me and like other people that I talk to who also have the same predilection that I do which is very hard to like let things go if they're less than perfect is to just do it on a case-by-case basis and think does this need to be my very best effort or does it just need to be good enough so just really tangible example of that is that
If you're trying to get a LinkedIn post out every day from your company page, if you obsess over those being perfect every single time, you are going to spend so much energy and mental load on fine details that really aren't going to move the needle that much. If one of those is, say, a fundraising announcement, then yes, best effort, make sure that it's...
really good, you want to put lots of effort behind that post, you want to get lots of people engaging with it and you want it to be completely accurate. Yeah, no problem. Like one about the team adding a new employee, it's just got to be good enough. It's just got to be consistent with the brands and message that you're putting out there and follow the tone and that's it. And that's probably just one sort of micro example of what I'm thinking about, which is
Yeah, just not to get caught up on in trying to make everything your very best work because that's what school teaches us, but that's not the real world. And the best thing to do for that is to just think about the audience, whether that's one person or a whole huge audience who are receiving it and put yourself in their shoes. It's like they don't care. They're never going to care about it as much as you. So how much less are they going to care about it than you? If it's like
going to care about it half as much, then you calibrate your effort accordingly. If they're going to care about it twice as much, for example if it's working with your founder, then that's where you pour more heart and soul into making sure that you're delivering to your perfectionist tendencies. It's also a benefit, right? Like I don't want to downplay perfectionism completely, I think that it has its place, but yeah you have to...
Forget about it, probably I'd say 80 % of the time when you're working in startup scale up environments.
Tom Rudnai (32:06)
like anything you need it's the self-awareness that allows you to harness the positives of whatever your of predilection is and lean out of it when you need to but I think what I was thinking as you were talking is it's something that's on leaders to communicate a bit better like the priority level and the level of perfectionism required for each task because a most people do come out of school and university which teaches you perfectionism but also
Like the bar 480, like getting something to a seven or an eight out of 10 now is so quick.
all of the effort now resides in that seven to ten or that six to ten part. So you need to be almost quite prescriptive on like how far do you need to get this because actually that's so much of the time. Whereas I think it used to be it takes quite a long time to get something to seven. So do the extra bit to get it to nine, ten. That's changed and it's a mindset shift that probably needs to cascade down an organization.
Aimen Chouchane (33:01)
Yeah, and I think a good point there is that you don't necessarily know all the context. So I think the other key thing is ask if you are not sure of what on that scale it should be, then you need to you need to ask someone that's especially true for like people that starting their careers or reporting into a marketing leader. A good marketing leader should be guiding you in terms of, you know, don't spend all day on this, please.
But if they're not, then it's okay to ask the question and say, not just how soon do you want it, but on a scale of good enough to perfect, where does it need to sit?
Tom Rudnai (33:45)
Yeah, and you probably are worried that you're gonna come across almost lazy if you ask, like, can I do this seven out of 10? But that honestly is a question that I'd love to be asked before more things. It's always really frustrating when someone goes away, does an amazing job on something, you're like, I just wanted you to spend half an hour on it. Anyway, we're getting towards the end of our time. So what I always like to do at the end, before I let you go, Eamon, is a couple of quick fire questions. So first one is, what's an AI use case that you absolutely love? Could be a use case, could be a tool.
Aimen Chouchane (34:15)
Yeah, so I heard about this one recently. I read it on LinkedIn and I love it. I can't give the credit, unfortunately, because I've forgotten who posted it. But I'm sure you thought it even if you didn't write it and you're ahead of the game. creating, like I think it was through Notebook LM or something like that, basically trained it to with all of the case study data that
Tom Rudnai (34:24)
say it was me.
Aimen Chouchane (34:40)
the company already had to create a interactive, like self-serve use case study guide for their sales team. So the sales team wants like this use case in this industry and say three talking points and a quote and a customer from that use case. And you just feed that in and then it brings it back. And I absolutely love that because as someone that's produced a lot of case studies,
You know, once you've got a library of them, it's really easy to forget the one that you did 11 months ago, even as the person who was there in the room filming it. So imagine from a salesperson's perspective, it's not even their project and their work, how quickly that goes out of mind. then often the disconnect going back to a lot of the things that we talked about is either they're then asking you to compile it or
it just doesn't get surfaced. So yeah, I thought that was really good. It's definitely something I'd like to implement down the line for us.
Tom Rudnai (35:43)
Nice, I I always try not to talk about demand genius on this, but sometimes I just can't resist. We're launching our own content copilot at the moment, which is a Gmail integration, which basically knows all of your case studies, all of your content, and it knows the context of the thread, and it tells you exactly this is the case that you should bring in based on the context, what performs. So if you're listening to this at home and thinking that's a good idea, just message me about that one. Next question, so.
If I was to approve your Plan A budget request right now, that intellects, like that the CEO of intellects would never be stupid enough to actually approve it for you, what would you do?
Aimen Chouchane (36:17)
Yeah, so I was thinking about this and I think that there's two things that I would have in my dream budget. I'd have the budget like right now to hire an engineer, an AI engineer into the team full-time. Like I know that we've gone on about it a bit but honestly I think that like having someone in the team like already at this point that where our cadence could be
Okay, I'll learn this, this and this. I think we need to X or like the example that we just talked about and they can go do it. Like I can still do it because the tools are that good, but I have to, it's going to take me more time. And I think that the getting to from zero to one is so much faster if you can build your own internal tooling to get you there much quicker. And then for me, the other one is I would definitely have like a
a huge huge event you know like that's always been my dream I haven't gotten quite round to it yet but I absolutely love the idea of having a kind of dream force style event for a company that I've worked for and I really believe that on the other side of where automation is increasing in the amount of work that's taken taking off people's plates that one of the
benefits that should come on the other side is more time for in-person interaction and I see that as having a huge comeback in the future because we're going to be talking to robots a lot more and a lot of us are already in jobs where we're not necessarily with a team every day. So I love building community. I would really double down on sort of building a really strong customer and partner community.
Tom Rudnai (38:01)
Yeah, I agree. One of my first CEOs, Ivan Mazzotta, he used to say that whoever owns the event owns the space, which I think is a very good point. And then I'm going to skip one because of time, but the last one, people will be listening to this thinking Eamon's very clever. I want them to realise that you sometimes are not. What was the biggest fuck up in your career?
Aimen Chouchane (38:11)
All right.
Okay, so I'm going to give you a long answer, but I'll give you a short answer first in case you want to cut my long answer. the short answer is that back in my PR days, our team once sent a press release out to over a thousand journalists that had the wrong headline. Luckily, it wasn't like a terrible, terrible word or like swear word or something in there. It's just an inaccuracy. you know, I had as the lead on that account, I had to spend a decent amount of time.
Tom Rudnai (38:28)
Okay.
Aimen Chouchane (38:51)
apologizing and making up for it afterwards. So that was less and hard learned. And then a longer example, one of the things that people who know me that I'm passionate about is mental health. I, during COVID, had a job where I really was struggling with my mental health. I actually ended up getting CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy for
like some mild depression as well as anxiety. I'm an anxious person. It's something that I'll contend with for probably the rest of my working life. And I was basically kind of kicked out from that job and with good reason. I was like massively underperforming. I just didn't want to work. was like, I was that, I was feeling that low. It was during COVID as well. was living on my own. But like the mistake that I made was just not
admitting that number one to myself and then opening up at work about that. And so since you've got this platform, I just wanted to be open about that. like I've seen massive benefits from like a couple of different types of therapy, talking therapy as well. And I've become a mental health first aid champion as off the back of that. yeah, don't suffer in silence, even if it's just one person that you can confide in at work.
No one can help you in your workplace if you're struggling with something, if they don't know what's going on. So don't keep it to yourself if you feel comfortable sharing it with someone, share it.
Tom Rudnai (40:18)
No, I'm with you and thank you for sharing that. I think it's something that...
more people would benefit from realising and I get every workplace is different and you might not feel comfortable but I think more people benefit from realising that the earlier you raise your hands and are open about these things, the more that can actually be done about it. Like you said, it was reasonable and understandable that you ended up having to leave that business because it's very difficult to do anything. If you've suffered in silence for three months, your performance has taken a big drop and then you open up about it, it's very difficult to help. It's a lot easier if you open up about it early.
and then we can work with you on that and hopefully give you the time that you need to get right. That's how I've always approached it. The more we make it possible for people to raise their hands earlier, the more we can help them and ultimately then it will help the business.
Aimen Chouchane (41:05)
Yeah, I couldn't have put it better myself. Really, what's that?
Tom Rudnai (41:08)
Awesome. And then final one is just one recommendation for our listeners, whether it's a book, a podcast, a thought leader, something that they should go and check out.
Aimen Chouchane (41:16)
I absolutely love the marketing against the grain podcast. that's hosted by, guy called Kieran Flanagan, who's a, VP, at hubs HubSpot. And it's, it's an amazing kind of learn as you go. Podcast that where the complete focus is on harnessing AI for, marketing use cases. And, it's, it's a, you know, it'll
it will get you to where you need to go faster. It's become my new obsession.
Tom Rudnai (41:43)
Awesome marketing against the grain second best marketing podcast out there going to anything you'd like to plug before that you go anything you're doing or you're doing it into next.
Aimen Chouchane (41:47)
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, actually a little side project of mine is that I run a small B2B marketing community. It's called B2B Sub Club and it does exactly that. We meet up once a month and we call the sessions B2B therapy. So it's an opportunity for people to get feedback and ideas and collectively problem solve with peers that know their language of B2B marketing.
They're London based events, we also do like a summer party with drinks that we just had. yeah, like if you can find me pretty easily on LinkedIn and message me there about it. But yeah, if you're in and around London and want to connect with people over dinner and we choose some nice affordable restaurants to do that, then hit me up there.
Tom Rudnai (42:43)
Well if you let founders in as well then I'll be there at the next meeting. Okay good, good deal.
Aimen Chouchane (42:46)
I'll ping you an invite after this. Marketing
curious founders are very welcome too.
Tom Rudnai (42:53)
Excellent, Awesome. Look, Eamon, this has been fantastic. I know I've kept you a little bit too long, so hopefully you're not late for another meeting, but I was enjoying it, so well. Yeah, all right. Have a brilliant rest of your day and everyone listening at home, thank you for listening even this far while I just written one at the end. I reckon about 10 seconds everyone must have stopped, if you're still here, God bless you and have a great day.
Aimen Chouchane (43:01)
Yeah, likewise, no problem at all.
You
Thanks, all.