Leading an AI-First Marketing Org

Think the cultural shift has been the most in important piece of it. And in some ways, even more of a challenge than the technology setup itself. It’s really required the team starting to think of AI not as so much of, like, a sidecar, but more of a copilot that’s embedded in everything that we’re doing. This is Revenue Makers, a podcast by six cents investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. So you may notice I am alone today. Saima is out traveling the world as she does every so often representing success and doing all sorts of great things on behalf of the company. So you are stuck with me today, but we have a great guest. We have Rachel Chouair, who is the CMO of Sympro. And we’re talking about AI. Now don’t grumble another AI episode. This one is special because we hear so much about AI. Well, I have to learn and experiment. What are we gonna do? What’s my plan? What’s my roadmap? How am I gonna get my team on board? Rachel’s done that, and SymPro is in it. They are operationalizing AI. They have things up and running use cases across the board and are seeing real impact, real results, and it’s really changed the way that she runs her team and the way her team operates. And so this episode ran a little bit longer than some of the other ones because there was just so much goodness in it, and it probably could have gone on even longer. But, of course, we have to keep it down as to a certain amount of time. So dive into it. So much to learn. Grab your notebook because you’re gonna hear some use cases you’ve probably never heard before and some ideas that are probably gonna be like, wow. I need to go and figure out how to do that right now. So let’s dive in. Well, Rachel, thank you so much for for jumping on today. I, really excited about this conversation. I’m sure the audience is gonna make, oh, boy. Not another AI conversation. But this is gonna be different. I’m ready for it. Alright. So the thing that’s really interesting about what we’re about to talk about is that there’s so much conversation about AI and b two b marketing and sales. How you’re gonna experiment, how people are gonna get fluent, and, like, what’s your strategy, and how is it gonna impact this, and how is it gonna impact that? But in your case and your team, you are way beyond that. You are in it. You’re doing it. It’s impacting. You have a lot of initiatives going on, and there’s real results. There’s real change. There’s real everything. So you’ve moved way beyond hypothetical. And I think it’s this sort of shift of, like, from experimentation and playing with it to, like, an AI led strategy. So could you dive in and talk about, like, where you are at this point? And you could I guess we call it, like, maturity curve or something like that. Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Adam. Excited to be here. And, yes, I’ve listened to many of those AI conversations over various formats. And one of the things that quickly became apparent to me was that it’s one of those places where people just need to start doing to some extent. And the more you experiment, the more you can then start to scale it and have some modeling and predictability around it. So, you know, my journey with how do I deploy AI in my organization really started a couple of years ago when I had a BDR who was working on my team when ChatJPT came out that took a real interest in it, was doing all sorts of interesting things with it. And I reached out to him and said, hey, would you do a lunch and learn and just teach us, like, what is this Chat GPT and how to use it? Then it’s funny because I look back on that. That was near the end of twenty twenty three, and things have moved just so quickly since then in terms of the amount of potential around AI, what people can do with it, the software that’s available to leverage. So how I think about it here at Sympro is we’re in what I call operational AI stage. I I’ve actually built a maturity model to kind of structure how I socialize where we’re at with my executive team, my leadership team, the marketing work in general, and even our board. And when I look at even a year ago, we were more in what I call foundational AI. So foundational AI being, you know, the culture is kind of experimental. People are kind of testing it out in different places. Different teams are using different tools and technology, and everything’s a little bit ad hoc. It’s not necessarily driving any kind of strategy. It’s more than an execution motion that’s being driven. And it’s unclear, like, what the impact always is. Oftentimes, we found ourselves trying to articulate, like, the amount of time savings we were getting or our ability to accelerate our work. But now that we’re in this operational AI phase, I see some some real tangible differences and it has to do in some ways around the culture and the shift around the culture of the team from an experimental mindset to more of an emerging mindset around, okay, we know this is here to stay. Now how are we going to scale it? How are we going to build it into our models for next year? And our strategy is even starting to be defined in some ways by AI, and we could talk more about that. And then the other big area is just around our ROI. We’re able to actually measure more business level metrics and impact of AI, which I think puts some real meat on the bone around the, you know, why we’re doing it and why it matters. You’re at this operational stage. Now you’re at one point you were at that experimentation foundational. Before we get into all the goodness around the strategy and everything, like, how did you actually get yourself and the team oriented of, like, okay. We’re playing with this, but now it’s actually the real deal. I think the cultural important piece of it. And in some ways, even more of a challenge than the technology setup itself. It’s really required the team starting to think of AI not as so much of like a sidecar, but more of a copilot that’s embedded in everything that we’re doing. So one of the ways that I did that over the last six months or so was by setting in our kind of marketing strategy for FY twenty five, a top line objective for the team that we would each in each of the functional areas of marketing, replace one workflow with AI. And I think understanding the difference between maybe a task or a tactic versus a workflow is it’s something that’s repeatable that’s happening frequently? That each team has a a workflow that they can look at and say, maybe AI could help solve for this. And so I challenge each of my leadership team members with identifying a workflow and moving their team toward replacing that workflow with some kind of AI tooling. And I didn’t give them a time frame other than I want this done by the end of the year. And what’s been great is as some of the faster movers on my team got AI up and running more quickly in some parts than others, it’s created kind of an internal competition for people to identify not just one workflow, but multiple workflows that they could start to leverage AI for. So I think, you know, giving the team a a clear picture around, hey, these are the objectives for the year when it comes to how we’re leveraging AI, and then putting them in the driver seat around where they want to deploy it. And then making sure you’re socializing what the impact is or who’s having success with with what, and keeping everyone kind of eye on the ball when it comes to the the overarching objective around, you know, having a a one workflow within each team that is replaced using AI. That’s amazing in terms of just, like, getting everyone’s mindset. But, I mean, there’s a lot of different programs and areas we’re gonna talk about. But, you know, as I was looking, you sent me over your your sort of your road map and your maturity plans. And voice of the customer messaging was in there. And I don’t know if that was one of the first places that you went to or not, but curious, like I mean, you’re really ahead of the game. You’re talking about digital twins and kind of, like, defining personas and all that in there. Like, how is that just off the bat changing the way that you’re go to market? And maybe we talk a little bit about, like, what that actually means in terms of setting up the the digital twins and and all that before we get into the the actual meat of it, though. Sure. Yeah. So voice of the customer was actually a bit of a gap here at Sympro. And if you think about we’re, you know, quickly nearing two hundred million in ARR and we’re a private equity backed business. And oftentimes voice of the customer as a scaled program can be a bit of a gap in in these types of companies. We’re not a big establishment where we’ve got a whole team working on voice of the customer. And the other challenge with voice of the customer is it it often sits with a lot of different cross functional teams. You can have it sitting in product marketing. You have people in brand working on it, people in product, people in customer success. And we weren’t really consistently pulling together a single view on all of the voice of the customer data points that we were getting. And it created a lot of confusion and disagreement sometimes when it came to, like, how should we prioritize what our customers are saying? So one of the things that we were able to do with this was identify a tool tool where we could actually go and build digital twins leveraging not only datasets from our existing various teams at how this voice the customer insights, but also doing some AI supported interviews with customers and prospects to build different personas. And it gave us almost a database of sorts to understand at a persona level, not only what are the pain points, but where do they sit in terms of their interest in field service management or in our types of solutions. It surfaced some additional personas that we didn’t necessarily target, and it really sped up that process. And it took a lot of the disagreement out of it. Because when you really pull everything together holistically and start to really pull it into, you know, large language model type, motion, it distills down the core elements. And so one of the things I heard at the beginning when we first launched it was, like, like, hey. Some of these insights we already know. And, there was a little bit of head scratching going on from the teams about why are we talking about these things we already know. Like, what did this really tell us? And we had to kinda circle back and say, look, like, this is a good validation of how we’re on the right track in some of these areas. It’s validating that we are hitting on some of these key messages that that matter to these customers. So it’s not necessarily a bad thing that it’s repeating back to us quite a bit about what we already know. But there are a few places where we identify themes or personas that we didn’t really uncover or know about. And it was more about that twenty percent that we really started to focus on and say, you know, what do we wanna do with this this different and new information? You know, I think it’s also just helped us speed up what we’re doing. And I think we recognize we’re a pretty lean team here at Sympro, and we wanted to be able to speed up not only our conversations around voice of the customer, but also our go to market motion. And it’s allowed us to avoid a lot of time and energy spent on deliberating about what’s the best next campaign, looking for, market insights to help us determine that. It’s really shrunk that time down quite a bit. Are they twins of your key personas that you can guess kinda go back to and sort of continue to query and ask questions against? Exactly. So you can either do it directly. Like, I would like to interact with you as if you are one of my personas. Or you can say, build a campaign for me targeting owners of HVAC companies that are under ten million dollars in revenue and are in the Midwest of United States. And it will actually come up with just similar chat to BT, several different campaign ideas. It will ask you if you wanna explore one or another. You can ask for ten different content ideas. You can then say build out a strategy, and it will actually just continue along that journey as far as you wanna take it in terms of structuring and building a campaign. And is the data that’s feeding that is, like, transcripts from those interviews with those particular personas? Exactly. Quite a bit of transcripts that were pulled in there through AI. We actually did the calls through AI, and then the transcripts were brought in. We also have loaded a lot of win loss interviews, just a lot of historical content that we already had. So we went and got a fresh set of content, but we also have so much like most businesses. We have so much data. And a lot of times, it’s not necessarily actionable, and it sits in different CRMs. One of the things we’re doing right now is we’re actually integrating that tool with our call recording tool that our sales team uses for all of their prospecting and and sales calls to be able to continue to feed transcripts into it and really have a better sense almost in real time of what’s working, what’s not from how we talk about the product, how we talk about the industry and the space that we’re in, and then continuing to build on those personas themselves. There’s a lot of talk about just, like, what tool to use and do that and, you know, and, like, who’s adopting this? And then like, there’s always a conversation around, like, there’s pockets of AI happening and people are using free tools and they’re using their own kind of accounts and so forth. So did you come together as either a business or a department on what you were gonna use tech wise? I mean, because you’re relatively large enterprise that has, you know, IT and infosec and all sorts of different things. Like, how did you go about or maybe you didn’t, and maybe it’s much more experimental. There’s all sorts of different tools going on as well, but I don’t wanna get you in trouble in case there’s, you know, going on. Well, I’m a little bit more an s for forgiveness phase. All of our technology has to go through our procurement process and through security. But one of the things that I found is when you’re trying to move quickly, you need to identify the tool that’s going to work the best. And it doesn’t always mean staying with, for example, one suite of products that we are already using. And so this sits outside of our kind of core suite of products. It was actually kind of an opportunistic tool where we learned about it from I was fortunate to have someone join my team that had worked with someone that had spun off to to build this. We did several kind of calls around it and learn more about it. And then we started coming up with use cases and really pushing the boundaries of what it could and couldn’t do for us. And, you know, the next kind of phase in this, so we’re we’re using it for voice of the customer because that was a big gap in the organization. And it was a place where I didn’t have a head count to allocate, you know, a full time employee focused on it. But one of the things I really see it being a huge benefit for is really going and scaling it through our campaigns team. And so one of the things I’m working on right now is we have second half where we’re going to build almost like a tiger team to focus on testing, building out campaigns against the existing campaigns we’re running and running those in market. Because while we’re using it for supporting our existing end market campaigns, we haven’t used it all the way soup to nuts the way that we’ve identified that we can. And so it’s kind of a next phase of our maturity to be able to say, hey, let’s run this and see see what we learn. If we can do an end to end campaign, leveraging, you know, list tool for ninety percent of what we would normally do across four different teams, that’s really an exciting unlock for us. Right? There’s still one you need to be humans in a loop for a lot of different places between taking the content, putting it into different forums and formats, you know, building the paid search ads. I mean, there’s definitely still space for humans involved. But if we can speed up that process, it’s really exciting for us for next year in terms of how that might look. And I will say you might the next question you might be asking is, wow, this is like a lot of change. And I think that’s one of the things that, again, it goes back to culture. I’m having to really even myself up level how I’m leading through this because it is a little disruptive. Some of these conversations create more questions than answers for people, even VPs on my team that are very seasoned marketers. And what I’ve learned is you have to continuously reset the expectation around, the changes that are going on and the culture that you wanna have. Because whereas before I could set a culture and say, you know, we’re, we’re accountable, we’re growth minded, you know, we’re, we’re one team and people are excited about that and working toward that. Once you start throwing things in the mix that kind of test that and make that a challenging space for people, your culture can start to kind of crumble a little bit. And so I’m having to really keep my eye on leadership and culture and making sure that everyone’s in the boat together, that people understand that there is this, need for experimentation around kind of our core motion of our business. Because at the end of the day, we still have a two hundred million dollars business to run, and we’ve gotta continue that. So I have to keep my foot on the pedal when it comes to our core business and how we’re doing it and and the way that everyone’s gotten used to doing it. But I am learning to kinda carve out pockets within my teams to say, 6AI. This is an experiment. Let’s try it. Let’s work on it. I will go and do the messaging on the leadership side and make sure everyone understands why we’re doing it and that the expectation is is that, you know, it’s not going to necessarily change anything right away. It’s not because anyone’s doing their job wrong. It’s more that we’re trying to test and understand and learn to inform what we do next. And this is the time to be doing that. So it definitely requires, I would say, a different type of leadership, a little bit more change management than maybe what most CMOs are having to do on a day to day basis these days. I mean, in my opinion, it’s kinda table stakes at this point. You talk about AI workflows and all the things you’re doing in the team now. Of course, one of the first, I guess, one of the first generative AI use case, I was just talking about content creation. But now what’s happening is that AI is completely disrupting search and, like, all the way people are consuming content, the way they’re getting to your site or rather not getting to your site now and sort of all the things that are happening with whether search is through one of the LMM tools or now there’s first, there was AI overviews on the Google side. Now we’ve got this AI mode that we’re contending with. So one of the things, again, you would send me this really great overview. You talked about building this moat around AI search. And, again, like, very, very forward thinking from your perspective and your team. What have you been doing to think about how you’re creating content in this very quickly emerging age of maybe this is going too far, but where the primary potential consumer of this content is going to be these search and agents and AI tools as opposed to it going right to a person. Yeah. This one is so disruptive. And for us, the big bullet point is is that, you know, sixty percent of Google searches now end without a click. And that’s a huge shift from, you know, a year or so ago. AI is answering so many questions without actually ever driving traffic to your own properties and websites. I remember being around earlier in my career during what became the inbound marketing days of of content and SEO. I was a really early customer of HubSpot when they first came out. And so I remember seeing that kind of migration toward creating compelling content that was highly discoverable on, you know, Google search. And what I remember the most was that the people that got to that point the quickest were the winners. If you could dominate early inbounds SEO, organics SEO, you’re gonna do do well pretty much forevermore. Now it’s not to say you you couldn’t optimize if you were a late starter and everything else, but building that early competitive mode around inbound SEO was was so important back then and continues to be hard to overcome for people and companies. So my goal is to make sure that we’re staying ahead of that. I think the very first step most companies need to take in understanding how to build a competitive motor on AI search is to improve their knowledge and reporting around what AI search is actually doing for them today. And so we have a whole team. My web strategy team has been focused on piloting and demoing a bunch of different discoverability, a Gen AI tools to understand, like, what does that look like? Like? And it also gives us the opportunity to have, you know, more recommendations around that. You know, some of my SEO experts focused on where are the places where we know AI search is really focused right now. I think just like Google, AI search will evolve. Like, I think the algorithm will change over time. So what works today won’t necessarily work in perpetuity, but what can we do now to be good stewards of AI search? And I think that’s the other key thing is making sure that you don’t end up in any kind of black hat situations like we used to see in the early inbound days where people created all this content and then got dinged. So, you know, making sure you’re you’re still keeping a value added approach to whatever it is that you are doing. And so the areas that we’re seeing, you know, for that is there’s a lot of different, like, social forums, Reddit, things like that, where we know we have not spent a lot of time there over the last few years. And that’s where we’re starting to move investments toward is to make sure that we’re really laying a strong foundation on some of these other forums that AI search tends to like and reward. And so it’s all about, you know, shifting and allocating resources in a little different way than maybe we were previously. It’s not about who ranks number one, which is an interesting place to be. It’s about who is getting to train the algorithm on your corporate narrative. And so making sure that you’re taking ownership of that. Another area is looking for gaps where maybe there’s common searches that you don’t have great content around. For us, one of those areas is around pricing. It’s a place that AI search likes to reward and likes to provide input on, and it often, when it’s making recommendations, will also include pricing. But if you don’t own that narrative and it’s pulling from other little places where people are maybe casually mentioning what they think your pricing is or your old pricing, it can really start to deliver some negative impact for you. So we’re taking a whole overview on pricing in general and thinking about how do we structure it in a way for AI search specifically. So I think to me, it’s it’s a daily kind of gardening that has to happen around, you know, know, making sure you’re nurturing the foundational aspects of search. Fortunately, a lot of the what works for SEO works for AI. But then looking for places where maybe you need to water the grass a little more on forums where you need to water the grass or specific topics where you need to make sure you’re not neglecting them so that you can continue to be found in GenAI. And then I think ultimately the idea is, you know, will we have websites and what will they be? If a website is just for AI, what does that mean and what does it need to look like? I think we’re a long way from that, but I I think I’m trying to continue to ask the question of my team. Because the more you push people to think a little differently, it’s it creates that mindset going back to the culture change that we aren’t going to go back to the way things were. We are going through some transformative changes right now, and we need to start kind of looking around corners a little I mean, this particular is really interesting, right, because there’s been this discipline of SEO. There’s been content writers in in b two b for a long time, and there’s sort of been overlap. And there’s, like, oh, you’re writing content for the search engine, you’re writing content for the people. And, ultimately, obviously, if you’re writing the best content for the person, it’s gonna help in search. But are you finding that the folks that are gravitating towards understanding this are in the same role? Meaning, like, your SEO people are like, oh, it’s sort of a natural evolution to start looking at this. Or do you have people that are content that are starting to think more about AEO and SEO and GEO and all those things? One of the things I keep thinking about too is whether you have an internal SEO team or maybe you’re working with a third party or an agency, like and if someone’s sitting there right now, like, oh, I need help with this. Like, just to go and suddenly sign a contract with some random agency doesn’t make any sense anymore because people are still figuring it out. And there’s there are certain people and groups that are rising and starting to learn, are you are you finding that the people in those roles are just naturally gravitating towards it, or is it there’s an innate curiosity from maybe someplace else on your team? It’s hard to paint with a broad brush because I think the answer is a little bit of both. But what I would say is, for example, my SEO and web team are really on top of what’s going on with AI. But is that because that’s their focus or is it because that’s their mindset? What I’ve noticed about that team in particular is they’ve always been early adopters of technology. That’s why they have more technical roles. They’re interested in technology. They’re comfortable with the idea that technology can improve and make things better. They’re also really interested in experiments and data, you know, proof points, not just assuming something’s good or bad. So they have an open mind to the fact that something could work or it it couldn’t. It depends on the outcome of the experiment. And so I have seen within my web team in particular, a group of people that are all very leaning into AI, very much leaning into AI. And hence why, you know, for some of these kind of more complex experiments, what we wanna run around, how are we going to scale campaigns? I’m actually looking at that team to support that experiment. Because campaign’s motion. Let’s go put it with the campaign’s team. But the campaign’s team has a very different job. Their job is to sit over here, do strategy, work on these different cross functional inputs and run campaigns. And I kinda need them focused over there anyway. But I know that the web strategy team, they’re constantly experimenting. They do AB testing on the website. They’re leaning into AI. They are understanding the discoverability challenges with AI. And so I’m actually looking at them saying, hey, this should just be another experiment in your box of tricks to run an experiment around, could you build a campaign and scale it and and have it perform as well as something that we’re doing out of the campaign’s team? Because if if they can prove that out, then I can go and apply it to the campaign’s team and say, 6AI, here’s your new toolbox. Like, let’s learn how to use this. Let’s figure out how we put this into your work day to day. But to try to put that kind of experimental motion on top of a group of people that are already kind of doing this run the business motion, one would eat the other, right? It’s always going to happen that the bigger kind of motion is gonna shrink out the other one. That particular team is ready for experimentation and they’ve been doing experimentation. And so I’ve leaned on them quite a bit, but in across the rest of my organization, what I would say is it’s very similar. I have some people that are early adopters. They’re bringing tools forward. They’re in channels talking about AI. They’re leaning in on understanding how it works. They want to use it and they don’t view it as a crutch or something that’s bad. They view it as, wow, this is like a a force multiplier. And then I have people on my team that are kind of on the flip side of that coin. Right? They may not necessarily think it’s bad, but it doesn’t come to mind for them. It’s not part of their day to day and it’s not the first thing they reach to spin up whatever question they’re trying to solve for. I do think that it’s more about mindset than even skill sets at this point. And the people that have started to adopt that mindset of leaning into AI are going to they’re going to outpace the others. I just had my marketing all hands last week, and I talked about this in the sense that I said, look, like, where every person is regardless of where they sit in the marketing or chart today, their career will be impacted by AI. And if they’re able to have a hand in how they used and leveraged and scaled AI and made an impact with AI, Even today at the earliest starter in their career, this will have a huge impact for the rest of their career because they’re going to be able to build on that, talk about it. It’s going to take them through the next thirty years. And so I keep reminding my team that they’re in a really lucky spot to be in an organization that is innovating so quickly that has so much opportunity to, to experiment with AI and they’re in these roles that they’re in because they, they are going to be the ones that define what these roles look like thirty years from now. And and I think for all of us, myself included, I see it as a really exciting opportunity. I find myself, like, maybe I need to get out more just, like, on the weekends and whatever. It’s like I’m seeing something new and, like, four hours go by and I’m like, wow. I just was like, it’s so cool, but it’s like, holy moly, just blap blows. Yeah. And with some of the stuff that’s starting to happen. It’s very powerful. To truly be AI first, I’ve challenged myself to be AI first. So everything I do now, you know, we’re talking earlier, you sent me an email. I’m like, okay, I read this email, but I’m gonna go check it with AI. I try to use AI for everything I do. I try to start with AI and sometimes I forget and I’ll be like Googling something or I’ll be calling someone and trying to talk through and I go, oh, 6AI. Why don’t I I just look this, look this up on AI. And it’s interesting how once you start doing that, it does start to become a bit more of a habit. And I’ve found that it’s unlocked more opportunities and ideas for me. That’s to me, if you’re going to be AI first, like probably the easiest trick of the trade is like start with AI for everything you do. Try to spend one day where you don’t even respond to an email without starting with AI and see how it goes for you. See where your frustrations are and where you have doubts and where you’re skeptical. See what cool things end up coming from it, what you learn from it, what you might do differently because you started with AI. I think that’s a a great way to for most people to start to embrace the benefits and and the opportunity of it. Alright. Last use case. Yes. And this is a big one. And this is one where you’ve got some real results. And this is very self serving because it does talk a little bit about six sense products. But outbound, BDR, SDR. And you talk about in your plan that you shared with me, like, wanting all outbound or automating all outbound to some form or fashion, inbound communications as well. So can you talk a little bit about in that specific area of bringing AI to an outbound motion, what you’ve been able to do and kind of some of the results so far? Yeah. Absolutely. So we started the year with q one. Our goal was to automate a hundred percent of our inbound outreach. So basically, BDR follow-up on any inbound MQL. And then for q two, to start to automate a hundred percent of our outbound motion. One thing I’ll start by saying is is that that 6AI hundred percent number isn’t the mandate. It’s it’s the mindset. It’s a force to help us design for scale and to try to obviously, there’s going to be places where we’re going to need human judgment and there’s going to be nuances and edge cases. But by kind of setting these moonshot numbers and say, 6AI, let’s automate a hundred percent of what we’re doing. It makes people think differently than, oh, let’s just do a little one little agent trialing it over here in the business. And so what we found is now a hundred percent of all of our MQLs are now touched by an AI agent using sixth sense. And we started with that program at the beginning of December in in twenty twenty four. We did a thirty day pilot. Within the first two weeks, we had several opportunities that were qualified by the inbound agent that reached out to our inbound leads. And within the first thirty day pilot, we had a couple of deals that were won from the inbound agent. So for a brand new BDR, so to speak, that’s reaching out to leads and sending emails and trying to book meetings to be so quickly ramped. She was my best performing BDR in terms of her ramp. And so we said, okay, clearly we need to do more of this. So we started putting it in each region. We started putting it across at first different segments. And ultimately what we found was that it was as it performed as well in each of the regions as a ramp to BDR. So we said, let’s just have this underpin everything that we’re doing on the inbound side. So now if you submit a lead to SymPro, you will get an email from a six cents agent within, you know, two hours or less. What’s that been able to do for us is we’ve actually decreased our reason for losing a lead, which is, often one of the reasons we would lose a lead is due to could not contact. So our BDRs would do their follow-up. They’d never hear back. They closed, you know, market out as disqualified. And what we found was it actually reduced that by eighty percent in the first quarter that we were using using the AI agent. So it’s had a huge impact on our ability to move MQLs into sales qualified leads because we’re getting to these leads faster. We’re leaving no stone unturned. On the outbound side, we started deploying that in q two. And what we found is that while the results are not as good as the inbound side, which makes sense because inbound people are hand raisers, It’s as effective as having a BDR doing outbound prospecting over email as it would be having an agent do it. So we’ve now really refocused our actual humans to doing higher value, higher touch outreach. So they’re doing calling, they’re doing account research, they’re sending direct mail, they’re going to events, they’re doing the things that AI can’t necessarily do at scale. And then meanwhile, all of the kind of more routine outreach over email that they used to have to click buttons and try to automate as best they could is now happening for them. What I love about it is it’s not really replacing them. It’s it’s not saying, 6AI, that you don’t have a job anymore. It’s giving them actually another tool in their toolbox that they can use to make their job actually more interesting and rewarding. I don’t think any BDR would say that they loved having to set up email cadences for half of their 6AI, responding to leads. And so it’s given them more time back to do things that are higher value. And we’ve also been able to create a new function within our go to market. That’s a kind of more of a full cycle BDR and sales rep. So we have a new ISR team where we’re actually repurposing some of our higher senior BDRs into kind of full cycle sales reps. So they’re actually getting to have a more interesting job, a different job, a job that has more career progression for them because they’re we don’t need as many of those BDRs focused on on just outbound. We now can have them doing some of our full cycle sales on some of our smaller deals. Wow. Are the AI agents and the BDRs, are they working together on same accounts, or is there, like, a clear delineation between where each one of those times are? Right now, we have them across the whole set of accounts. We have different agents for different segments. And then we have the humans actually working on some of the more quality accounts doing the deeper higher touch follow-up. And then we have a set of accounts that just gets AI agents. If someone raises their hand or becomes an MQA, that’s when they go into, like, the next tier in terms of their their follow-up that they get from a human. So we have a question, and I did not prep you on this. So if you I’m sorry in advance. We have a question that we ask all of our guests. What is the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever been asked to do in your career? And it can be ridiculous bad or ridiculous good. I won’t say what company it was, but it would be pretty obvious if someone really wanted to know. But I’m not going to say the name. But I did a brief contract role when I was doing my MBA with a very large industrial manufacturing type company. And I went in as like a digital marketing manager. Okay. That was my title, digital marketing manager. You go into their big corporate office. And I would go in and I sat down and one day they came and they handed me this large stack of that very thin like newspaper print paper in a book, like bound in a book. And it was probably like five or six of these books. And it was their supply catalog of all of their various just like product d seven nine two, you know, product name, this and that, the price and this. And they said, we have these catalog books, these product catalog books, and we give them out to our suppliers and whatnot, but we need them all put into a spreadsheet. Oh my god. And I was like, okay. And I really, at that point, didn’t quite get what the ask was. I mean, it didn’t connect until until it happened. And then someone had been creating this spreadsheet by hand and they were like, today, it’s your day to work on it. I made it through about ten pages And luckily, it was near the end of the day. And I went home that 6AI, and I was like, I’m I think I’m gonna have to resign from my contractorship because I realized that that was not at all what I expected as a digital marketing manager to be doing there. So that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever been asked to do. That’s pretty good. Yeah. Thank you very much. I I that was there’s so much to dig into. And I think, again, like, having hearing somebody’s out there, marketing team, CMOs that, like, we know the promise is there, but where do we go and what can we do? Like, you’ve just sort of answered the question of, like, this is real. And get it with your teams, but you can have a massive impact. So I thank you so much. It was it was great to have you. Yeah. Thank you for having me on. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue. We might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.