75 Episodes and AI Trends This Year

When it comes to the people, I think you still need people to keep these agents on track to orchestrate them, to sense check and, you know, make sure that there’s the human in the loop. So I think this will help our teams take this on a bit more, but also, I think, help them feel really confident about their role in an AI led marketing work. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by six cents, investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Simon Rashid. Adam Kaiser. This is a milestone episode. Another milestone in a list of long milestones in our podcasting career. You realize what it is. Right? I love that you said we have a podcasting career. I’m just gonna take that. Doing this for a while. Come on. We have been doing this for a long time. Alright. What’s the milestone? Seventy fifth episode. Dang. I never thought we’d hit seventy five this quickly, I guess. It seems to have really just come out of nowhere. Seventy five is a milestone. Do you have any, like, pop culture stats to put it into perspective? So you know what I actually did? I turned to my dear friend and adviser on such things, ChatGPT, who I now is just, at this point, my friend. And I believe that ChatGPT has gone wrong, hallucinated. But I was curious about shows, television shows specifically, that had gone seventy five episodes exactly. And why I thought about that, I don’t really know. But there is a show called Animal Kingdom that was on TNT, which they claim to have seventy five episodes. K. And then this next one I know is wrong, but I’m gonna bring it up because it’s funny, and it probably will just give us as a Fuller House. So not Full House. You remember Full House? I’m gonna be real. I watched Fuller House, and it was like, I was nauseated that I was watching it. Did you enjoy it? It was so horribly bad. I was uncomfortable, but it was almost like I was better that you didn’t enjoy it because Like, I was doing penance for some sort of thing, but I did watch it. And this is saying I had seventy five episodes, which I don’t way. Hey. You can’t trust chat GPT for everything, and it does hallucinate. I don’t think it had seventy five episodes. Full House, of course, probably had more than seventy five, or maybe they’re including Full House in this. Now I’m wondering because I’m I’m going over here to quick little Wikipedia, and you know what? It’s right. They were down there. Had seventy five. I don’t believe it. Season one, thirteen episodes. Season two, thirteen episodes. Then it goes eighteen. So now we’re at twenty six. We’re at forty four. Yeah. Wow. Wow. So we stand in company with Fuller House. Oh gosh. I’m a little depressed, Adam, but let let’s pick it up here. There’s a kind of a big, kind of prolific history there. What were some of the standout episodes for you? Well, I mean, Seth Godin Of course. Was in that twenty five since fifty. Because we did remember, we did this at fifty. We talked about the first fifty. Right? Yep. But, like, we got to talk to Seth Godin. And was that just not bucket list at this point? I think you even posted about it as calling it bucket list. It it is a bucket list moment. And I think I’m just gonna say that the timing of that episode, given the Gen AI shift that’s happening within marketing specifically, I thought that he did such a beautiful job of bringing it back to People. The basics and the people and owning the market and what really matters. And and then, of course, how to incorporate Gen AI and how to take advantage of it, but something really just great about the two episodes that we did with Seth that I have gone back and actually listened to. What a lovely human. Right? Mhmm. Like and also, there were a couple email interactions I I think you had, and then I had some afterwards when doing some logistics on, like, photos and all that. And, like and then he said, like, you guys did a great job. A little self congratulatory, but I’m like, alright. Think the quote was, you both are very good at this, which I will take that as a higher accolade than being equivalent to Fuller House. Well, hold on. I mean, Fuller no. You’re right. I would absolutely go with Fuller House. Alright. So, yes, Chess was a milestone memorable episode. I think there was a really great episode on alignment. But, like, not just, oh, we need to be aligned sales and marketing, but really specific just takeaway strategies, like a human centric approach to sales and marketing as I think what we had called it. It was with Leah Davidson. That was just really good. So good. I walked away from that episode with tangible things that I am using in my real life. Case in point being, let’s not call it sales and marketing. Let’s talk about the people on those teams and how we relate to them. And honestly, like, going into that, was like, okay. Sales and marketing alignment’s kind of you’ve beaten it over and over again. But, like, it just had a different feel, different approach that Matt was a big fan of that one for sure. Yep. Alright. One more. I would say actually, what was really interesting too was Tricia Gellman from Box was talking about kind of you know, everyone’s sort of, like, talking about we gotta expand our TAM. We gotta go here. We gotta grow. We gotta go there. Like, they did this massive and this was, like, basically file storage in the cloud company that’s done this massive pivot, again because of AI, and made a huge growth of their TAM and all that, and it’s had a huge impact on their business. I mean she’s a great, mean she’s a multi time CMO, but I just thought it was like taking a moment in time, which I mean, AI to a sense is like a moment in time, at least in terms of new how people are thinking, how things are changing, and then just like completely transforming that business and where they’re where they’re spending their time, their roadmap, everything, and then getting it from that level from a TAM expansion I thought was really great too. Yeah. And, again, something that probably every listener can go out there and start to think about and quantify and do something about. So yay for seventy five. Now I’m gonna pivot for a Yay second because I think you and I are uniquely positioned to talk a little bit about what’s on the mind of the CMO. Obviously, I run marketing for sixth sense, but I think the more important piece is I talk to CMOs every single day, at least once a day, most often multiple times a day. These are customer and prospect CMOs. You do the same. I think you have pretty much an equivalent number of customer prospect calls. It’s kind of part of our job at this point. Themes start to emerge. Outside of that, of course, with CMO Coffee Talk, which we have twice a week, two times on Friday, It’s a community of four thousand CMOs where we bring important topics and discussions. So we’re uniquely positioned to have a pulse on what people are talking about now. Yes. And so I’d love to go deep on one or two of those topics. Let’s start with the big one. Ready? Zero click search. Oh, that little nut. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, that for anyone out there right? Again, we’ve got there’s a confluence of things. Right? We have just sort of the rise of all of the AI clawed, ChatGPT, Perplexity, all of these tools now pulling in live search and doing so in such a way where a lot of times it’s you’re getting an answer, it’s coming in, and you may or may not go any further to an actual website of where that content’s from. Added together with our friends at Google doing AI overviews where they’re pulling in answers essentially, right, from various sources through the index. And then now Google’s AI mode, it’s not yet, but probably going to take over search completely. And all of this happening, everyone is like, we’re seeing massive drop offs in traffic, but we’re not necessarily we’re seeing increases in impressions because your content is showing up in different ways where you’re like, you’re getting pulled in, you’re in an overview, you’re able to understand like your brand is coming up, but not necessarily leading into traffic. So it’s like everything’s on fire in terms of like, well, what’s SEO look like in the future? How do I start to create content for this new world of LLM searches? And like that, that seems to be hot for just not obviously CMOs, but everyone down. It’s interesting. It’s scary too again. But Well, let me hit you with two stats. Fifty eight percent of all Google searches now end without a click. Is now the majority, fifty eight percent. Ahrefs saw that, yes, while AI generated traffic, meaning the traffic coming directly from these LLMs is small. It actually makes up only point five percent of their total traffic. It drove twelve point one percent of their new user sign ups. So a twenty three x higher conversion rate than traditional SEO or traditional organic search. So it’s small in terms of what it is driving for us, but it is meaningful in terms of outcomes. But, yeah, fifty eight percent of all Google searches end without a click. There’s sort of like these two schools, I think, that I’ve I’ve approached in terms of, like, how do you adapt to this world? Is SEO dead? Is there a new type of, you know, GEO and AEO and other acronyms? There is a a decent amount of of things that have emerged as, like, these are definitely things that you need to be doing to ensure, and a lot of it’s technical. But, like, auditing your site, understanding, making sure that you’re using schema markup to indicate the type of content it is. Think about, like, the biggest thing to sort of take away from this, not one of them, at least with, like, these LLM searches is that they’re not looking for words or phrases. They’re looking for, like, chunks of, like, answering a question. Right? So if if you go and you’re searching in one of these things, content that’s sort of, like, almost bite sized within longer form that can address questions is certainly helpful. There’s this concept now, I think on most of these engines called fan out query where, like, when I search for, like, you know, what is the best b to b podcast? It’s actually gonna go and look at derivatives, other questions of that Four or five different kind of questions that could be like, well, if the searcher is looking for this, these might be related. So they use those, like that fan out process to sort of answer and create an answer. Again, because what it’s doing is it’s creating those answers by pulling in all those different content. So again, like, sort of chunking of the content is getting big as well. But I also think that it’s still early days in the sense that, yes, they’re capturing a lot of mindshare. Yes, they’re capturing some of this traffic, but, like, regular SEO is not going away tomorrow. It’s changing. You still need to keep yourself concerned about traditional organic rankings. And there is some overlap in the sense that the type of content that you can create to help you with your SEO rankings rankings will do well or help you at least on the LLM and AI search type of thing. And I think there’s still a lot of questions that are unanswered. I think it was maybe in just a week or two ago, there was a a search evangelist at Google that he said, like, there’s no difference. Do your SEO, which I don’t think there Google’s trying to, like, do any sort of, like, tactics of fending people off, but that one is counter to a lot of people are seeing. But I guess if you take it specific to what Google is doing, that if you’re ranking well in Google, will you see better results in their AI overviews and in their AI mode? And they continue to test other forms now. I think it still remains to be seen. People should be CMOs especially, like, obviously need to know what’s going on. I have to be thinking about content strategy with their leadership and their content leaders. But it’s like, start heading in that direction. But, again, Google still has a massive amount of market share for traditional search. Yep. You hit on content. Right? And what we’re seeing and I think because we’re so deep in account based marketing in the ABM world, a lot of the good habits from there do translate because it is about obviously having the right content, but we always prioritized precision Yeah. Of that content over very broad reach. That means going persona specific, answering real business needs, questions and answer type formats. Right? Intent based messages at the right time to the right person. But I think also we’ve really done a lot of work to focus on brand consistency across platforms. Right? You want that digital footprint to be consistent so that it is more likely to be cited by the LLMs. But I’d say if we had to boil it down, I think step one is obviously continuing to just do what you’re doing on traditional SEO. Right? Ensure your pages are crawlable. You’ve got metadata complete and accurate. You’ve got good links. And then beyond that, it becomes you should be ungating your content as much as possible. You should be creating new content that is persona based and buying stage based. You should be republishing that and distributing it across a variety of platforms. Yeah. I mean, the ungating argument, I think it’s over now. Sure. If if you just don’t want people to be to see your content period across these other channels. And actually going back to what you said about brand, I mean, that’s hugely important as well. Right? Because if you’re if you’re being cited, if you’re showing up in the press, all these different places, like, it’s showing credibility and these systems and these the AI searches especially are are picking up on that. So what’s really kinda cool is that the importance of brand Yeah. Is again, it’s funny. We go on these tangents in marketing, right, where it’s like, oh, it’s all about performance and measurement, we have to be able to measure everything. It’s like, oh, what brand is important. And then you have this whole brand to demand movement that sort of happened where, like, brand is driving demand. But again, now it’s like brand is driving these GEO or whatever we’re calling it because, like, you’re better your brand is positioned. To your point, those citations, those mentions are all gonna help you there. So I know Sixth Sense years ago had this thing that ABM is just good marketing. And it’s sort of like, not all of this, but some of this is just good marketing and good PR and all those things. And, of course, all the other technical and the content creation side as well, but I think it’s everyone just take a breath. And it’s a time to innovate, and it’s a time to experiment. Another trend, this one, which, again, like how b to b marketers are using AI in their world is important and has been talked about for a while. But the latest trend is, like, building a org chart with all your agents, which is both cool and disturbing to me at the same time. I know. We’re living in that kind of a reality where what was normal yesterday is not normal today. And you had a great conversation speaking over the last seventy five with Rachel from Simpro about how she did enhance and augment her marketing team with AI agents. That one was really good. That was only the second time in seventy five episodes that they did an episode without you, so it didn’t totally fall apart, thankfully. But, yeah, she was a really good example of a marketer and a CMO that wasn’t like, oh, well, AI could do this. It could take us here. Was like, no. This is what we’re doing. This is how we’re doing. It was like a real world example of, like, agents in play, things that were happening. And if you go back to that episode, everything that she talked about still came back to her people and kind of making them better, hitting time to value faster on workflows, like impacting those metrics and KPIs that are gonna impact the business most. And I think that’s AI is not it’s not about doing more for the sake of doing more. Right? It’s doing more of those things faster that are gonna drive the most value. And so she talked a lot about that. But, again, these org charts and you now you’re hearing about, like, the the one thing is, like, soon there’s gonna be the billion dollar company with one person in it because of AI. I think I don’t know. But CMOs are talking about me. If you look on CMO Coffee Talk, we have the Slack channel. Like, it’s, every five minutes, there’s a discussion about automating a workflow or how I’m gonna do this and how I’m gonna that. So incredibly important. But we the transition from the the AI, GEO, SEO thing was there is so much that you can do. Like, literally, like, why am I not coming up in ChatGPT search? Ask ChatGPT. And then being able to scale literally generative AI, like, first use case was content creation. Right? I think no doubt. But scaling content creation against these kind of new types of content types and all that technical content optimization that we talked about is huge and will help there. But I said, I’m still not sure how I feel about people actually literally putting agents on the org chart. Agents on the org chart. Listen. Well, this might be our first disagreement. Oh, let’s go. We’re fight now. Not gonna fight you. Although I did was we were just before we hit record, I threw in a Rocky four reference. I think we’ve talked about Rocky four, but we both have a very, very strong affinity for Rocky four, which in my mind might be the greatest film ever made, but continue. There you go. I think agents have a place on the org chart, and I’ll tell you why. Even if it’s just for that mind shift of Yeah. This is not negotiable anymore. This is not a fun, like, oh, let’s tinker with AI over here or let’s test something. This is now part and parcel of how we do work. And I think especially for CMOs looking to set that trajectory for their teams, I think agents on the org charts make sense. And I think there’s a couple of ways to do it. Right? Number one, you could do an internal hackathon or or have, like, a, you know, an AI day where every individual team starts to come up with one or two or three use cases, which, by the way, don’t have to happen overnight. You can build towards them. But to get people to start to think about how to incorporate agents to solve and support for things within their function, I think the agents on the org chart help with that. We at Sixth Sense have put on what we call our monthly AI lunch and learn where we’ve got different people from different teams coming and showing and sharing how they’re using it. I think that helps with ideation. I think if you set the KPI, if you set that trajectory and put them on the org chart, it will almost be a forcing function to drive adoption and innovation. I think you and I both agree, though. When it comes to the people, I think you still need people to keep these agents on track to orchestrate them, to sense check and, you know, make sure that there’s the human in the loop. So I think this will help our teams take this on a bit more, but also, I think, help them feel really confident about their role in an AI led marketing work. No. You’re right. I think the AI it also sends a message about, like you said, like, this is no longer optional, but AI fluency. And then also, like, you know, the world has changed. Like, you’re not like, oh, we need to do x. Like, oh, we hire somebody. Like, I mean, again Yeah. We’ve beaten into the ground that growth at all costs is over. And again, like efficiencies are there and all that. And then, you know, how are you going to solve x challenge? The first place you’re gonna go now is going to be likely gonna be AI. So I think that that’s it’s a fair it’s a fair assessment. To make your teams, like, not feel like somebody’s coming for their job is obviously a challenge. But, again, like, it’s gonna be on not just leadership, but on them to continue to push, ask for either its resources or time or give them time to go and just sort of run projects, skunk work projects. And then I don’t think there’s enough top down initiatives probably across companies for, like Yeah. Full on. It has to graduate out of Skunk Works and Tinkering. The very best companies are doing that, but I think there’s a long way to go to, like, there is a company wide AI initiative, and we are going to lead the company, and all the departments are gonna have access to resources to do that. I think that is something that that needs a little bit more thought and, like, office of, like, whether we’re gonna see chief AI officers or if they’re coming out of CIO. I mean, there’s all sorts of different places that could do. Then things are gonna get really interesting because this is, like, table stakes across the entire business. Adam Kaiser. Yes. It’s been a lot of fun doing seventy five episodes with you. You. I think there’s no one in the world I would have rather done it with. I think we’ve had so much fun. I think we’ve put together some great episodes and some great topics. So thank you for seventy five episodes of Revenue Makers. Thank you. And, yeah, I couldn’t have think of anyone else to do with. And I it’s actually you know, you and I have this conversation every so often. It’s like, I don’t it’s seventy five, and you look back at them and you, like, you read an episode and a guest. And we’re talking about, you know, thirty plus hours of recordings and just so much, so rich. And, like, we’ve just been through, like, incredibly busy times. There’s podcast episodes where we go back and we look, and we’re like, oh, that was a bad week, and you can see it on our faces. We haven’t seen actually one in the in the last twenty five, which I actually didn’t think so bad. And then not long after, we’re like, Adam, we look like shit. I was like, woah. Thank you for the inspiration. No. You’re there’s definitely you look at when I was recording. Don’t worry. We both did. I had high hopes that we would do this for a while, and we but we’re at this now. We recorded our cool trailer in December of two thousand and twenty three. Wow. And here we are halfway through more than halfway through twenty twenty five. Well, happy seventy five, Adam. Thank you. Happy seventy five. You’ve been listening to RevenueMakers. 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, and 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.