GTM After Hours
This is a safe space for the best GoToMarket execs, IC’s, and middle-managers in B2B SaaS. We've all failed and succeeded, so, of course we'll talk about both - and we'll spill the tea on how we coped along the way. Join host, and veteran SaaS GTM leader, Mark Bliss for some real talk about how to survive, succeed, and thrive in your GoToMarket career!
GTM After Hours
Adapting Your Marketing Strategies for the AI Era with Katrina Denk Gonzalez
In this episode of the GTM After Hours podcast, Mark Bliss and Katrina Denk Gonzalez discuss the evolving landscape of B2B marketing, emphasizing the importance of data-driven decision-making, the role of experimentation, and the impact of AI on marketing workflows. The conversation also delves into the significance of effective communication between marketing and sales, the value of events in driving revenue, and the need for human oversight in AI-generated content.
Takeaways
- Switching industries helps marketers learn their personas better.
- Human oversight is necessary when using AI in marketing.
- Effective communication with sales teams is vital for success. Evaluate the state of available resources before committing to events.
- Large industry conferences are becoming less favorable due to high costs.
- Creating memorable experiences is key to event success.
- Understanding financial aspects is essential for marketers.
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Hi, and welcome to the GTM After Hours podcast, a safe space for marketers, AEs, CSMs, and everyone else who's stuck in that B2B SaaS growth hamster wheel. Grab a comfy blanket, your go-to drink of choice, and join me for another exciting go-to-market conversation. All right, today I'm stoked. I've got a, I think 15 year marketing veteran who understands the correlation between activity and data and how to blend those two together to make better decisions. And so we're going to get into that. We're going to talk about event marketing and why everybody sucks at it. And, Yeah, well, we'll talk a little bit I think about the relationship with with the sales team and dig in there. But I'm joined by Katrina Dankens Alice, a marketing guru who's owned nearly every aspect of marketing, full funnel for the last 15 years. So Katrina, you want to give the audience a little bit of an overview of your background? What's the 30,000 foot view? All right, Mark. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I do love to nerd out. So I followed you for a bit too. And I like where you take conversations. So when you extended the invite, I was all in. So yeah, a little bit of background about me. Like you said, I've been in B2B marketing for 15 some years. So that means I have seen the SaaS. evolution, the dawn of SAS, the dawn of map, CRM, all that kind of good stuff, which has been a really exciting time because right from the get go, I got to see the power of technology and how that was really going to transform marketing, operationally, from a digital perspective, engaging your ICP. I've also been, primarily for a while, I've been in SaaS, Martech, but I've also been in the professional services side, MSP. Also, I had a stint in manufacturing, which was really fascinating. And it has really given me both the depth in B2B and SaaS and Martech, but also having exposure to another industry. I think is critical for marketers too, right? Because it forces you to learn your persona. It's easy for me to be marketing to fellow marketers. It's very clear for me to understand, but then if I'm manufacturing to, excuse me, I'm marketing to manufacturers, you know, it is key to really get in the mind of somebody you are completely unfamiliar with. And I mentioned that because I think that is a critical point that a lot of marketers are losing today, some of them are really making a great transition of speaking in the person they are speaking to and getting away from that. Here's what my company does and here's what's great about my company. like, here's why, you know, product feature A and product feature B is going to like blow your mind. You really have to be thinking of the the pain points, the transitional elements, how your ICP's industry is changing over the years. And so that's also where data comes in, right? You have to be always looking at those data points that are informing you, whether it's first party, second party, third party data. Where I am now, we play in the tech space, we play in data space, solutions for full funnel. So... really some exciting times to be squarely in, since we sell to marketers as well, to be really squarely in the space of capturing all of the data and go-to-market motions that are critical today to success. You know, I kind of love what you said about switching industries up. cause it forces you to do, I guess the, the only good habit you can have, which is actually starting a new playbook. You know, if you've been somewhere seven, 10 years, and you know, that industry, like the back of your hand, you're tempted to run the same plays that you ran five years ago. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. taught you that you needed to start something new. You needed to learn your ICP there. You needed to create campaigns specific to them. And instead of running the same playbook that worked, you know, years ago. Exactly. So for instance, when I was in manufacturing, old school trade show convention center, like that was big, you had to invest there. You know, those people are very much about the face to face, like they need to see the machine, they need to develop that relationship. And, you know, obviously, when I switched to MarTech and SaaS, like it was a little bit different, but again, it's really understanding, you know, what are those levers that you need to pull and how do you need to switch your investments. And at the same time, as a marketer, you have the responsibility to educating your own leaders within the business about changes that are happening in buying behavior, right? So, for instance, you know, the CEO that I used to report to, the good thing is that she was very open-minded. So she could kind of embrace some new concepts, but it did take a little bit. had to explain how marketing was evolving and that media was coming into play more and bringing in things like video. And it wasn't the dawn of the podcast at that point, but it's also this managing out, managing up. managing within, all of those are really essential to being able to drive results at the end of the day. Well, and I think that leads us really well into, you know, the topic I hinted at, at the beginning of the show where, you know, we can talk about the emphasis on data and how it correlates into action. Because I think what a lot of people get wrong and why they don't maybe trust marketers to make these decisions is marketing is very data centric. You know, the best marketing leaders are data nerds, you know, we, love dashboards, we, we dig into split tests. And so, you know, that speed of execution, this is a great idea. Let's ship it and test it becomes just natural to the best marketing leaders and the best marketing departments. And I think that is the antithesis because a lot of executives have seen stalled out marketers and departments who talk. about things for months before anything gets shipped. And so they want to experience that they want to make sure that at the end of all those months, what gets shipped is something that they like. When in reality, they should have never had a single conversation, it should have been shipped. then you walk in and hey, it was surprising. Look at the data that we saw, we need to change our whole messaging up because four split tests in a row have told us that we need to change such and such verbiage like, you know, It's an interesting scenario. so tell me how, how you've experienced that. Like what is the correlation for you between action and speed of execution and data. Right, right, exactly. So, you know, it is key to be able to communicate some of your plans with it. You you have to get sales on board. You do have to let them be aware of things that are coming to market, because I'm sure you've experienced this too, where you get something to market, you start getting inquiries in and the sellers are like, I don't even know what this is. Like, where's this coming from? So I do believe that the initial is helping people understand, What is the objective? The thing that you are about to do, how that completely directly ties to the business objective, and then sharing some projections so that they have an idea of what they can expect and get them excited about it. And then you need to ship. You need to let them know a lot of times also when something is a pilot. When is something that's an experimentation? And saying to them, I'm making some projections. I may not have historical benchmarks for our business. I've done my due diligence. I've been talking to other marketers in the industry. We know what they're starting to accomplish. But you can still create some baselines. And then as you collect the data from your first iteration, you go and you share that back with sales. You say, here's where we're at. We're either already knocking out of the park or we're not hitting those projections. I'm going to shift something and then keep coming back to them. Keep them a part of the process. Let them know how things are progressing. And I think too, if they have questions, be answering them to the best of your ability. And then also just understanding yourselves. They're incredibly busy. They don't really care, like, are you rolling out a new ad? So it's this fine balance of. visibility into what marketing is doing, getting it out there in the market, and then coming back to them and showing them here's what we're seeing. So for instance, I was part of a digital transformation at a company years ago. as part of that is when we started bringing in some ABM and some content more. And initially, you know, sales had operated from like, here's your product sheet, right? And like, that's the only content you produce is like a product sheet and a website and like maybe some email newsletters. So then when you're starting to bring in concepts like thought leadership and, and white papers and that other like shorter form video content, Because those things can be time consuming and you have to develop a strategy and framework around it, you need to then be able to come back and communicate, like here are, we have been able to measure this and here is the boost in our leads and our traffic and our improved engagement on the website. And then that way you are, you're making sure that you're getting things out in the market. You're not tying yourself to. too tightly to trying to perfect it and also letting people know that, look, the goal is to get it out there and market, see how the market responds. So even if you're not hitting that initial projection for something that's completely an experiment, like they understand, you're like, part of it is you need to collect data in order to then start informing the next iteration. I love how you emphasized experiment. I think people miss this all the time. You know, the label, the doc that they want feedback on and they won't include that it's a draft. I often tell my team to reference it as version shit.do and on the physical thing, it's V 0.5. because it changes that that framework, right? Like, you know, the how the executives coming in to review it shifts when you know, it's a draft when you know, it's an experiment, when you know, we're testing this thing, it's low budget, you know, we've got the confines very narrow, like, it changes the entire discussion, I think, and it allows you to actually push it forward. So I really love that you emphasize the word experiment. mean, how I put that in the in the title like if you're doing a slideshow presentation on it I'd put that in the right in the title slide of the PowerPoint experiment. Right, right. You know, another thing is like I joke sometimes because, you know, somebody asked me like, you know, for a creative brief or project brief or whatever, you know, and I'll say, hey, guess what? Here's my initial brain dump. because what we need to do is like, yes, we need to get things like fully outlined and specs and requirements and all of that. But also, you know, I know myself as a marketer, I think this is the other thing is marketers need to understand how they work. Right. And there are certain people like me where there's a lot of ideas. I start getting them on paper and then I have partners who then also help me dial into the to the Rex, you know, ensure that the language for, for instance, like pulling those lists or whatever else is needed from a from a data ops type aside, that they are helping to pull that information together. And so that also is really key to, you know, if you're experimenting with something like, sometimes you just need to start getting it on paper in order for it to start formulating into the reality for the shipping. Well, and how cool is AI now for that? Cause I got to tell you, like, I'm not a paper and pen kind of guy. I'm a have 16 ideas in the drive home from the grocery store kind of guy. And so being able to just do quick voice memos and then AI automatically transcribed and summarizes and my gosh, it's, it's freed me up so much to get to actually like actually doing instead of sitting with a word doc open, like how is that change life for you? Like how is this new, brand new AI and all this tech changing your working habits? I mean, I hate to sound trite and like everybody else, it's freaking changing so much. I, you know, I see that the downfalls, like it's very clear where the holes are. Right. and you know, Even going back to experimentation, like you said, like I'm playing with different AI tools. Like I use Claude, you know, I use Claude for this. I use Jatch EBT for this. And then I test them against one another. Like there's a couple others that I want to try at some point, but right now it's my, my focus has been. Yes. I yeah. Yeah. there's, there's another one. starts with a P blanking on it. Nah, it's not coming. Okay, there's another one. I'll have to pull it free and tell you. So I was at this... speaking panel recently, and it was specifically about AI, and we covered that topic as well. And one of my fellow panelists, Will Reynolds, who's with Seer Interactive, SEO firm, and a lot of people know it. I'm in the Philadelphia area, and he's huge in the community. And he was talking about some really interesting ways that he was using it from the business side. One of the things that I have found amazing about it is that you can create those base prompts that then I pull and start building playbooks, right? And then from there, I use those playbooks to then just iterate a different prompt for a different purpose, right? And then I have all these projects bucketed. I've got like, you know, the email nurture brainstorming, you know, an analysis project. Then I have like, know, event marketing concepts, like, because I'll have some of those ideas, but then I want that extra fuel to the fire about, you know, whether I'm, I'm, you know, getting a little bit of research feedback on some different ideas that I'm thinking of testing, or even just like some positioning to quick ship things, like you talked about quick shipping has been transformative in just helping get something to market much faster. I even have used it for like an advocacy program, right? So like there's a new campaign that I rolled out and part of it is because we've talked about like sales and sales enablement, you know, we, had mentioned that kind of at the very beginning to make the most of sales enablement. You also need things packaged and, and as quick for them to help you ship as possible. Right. And so I've been using AI for that. Like I'll have my base layer of like, here's our brand voice and like, here's the specific objective for, for this. feeding in some of the information about what ends up fueling the content, right? I've even been training it on different voices. So I have the AI trained on my voice. I have the AI trained on one of my team members' voices. I have the AI trained for a few different of our reps who are very active on social. And that helps them ship not only faster as well, but authentically. And the authenticity is, I've been impressed with that as well. Like these AI agents, they learn your voice pretty well. And they do understand some nuance. There haven't been too many instances once I've trained it pretty well that it can't then handle and deliver on what I'm doing. And now that I have these like playbooks and frameworks, I can just start plopping that framework into these different projects that I need different endpoints. It's helped with, you know, further developing our ICP. It's helped with like... creative tasks, it's helped with some data analysis. I mean, it truly is transformative. At the same token, I think that it is a responsibility of a marketer to still make sure there is human oversight. Because as much as we talk about the necessity of shipping, there is potential for great brand damage if there is not some sort of human element involved. in it. We're, I mean, obviously we're seeing the discussion about like AISDRs and some of the shit that you see getting pumped out on LinkedIn that somebody's just using like, you know, expand your something like that to just pump out and you're like, that's, you know, really cool piece of content. And like you go on the content, you're like, to me, like if somebody's putting out what presents is like really fascinating valuable content, and then you deliver crap that clearly like, 98 % of it was just AI spit out with like no review. I, whereas maybe once I would have been like, Hey, this might be a vendor I want to work with later. Like next time I'll be like, I don't know. Just pumped out total crap. Like what, what is that going to say about the rest of the quality of their work? Right. Yeah. I think there was this initial shift, the second, chat GPT really hit the scene where folks were like, well, we can get rid of our, our, our content team. You know, we don't need, we don't need that. We know what's have a person read it and we'll, we'll change a couple of things. So it doesn't sound like a robot and it's like, no, no. And what it does is it changes the type of talent you need in your content team. Because if you just pump out. the garbage that's created, it's not going to resonate. Like there's a, there's an instant disconnect. You can feel the, the lack of heart. I, I think it works best when you record audio and then turn that into other pieces of content. Like if you did a webinar and then you've turned that into blog posts or, you know, social posts, think, chat, GBT does a really good job with that. I, I don't think it, works as well creating content from scratch. And so, you know, you need that content leader who's going to be really deep in, with your subject matter experts. need to really understand your ICP and then create those types of audio moments that then can feed the additional content, at least for current state, you know, maybe future state, maybe people are writing, it'll be like, well, we don't need any content marketers at all because the AI will just generate whatever. And it's like, you know, fucking Hemingway coming out. I don't think we're anywhere near there yet. I think it's how do you create that initial set of content? And frankly, to the sales enablement point, notebook LM has been an absolute game changer for me. Absolute game changer, creating that, that podcast around. any type of materials I need the sales team to understand, it's absolute gold, like absolute gold to be able to do that. and then that also shifted me for, you know, larger things. I will record a little mini podcast episode with SME. for anything major that I need them to truly understand and grasp from a messaging perspective. Cause a lot of times we do these things on live meetings, not useful at all. Everybody's checking, checking their phone. You know, half the people aren't even at their desk. Somebody's running on a treadmill. Like it's, it's not, it's not super, it's not super useful, but if you put out a very short, like 10 to 15 minute, conversational webinar on it and then do your meeting like after everybody's watched that now you do your live meeting so much more beneficial Right. I think, Keita, what you touched on earlier too is like the content atomization element. You know, it's like, rather than marketers no longer have to think about like, I'm going to spit out a quarterly white paper. And it's going to be a white paper. And maybe I'll write an email about it. mean, now you have that one piece of content that is, you know, authentic, high quality, truly gets to the heart of your value prop. And then from there, you let AI, once you've trained it again, brand voice, appropriate channel that you're looking for to produce on. And then from there, it just starts allowing all of those subdivisions of the content for all your distribution channels. I love that. And the training part is so key. And you, you, touched on it before, like how, how you've inputted so much on your playbooks to be able to, train that AI in the voice of your customer. I love doing that from an event perspective. even if you, even if you lose money doing the event, if it's stocked with your ICP, and you record those conversations, the questions that they asked, how they phrase the problem. It's going to impact your AI models so significantly. Right. Exactly. Because you may as well, you know, I mean, whatever you're able to capture in discovery calls, for instance, right? You can utilize that. You extract the audio there, you pump that into AI, you add that to your training framework. And then from there, it's cross-referencing maybe what you've drafted for the ad, the LinkedIn ad, and then you cross-reference it. And it just, might find those little isolated bits from the conversation, the discovery calls where they're specifically talking about their latest problem and challenge. And then it can modify and improve the language in an ad or an email or whatever else is going to be your next output. That's why I like digital signage for events because you can make adjustments in real time. Right, right. So we should chat about events because I know you're a outspoken, you know, pro events done right, a marketer and there's, there's, there's less of us, nowadays, you know, post post COVID, there are far less of us pro pro event people, but why, has kept you so, so pro events in an era where events continued to decline. So I will counter that assumption there or that statement mark. So we have found time and time again, if you're executing the event effectively and you're also responding to where your ICP is and how they want to engage at events, events have continued to be one of the strongest revenue drivers for us. Now, ROI can fluctuate. And that is something that you constantly have to keep an eye on. And you're looking at that to inform your next year's event strategy or if you need to make a pivot within, right? I think there's a couple of things. When people say that they're souring on events and the events don't make sense, you have to look at what events are you doing and how. have you shifted your playbook? Because if you're trying to use a 2019 playbook or you're trying to use a 2022 playbook, then yeah, 2024 events aren't gonna be looking so hot. The one thing, I have loved events for years and it's great because events are very particular. You either love doing them or you fricking hate doing them because they are a monster. So anybody who's like, yeah, just like pull off a webinar. yes and no, yes and no, or like quick, like, can we just pop into that trade show like next month? Like we're not going to get approval until about 30 days out. Isn't that cool? And you're like, well, technically yes, we can arrive. You know, and like, I'll work my ass off and get it done. But again, there, there's all those elements of, you know, evaluating the state of what's available to you, reviewing past year's data, having your finger on the pulse of what the market is actually looking for. know, virtual events still have a place. They absolutely do. I launched a virtual event series here at Farris IQ recently. You know, we already secured a couple of deals as a result of it, even from it being like a very in its infancy. So they do have a place. You just have to do them right, right? We're also already from being able to show that, yes, virtual events will have a place in our strategy. Being willing to look at investing more in order to keep that going. And if you're seeing you already had some success as it is, I always kind of push people in there like, well, if you've already been successful, how you're doing it, like just leave it at that. And I'm like, you can leave it at that for a bit. But if you're already seeing that that is driving some results and meetings and pipeline and closed deals, know, which is the ultimate, obviously, then you want to be in a position where you can double down on that a bit more and if it requires a little bit more investment, like you've already proven that putting some sort of investment, even if it's an initial time, like that is producing some results. The other shift with events is I think people are tiring of the massively, massively expensive large scale industry conferences where, you know, they are firms or like the publishers have just kind of had like this, this grab hold on the conference and they just, the prices have gotten exorbitant. And then the events are structured in a way that it's never to the advantage of the sponsor. That's where the issue is starting to come in with modern events. And it's exactly why, and there's a couple of different elements to this that I want to talk about. So there's the large scale industry conferences that can be very difficult for marketers to extract ROI when the prices are absolutely exorbitant. Especially because anybody walking into the exhibitor hall, for lack of a better term, like A lot of them, they're going in there and they either want to pick up the tchotchkes for their kids. Maybe they want to have a couple of conversations with a vendor, but they also know that some people are just going to end up like, it's just going to be kind of this like gross interaction. And so people are hesitant because they're not sure like, am I going to be walking up to people that is going to be like, I'm going to have a cool conversation and like, maybe they can actually solve my challenge or just not. So there is a shift. A lot of people are starting to, pullback, they're either investing in virtual activations that are taking a little bit of different style, could be thought leadership, could be a conversation that's more like this. Then there are the smaller virtual plays that could be ABM specific. You're going to invest more per head, but you've chosen that because it might be a significant count that you're going to have much more customer lifetime value. Then there's also the bespoke events, which are becoming more and more popular, the in-person, because what we are seeing, even just a cultural shift, there is an exhaustion to a degree with virtual events. People are wanting more human to human interaction, but they also are seeking something different. And that's where these bespoke events are starting to come in. They take a lot of different styles. They could be a workshop, they could just be a... customer appreciation, luncheon, where there's still some valuable conversations. Then there are even other, you know, what I call more like bespoke boutique events. There was one that we ran this past January that I put together is called a speak easy. And the idea specifically was we brought together rather than just marketers talking to marketers and sharing like, Hey, here's my best practices and here are the results I have a Ferris IQ like. We specifically focused on our panel was our buyer's buyer. We were the facilitator for honest conversations between the buyers talking about their buying journey, where their strategic focus was going to be for 2024 since it was January, how they like to learn, how they like to hear or not hear from vendors. and what's the information that they're seeking. So it was almost like an in-person micro market research opportunity for our audience. And the feedback that we got was amazing. Like the panelists came to me and they said, that was one of the more interesting panels and events that I've been to in a long time because it was so different and it was authentic. And we were able to like finally say in this kind of open atmosphere, like, We had mostly C-suite like VP and above were on the panel. And one of the CEOs said, stop assuming that you need to send your SDRs to chase me with like these long cadences that drown my inbox. She's like, you don't understand. My entire day is packed back to back with meetings. I don't start looking at my inbox until 10 PM at night. So she's like, there's a reason I've built my team. I've built my team because they're competent. and I trust their decision-making process. Go talk to my managers, right? My managers are collecting some of the information. They're helping develop that short list. She's like, you know, don't immediately say, well, the manager is not my ICP and like SDR shouldn't reach out. So it's really about being able to create something new. ended up, it wasn't a significant investment. We did a lot of, rolled up our sleeves. Like we just got in there. We were like, let's just do something really different that's still delivering value, has intelligent conversation, has a little bit of fun, right? Because like, look, at the end of the day, like if somebody's wrapping up their work day and they can go do something like educational and interesting and also fun, like that's great. And somebody else is paying for it. Great, right? We got 9x ROI on that event. So again, that proves like events aren't dead. If events are done right and you're delivering something valuable and unique and authentic with your ICP and you're also training your sellers who are going to attend how to have those conversations. And it's not like, Hey sellers, come here. stand in a circle together and like sip your bougie cocktail. No, part of that enablement too is like, here's how we facilitate these events. Here's how we want to be approaching these people who are spending their time coming after work. You know, it's not about just grabbing a cocktail. Like, yes guys, you can get ops out of this. And so with the right enablement there too, and then lining up like that followup as well, that's how you can get a nine X or more. I love that the entire idea of doing like these road shows and your own hosted events, even if you do them like kitty corner to the large industry shows, like you're able to control so much of the experience that, you know, your people resonate with that. You know, you're, you're, building that for your ICP. I love that. I love the practitioner look, way too many times. I think. marketers and you know, sales leadership have a hard time understanding the, you know, ground swell approach where you're starting with practitioners and middle management, middle management, and then you're moving upstream to the C suite. All of them want that old, you know, the Reaganomics style of marketing where it's like, it does trickle down and right. In modern era trickle trickle down is it's just doesn't work. You can't get to those people. And even if you can, they're just going to pass it back to that manager who's going to be mad that they weren't involved in the initial conversation. So, you know, you got to factor that in. And I kind of love what you said about attribution to, it got me thinking about how folks, I think, discount events because they're doing attribution reporting that like it's 1999. You know, it's a first touch kind of model and you want to see somebody from that company three times over the course of a buying cycle. And you know, it will be practitioners and you need the practitioners to like you. And so if you run your attribution that way and you break out percentages based on all of these shows that they attended. It's much easier to show the success of that individual show in hindsight than it is if it's just like, okay, so here's all the deals that are from people that we met at that show. It's like, y'all, you're missing a huge block and you're going to end up not doing shows that had significant ROI on the back end because they didn't on the front end and you didn't understand that. Right, exactly. And the other thing with these boutique events is when you own the space, you own the entire environment, you're not competing with your competitors. So still in, mean, a lot of people are still going to the industry conferences, like they have their place, but you're constantly competing for that mind share. If you're doubling down, you're spending, depends on what your level of investment is. You can knock out a bunch of these road shows for one mass market event. And exactly what you talked about, mean, a lot of marketing, it's building the relationship, right? It's, you know, yes, you can get deals directly attributed to the event, but if you've got a series of like two X per, you know, once a month or more than once a month, and you've got these continual events, whether it's road shows or virtual events, like you're creating that cadence of interactions. And at the end of the day, like by the time you start multiplying all of that, and then it's the same level of investment as like one trade show where you had to fly out an army of sellers halfway across the country, like it ends up becoming a no-brainer. Well, and it allows you to, utilize your, your channel and do collaborative and co-marketing with complimentary brands. And, know, it still reduces your costs, increases your list. Like there's, so much benefits of that, but I would counter with the whole, like, you know, I'm not saying that we're shitting on big events. so I will, I will, I will walk that back a little bit, but I. I think to be fair to a big event though, you need to treat your booth space in the exact way that we're talking about running your own event. It needs to be for your people and it needs to be the right experience for your ICP that will attract the people that you care about. this isn't about catching all of the onlookers to be able to get them to walk over for your Chachki. This is to create a memorable experience that if they're looking for a product like yours. in six months. They're like, Hey, actually, Right. Right. the big events see a lot of benefit. And I would also say that the biggest benefit to the huge events is going to be your social following and PR. because, and a lot of people don't factor that into the success and failure or the ROI of the event, but, that's where the big events really come into play is if you do something really unique, you're going to grow your audience very quickly from it. And you're going to grow your, your public mentions, your analysts community. is going to be more obsessed with you because they saw your experience in person. So yeah, don't don't miss that. and now, yeah, and I'm not saying get rid of your, get rid of your, you know, large industry event, part of your strategy. Like, no, it's still there. You have to utilize them for different purposes, right? Yes. Large industry conference, you've got reach. You can treat it like a billboard to a certain extent. There's a billboard aspect to it, right? You have to stand out. You have to have a very clear message. You have to have something that captures people's attention and experience that is going to be memorable, right? And then also you, you know, which is another reason that people will pay more for sponsorship that has the speaking opportunity. Because again, you've got a very large wide platform in order to get that message out. Bespoke events, they have their place, right? It's going to be smaller reach. you're tapping into fewer people, but it doesn't mean that you can't still have a strong ROI from that just because it's a smaller audience. It's like ABM versus like hitting your tan, right? Well, I mean, and, two, can run those same bespoke events at your booth and at these larger conferences and tie in the best of both worlds to, quote the philosopher Hannah Montana. You know, it, I think people have such a hard time looking at that, you know, this marketing mix, particularly as it relates to events in a cumulative. 30,000 foot views standpoint, particularly C-suite executives, finance, CRO, like you're going to see some differing opinions on events. And I think it's because they're not understanding how one goes into the other that goes into the other. There's somebody from every major company will be at one of the top three industry events. So if you've got your ICP locked down and you've got your ABM lists and you know, here's, here's the 200 companies you're targeting right now. You can pretty much guess that that company is going to have somebody there. And so how you capture them and then how do you build and expand that relationship with other folks from that company over the course of the next three shows? How do you invite them to your own shows? Like I love doing a road show where I've seen. handful of really strong prospects from a bigger show. And so if I do a big industry event, and here's these five that are all located within a, you know, particular region, I'm going to do a roadshow right there, because I know those people already have a strong first touch and experience with me. And now I can get them out to a second smaller venue, more curated, and just build that evolution over time. Exactly. So I mean, one of the things that I've done previously is like, I'll take the SALs from a prior event that stalled and didn't progress further into pipeline, but you know, their ICP and for instance, like, let's say that they just brought on a new VP of marketing, right? And they're in one of those tech hubs that you can easily put together, like one of these bespoke events or an executive dinner and like, then there's your targeting, right? So like you had that initial touch. maybe they just went cold, but now you're starting to gather intense signals that it looks like they're starting to get back into market. Well, that's where if you have enough of those people and you have kind of like a playbook already for these bespoke events and you have the resources on the ground to like hop on one of that, you can pull together one of those things. Like you could pull together one of these events in like a 60 day timeframe, right? And if you have that all packaged up, it's like you've got your outreach package ready to go. You've got your data signals. You've got some boots on the ground that can help pull together like that, like drop in road show. It's almost like the whole concept of like the pop-up shows, right? Like just in your community. It's like, like pop-up bar, pop-up this, pop-up that. You're essentially, it's a similar thing, like an ABM approach. Or if you want to get, again, like re-engage some leads that have cooled off. that you know there was something there, just stalled. of it. I mean, couldn't love it anymore. I do want to talk about sales enablement on this because I think that relationship with sales when you're trying to tell the story and this plan, this interconnected model of how we're going to go after our target number this year. How do you get them to truly understand the interconnected nature of everything that you're doing from content and social to big events to these bespoke events like how do you get them to really grasp and understand the complete view of your marketing plan for the year? I mean, I think it comes down to you have to have some clarity in how to communicate that, right? So you always will start with, need to understand like what are the specific targets they're needing to hit, right? What are some of the motions like, are they quarterly buys that are with your business or these long annual contracts, that type of thing. So you need all of that in view too, so that everything that you're communicating about the plan that you put together will touch onto the and the timeliness, right? So with that, you don't want to get deep into the weeds. You can easily see like they start glazing over, they're trying to run to another meeting, they need to do some follow up. So you want to make sure that it's really concise. One of the things that I also do is I do focus on timing when I have these conversations. I will even make it clear from the beginning, like I'll even be strategic as saying like this is a 20 minute meeting, right? Because the number of times where you're trying to say, want an hour of your time so I can walk you through my deck where I'm going to take you through like, why is this advertising important? And then what, like, where's LinkedIn coming? Like you want to talk about it from the perspective of, know, is this designed to speed the deals that are in pipeline faster to close? Is this because when you are on that phone call and people are saying, I've never heard of Faris IQ, like you can say that's what, you know, these perpetual ongoing ads are going to help serve. This is one of the reasons that we do need to be at that industry conference. So just helping make sure that it's very clear, you're not speaking marketing language, you're not getting into CPLs, you're not getting into CPM, you're not getting into like open rates and click rates, right? You need to be saying like, this is specifically, I have projected conversion rates that I anticipate are going to deliver XSALs to you. And by the way, here's a couple of the points that you may see out in the market. You may see these LinkedIn posts. Guess what? Those specific LinkedIn posts, that's exactly what is intended to get you the X number of SALs this month. Love that. I, I think to add on that, we as marketers do such a great job of marketing externally. And then we completely overlook the internal marketing. And so like we would absolutely create a hype reel for something externally, but why don't we do that internally? Like videos are cheap. do a 60 second hype reel of this new campaign with all the components that you just mentioned and toss that in the sales Slack channel. They're all going to watch it. They're all going to get excited about it and then do your 20 minute meeting. Like it's not, it's not rocket science, but I don't, think there's a, I, how do I put it? I think there's a lot of marketers who think that that's beneath them. You know, like I I'm a babying the sales team, you know, I just need to send them the materials and they'll get it. And they're missing the point. The point is not that you're educating sales. The point is that you're getting everybody on the same page. Yeah. It's much more a locker room motivational speech than it is some sort of, you know, classroom lecture. And I think we missed that. I'll tell you what else I have found that has made a huge difference is you need to find your sales champion. You need to have your sales bestie, you know, your sales husband, your sales wife, like as a marketer, you know what I'm saying? Like, because you could put together a loom video, right? And then just like blast it out there. But how much better does it work? And I bet anybody who's watching this, who's done it themselves. If you have that person who does get it, you know, I've worked with sellers who don't give an F about marketing, sellers that don't respect marketing. And sometimes there's reason like I get it. Right. But then I've also worked with plenty of sellers who do get marketing. And so if you're having those one-to-one conversations and you're sparking off and saying, hey, FYI, I'm going to be doing this. And they're like, awesome. I know the other sellers are going to be really excited to hear that. You bring them into the fold. You even can have co-presenting meetings. So for instance, I talked to you about I'm rolling out this micro campaign and it's got advocacy elements to it. And I found one of my coworkers who's like, I totally get it. And so we're going to be having some meetings coming up and like, I'm going to have them a part of that. So they can then be that internal voice too, within the sales org that helps them kind of buy into it. And that's what's really key to like, again, it's, not just finding different ways to deliver the information. It's also like your strategic approach to who also helps you deliver that message. Ooh, I love that. I think, I think we, I think we end there for our, marketing and sales enablement and everything portion of the show. but every, for every guest, I always give them the last word on the show. and I want to ask you a question to, yeah. Have you elaborate on which is what advice would you give to brand new professional Katrina stepping into that very first go-to-market role. I would say financial literacy. there's a lot of marketers. Some marketers do come from a bit of a finance background or like maybe they're business major, but like not every marketer comes from there. Right. And so any marketer that comes in, if they don't have some sort of, you know, groundwork of some financial literacy, that is going to be something that they want to hop on and learn. Like, yes, you want to learn your digital marketing, you want to learn, you know, UTMs and like all of that. You want to learn all the different channels, but also understanding the financial elements specifically for the part of like those relationships with the finance team and the relationships with sales. You have to be able to translate into those types of conversations too.