Latest / Content, Briefly / The emerging importance of AEO with Conductor's Lindsay Boyajian Hagan

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The emerging importance of AEO with Conductor's Lindsay Boyajian Hagan · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [on-hold music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Really happy to have Lindsay Boyajian-Hagen today. She's the VP of marketing and co-head of revenue at Conductor.
• 0:15
  Conductor's been around for about 10 years, primarily as an SEO tool, although they have recently, and I think probably still currently, are making a shift into AEO, and we talk about that quite a bit.
• 0:25
  Like, how does a company with roots in SEO basically rebuild its tools for this new use case, which is emerging as a very important one? That's kind of the first theme to this conversation.
• 0:34
  And then the second is, how is her team doing marketing, right?
• 0:37
  Like, I think it's important that a company like this practices what it preaches, and it also, it's really helpful when it works, and you have great data and great anecdotes to share with your customers, and that's exactly what's happening.
• 0:46
  So Lindsay runs us through that as well. Really interesting conversation. Uh, to be completely honest, AEO,
• 0:52
  kind of like not really on my radar so much until recently when I checked Google Analytics and saw the uptick in visits from LLMs, and then also, you know, in doing some research, learned that many of the visits that LLMs drive go under-reported because, you know, somebody is doing a search, they don't click the link in the citation.
• 1:11
  You know, they might Google it actually. After they find the tool they want, then they go Google it and find it that way, or they just type in a domain. So that's a whole nother conversation, the attribution part of it.
• 1:20
  But it made me realize actually there's a lot more power to this than I previously thought, which sent me down the road of using these tools more for search. Perplexity in particular, I find to just be incredibly useful.
• 1:30
  So consider my interest piqued, which is why I was so excited to have Lindsay on the show today. Quick plug for Superpath Pro. As always, we've got the free trial.
• 1:38
  As part of that, you get access to our Slack community, our monthly one-on-one calls, our monthly socials, which is a group call with breakout sessions, and then more recently, once a month, we're doing an AI show-and-tell where we bring three people on, they share their screen, and they walk us through a cool use case for AI.
• 1:53
  Sometimes it's writing-related, sometimes it's workflow-related, sometimes it's, you know, vibe coding-related, but they've been really cool so far.
• 2:00
  So you can learn all about that at superpath.co, and we would love if you give us a chance to check it out. All right, I'll get out of the way now. Please enjoy this episode with Lindsay Boyajian-Hagen.
• 2:10
  Hey, everybody, Jimmy from Superpath. Here with another episode of Content Briefly. Really excited to have Lindsay Boyajian-Hagen on today, VP of marketing and co-head of revenue at Conductor.
• 2:19
  We have lots to discuss here. But Lindsay, first, thank you for being here. Would you mind introducing yourself? Tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and, uh, maybe a quick career history too.
• 2:27
  I saw you have some product marketing experience, and I would love to maybe just touch briefly on that to sort of set some of the context for our conversation today. Yeah, of course. So been with Conductor.
• 2:36
  For those that may not know Conductor, we are the leading AEO and search optimization technology in the market, really focused on enterprise brands.
• 2:44
  So we help folks understand how they're showing up across traditional search, but also new AI engines. And then we actually help you write and create and optimize your web content, so it gets found in those engines.
• 2:56
  So really end-to-end platform built and designed for the enterprise.
• 2:59
  We have over 10 years of experience and data in the space, so our roots are traditionally in SEO, so we bring a lot of that into the product today, which is a big differentiator.
• 3:09
  I started at the company actually in product marketing. My roots are in product marketing- Oh, cool... I think. Yeah. Product marketers, I think are really
• 3:18
  amazing in terms of their ability to connect strategy to execution.
• 3:23
  I think in the world of AI, it's even more important to have an amazing product marketing team and function, and I think the skills you learn as a product marketer are really important as you build your career.
• 3:32
  So I love product marketing. I love the storytelling of it. And then before that, I ran marketing at a smaller augmented reality company. They were Salesforce-backed.
• 3:41
  This was in kind of the nascent days of augmented reality, so it was like a little like the Wild West when augmented and virtual reality were, were still fairly new, and that was a super exciting venture.
• 3:53
  And then before that, had my own company. So dabbled, been in tech for the last 15 years, and it's been really exciting and especially with all that's happening in AI and AI search right now. A lot to talk about today.
• 4:04
  So much to talk about, and there's kind of like two main themes I'm hoping to touch on. One is Conductor's strategic shift into AEO and AI, and then would love also to talk about your team.
• 4:15
  Like how is your team doing marketing right now? So maybe we start with the first. Obviously, AEO is like the hottest thing in marketing right now.
• 4:24
  Conductor's been an SEO tool for a long time, and so maybe just to begin, how do you think about AEO? Is it supplementary to SEO? Do you think of them as distinct disciplines?
• 4:34
  Is your customer tra-- Sorry I'm getting into, like a lot of questions now. Like maybe just like from a high level, how are you thinking about this? And then like how, how is Conductor thinking about this?
• 4:41
  Is it exclusively AEO now, or is it still able to cover both? Yeah. Uh, it's interesting to see the evolution of SEO, AEO, and GEO.
• 4:49
  Um, and what we've been telling our customers is really AEO and GEO are kind of an evolution of SEO, and SEO has seen a lot of evolutions over the years.
• 4:57
  It's seen when mobile-first indexing, different algorithm changes, different requirements of Google throughout the years, and so Google's snippets over the last 24 months.
• 5:07
  So Google's been constantly evolving, and the SEO function in a business has been constantly evolving with it. And so this is sort of just the next evolution of an SEO organization and organizat- an SEO practice.
• 5:19
  It is just... it's bigger, it's more existential, but there's no one better suited in an organization to help shepherd this change than an SEO and a search team.
• 5:30
  And so the companies that have been putting down really strong roots in SEO and creating really good content over the last X many years are the companies that are doing really well in AEO, meaning AI, their AI visibility, so their citations, their mentions in the AI engines, they're doing great.
• 5:47
  And companies that are struggling are maybe companies that haven't been investing as much in content, maybe they've been relying a lot on paid ads and haven't been focused on their organic presence, and those are the companies that we see struggling a bit more because really we've been sayingCurrency of AI search is content.
• 6:03
  And it's a little bit of a cliche we've heard over the years, like content is king. Everyone's heard that 100 times, but it's like it's so true with AI search.
• 6:10
  AI search is just hungry for content, and it's one of the reasons when y- you go into AI search and you start messing around in ChatGPT, a lot of the like citations come from Reddit and Quora and forums.
• 6:22
  And it's not because those m- have like necessarily the best content, but they actually have a ton of content.
• 6:27
  And so the AI engines just need content, and the brands that are creating great content are the ones that are getting found and visible in these AI engines.
• 6:35
  And so our job at Conductor is to help our customers navigate through this change.
• 6:39
  And so we launched Conductor AI over the summer, which is a whole suite of AI functionality to help our customers measure how they're doing in AI search, but also help them take action on that.
• 6:49
  So it's not just a visibility tool, it's a full end-to-end platform, so you can go from measurement to actually creating and optimizing content, and then measuring that presence.
• 6:57
  So it's the whole workflow, which folks are really excited about having that end-to-end solution. That's awesome. You know, you mentioned search teams are the best equipped to handle AEO.
• 7:06
  Is your-- I'm sort of curious, like is your customer changing? Is like the buyer and the end user, are these primarily f- you know, SEO people and teams that are the ones owning this in these orgs?
• 7:19
  Are there new roles popping up or other parts of the org that are working on this? Yes. It's been super interesting to see the evolution of sort of what's been happening.
• 7:29
  The SEO is, and AEO has never been more topical for executives. We have gotten more- Oh, interesting...
• 7:38
  phone calls from CEOs, CMOs, board members at like top enterprise brands being like, "We need to figure out something for this ASAP," because this is such an existential change in the market that's happening, and folks are going into ChatGPT and Perplexity, and they're not seeing their brand show up, and they need help.
• 7:57
  And so it's been really interesting to see how the SEO is no longer sort of SEO that we know in the past that's just sort of been pretty, a lot of times siloed, a lot of times tr- kind of struggled to get their web team and content team ar- around and to partner with them.
• 8:13
  But now it's like all hands on deck, this is an executive level conversation. Which I think is very telling around what's happening in these organizations. That's so fascinating.
• 8:22
  And I feel like when you step back, it makes sense because, you know, basically every marketing channel is really difficult right now. Like SEO is hard, you know? Paid is expensive.
• 8:32
  Social's ridiculously hard, you know, especially as like more of these platforms wanna keep traffic for themselves rather than send it back to your website.
• 8:40
  So the opportunity to be discovered, gain visibility in a new way is just like incredibly exciting. We haven't had that in a long time.
• 8:49
  So like if you look at the last, say, 10 to 15 years, like there's lots of opportunity across these channels. Each gets harder and harder over time as more companies leverage them.
• 8:58
  And now for the first time in a while, we have this new thing and basically everyone I talk to about AEO says, "Actually, it's great, too. Like the traffic we get is more qualified, the visits are...
• 9:08
  The analytics show that visitors are more engaged, they visit more pages at higher conversion rates, et cetera." So I find it to be like...
• 9:15
  I hadn't really considered that like execs are thinking about this in a way that like they're not thinking about like, you know, marketing, other marketing channels in that way. So that, that is really fascinating. Yeah.
• 9:24
  And to your point, too, like the...
• 9:26
  Although it's scary and we can talk about the kind of the modern metrics that folks would be looking at, but it is interesting, although a lot of folks are seeing t- traffic down 10, 20, maybe even 30% year over year, which is really scary as a marketer.
• 9:38
  That's like your bread and butter. If the top of the funnel is dropping that precipitously, you're like, "Oh my gosh, what do we do?"
• 9:44
  But the crazy thing is the new traffic that's coming in is more qualified, to your point. Like in my own attribution software, we're seeing four, five, six x times conversion on the traffic that is coming from the LLMs.
• 9:55
  That's wild. And although it's a small percentage, you can assume it's gonna grow over time. And so how do you start capturing that? Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating.
• 10:02
  You know, I was in Google Analytics recently trying to understand the trend of visits from LLMs, and it's small, right?
• 10:10
  But I was also recently listening to a webinar with Ethan Smith from an agency called Graphite, and he was saying in exploring analytics for some of their customers, they find that LLM traffic is significantly underreported because it's...
• 10:24
  For some people, yes, it's cited in Perplexity, they click it, they end up on your website. But for many others, they do a bunch of research in an LLM and then just type in a URL, right?
• 10:32
  Or they Google it, which is sort of interesting.
• 10:34
  So like in a weird way, like the attribution becomes probably a little more complex because it's not like this straight like Google it, click the link flow that we've all become accustomed to. Yeah. It's interesting.
• 10:47
  It's almost-- And what makes it hard, to your point, is it's not really... I mean, it can be looked at as a demand channel, but it is really a brand activation. Is your brand there when someone's searching?
• 10:57
  And that's what you're measuring.
• 10:58
  You wanna measure brand, essentially brand visibility, brand citations, and then you assume over time maybe, to your point, your direct traffic, you should start seeing your direct traffic go up because that will be an indicator that folks are- Yeah...
• 11:09
  seeing your brand and going. So to your point, it's not going to be a simple attribution story like with PPC or some of the other channels. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. I've been using Perplexity a ton. I just love Perplexity.
• 11:20
  I think it's just a such a great tool. And I was doing some research on actually a framework called the Four Fits framework. It's like a growth framework that Brian Balfour from Reforge has written about.
• 11:31
  And I was doing some research on it, and I found it to be very interesting because I know in my head that there is an original source, that this was a blog post he published a long time ago, and that's the original source.
• 11:40
  But also there's been a lot written about it by other people, sort of reacting to it, expanding on it, et cetera. And so the citations, there's like in my research probably 10 citations come up.
• 11:50
  One is the original, nine are mentions. And I was like, "Wow." That-- It just kinda like drove the point home to me that like, wow, these mentions are really important because of this idea like, you know, the...
• 12:01
  I guess this sort of is-- There's a nice tie-in to SEO here as well, like it was mentioned, it was linked. I know that's probably a little bit different right now, but it gets visibilityBecause you know what?
• 12:11
  Because there's, like, some consensus around it, like, that people... Like, the idea clearly hit, you know, which created other mentions and citations.
• 12:18
  And what I'm getting at is, like, there's sort of a different mentality around this.
• 12:21
  Like, I think, at least the way I used to think about it, is like you write a thing, you try to build links to it, because, like, that feeds the algorithm, which drives more traffic to the source.
• 12:28
  And now that just, like, doesn't really matter as much, or that's kind of how it seems. Like, the mentions actually now are equally as important as the original thing, because that is an avenue for discovery.
• 12:37
  Have I summarized that reasonably well? Yeah, it's a great way to think about it. No, absolutely. It's a great way to think about it.
• 12:43
  The world of where, of a piece of content end goal being clicks to a website is, it's rapid- that's changing. The goal really, to your point, is authority, brand visibility, and clicks will come with that.
• 12:55
  But your job and our job as marketers now is, how can we create not just a ton of content, but really valuable content, to your point, that has some unique POV that the LLMs re- deem authoritative on a topic, so it shows up, and then your brand is visible.
• 13:11
  I think what we're seeing from conductor is, especially when the AI engines first sort of came out, folks were like, "Oh my God, this is amazing. I can create 100 pieces of content in, like, 10 minutes." Yeah, yeah.
• 13:21
  And folks were just churning out really thin, really kind of crummy content, and maybe they could make that work with traditional search and show up and kind of jerry-rig things together to get a top spot on Google, but just how the engines understand content and semantic meaning and intent and authority is so different.
• 13:41
  And so as a brand, you have to think about building content that's really authoritative and has actual wisdom and value in it. So there's this interesting, I think, balance that brands have to navigate around.
• 13:52
  You have to create a lot of content, so you have authority around different topics that matter to your business, but the content also has to be good, and good means it has to have value, it has to have maybe unique research or quotes or some sort of, to your point, a, a POV that's a little bit different so it gets sourced.
• 14:09
  A generic piece of content isn't going to cut it anymore. Yeah.
• 14:13
  You know, one thing I hope, you know, speaking from a content marketing perspective, is that AO loosens the reins a bit on some of the SEO best practices that many of us have followed for years, because I feel like content marketers, sometimes they do it on their own, sometimes they get pressured to do it, is to, you know, optimize the piece for SEO, and there's this balance.
• 14:34
  You gotta weigh the balance of like, well, does that make the article better, or would it be better if we didn't do this? You know what I mean?
• 14:40
  [laughs] There's, like, a tension that I think a lot of content marketers feel, and my hope is that, to your point, a greater focus on quality, subject matter expertise, you know, unique angles, anecdotes, et cetera, is that's what's going to feed the LLMs more so than, you know, did you mention the head term
• 14:57
  twice in the first paragraph- 10 times... yeah, exactly, like, that type of thing, you know. Yeah, and I think there's just gonna be a different...
• 15:03
  I think there, that tension will exist, but it will exist a bit differently, because what is really important is more of the schema and the things on the back end.
• 15:12
  So the content team is still going to need to partner with their SEO team, but I think the partnership's gonna look a little bit different and as the, well, the content marketer changes and the SEO team changes, but we're certainly going to want, and you will want really your content to be structured really well, because ultimately at the end of the day, you want the AI engines to be able to read and understand your content, and the best way to do that is having it really well structured content.
• 15:34
  So I don't know if that tension will go away, but I think it will be a different type of partnership, not about kind of like, to your point, stuffing keywords in the opening headline. Totally. Totally.
• 15:45
  I think on the, for the SEO stuff, at least from my perspective, like, it, the playbook had become refined to the point where it was sort of predictable, and I feel like now we're in this, we're resetting expectations.
• 15:55
  You know? There's, like, a chance to, like, have a new conversation with your SEO or maybe now AO team about, like, what do we deem are best practices, and then you can look at the data and see how it works. Yeah.
• 16:05
  I think it's just more fun.
• 16:06
  It's a little bit, I think, like, my team's having a lot more fun in some ways, because we're experimenting and trying a lot of things, and things can get picked up, like, in AEO and GEO and AI engines really quickly.
• 16:19
  So you can tell really quickly if your, the strategy or the test you're running is working or not working, and it allows for more real-time feedback.
• 16:26
  And to see a new piece that you publish show up in an AI search the next day or within a few days is, like, pretty exciting for folks- That's awesome, yeah...
• 16:34
  and especially when we just talked about that's, like, a board level conversation. You know your CEO is gonna be searching that in two days, because- Yeah...
• 16:40
  they're always searching who's better, this company or this company or, you know. That's pretty cool. So at least for my team, I think it's infused the team with a lot of energy around this. That's awesome.
• 16:50
  You know, one of the things I was curious about from AO perspective that I really don't have a sense of yet is, do companies primarily want their brand mentioned?
• 16:59
  Like, is the content that they create primarily a means to help get the brand mentioned when the end users of LLMs are doing research on products?
• 17:09
  Like, so to give an example from, like, a couple of years ago, if you write a piece about email marketing best practices and you're trying to capture people who are searching for those best practices, and then there's, like, this chance while they're on the site to say, "Oh, we have an email tool that can help you execute on these things."
• 17:24
  Like, that feels a little bit different. Like, is the email marketing best practices piece still worth creating? Like, are... You know what I mean?
• 17:31
  Like, can you draw the, the line from, like, the LLM searcher looking for email best practices to signing up for a product, or is it really just kinda a means to an end, you know, where the end is trying to help get the brand get more visibility when searchers are looking directly for the tool itself.
• 17:44
  Yeah, I think it is more about visibility. If you think about that example, I think there's sort of twofold to it. It's like, one, who do you want answering that question?
• 17:53
  Let's say you are an email marketing software company. Who do you want answering the question about the 10 best email marketing softwares? Is it you? Is it a random Reddit user, or is it your competitor? And so- Yeah...
• 18:04
  one, it's like you wanna have, be the authoritative source on that, so you can control the narrative.Two, it does show...
• 18:11
  it does help having your brand there as a citation, because I think that says to them, "Oh, okay, like, this company is authoritative. They must know what they're talking about."
• 18:18
  Maybe they do wanna click in, and as we talked about earlier, maybe when they click in, they're more qualified than kind of your traditional search traffic. So that's, like, I think certainly one piece of it.
• 18:28
  And then I sort of touched on the, the second piece is really around just being an authority in the space is super important, and I think it's more of a brand play.
• 18:37
  So when you use an AEO software, like Conductor, when you look at kind of the dashboard of what you're measuring, you're certainly measuring AI referral traffic.
• 18:45
  You have your traditional metrics, like GSC impressions and all that stuff, but the new things folks are measuring are AI visibility. So when someone's searching, is your brand mentioned? Is it cited?
• 18:56
  Is it how are you doing compared to market share? So how are you doing in terms of your competition in the topics that you care about? What's the sentiment, or is it positive or negative?
• 19:06
  So there's sort of this new marketing metrics pack around just AI visibility and how you're doing there that I think is a little different than kind of that traditional traffic to click to conversion model. Yeah. Yeah.
• 19:16
  That makes a ton of sense.
• 19:18
  You know, I wanna make sure we touch on Conductor's marketing too, because, like, you're thinking about this gigantic macro shift and, like, how does Conductor meet the needs of customers which are ever-changing, but then also your own go-to market.
• 19:29
  Can you talk a little bit about the shifts that you've made and that Conductor's made in its own marketing, like specifically AEO and content?
• 19:36
  Those are the two I'm most curious about as, you know, kind of you're, you're experiencing the same shifts as your customer. Yeah, absolutely.
• 19:43
  So we made a big decision at the beginning of this year to make a bet, and we said, "Let's take half of our kind of traditional demand dollars, direct response, like again, dollar in, dollar out, or dollar in, dollar out marketing," and said, "Let's invest it in content."
• 19:58
  We know that we need to be creating, again, not just, like, more content, but more high quality content, and we also need to be doing things like more influencer, social. We need to be...
• 20:09
  have a presence on Reddit and other sort of forums and things to help influence our presence in the LLMs.
• 20:14
  And so we made this big investment to n-not only invest more in content, but also the content team, so the staff around content, and we've been really excited about it.
• 20:25
  We've seen, using our own software, Conductor, seen really big strides in terms of our AI visibility over the last two quarters going up, up and up. So we're starting to see this investment pay off.
• 20:37
  Content is generally a long kind of f- investment, and so it can be kind of scary to say, "Let's take these dollars that we know work in these channels and invest it in something that's maybe a little longer term," especially when everything in marketing feels really short term.
• 20:50
  It's like- Yeah... we need more leads. Your sales team's always like, "We need more leads. Where are the MQLs?" And we get...
• 20:54
  We actually had amazing alignment from our head of sales, when he was like, "I'm 100% on board with this investment. I get it.
• 21:01
  My MQL number might go down," but we're also seeing now, even though MQLs have gone down, the MQL to SQL has... conversion has increased.
• 21:08
  So the content that we're creating and the folks that are coming in, again, to what we spoke about earlier, are more qualified than ever.
• 21:14
  And so we're really excited about this investment, and hopefully we see, going into next year, we can kind of continue on this trend. It actually warms my heart [laughs] to hear you talk about an investment in content.
• 21:24
  You know, the content marketers have been through a rough patch here. [laughs] And there's... The skepticism around it has been introduced, I think, for the first time over the last, you could call it two years. And now
• 21:37
  I do feel that sort of the clouds are clearing a bit. It's, like, more clear, I think, what, like, a, what a B2B SaaS go-to market motion should look like, and content remains a very important part of that.
• 21:48
  So just on a personal level, that makes me happy. Absolutely. And I talk to so many marketers, and they're at big brands, and they're like, "Oh, we have a three-person content team." And you're like, "How? That's crazy."
• 21:57
  But it is.
• 21:58
  It's hard to get investment for something when it's hard to show the ROI, it's hard to show the attribution, but when you really think about it, content's at the core of every marketing channel, marketing activation you do.
• 22:09
  And so if you're not creating enough content, you're not only kind of starving your AI and search visibility and everything we've talked about, but all your other channels suffer.
• 22:18
  What are you putting behind your paid ads? You know, like, there's this whole ecosystem that content fuels, and having really good content is not just important for AI visibility, it's for your whole marketing funnel.
• 22:29
  And so again, really bullish, and obviously we're biased, we're a content marketing company, but, you know, as a marketing org, it, it does feel risky as a marketing leader and a little nerve-wracking to say, "Okay, I'm going to cut leads, and hopefully the revenue doesn't fall, and we can make it up with conversion, and we get increased buyers," and we've seen that.
• 22:46
  So it's been an experiment that's going really well for us. That's awesome. You know, I gotta think there's other marketing leaders out there kinda in the same shoes as you were.
• 22:55
  Like, if you just keep doing the same old things, like, it'll work, but it's gonna decay and decay and decay, and it's like now feels like a really good time for a bold bet. And also I appreciate that you're- Yeah...
• 23:03
  practicing what you preach also.
• 23:05
  Like, I worked for a content agency, this is going back probably like seven or eight years now, and we didn't do content, and like, so we were always getting asked by customers and prospects, "Well, but, like, why don't you do it?"
• 23:13
  [laughs] So eventually we're like, "Okay, we have to, because we have to show that this works. We have to prove that it works."
• 23:18
  And we want our customers, especially when you're marketing to marketers, I feel like this is very important. They wanna see you doing the thing that you are suggesting that they do.
• 23:25
  And then when you can report back, like, "Actually it's going well. You know, we can speak to our experience.
• 23:29
  We have some data points we can talk through," like, it bolsters the confidence in your customers in your ability to help them, you know, get whatever they're trying to get. Yeah, absolutely.
• 23:37
  And for our content team it's also fun. Again, it gives them some infusion of energy as well, because now they're the experts, you know?
• 23:43
  They are the ones that when we are talking to customers, now sales folks wanna bring our content team on the calls and say, "Look at what we're doing. Look at our AI visibility.
• 23:52
  Look at how well Conductor is doing over the last year." And so that's really fun for them too to be sort of the example in their own case study, which- Yeah... isn't always the case. That's awesome.
• 24:02
  You know, related to Conductor's go-to-market, there was another question I wanted to ask you about the enterprise thing. So Conductor primarily is enterprise, is that right? But there is a PLG motion as well.
• 24:11
  I find this to be very interesting, because, you know, I feel like for a while there was this... there's sort of a spectrum of, like, PLG to enterprise, and companies sort of put themselves on one side or the other.
• 24:21
  And then over the years we've seen-You know, companies get closer. Like they start PLG, but then they add sales later. They start with sales side, then they add PLG later.
• 24:28
  I feel like AI's kind of blown this up to some degree because there's so many new tools and new types of tools out there, like people want to be able to use them.
• 24:37
  Like, I don't know how many hours people are using of their day tinkering. Like, for myself, it's quite a bit.
• 24:42
  Like, I'm playing with new tools a lot because I'm trying to understand, like, what are the capabilities of these tools? Like, what could I potentially do now that just wasn't even an option previously?
• 24:51
  Like, I don't wanna go through a long sales process just to get my hands on the tool so I can test it out a little bit. And so Conductor n- is doing this, right?
• 24:59
  Like, you're allowing people to get their hands on something immediately, even if the end goal from your perspective is, like, we wanna sell into the team, sell into the enterprise. Yeah, absolutely.
• 25:09
  We have had a enterprise motion for years, an amazing sales team, but to your point, the preference of how folks wanna buy and experience software has changed. Folks are doing a lot more tinkering. You're using...
• 25:23
  You're build vibe coding on the weekends. You're doing all this stuff. And so there's definitely an appetite for folks to be able to test and try software and comp- compare things in more real time.
• 25:33
  So we launched our trial about a year ago, and it's been amazing in terms of the ability for the trial to not cannibalize sales, but really assist our sales team along the way, and help folks get more time to value quicker, get their hands on the product, ask better, deeper questions through the sales cycle.
• 25:51
  And so it's been fantastic. And then the trial also does make it more accessible for folks that maybe aren't in the enterprise, but do wanna start with a more sort of accessible package.
• 25:59
  We certainly have options there, too. And so for us, it's been a really great learning for us in terms of our sales process, and then for our product team, it gives them a lot more...
• 26:09
  They're able to get a lot of real-time feedback with the trial, so they're able to get even closer and closer to the end user, which is fantastic as well. So there's been a lot of benefits for us as a business. Yes.
• 26:18
  Y- you had mentioned sales earlier, too. Like, in terms of, like, sales marketing alignment, this feels like a very important time to be on the same page as your sales team.
• 26:26
  You know, 'cause it's so important to understand, like, w- what are you seeing? What are people saying when you're on calls with them?
• 26:30
  And, like, maybe you can get that through Gong or whatever, but feel like actually sitting down with folks from the sales team and having that conversation could be so... And vice versa, too. You know?
• 26:39
  Like, as the marketing team is rethinking the strategy, I feel like it's, uh, to your point, very important to keep sales informed about what you're doing, why you're doing it, how you're measuring it, so th- because they're gonna see the trickle-down of that at some point, hopefully.
• 26:53
  Hopefully in a good way. Absolutely. The last thing you want as a marketing leader is for your head of sales to be like, "What's going on? What the heck?"
• 26:58
  And not be aligned when you made this investment decision around purposely knowing that you're gonna have less MQLs and leads coming in.
• 27:05
  And so the communication and the alignment is so important, and we've been fortunate at Conductor, I think just for, uh, the culture of the company is really collaborative, so the r- relationship between sales and marketing is really easy.
• 27:16
  It's, again, I think comes from, like, the culture of the business. But I know that's certainly not the case for most, every company, let alone most companies.
• 27:24
  But it's, I think it's really important to have that connection point with folks.
• 27:27
  At the end of the day, you're all responsible for revenue, and so I think a lot of marketers may think that, "Oh, well, I deliver my leads. Like, I'm done here."
• 27:34
  But it's really, like, at the end of the day, we're all responsible for revenue of the business.
• 27:38
  And as a marketing leader, it's something that I spend a lot of time looking at and thinking about, and equally my head of sales thinks about the top of the funnel. So it's very important. Yeah, yeah.
• 27:46
  Actually, that [laughs] made me think of one other question, which is your title is VP of Marketing and Co-head of Revenue. That... S- I assume there's another co-head. Is that someone from sales? Yep, absolutely. Yeah.
• 27:55
  That's awesome. Really cool. Lindsay, thank you so much for making time to chat. Will you plug Conductor? You know, like, give us a quick rundown of the tools and why people should check it out. Yeah.
• 28:04
  Conductor is an enterprise AEO platform. As mentioned, we've been around for 10 plus years, meaning we have 10 years of experience and data behind our product.
• 28:13
  We enable enterprise teams to measure their AI visibility along with their traditional search metrics, and then also create and optimize content so they can get found. And start their Conductor free trial.
• 28:24
  I'm also happy to connect with folks. We were at an event this week, a big content conference, and there were so many questions about content and what folks should be doing with AEO.
• 28:34
  And so I know it's a little overwhelming, but I think if folks do need help, we're always here.
• 28:39
  We have some amazing experts in-house, and we have a ton of webinar content and things like that if folk- if folks need, feel like they need help, because this journey is definitely, it's definitely a transition for folks.
• 28:48
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