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AI Optimizes What Exists, but Only Humans Can Imagine What’s Missing · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:15
  Matt Heinz: All right.
• 0:15
  Welcome to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 0:18
  We are recording here live on the show floor.
• 0:20
  We're back in the corner by Flow TV here, Chris.
• 0:23
  It's day two of the Webflow Conference.
• 0:26
  Yesterday was a whirlwind.
• 0:28
  Was excited to have you on a panel with CMOs, Chris, that we had yesterday.
• 0:33
  It was a good day.
• 0:34
  Chris Gaebler: It was a great day.
• 0:35
  Yeah, very excited to be here with you.
• 0:36
  That was a great panel.
• 0:37
  And I'm feeling the flow.
• 0:39
  Matt Heinz: Awesome.
• 0:40
  So we got Chris Gaebler here on this episode, chief marketing officer
• 0:43
  for Protegrity, Boston native.
• 0:46
  We're gonna get into — you mentioned, and somewhere I saw that you enjoy cooking.
• 0:49
  We're gonna get into that in a minute.
• 0:51
  And, like, maybe we start with just like, you know, having to balance
• 0:54
  everything we do in life, right?
• 0:56
  We're at this conference, but because you're local, you live here, you got kids
• 1:00
  starting school this week, you're also trying to run marketing a large company,
• 1:03
  you're at this conference, what are some of your strategies for balancing all that?
• 1:08
  Chris Gaebler: You know, you used this term, productivity something, where you
• 1:15
  look at different apps, and I know the community talks a lot about how to stay
• 1:18
  productive, and I would say I am, like, another devotee of all those tools.
• 1:24
  I, you know, use a productivity app called Todoist, but I've gone through a number.
• 1:30
  But I really do try to sort of, like, map out my time during
• 1:34
  the week because intentionally I wanna spend time with my kids.
• 1:38
  Intentionally I wanna spend time with different people at work,
• 1:40
  not just, you know, the couple that are easier to work with.
• 1:43
  And so I would say some of that sort of, like, setting the week ahead and
• 1:47
  planning to have those moments is important, and then obviously marketing
• 1:51
  is a lot of chaos, sales is a lot of chaos, you have to plan for that as well.
• 1:55
  But I really do think it's important to make sure you get
• 1:58
  time to restore, and time to step out to a conference and learn.
• 2:04
  Like, you know, some of these things are not mandatory, but
• 2:06
  they are career accelerating.
• 2:08
  And so intentionality is a big part of it.
• 2:11
  Matt Heinz: Well, I think the more you can be intentional about those
• 2:13
  things, the more you can take advantage of serendipity, right?
• 2:16
  'Cause you start your day with a plan for what you think
• 2:18
  you wanna do and get happen.
• 2:19
  And then, you know, as the great poet laureate of our time, Mike
• 2:22
  Tyson, said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
• 2:24
  Chris Gaebler: Amen.
• 2:25
  Matt Heinz: And so sometimes it isn't a punch in the mouth, but
• 2:27
  it's a real legit opportunity.
• 2:29
  So if you go in with a plan and know what you need to get done, you can better
• 2:33
  take advantage of those opportunities which sometimes might be, like, oh, an
• 2:36
  opportunity at work, sometimes might be a last minute request to drive your
• 2:39
  kids to the wrestling meet, right?
• 2:41
  It could be anything.
• 2:42
  Chris Gaebler: Absolutely.
• 2:43
  And, you know, here's an anecdote.
• 2:45
  Three months ago my daughter got her driver's license, but it was,
• 2:50
  like, a permit where she's not allowed to drive her friends yet.
• 2:55
  And the second day after she got her permit, she drove her friends and got
• 3:00
  busted by Lieutenant Dan, who I got a call from as he pulled her over.
• 3:05
  And so she lost her license for the summer right after she got it.
• 3:08
  Which meant I had to drive her out to her job, which is at a farm outside of Boston.
• 3:12
  And so every day I had to drive her back and forth.
• 3:16
  Lo and behold, we had a lot of car time, and we caught up on a bunch of things.
• 3:19
  It was awesome.
• 3:20
  And I was, you know, frustrated at the beginning, but it was a terrific moment.
• 3:24
  Now, she learned her lesson by Lieutenant Dan.
• 3:28
  And, but I got a lot more time with her, and I think those kinds of things
• 3:30
  present themselves at work and, you know.
• 3:32
  Matt Heinz: Was the officer's name literally Dan?
• 3:34
  Please tell me it was.
• 3:34
  Chris Gaebler: It was.
• 3:35
  Matt Heinz: That's awesome.
• 3:36
  Chris Gaebler: My backup, Dan.
• 3:36
  Matt Heinz: All right, we're gonna start, attempt to get this back on rails because
• 3:39
  we don't have a ton of time here with you.
• 3:41
  On our panel yesterday, you talked a lot about what it means to stay human, and our
• 3:45
  panel yesterday was basically building a marketing team and managing a marketing
• 3:50
  team in the age of AI, when we're asking AI to do more and more of the work.
• 3:53
  And one line you used, you said that, "AI can optimize what exists, but only
• 3:56
  humans can imagine what's missing." Can you unpack that a little bit?
• 4:00
  Chris Gaebler: I think it's a uniquely human thing to be creative,
• 4:04
  to use our right brains, and I think it's important to optimize
• 4:07
  AI for what it's really good for.
• 4:08
  But, like, we are the ones who are, you know, imagining
• 4:11
  new configurations of things.
• 4:13
  And, you know, from a marketing or sales perspective, I think one way
• 4:16
  to do that is, like, what is this human being who's buying our stuff
• 4:21
  or choosing not to buy it, what are they, you know, struggling with?
• 4:24
  And you have to have empathy and understand what that means and be
• 4:28
  creative in designing a new approach to them because AI can help you optimize
• 4:33
  a campaign that is mostly working, but it can't help imagine what's not.
• 4:37
  So I think about this a lot with product repositioning.
• 4:41
  It's easy to build on momentum of a product that's working, but in
• 4:45
  B2B, a lot of products get stale.
• 4:48
  And so you have to reimagine what's happening in the future,
• 4:51
  and a lot of that's because of buyer demand is changing.
• 4:53
  And I think it's a human skill to be able to sort of anticipate what's
• 4:59
  not on the page versus optimize what has already been written.
• 5:03
  Matt Heinz: I love that.
• 5:03
  We're here on the floor of the Webflow Conference, special episode of Sales
• 5:07
  Pipeline Radio with Chris Gaebler.
• 5:08
  He's the CMO at Protegrity.
• 5:12
  Boston native, longtime cybersecurity CMO.
• 5:16
  You've been in a number of cybersecurity companies, been in
• 5:17
  this industry for a long time.
• 5:19
  How does the sort of regulatory elements of cybersecurity impact how you can
• 5:27
  leverage AI internally and externally?
• 5:29
  Chris Gaebler: Well, you know, compliance and regulations usually
• 5:32
  don't catch up to where technology is.
• 5:35
  So, you know, the buyers in our industry who are only focused on
• 5:38
  compliance are usually not the leaders.
• 5:41
  But there is an emerging recognition that AI is gonna change what
• 5:45
  is needed to be protected.
• 5:47
  Protegrity in particular was founded to help people's data be private.
• 5:51
  So if your medical record, records or financial records are out there
• 5:55
  in the wild, it's a bad thing.
• 5:56
  So Protegrity was designed to do that.
• 5:58
  But with AI, there's a new attack vector.
• 6:02
  And we need to use AI to help prevent, you know, those kinds of new attacks
• 6:07
  in addition to the humans, you know, on the security team side, who are the real
• 6:12
  heroes in the industry, the ones who are protecting all of our data and keeping,
• 6:15
  you know, the economic machine running.
• 6:18
  Matt Heinz: You talked about this AI friction tax.
• 6:22
  Talk about that as a marketing play.
• 6:24
  You know, how, why did you name that problem and sort of how
• 6:26
  should people be thinking about it?
• 6:27
  Chris Gaebler: I'm glad you picked up on that.
• 6:28
  So AI has a tax that lots of data that you would want to use for your analytics isn't
• 6:33
  available because security teams will lock it down because they're not sure how
• 6:37
  it'll be used, so there's a tax in use.
• 6:40
  If you can make data more available, it's good.
• 6:42
  I think the same thing can be applied to, I saw it here at the conference
• 6:45
  yesterday, someone said a creativity tax, which is like if you can't experiment
• 6:51
  because your bosses are keeping you from taking risks, you're not allowed
• 6:55
  to explore new ways to do things.
• 6:59
  So I think this idea of examining where the friction is in AI and then, you
• 7:04
  know, really digging into removing that friction— that tax is keeping a company
• 7:09
  from going forward, and it's keeping marketers and salespeople from doing
• 7:13
  better things if it goes under examined.
• 7:15
  Matt Heinz: Well, I found this just even in my own work, you know, using
• 7:17
  Claude to sort of help me address issues that I have in our business,
• 7:21
  helping me to automate things.
• 7:22
  Like we tend to think that AI is just this, you know, easy button we just press,
• 7:25
  and even if the outcome is where you wanna go, sometimes getting there is complex.
• 7:30
  Like we're solving complex problems, right?
• 7:32
  And so I think leaning into things that are hard is still part of what we have
• 7:36
  to have as a mentality to make that work.
• 7:37
  Chris Gaebler: Oh, I think absolutely.
• 7:38
  I think when you take your foot off the gas and think that your job's gonna get
• 7:43
  easier, your job becomes less relevant.
• 7:45
  The marketers or anyone who uses a tool just to sort of stop thinking
• 7:49
  hard and leaning in are the ones to me who are more at career risk.
• 7:54
  Those who are leaning in and looking for new ways to add value with AI,
• 7:57
  I think that they're accelerating.
• 8:00
  Matt Heinz: There's been a, I wouldn't call it a movement, but there's a
• 8:04
  lot of companies that are asking the CMO to report into the CRO now.
• 8:09
  And I've even seen some that say that, you know, maybe it's the CEO that should be
• 8:14
  owning go-to-market in an organization.
• 8:17
  I have a different point of view.
• 8:18
  I think that marketing is a verb, as we talked about on the panel
• 8:21
  yesterday, and if marketing is a verb, then the chief marketing
• 8:24
  officer's role is really the market.
• 8:26
  So whether you call that person a chief market officer, or whether you simply say,
• 8:30
  like, you know, don't start your board slides with how many leads you generated,
• 8:33
  start with an update on the market, 'cause the market is the basis for all of this.
• 8:37
  I know you've talked about this quite a bit as well, so would
• 8:39
  love to get your perspective.
• 8:41
  Chris Gaebler: You've been a real motivator to CMOs to think that way,
• 8:44
  and I really do appreciate that, and I think other people need to pay attention.
• 8:48
  I think in order to be the chief market officer and have an equal
• 8:53
  seat at the strategic table with the CEO and CFO, you have to earn it.
• 8:58
  Everybody has to earn it.
• 8:59
  And so I think the call to marketers is that you have to
• 9:03
  take on that responsibility.
• 9:04
  To own a market means you really own the customers.
• 9:07
  Sometimes I envy when I come to marketing conferences that the
• 9:10
  people they market to are other CMOs.
• 9:13
  The people I market to are really technical CISOs.
• 9:16
  But to own that market means to really understand them, but I have to do it.
• 9:20
  And so I think in order to earn, to do that, but I think you should aspire to
• 9:25
  earn it, because no one else is going to think about the market the way marketers
• 9:29
  do, and that value, I think, is the one that propels successful companies forward.
• 9:34
  Matt Heinz: Now, you mentioned that, you know, the marketing leader can
• 9:37
  own that definition of the market, but you've also said that brands
• 9:40
  are partly owned by customers.
• 9:43
  It's their impression of your solution and company that creates the real brand.
• 9:47
  And so we have sometimes this illusion of control around a brand
• 9:51
  and around how we wanna position things, and we sort of obsess about
• 9:55
  the image and everything else.
• 9:57
  But if it's perceived differently by the customer, how do you manage that
• 10:01
  when you don't have that full control?
• 10:03
  Chris Gaebler: I think you have to, what is the serenity prayer?
• 10:06
  Control the things, you know, you can.
• 10:08
  Have the wisdom to know the difference and when you can't.
• 10:11
  I think when the market doesn't perceive your brand the way
• 10:15
  you want it to, they're right.
• 10:17
  And you have to figure out, how do you address that?
• 10:20
  Usually, it's a credibility and a trust gap.
• 10:23
  You haven't delivered the product or the value that you think you
• 10:25
  had, and you can't just say it.
• 10:26
  There's no billboard that papers over a poorly delivered solution.
• 10:31
  But I do think as a marketer, you can understand that gap and really implore
• 10:35
  your company to go help connect to it.
• 10:38
  And I think it's also good to understand, if you persuade real customers, then there
• 10:44
  is power in that emotional engagement.
• 10:47
  And so I think the market owning your brand is okay, but you're
• 10:50
  always the one who wants to steward it to be more interesting.
• 10:54
  Matt Heinz: Tell me about the Shooting Stars Foundation.
• 10:57
  Chris Gaebler: So this was founded about 10 years ago by a woman I used to
• 10:59
  work with at a company called NetScout.
• 11:01
  She's still on the IT team there, but she and her son founded an organization
• 11:05
  where they believe that STEM education could be a catalyst for breaking
• 11:11
  generational poverty, mostly in India.
• 11:13
  They also do programs in the United States.
• 11:15
  And so she is just a phenomenal person.
• 11:18
  I'm so impressed by her just power to sort of transform the world.
• 11:22
  And the organization has taken, you know, more than 3,000 mostly young
• 11:27
  women, also some young men in India, given them a full college education, and
• 11:32
  literally the transformation in their family and whole villages is amazing.
• 11:38
  And why'd she ask me?
• 11:41
  She likes the little marketing help I can give.
• 11:43
  And sometimes I help, and sometimes I think, like, I'm
• 11:45
  just getting out of her way.
• 11:47
  Matt Heinz: No, I love that.
• 11:48
  I think I've seen, my wife's a teacher back in Seattle.
• 11:50
  I've seen the impact that STEM has, not just in sort of, you know, just
• 11:54
  to helping kids get more skills that they can then take sort of into
• 11:58
  their career, but also confidence.
• 11:59
  Confidence that they're learning things and can do that, and that confidence.
• 12:03
  And my wife's a reading specialist, and she said just literacy.
• 12:06
  Just the confidence in being able to read unlocks so much in kids.
• 12:10
  Chris Gaebler: Oh, she is, she's doing the real work of, you know, driving
• 12:14
  our society forward, as are you, but she's really having an impact.
• 12:18
  Matt Heinz: So I'll tell this story.
• 12:19
  We were at dinner once, and we had a double date with some friends,
• 12:21
  and I'm looking around the table.
• 12:22
  So there's my wife, she's a teacher, right?
• 12:24
  She's literally sort of raising the next leaders of our society.
• 12:27
  And then across from her is her best friend, who's a
• 12:30
  nuclear radiologist, right?
• 12:32
  Saving people's lives.
• 12:33
  And her fiancé at the time, in the Marines, literally protecting our freedom.
• 12:38
  I'm sitting here convincing people to buy things they may or may not
• 12:41
  know that they want to buy, right?
• 12:42
  And so I think of, like, the role of the marketer compared to the people doing
• 12:46
  the real work in society, I don't know.
• 12:49
  It's an interesting balance.
• 12:49
  Chris Gaebler: It is a balance.
• 12:51
  I don't know how much time we have, but I wanted to take one moment, on the heels
• 12:55
  of Dolly Parton passing away last week.
• 12:57
  Gloria Steinem passed away yesterday, and in my household, she was a real icon.
• 13:02
  And from a, like, a marketing perspective, it's interesting.
• 13:04
  Her brand of changing people's perception of the potential and
• 13:08
  power of women was phenomenal.
• 13:10
  And to her end, she was transforming the way we all sort of perceive that.
• 13:13
  Our industry has many incredible women in it, and, you know, I just
• 13:17
  wanted to say, you know, rest in peace, Gloria Steinem, and also
• 13:20
  thank you for the gift you gave, too.
• 13:22
  I have daughters, and I'm glad the world is better because of that.
• 13:25
  Matt Heinz: Well, and, you know, when you lose someone like that, it's a definite
• 13:29
  loss, but it also, there's a lot of people that didn't know her, and a lot of young
• 13:34
  people that didn't know the role that she played, and that, you know, unfortunately,
• 13:38
  when someone passes, you get the obituaries, you get the memorials, you get
• 13:41
  the, you know, here's the impact they had.
• 13:43
  And I, I'm hopeful that that will inspire a new—
• 13:48
  Chris Gaebler: I really hope it works.
• 13:50
  'Cause we need it.
• 13:50
  Matt Heinz: We need it, we need an ongoing— Okay, last question for you.
• 13:52
  You mentioned in your bio on Protegrity that you love family
• 13:56
  time, travel, and cooking.
• 13:56
  What do you cook?
• 13:58
  Chris Gaebler: So you know, I started grilling as, you know, lots of men do.
• 14:01
  And I know your advanced skills on grilling.
• 14:03
  I pay attention a lot to your recipe talk on that.
• 14:07
  But I spend a lot more time looking into Mediterranean cooking.
• 14:09
  You know, I know it's healthy.
• 14:10
  And, you know, as you age, you gotta deal with the Mediterranean.
• 14:13
  And I love it, so I spend a lot of time in Israel with the cybersecurity companies,
• 14:16
  and I really just love their food.
• 14:18
  So I try and cook some of that.
• 14:19
  Matt Heinz: That's awesome.
• 14:20
  I love, I'm definitely an amateur.
• 14:23
  Sometimes I call myself an adequate cook, not even an amateur.
• 14:25
  Chris Gaebler: Ah, you got skill.
• 14:26
  Matt Heinz: Well, but it's fun, 'cause I mean, not only do you get
• 14:28
  to feed the people you love, but also, like at our house, it becomes
• 14:31
  sort of a family time, right?
• 14:32
  Not just the meal, but also the process of making it.
• 14:35
  So Chris Gaebler, thanks so much for joining us today on this episode.
• 14:38
  Chris Gaebler: Matt, great to be here.
• 14:38
  Thank you so much.
• 14:39
  Matt Heinz: Take care.