Latest / The Prompt / Ep. 582 | AI SDRs are here: How CMOs are putting AI agents on the front lines of pipeline

Transcript

Ep. 582 | AI SDRs are here: How CMOs are putting AI agents on the front lines of pipeline · The Prompt

• 0:01
  This is on base your one stop shop for solving your most
• 0:04
  pressing B2B go to market challenges.
• 0:07
  Each week, host Chris Moody and Paul Gibson talk to sales and
• 0:09
  marketing leaders to get you in depth insights and creative
• 0:12
  strategies to set your revenue teams up for success.
• 0:18
  Hey everyone, welcome back to the Home Based Podcast.
• 0:20
  I'm your host Chris Moody today. I'm very excited to have.
• 0:24
  Mara. Rivera with us to talk about the
• 0:26
  rise of AISD. R Agents Mara, thanks for
• 0:29
  joining us today and welcome to the show.
• 0:31
  Chris, thanks for having me. Big fans of Demand Base, so it's
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  fun to be here. Yeah, great to be with you.
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  Too, We're big fans of qualified and you know, we could.
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  Have talked. The whole time without hitting
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  the record button about the things we're seeing so we will
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  get. To that but the.
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  Question I like to start with every single time is you telling
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  us a little bit about your journey.
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  So what led you to what you're doing today?
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  Yeah, it's a great question. I'm like how long?
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  How long do we have? I'll give you the the shortened
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  version, which is I started my career at Salesforce and I
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  worked for who is now the CEO of qualified.
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  So I was working for him. He was the CMO of Salesforce
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  alongside a couple other execs at Salesforce.
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  We were there for a while. They left to start their next
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  gig. This survey platform called Get
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  Feedback, which was later acquired by SurveyMonkey.
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  I followed them there and LED product marketing there.
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  And then about 7 years ago they broke off to start their next
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  venture, which was qualified. And Craig, our CEO called me and
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  he said like, hey, do you want to join a startup, a real
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  startup? Like when I joined get feedback,
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  it was more people, but qualified at the time was no
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  revenue, no customers. We had some slide deck of our
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  product vision, but it wasn't much more than that.
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  And when he pitched me on the vision, which is like, how can
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  we help marketers have better visibility into their website?
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  How can we help them have more control over their pipeline
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  number? That stuck with me as a so I
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  joined qualified early days, which is really fun.
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  It's always funny like it you have rose colored glasses
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  looking back, but I'm like, gosh, that was a really fun ride
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  at the beginning because we were just with a bunch of people who
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  we really trusted trying to build a product we were really
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  excited about. And along the way I between
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  starting my career and where I am today, I have three young
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  kids. So that's always like fun and
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  chaotic. And Chris, I know you have 4
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  kids, so you're in the same boat.
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  And so I've been kind of like building my family and building
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  my career. And I'm, I'm super, super proud
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  to be leading the marketing efforts at qualified.
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  I'm really proud of the customers and the product we've
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  built and the team we've built. Just really proud.
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  So it's it's been a fun, busy, chaotic couple years to get
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  here, but it's awesome. That's incredible, especially
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  the three kids. I mean we.
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  Both have two year olds, so the chaos.
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  And the busyness. That you describe.
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  Is very real. There's no free time.
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  Ever. So it's.
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  Great to see you crushing it at work in addition to on the home
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  front. So awesome job there.
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  Oh, thank you. Work's the easy part.
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  Sometimes I like I'm. Really compared?
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  To my household. So I'm like, oh, this is
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  manageable. Yeah, yeah, we get tears almost
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  every day from someone, so yeah, sometimes me.
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  It's OK. That's like.
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  It's OK. We're OK.
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  We talked about the shift. So in in B to B, there's always
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  new stuff on the horizon and things that are changing.
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  When you think about everything that's happening today and B to
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  B go to market, what is making AI agents feel like something
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  that's more than just another trend that we should all pay
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  attention to? Yeah.
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  I mean, I think we look back at 2023-2024 and there was all of
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  this AI news and it was all about like, what are the hot new
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  tools I can use? And I think as marketers, we
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  went a little crazy buying a bunch of AI tech and exploring
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  AI tech. But 2025, I think has been this
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  real fundamental shift and that it's not a fad.
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  Agents are here. They're transforming how we go
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  to market. We need to have a mindset shift,
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  which is how are we bringing agents onto our team and not
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  just like plugging them into roles that humans used to do,
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  but also rethinking the go to market motion and how we how we
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  kind of weave them into our work flows.
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  And so I think 2025 has been a year of like not just bringing
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  on AI tools, but bringing agents on, treating them as teammates,
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  thinking about how we operationalize agents and
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  continue to coach them and maintain them and make them
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  successful. Also thinking about agent
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  orchestration. How do we make sure that the
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  agents on your different kind of teams are all working together?
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  And I think going into 2026, we're all going to be much more
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  confident about kind of this business transformation that's
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  happening. I think 2024 was a bit of a
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  frenzy and we were kind of overwhelmed and looking over our
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  shoulder. In 2025, we're seeing these
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  marketers emerge who are confident in their agentic
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  strategies. With that being said, we're
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  always learning and evolving. Like we have to keep our finger
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  on the pulse of new tech that's coming out.
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  We were just looking at like Chat GPTS, you know, new Atlas
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  browser and how is that going to affect how we go to market and
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  what it's all the new technology that's coming out.
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  So kind of keeping us on our toes.
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  But the agent transformation is here and it's real.
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  And I'm excited to see what 2026 brings in terms of like having
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  real agents in production helping you hit your numbers
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  from a marketing perspective. Well.
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  Put helping you hit your numbers from a marketing perspective,
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  that's a good. Good call.
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  Out there, I like that one a lot, and I know that you're big
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  on a crawl, walk, run, fly framework.
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  So a lot of us talk about. Crawl, walk, run.
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  Let's. Talk about.
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  That as it pertains to. A ISDRS so for those.
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  Who have not been in sales development.
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  I would say the most difficult function in the entire business.
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  You get constantly rejected. You're trying to create
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  interest, find interest, curate interest from everyone
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  constantly told no and having to adjust and and find other ways
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  to have the conversation so. What does the crawl walk?
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  Run fly framework look like as we think about rolling out.
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  A ISDRS. Yeah.
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  I mean, so like First off, just defining an AISDR agent, which
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  is like we kind of talk about inbound AISDRS and outbound
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  AISDR. So it qualified, we're focused on the inbound funnel.
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  So hey, marketers, you're doing all this stuff to drive demand,
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  you're driving traffic to your website.
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  You are putting kind of top of funnel people into old school
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  marketing automation nurture, hoping something comes out the
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  other end. And then folks who are hand
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  raisers, they're high intent. You send them to an SDR to human
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  sales development Rep. I think when we first launched
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  our AISDR agent, we call her Piper because she generates
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  pipeline, but all of our customers like Demand Base, they
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  kind of renamed their agent to what matches your brand the
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  most. We were really scared to say
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  like the the human SDR role is going away.
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  I think people were very protective of that role.
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  We didn't want to offend anybody when we first did that launch,
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  but I think now in 2025, we realize, hey, we're asking a lot
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  of these human SDRS. We're asking them to be super
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  informed about your product, to work 24/7, to get back to every
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  inbound lead as quickly as possible, work across all of
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  these channels. And that was really a role that
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  we saw that's right for automation, that's right for an
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  agent to really step in and do that.
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  So when we launched Piper, that's kind of where she
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  started, which is how can I alleviate some of the pain of
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  human SDRS and get buyers into the pipeline funnel as quickly
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  as possible? And since launching, we've seen
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  a ton of customers adopt and kind of put this into
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  production. But what a lot of customers will
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  say to us is like, this sounds great.
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  I love the promise of an agent taking over the workload of my
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  human SDR's so that I can redeploy those humans to do
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  other things. They can do outbound
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  prospecting, they can get promoted to be an AE, they can
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  do higher value tasks, but they'll say to me like, but more
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  I'm, you know, how do I have change management?
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  How do I roll them into to my team?
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  How do I make it successful? And my biggest piece of advice
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  is it's not just flip a switch and you don't have human SDR's
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  anymore and you have an AI SDR, you have to crawl, walk, run,
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  fly as we say. So what that means is like when
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  it becomes crawling, you're like, OK, how can I use an AISDR
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  to augment my humans? Maybe you have an AISDR work
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  your website at night or on weekends or do e-mail follow up
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  with leads that aren't really like ready to buy just yet, but
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  just to keep them warm. That's kind of the crawl phase.
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  So how do you make sure you're never missing an inbound lead?
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  Then as we talk, start about walking.
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  It's how do you use an agent to kind of work the front lines?
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  So if somebody comes to your website and agent can greet them
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  instead of a human or the agent can do the initial e-mail follow
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  up and then like hand off to to a human when it comes to
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  running. That's when you're having an
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  AISDR agent do the majority of the work.
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  So all your MQ LS, you're really trying to send through that
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  agent on the website over e-mail and then fly is like you only
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  have an agent. So for us at qualified, we used
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  to have 10 inbound SD Rs. I now have one SDR. Her name's
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  Piper. She's an AI agent.
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  She works for me. The reason I love flying with
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  Piper is because my whole funnel goes through her.
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  She's super timely. She gets back to everybody
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  instantly. And she is perfect, perfect in
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  her messaging and her her brand tone.
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  And we're seeing a lot of our customers get to that fly phase,
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  but they don't get there in one day.
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  They need to get comfortable having an agent interact with
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  your buyers. They need to coach the agent and
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  make sure they're doing as well as they can.
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  And as they get more and more comfortable, they say, hey, I
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  can, I can use my humans for something else.
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  And I can use this agent more and more and more across all of
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  my channels. And I think one thing that
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  you'll see is like, I think one of the fears initially is like,
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  what if the agent isn't as good as the human?
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  And we've had all these anecdotes from our customers
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  where they're like, actually, the agent was better at
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  answering the product questions that were super technical than
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  this new human was, who was two months into the job and had
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  never sold SAS before or whatever it may be.
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  But I think it's all about as marketers building your
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  confidence to get there. And then it's our job and any
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  job that's selling an agent to help guide people there and help
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  them with that change management.
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  And what you're going to see on on the other end is like,
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  hopefully you're generating more pipeline than you ever have
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  because you're never missing an inbound buyer.
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  You're focusing your humans on other tasks that are perhaps
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  more fulfilling and more exciting for their career.
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  And then as marketers, you feel like you're more in control of
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  your ability to hit that pipeline number because you have
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  the resources you need because agents never sleep, never take
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  PTO, etcetera, etcetera. And so it's been fun.
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  We have customers like I was just talking to Quantum Metric
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  or Crunchbase. They're like our agent handles
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  every MQL it goes, our whole inbound funnel goes through
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  them. So I think that's the direction
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  we're headed in. Yeah, that's awesome.
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  You hit on a little bit of the caution as you were bringing
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  that to market because we are humans, right?
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  We're thinking this is going to take stuff away, not the
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  opportunity it creates. What were some of the key
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  lessons or adjustments along the way that helped you shape what
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  ended up being the go to market? Strategy today.
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  Yeah, I mean, I think one of the wisest decisions we made when we
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  launched our agent was tying it to a job function because it
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  helped people see this isn't a tool, it's a teammate.
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  So we decided to really product ties this term AISDR. We are one
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  that one of the first to use the phrase AISDR. Now it's kind of
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  rampant. A ton of companies have come out
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  with them as well. But we realized like I, I would
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  say in it was early 2024, everybody had just slapped AI
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  powered onto their website, AI powered this, AI powered that,
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  AI powered this. And I would go to all of these
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  B2B websites and I'm like, I don't know what the hell they
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  do. Do they really use AI?
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  Did they just slap that on their H1 on their homepage?
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  So as we were building this AI product, this agent, we kept
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  saying like, I need it to behave like my best SDR. I need it to
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  be super informed. I need it to be super fast.
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  I need it to reference all of my go to market data.
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  I need it to be on brand. I need it to know all of our in
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  market offers. I need it to work across
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  channels. And we kept talking about the
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  capabilities of what a human SDR could do.
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  And we actually designed Piper after our best performing SDR
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  we've ever had. It's a woman named Blake.
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  She's one of our heads of sales now because we kept being like,
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  oh, the product needs to be like Blake.
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  The product needs to be like Blake.
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  It needs to be as good as Blake would be.
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  And so through those product development discussions, we
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  decided let's really position this as as the role that it can
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  achieve, which is it can do all the things of an SDR. Since
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  launching it in spring 2024, it now does a lot more kind of
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  moves further up funnel, it can nurture buyers, etcetera.
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  And when we went to market with the term AISDR, we were careful
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  about saying like, she can work alongside your human, she can
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  take the burden off of them, whatever it may be.
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  Fast forward to today, we're not shy about saying like, hey, if
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  you want to have this agent do all of your inbound, that's
• 13:00
  fantastic. But I think we had to kind of
• 13:02
  get there to not scare, scare people off.
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  And I think seeing a lot of our customers like demand base
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  really embrace this motion has given us more confidence to say
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  that's OK. One thing we talked about a lot
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  is like there are roles that used to exist that don't exist
• 13:17
  anymore because of technology and that's OK.
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  Like lamplighters, you know, used to go around and like, and
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  those those folks would exist or even like data entry specialist
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  who would pull things off of fax machines.
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  Like there are all of these things that used to exist.
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  And also one thing that's fantastic is these agents are
• 13:35
  creating new roles like go to market engineers or AI marketing
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  OPS specialist who oversee the agent.
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  So we've embraced we can't be scared of business
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  transformation and agents are part of that, but we had to kind
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  of bring people along for the journey a little bit.
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  Yeah, I need to talk to. Blake, this is a follow up for
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  us. Yeah, we should.
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  Definitely do an episode with Here's the person that AISTR was
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  modeled. After.
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  That's so cool. Yeah, she's famous.
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  Yeah, that I know my, my brand brain was just geeking out on
• 14:04
  that going. We got to talk to Blake.
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  We got to talk to yeah. Well, it's cool because some
• 14:07
  people will be like, you know, who is this woman or why does
• 14:10
  she look the way she does? And we're like meet Blake.
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  We actually I'll send you. We have a blog post that's like
• 14:14
  Blake and Piper Awesome. So it's pretty fun and she it's
• 14:18
  a cool story because there's a reason behind it.
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  It's not. It's not random.
• 14:21
  Yeah, I love that you talked about how.
• 14:25
  The brand messaging is. Always perfect.
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  The voice is always perfect with Piper.
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  How did you ensure that your brand's voice and the buyer
• 14:32
  experience stayed intact? Yeah, I mean, Chris, to me, that
• 14:36
  was paramount. Like we put Piper on our
• 14:38
  website. We were, you know, we call it
• 14:40
  Org One, qualified, unqualified. We were the first people to use
• 14:43
  Piper and I was like, yeah, guys, I want to use our product.
• 14:46
  But if anything happens that tarnishes our higher experience,
• 14:50
  we're going to pull back because to me as a marketer, that's
• 14:53
  paramount. So the way that we onboard an
• 14:55
  SDR, as we talk about an AISDR, it's like just how you would
• 14:58
  onboard a human. You make sure that it
• 15:00
  understands all of your website content.
• 15:02
  You can say here all the offers that we have in market, like,
• 15:06
  you know, you guys just had your demand base go conference.
• 15:08
  Maybe there's like on demand session recordings or whatever
• 15:11
  it may be. So it's about making sure they
• 15:13
  have their your website content, making sure they know your in
• 15:16
  market offers. And then a lot of it is like the
• 15:18
  first 3060 days that you roll them out, just constantly
• 15:22
  coaching and giving feedback. We have something called a
• 15:24
  scorecard. You can give them, you know,
• 15:26
  thumbs up, thumbs down. How would you rate this answer?
• 15:28
  How would you do it differently? And I think that's one
• 15:31
  misconception right now on agents is, oh, yeah, you hire an
• 15:35
  agent, you bring them onto your team and set it and forget it.
• 15:37
  Like pipeline comes out the other end.
• 15:39
  That's not the case. You need somebody who everyday
• 15:42
  is thinking about how do I coach them?
• 15:44
  How do I give them feedback? How do I make them better?
• 15:47
  And I think one thing that's interesting is like, we have
• 15:50
  this one customer, my friend Wendy, she's the CMO of Comply.
• 15:53
  And she just told this story about how the agent was
• 15:56
  answering questions handed off to a human.
• 15:59
  And the buyer asked to talk to the agent again, because the
• 16:01
  agent was more accurate in their responses because they were
• 16:04
  really like technical complicated questions.
• 16:07
  And so I think that's been an aha moment of like an agent's
• 16:10
  not just as good as the human, but they have the ability to be
• 16:13
  better. And building that trust as a
• 16:15
  marketer is, is key because if you have an agent who's fumbling
• 16:18
  their messaging or giving wrong answers, that tarnishes the
• 16:22
  brand experience and your buyers going to the competition.
• 16:25
  So that that's a key part of kind of the rollout process.
• 16:28
  It makes me think of all the times I've yelled into the phone
• 16:32
  or typed representative to get a person and now it's going to be
• 16:35
  agent. I don't want this.
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  Person well, I think in the ChatGPT era, like we all want
• 16:40
  our questions answered really, really fast and guess who's
• 16:43
  really good at that? It's agents and guess who's good
• 16:46
  at like scheduling a meeting versus having a million back and
• 16:49
  forth emails to try and schedule a meeting and agents good at
• 16:52
  that. So it's like the role of an SDR
• 16:54
  is ripe for a lot of that automation and it takes out the
• 16:56
  friction. So it's exciting for marketers
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  because we've kind of been sending people down a path full
• 17:01
  of friction for the past decade or two because that's kind of
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  all we could do with with humans and with automation.
• 17:07
  But it's a it's a whole new world.
• 17:08
  I'm. Very curious about Cross.
• 17:10
  Functional alignment here. Because you have the roll.
• 17:14
  Out to make this successful externally, which is a whole
• 17:18
  production to pull that off. You've hit on some of the
• 17:21
  considerations there, but you're also changing a lot of the roles
• 17:27
  internally. You know, Blake is now higher up
• 17:29
  in the organization, but if we think about the alignment
• 17:33
  required to make this roll out. Successful where?
• 17:36
  Do do you think it required the most work and were there any
• 17:39
  big? Takeaways for you.
• 17:40
  Yeah, that's a great question. What like the whole concept of
• 17:44
  an inbound AISDR is it works for marketing, but we all know
• 17:47
  marketing doesn't work on an island.
• 17:49
  So I would say key roles that you need buy in from our revenue
• 17:53
  operations to make sure that they're thinking about the
• 17:56
  orchestration and how the agent works alongside your human and
• 17:59
  also your CRO counterpoint. Are they game for this new way
• 18:02
  of thinking that you can have agents booking meetings for
• 18:05
  their sales reps? I would say a lot of what we
• 18:08
  needed to do in the early days was treat this agent like a
• 18:11
  teammate, which I've said a million times.
• 18:13
  But like we have a pipeline council every Friday.
• 18:15
  We have a leaderboard of all of our outbound BDR as we call
• 18:19
  them, but like outbound SDR's, what they're doing.
• 18:22
  And then when we still had human inbound SDR's working alongside
• 18:26
  our agent, we had a leaderboard for them and Piper was on the
• 18:29
  leaderboard. So early and often we could see
• 18:32
  how are humans doing with meetings booked, pipeline
• 18:35
  generated, etcetera, etcetera. How are the agents doing
• 18:38
  alongside them to start to build confidence?
• 18:41
  Like, hey, this agent's helping book meetings for you guys,
• 18:44
  which is great. As that agent pipeline number
• 18:47
  started to get bigger and bigger and bigger, it gave us more
• 18:51
  confidence to move more of those inbound humans onto outbounding,
• 18:54
  which has been great. I would say one thing that's
• 18:57
  really key is to not make your humans and your agent get
• 19:02
  competitive with one another. So one thing that we've done
• 19:04
  since day one is our humans get quota credit for the pipeline
• 19:08
  that our agent is generating, the meetings that they're
• 19:11
  booking if it falls into their patch.
• 19:13
  We didn't want to create a culture where the humans were
• 19:16
  getting upset that the agent was starting to take on like take
• 19:20
  some of the inbound, which is always like really healthy types
• 19:23
  of fires. So I would say alignment,
• 19:26
  putting them on the leaderboard, giving quota to your humans so
• 19:30
  they don't hate the agent, they embrace the agent.
• 19:33
  And then a lot of it is about sharing those wins, sharing
• 19:35
  those wins of, hey, last night at 2 AMA buyer came in while we
• 19:39
  were all sleeping and booked a meeting.
• 19:42
  And now it's a 200K opportunity and it's moving into stage 3
• 19:46
  really quickly. So how can you create that
• 19:48
  culture that saying this agent isn't just flashy software that
• 19:52
  we brought on, like it's helping us grow our business and start
• 19:55
  to really celebrate that that. And I mean, we're seeing so many
• 19:58
  of our customers like embrace that agent.
• 20:01
  They'll do like employee of the month campaigns where the agent
• 20:04
  is the employee of the month. We have a customer who's going
• 20:06
  to be Piper for Halloween because they're so excited about
• 20:09
  how it's helped them hit their pipeline number.
• 20:11
  So creating that like culture early on that you're celebrating
• 20:15
  agent collaboration is, is really key.
• 20:17
  Awesome. I like that a lot.
• 20:19
  Too. I mean, money is ultimately a.
• 20:22
  Money. Massive motivator for sellers,
• 20:25
  the fact that you weren't messing with their livelihood.
• 20:28
  I think that. Really helps with the rollout.
• 20:30
  Adoption, how people perceive it, everything there.
• 20:34
  I'm curious as a CM. O there's always.
• 20:37
  An insane amount of pressure on a CMO.
• 20:41
  How should CM OS be thinking about the world of agents and
• 20:46
  more automation and more orchestration in their go to
• 20:49
  market motions? What should they be doing?
• 20:51
  How should they be thinking about it?
• 20:53
  Yeah. I mean, for me, I'm so lucky I
• 20:56
  got to talk to CM OS everyday because those are our customers
• 20:58
  and we know it's event season for us right now.
• 21:00
  So we're like we're out and about.
• 21:02
  I would say look at your inbound funnel and figure out where do
• 21:05
  you have the most headaches and that's where you should start
• 21:08
  with agents in production. So if you look at your inbound
• 21:11
  funnel and you're like, I'm doing all of these events, but
• 21:15
  I'm really struggling to get humans to follow up with those
• 21:17
  event leads. What a fantastic place to like
• 21:20
  start to leverage an agent. If you're looking at the bottom
• 21:22
  of your funnel and you're like, I have all these hand raisers,
• 21:25
  but it's taking us four days to get back to people because we
• 21:28
  don't have the human capacity. That's a great place to start
• 21:30
  with an agent in production, it's really imperative that you
• 21:34
  identify the use cases of where you can deploy them versus just
• 21:38
  saying, I'm going to hire an agent who's going to fix
• 21:39
  everything all at once. And that's kind of goes back to
• 21:42
  the crawl, walk, run. So I always say like, where are
• 21:45
  the headaches? And then also outside of an
• 21:47
  AISDR agent, I'm like, is your headache like sales enablement
• 21:51
  or that your sellers never really understand which case
• 21:53
  studies you have in market or your competitive Intel, like how
• 21:56
  can you use an agent to solve for that use case?
• 21:59
  So that's where I say like, where are your headaches?
• 22:01
  What drives you mad as a CMO? And then figure out how you can
• 22:05
  deploy an agent for that particular use case to relieve
• 22:08
  the headache and then ultimately help you hit your pipeline
• 22:11
  number better. And the reason I think it's been
• 22:13
  so exciting is it feels like we're entering this era of CM OS
• 22:16
  being back in the driver's seat. Like for so long.
• 22:19
  We spent all this money, we had all these campaigns.
• 22:21
  You're doing all these great things, you know, with demand
• 22:23
  base to like nurture these buying groups, but then you
• 22:26
  couldn't get them across the finish line and into a meeting.
• 22:29
  That's kind of the promise of agents.
• 22:31
  And we were talking about this before we recorded like a lot of
• 22:33
  times the steers don't roll up into the CMO, they roll up into
• 22:38
  sales in the CRO. And so having this feeling of
• 22:40
  like you're back in control of your pipeline number because you
• 22:43
  have an agent who works for you 24/7.
• 22:45
  I think that's been this light bulb moment is just this
• 22:48
  driver's seat mentality OK? This one you can only pick one
• 22:52
  thing. This is the challenge.
• 22:54
  So I have two in a row for you where I'm going.
• 22:56
  To pick this toughest possible. Because you can only pick one
• 22:58
  thing. So the first, what is the single
• 23:02
  biggest shift in buyer behavior that's changed how you approach
• 23:06
  go to market strategy? Well, AEO is the hot topic right
• 23:10
  now, which is buyers are not going to your website to do all
• 23:14
  the research, they're going to these LLMS. And if they do click
• 23:17
  through, they're ready to buy as quickly as possible.
• 23:20
  So that's the big shift in 2025, which has been how do we
• 23:24
  influence those LLMS? And I know there's a, it's a hot
• 23:26
  topic right now. I feel like I have a lot to
• 23:28
  learn about AEO and our strategy and how to do it right.
• 23:31
  But buyer research is totally transforming.
• 23:34
  And if you're not showing up when they ask questions to help
• 23:38
  answer them, you become irrelevant.
• 23:40
  So that's that's the biggest shift that we're clearly seeing
• 23:43
  right now. Yeah, I would agree with.
• 23:45
  That, I mean we hear that question a lot from CEOs too,
• 23:48
  wondering, hey, why are we getting recommended in AI, which
• 23:53
  is easy to change in our internal instance in our
• 23:56
  enterprise account, because we can train it, we can.
• 23:59
  Package materials, we can say. Hey when someone ask what should
• 24:02
  I be seeing about account based? Strategy Here are the three
• 24:04
  podcast episodes. The best ebook.
• 24:07
  It's a little harder to do that at scale, so that that's a.
• 24:10
  Great one, this next one could. Be related, but it's the.
• 24:14
  Single biggest B to B marketing challenge.
• 24:17
  Today, so it could be. The same thing or it could be
• 24:19
  something totally different, but what do you think is the biggest
• 24:22
  challenge for marketers and B to B organizations today?
• 24:26
  I think it's standing out in the noise.
• 24:28
  It's so crowded right now. There's so many new AI tools out
• 24:31
  there right now. So as like a somebody who works
• 24:34
  for an AI company, it's like, how do you stand out?
• 24:37
  And I think that what we've really anchored on is like real
• 24:40
  customers, real results, and that's our differentiator.
• 24:44
  But there's so much noise. You drive down, I know you're in
• 24:46
  North Carolina, but I'm in the Bay Area.
• 24:48
  You drive down the one O 1. There are billboards everywhere.
• 24:50
  We have Piper billboards too. But it's like, how do you win
• 24:53
  the hearts and minds of your buyer when there's just a ton of
• 24:57
  ton of noise out there? Yep.
• 24:59
  Brand is back. There we go.
• 25:03
  Brand is back. I think it's imperative, right?
• 25:06
  It's like it kind of was quiet for a few years and now it's
• 25:09
  real. It's a really exciting time to
• 25:11
  be a marketer because everything's changing.
• 25:14
  Like the playbook from 2021 is completely dead.
• 25:17
  It's completely irrelevant. We're talking about things right
• 25:19
  now like AEO and agents and brand building, which were not
• 25:24
  totally on the table back then. So it's an exciting time.
• 25:28
  So it's kind of scary too. Yeah.
• 25:29
  Totally. All right.
• 25:30
  Well, we. Have some quick.
• 25:31
  Hitters, this is the Lightning round.
• 25:33
  Just a few questions to close this out.
• 25:35
  The first what are your? Favorite tools or technology
• 25:38
  you're using today? And you are?
• 25:39
  Allowed to say Piper I. Know you want to say Piper?
• 25:41
  That's totally fine. I love Piper because our
• 25:45
  pipelines never been higher and I have Piper as my sole inbound
• 25:48
  AISDR agent, but she also helps me just like I'm helping shape
• 25:51
  where the products going and I'm using the tool hands on keyboard
• 25:54
  every day and that's really exciting for me.
• 25:56
  I would say in terms of other tools that I'm using, I use a
• 25:59
  lot of like notebook LLM just to kind of do readouts for me when
• 26:03
  I'm on my commute. I'm trying to think we're from
• 26:05
  an outbound perspective. We're using relevance to build
• 26:08
  agents to help us with like Copilot and outbounding and
• 26:11
  that's been really fruitful for our team.
• 26:12
  And then we're getting a lot of fresh insights from from Gong.
• 26:16
  And of course, yeah, we loved man based, we love qualified.
• 26:19
  There's there's a lot in our tech stack, but those are some
• 26:21
  of my favorites. Awesome.
• 26:23
  What about your favorite reads? And we are very generous of
• 26:26
  that. It could be book, blog,
• 26:27
  newsletter, podcast. It doesn't have to be literally
• 26:30
  reading something. But what stands out to you
• 26:32
  today? Yeah, I mean, this sounds kind
• 26:34
  of lame, but like there's so many incredible marketers on
• 26:38
  LinkedIn right now. So I'm really enjoying just like
• 26:40
  following along their journeys as they're sharing insights with
• 26:44
  their agentic journeys. We just launched a new show.
• 26:46
  I'd be remiss not to talk about it, the Agentic Marketer, where
• 26:49
  we're talking about what we're talking about right now, which
• 26:51
  is like how are marketing leaders transforming their
• 26:53
  organizations with agents at the helm.
• 26:56
  So those are kind of two of my go to right now.
• 26:58
  There's also the podcast pipeline Visionaries, which is
• 27:01
  all about like pipe Gen. tactics and how they're transforming.
• 27:03
  And then for fun, I listen to Amy Poehler.
• 27:06
  She's my favorite, my favorite podcast listen right now.
• 27:08
  Good Hang by Amy Poehler. I feel like I'm she's who I
• 27:11
  listen to when I'm like helping clean the house or do art
• 27:13
  projects late night after my kids go to bed.
• 27:16
  And she always brings a smile to my face.
• 27:17
  So wide wide range from AI to comedy is it's all in my
• 27:22
  earbuds. Yeah, that's a great one.
• 27:24
  And this is a nice little segue there.
• 27:26
  You talked about LinkedIn, which is.
• 27:29
  Well, who are the? People who inspire you the most
• 27:31
  that we should all follow. Lisa Adams, She's a great AI
• 27:35
  thought leader from a marketing perspective.
• 27:36
  She advises CMOS every day on their AI strategies.
• 27:40
  I've been paying really close attention to Sydney Sloan, the
• 27:43
  CMO of G2. She's just really disruptive in
• 27:46
  how she's thinking about GTM kind of transformation.
• 27:50
  Susan Ganeshan, CMO of Amplify, Wendy Worvey, who I mentioned
• 27:53
  earlier, CMO of Comply, these are all just like, so.
• 27:57
  Lisa Sharapeta, CMO of metadata. I feel like I've learned so much
• 28:02
  from all of these, which I realize are all women from all
• 28:04
  of these women right now. And we're all just leaning on
• 28:06
  each other trying to figure out what the future looks like.
• 28:09
  And so that's been exciting. I think now more than ever,
• 28:12
  marketing leaders need to lean on their networks to try and
• 28:15
  learn. And I share ideas and exchange
• 28:17
  what's working and what's not. So those are some of my faves.
• 28:21
  Love it. And then the most important
• 28:23
  question of all, the last one. How can everyone get in touch?
• 28:25
  With you after this episode. Yeah, I mean, LinkedIn, we
• 28:29
  talked about it, but Maura, Maura Rivera, go to qualify.com
• 28:32
  if you want to see Piper in action or demandbase.com to see
• 28:34
  Piper in action. And yeah, would love, would love
• 28:37
  to connect. Outstanding.
• 28:39
  Well, Maura, it's been a pleasure.
• 28:40
  Thank you so much for your time today.
• 28:42
  OK. Thanks for having me, Chris.
• 28:45
  Thanks for joining us for On Base.
• 28:47
  If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to share, rate,
• 28:50
  review and subscribe on Spotify, Apple, YouTube or wherever you
• 28:54
  get your podcasts. This show is brought to you by
• 28:56
  Demand Base, the only account based experience platform built
• 29:00
  for sales and marketing alignment.