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Best Practices For Driving Innovation in B2B (Let AI Agents Do The Work) · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:15
  Matt Heinz: All right.
• 0:16
  Welcome to Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 0:18
  I am your host, Matt Heinz.
• 0:19
  Excited to have y'all here.
• 0:21
  Uh, yes.
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• 0:27
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  would love to have any and all of that if you're watching or listening on demand.
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  Thank you so much for checking out Sales Pipeline Radio, over 500,000
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  downloads over the course of the last several years, and continue to do
• 1:03
  this as often as we can to share ideas from some of the best and brightest
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  minds in B2B sales and marketing.
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  Very excited to have today to have with us Anna Luo.
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  She's the EVP of Customer Innovation Marketing at Jivox.
• 1:15
  Anna, thanks so much for being here.
• 1:17
  Anna Luo: Glad to be here.
• 1:18
  Thank you for inviting me.
• 1:20
  Matt Heinz: Okay, so my icebreaker question to you.
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  What do performance marketers and endurance athletes have in common?
• 1:28
  Anna Luo: Okay.
• 1:29
  Um, well, you know, it's all about data.
• 1:32
  Um.
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  So let me start with endurance athletes athletics, it is, so when we go out, you
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  know, a swim, bike, run, it's usually, you know, on the bike like it's 70 miles.
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  And, um, so as part of the training, obviously you can't
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  just dive right into it.
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  Um, right, so you gradually build your endurance.
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  And so the data we look at is how much power you produce, you know, during the
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  three hours and how they optimize that.
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  Um, and so we look at power, we look at, you know, training stress scores.
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  We look at uh, intensity factors, I mean, lots, right?
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  And then while you're writing you wanna make sure, so for endurance
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  athletes, um, fueling is very important.
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  So if you have this wonderful engine, but if you run out of fuel, you can't perform.
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  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
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  Anna Luo: So we look at how many cal, how many carbs, grams
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  of carbs you take per hour.
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  And for us, you know, amateur, it's probably, we're working
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  towards 60 grams of carbs per hour.
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  Wow.
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  And the professionals, they go to 120 grams.
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  Wow.
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  Imagine that on an hourly basis and how much you can tolerate.
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  So all of that is part of training.
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  So data that will tell you, you know, um, how you are, uh, progressing
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  along this path of training.
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  Matt Heinz: Yeah, and
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  Anna Luo: same thing for performance marketers and as you know, right?
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  Yeah.
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  Like when you invest, you wanna make sure there's ROI.
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  In you know, whatever the ad, uh, campaigns that you're running.
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  So, um, you know, beyond just, you know, uh, clicks and now a lot of us have
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  shifted to looking at, uh, conversions.
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  Matt Heinz: Mm-hmm.
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  Anna Luo: Conversion meet, you know, maybe it is landing on a website, landing on a
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  certain page landing to join a free trial.
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  Um, yeah.
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  Ultimately we're all being judged by revenue.
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  All everybody in our company, the uh, north star is revenue
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  and that includes marketing.
• 3:33
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
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  No, it has to be.
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  It has to be.
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  And I think I liked your analogy, and I like the way you described sort of
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  endurance and sort of the, the other thing I think about if you're gonna go
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  on a 70 mile bike trail trip, if you are going to swim across the English
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  channel, if you're gonna do some of these like crazy things, like there's a
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  lot of preparation that goes into this.
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  You don't just like put your speedo on and get in the water.
• 3:51
  Right.
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  And if you said like, oh, I gotta spend a year preparing for this, it's like, what?
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  That's crazy.
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  Like what goes into that?
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  And you're like, if I don't actually do this well, like I could get hurt.
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  Right?
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  And like some people don't typically die for marketing campaigns, but I also
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  think like some of the channels we have have made it so easy just to send an
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  email or just to write an ad, or just to post something that if we forget
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  that you still need preparation, you still need to have the fundamentals.
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  You know, who am I talking to?
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  What do they care about?
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  Where am I meeting them?
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  Like how, like how does this fit in?
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  The context matters greatly in terms of how you execute that.
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  I'm seeing cases where that preparation can be accelerated in many ways through
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  AI by answering some of those questions in a more, not only a deeper, faster
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  way, but a more dynamic way as well.
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  Are you seeing some of that too?
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  Anna Luo: Oh, absolutely, especially with AI, I mean, now you can really
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  look at you know, your audience in a much more precise way.
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  So for example, um, retail media, first party data, right?
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  Mm-hmm.
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  So retailers, um, so for a long time, CPG brands, they don't
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  have specific customer data.
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  And now that retailers, because they know who buys like Amazon, for
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  example they have purchase history.
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  They have all kinds of data about your behavior, right?
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  Mm-hmm.
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  What's in all the content mm-hmm.
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  And all of that stuff is valuable, super valuable.
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  And when you have, when you go to like, Target or Walmart, they have
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  in, they have store data, right?
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  Mm-hmm.
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  So shoppers, what they buy online and in store, so it becomes really rich.
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  And what do you do with this data and how do you organize this data?
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  Yeah.
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  And that AI comes in.
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  Matt Heinz: Well, I, feel like for so long we've had access to this data and
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  when I say access, I mean the data exists.
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  It might be in like 14 different systems or platforms or data centers.
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  And so like for a long time, like we've had this amazing library, but
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  all the books are on the floor and you have no idea how to access it.
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  Let alone sometimes to know what questions you should ask.
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  Right.
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  Like even if you have all the data together today, you have to
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  know, you have to have asked a very tactical question, right.
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  To get to that data, with AI even what, even with what exists today,
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  you can ask outcome related questions.
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  Yeah.
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  And the models are gonna be able to translate that into technical
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  questions to get to your answer.
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  It's pretty crazy.
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  Anna Luo: Oh, I know.
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  And this is a tremendous tool for marketers.
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  So for example, currently our team is a third of what we used to be.
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  Yeah.
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  And it's because we, you know, AI is not just a tool, it becomes a part of team.
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  So we look at, you know, for the few of us on the team,
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  what are our strengths, right?
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  As humans.
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  Yeah.
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  And then where are the gaps?
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  This is where we deploy AI to fill in the gaps for us.
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  Yeah.
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  And to turn out the kind of volume of content that we're able to, it, it's
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  impossible to scale it without AI.
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  Matt Heinz: It is.
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  And I think you know, there's a lot of folks that are worried about like,
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  oh, this is gonna take my job away.
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  I think it's gonna change the job you're doing.
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  You think about, like, I was talking to a friend this morning,
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  we were talking to you saying like, outside my office, there's a
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  construction project happen, right?
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  And there's like eight people on site right now working various machines.
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  Like a hundred years ago that would've been a hundred people with
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  pickaxes, like just manually trying to get through, you know, the ground.
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  Now you've got eight people doing that work.
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  But someone's gotta service and sell all these machines as well, right?
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  And so it's a, there's a bunch of people still supporting
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  that construction project.
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  I'm old enough to remember when Sabre was released and we thought that
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  travel agents were gonna go away.
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  When Sabre was released and the internet Expedia came out, there were
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  200,000 travel agents who had access to that same thing for realtors in
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  the MLS, the multiple listing service, 200,000 travel agents back then.
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  Do you know how many there are today in the United States?
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  Anna Luo: How many?
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  Matt Heinz: 600,000.
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  Oh, there's more because like the complexity of travel has increased.
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  The, the, the specialization of like, where should I go?
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  What should I do?
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  And how do I create these bespoke experiences at an
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  individual and a group level?
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  Like we reinvented what that, I mean the, the what used to be.
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  Sort of 90% of their job accessing Sabre is now 5%, and they found
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  other ways to be valuable to, to an audience that continues to travel.
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  Are we gonna, I mean, it's, it's hard to know what that's gonna look
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  like without living through it.
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  Do you think we're gonna see something like that as AI
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  continues to evolve and scale?
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  Anna Luo: Well, okay.
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  Scale, definitely.
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  And I think I'm gonna talk more about, you know, like what kind of skills we
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  need to develop now that we have AI.
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  Yeah.
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  I can't speak for the longer term though because AI, you know, I mean
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  it's self-learning, especially, you know, with these agentic AI, I'm not
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  sure where that's going to take us.
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  But today for example people who start using AI and to use that as a
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  tool to help them with productivity, those people will actually do well.
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  Mm-hmm.
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  Um, for example, you're hearing a lot of the agencies, you know, firing their
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  content creators, their, you know, designers and copywriters, because
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  they think, you know, the job there, it could easily be replaced by AI.
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  Now, if you, so we work with contractors.
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  We have a writer, a content producer.
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  We also have a team of social media.
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  Yep.
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  We're training them to use AI so that, you know, for example, you
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  go use AI to research, right?
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  Yeah.
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  What are some of the hot topics, you know, that people talk about today?
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  Yeah.
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  In the market.
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  And then you come back and you start creating, you know, yeah.
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  All of this can be done with AI.
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  So you, so the writer can actually manage multiple articles at the same time
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  and he just overlaid the human voice.
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  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  Anna Luo: Yeah.
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  So that's how they actually can perform and can do well in this,
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  you know, in, in this world.
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  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
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  Our lizard brains are gonna continue to seek out something
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  interesting, something entertaining, something that seems useful to us.
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  AI is gonna help us get there.
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  But I've seen many companies say, I don't need, I don't need BDRs anymore.
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  I'm gonna have AI do all my inside sales.
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  And then they scrambled to bring some people back because they needed to be
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  a partnership, not a full replacement.
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  Same thing with content, same thing with design.
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  Same thing with a wide variety of things where doing it faster, cheaper, easier.
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  We think it solves a seller problem.
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  It actually doesn't entirely, and it makes a bigger problem for the buyers.
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  Like I've seen, I've had chief marketing officers show me
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  their inboxes now versus before.
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  And now that AI is making it easier to send emails, it's just more noise, right?
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  And the more noise isn't helping anybody, buyers or sellers.
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  So we still have to be smart, right back to your endurance athletes.
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  We still have to be smart.
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  We still have to prepare.
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  We still have to think about.
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  How best to engage on this.
• 10:34
  Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio.
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  I'm very excited to have Anna Luo out here.
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  She is the SVP, I'll make sure I get this title right.
• 10:40
  SVP, customer Innovation and Marketing at Jivox.
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  And we were talking earlier, Anna, about how you guys are using AI internally.
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  How is it helping your organization just operate in a smarter, better way?
• 10:52
  Anna Luo: Well, it starts with if your platform is built on AI.
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  You can have those, you know, direct you can have this hierarchical reporting,
• 11:02
  right as part of the structure.
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  So the first thing we change is the organization itself.
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  So, um, instead of like, here's the marketing team, here's a sales
• 11:10
  team, product team, and so on, we now have this growth team, right?
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  So that's like the, uh, the hub and then you have all these other spokes.
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  So marketing is part of it.
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  Everything is an offshoot.
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  You know, from that hub and all the knowledge will feed
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  right back into the hub.
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  And so, um.
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  We are not.
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  So from that standpoint, when you deploy AI, it is the knowledge
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  sharing is a lot more fluid and Yep.
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  Um, so I think from the organizational learning and just aligning, you know, the
• 11:44
  message with the product, with customer feedback, it's a lot more efficient.
• 11:48
  Matt Heinz: Well, and, connecting your LLMs to each other in an organization.
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  I don't see a lot of companies do that.
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  Even those that are more advanced in terms of their, not just
• 11:58
  individual, but corporate use of AI.
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  Like the machine learning becomes like hive learning for your company, right?
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  Like you think about how many things happen and there's no postmortem that says
• 12:11
  Here's what worked, here's what didn't.
• 12:13
  Because we have to physically create that postmortem, and even if you do
• 12:17
  it, it sits in a C drive somewhere and like no one can find it.
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  Once that person leaves for another company, now it's
• 12:23
  accessible to all, right.
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  How have, what's the history of how this company has done X?
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  What worked and what didn't?
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  How could, should we do it moving forward instant access, that
• 12:33
  information for everybody, right?
• 12:35
  You think about like, when you had to sort of, what was it, what was the
• 12:37
  internal, um, the internal knowledge hubs that we used to have, but you had
• 12:40
  to physically throw everything up there.
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  Like now it just exists in, in, in, in your LLM for your company.
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  Connecting those together becomes critical support.
• 12:49
  Anna Luo: Well, not only postmortem, but let me just take you to
• 12:52
  the other, the opposite end.
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  Um, you know, like when you wanna get into a new market, um, all that research.
• 12:59
  Right.
• 12:59
  And then, how do you know your GTM is the right, you know, is the correct approach?
• 13:05
  Yeah.
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  Now with AI you can simulate, so for example, we have a hackathon and it's a
• 13:11
  small team of, you know, myself, a product person and engineer, and, the simulation
• 13:16
  is we have this product, we want to take it to a it, it saturated in where we
• 13:21
  are and we wanna create a new market.
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  And, so we start looking at direct to consumers.
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  And so you look at the first scenario would be, okay,
• 13:30
  what are the most profitable?
• 13:31
  Where the, you know, what categories have the highest growth now?
• 13:35
  In reality because of tariffs and all these other economic, you know,
• 13:40
  forces, what's happening is, um, you want to overlay some of that.
• 13:45
  And so you run a simulation again with different constraints.
• 13:49
  So you just keep running it and you can see the results right
• 13:51
  there before you dive right in.
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  So that, for us is just amazing.
• 13:56
  Matt Heinz: See, I told you we run out of time.
• 13:57
  We're already getting close to the end here.
• 13:59
  Um, I, I do wanna ask you about the importance of data because that
• 14:04
  access to data is gonna be the biggest limiter for people's use of AI moving
• 14:10
  forward, what are your recommendations for companies that understand that,
• 14:14
  but want to be able to sort of unlock that data in a more productive way?
• 14:18
  Anna Luo: Wow, that's a huge question.
• 14:20
  Yeah.
• 14:20
  And um, so AI, right, is a powerful engine.
• 14:23
  It's like a Ferrari, but without fuel it doesn't run.
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  And with bad fuel, it doesn't perform right.
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  So data is absolutely important.
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  And also good clean data.
• 14:35
  So in our industry today, there's a lot of data, but it's very fragmented.
• 14:41
  Yeah.
• 14:41
  And so I think the first thing is, you know, organize your data and um, after
• 14:48
  that you start using that to train the AI.
• 14:51
  And I think that needs to happen.
• 14:52
  It's easier said than done.
• 14:54
  I'm saying it because we're going through that ourselves.
• 14:56
  Oh,
• 14:56
  Matt Heinz: it's a work in progress, you know, and you can't expect it to
• 14:59
  happen, you know, immediately, I think.
• 15:01
  But I think, again, back to our performance marketer and, you
• 15:04
  know, and elite athlete scenario.
• 15:06
  The more you plan, the more you prepare, the more you think now
• 15:10
  about what you need to have.
• 15:11
  You may not have access to all the data you need.
• 15:13
  You may not have it all together.
• 15:14
  You may not have the connected LLMs in your organization, but understand the
• 15:18
  importance and the impact that can have and start moving in the right direction.
• 15:23
  You know, the best time is early, right?
• 15:25
  I think we're at that amazing early adopter.
• 15:28
  You know, scale up of the technology here and the early adopters are
• 15:31
  gonna really benefit from doing this.
• 15:33
  As you have Anna, and as your organization has, thank you so
• 15:36
  much for being part of this, for joining Sales Pipeline Radio today.
• 15:39
  Really appreciate your insights.
• 15:41
  Anna Luo: Thank you.
• 15:42
  Matt Heinz: Thanks everyone for joining and watching and listening.
• 15:44
  We'll be back soon with another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 15:47
  Until then, take care.
• 15:48
  We'll see you soon.
• 15:49
  Anna Luo: Bye.