How to Use AI to Automate GTM Workflows to Drive Pipeline

Hi, I'm Laura. Hey, I'm Stefan and you're listening to Attributed, a podcast library by GreenDidda. The purpose of it is to store and share all the knowledge that we have gathered across DreamDid employees through our LinkedIn Lives, podcasts and webinars. The typical topics you'll find here can be stuff like marketing, sales, V2B ads, operations, social selling maybe. Hello and welcome everybody to today's live session brought to you, Gaios here at DreamDidda. You show I am Stefan, I'm the CEO and co-founder of DreamDidda and we call this show Attributed and you can say today we're going to attribute this show to probably one of the most 22 and the six statements that you can have which is how to use AI to automate, go to market workflows to drive pipeline. Which is what all of us want to do in this very year. And to do so I have a very, very qualified guest about this topic, which is you, Simon, because when you just quit or you announced your job resignation from six, since you wrote that 25% of new business pipeline was coming from AI agents which got me super intrigued. So I'm super interested in like drilling into this topic and learning from you about what you've experienced so far. But for those who haven't been connected to Simon, maybe you can just give them the couple of minutes introduction to what you've done professionally. Yeah, hi everyone, thanks so much Stefan for having me on today. It's a topic I'm passionate about but I think maybe my introduction will explain a little bit of why I'm so passionate about it. I am currently CMO of Work Human, which is an AHR tech company. It's essentially the world's leading employee recognition software, which I'm very fortunate to just be a part of because I feel so strongly about the mission of the company and how recognition can breed just a beautiful culture within an organization. But I've been in B2B my entire career. So prior to coming to Work Human, I ran marketing and BDRs at a company called Sixense, which is a leading Martek CountBase Marketing Platform. I was before that for 12 years at a company known as PTC where I actually led the analytics and operations functions, which and then before that I was in an analytics consulting group. So I kind of grew up in analytics specifically for marketing and sales and go to market, data science and operations. So my mind thinks like that, my mind thinks of how do we streamline processes, how do we improve our ways of working, how do we allow tech to enable us so that it's taking away some of the friction that we've got in our own internal processes and more importantly in the way we serve our customers and prospects. And so if you are in analytics, essentially you are really a partner to the business. And you're guiding them and letting them know here's what's working, here's what's not working so that eventually then that's what led me into running marketing because I was already telling everyone, hey, here's what we should be doing, here's what we shouldn't be doing. So they gave me the role. That's fantastic. I think there's not many people that have a much better CV suited to how technical marketing is today. But I think even me, I'm not, I don't know, we're around the internet, but it's not like I can write code or anything like that. And I think others as well when they hear AI and GTM feel a little bit overwhelmed because as you scrolled your LinkedIn CV, you also see so many people doing or at this claiming to do fantastic things with AI, but how overwhelmed should we feel and how technical do we need to be as market to utilize AI for go to market? I mean, I think, so I think the tools are such that you don't have to be so technical. Back when I was starting and I'm dating myself here, I was writing code and SQL to essentially rent any sort of analysis on how to understand if a program was working, responses and all of that. Now, you know, you don't have to do that. You really can be leveraging the tools to understand current state, to understand which parts of your business are working well, which ones aren't to really get a POV on what's working, what's not working. And I think by the way, the fact that marketing has become so data driven and so much more technical, even in the last five years and even before AI by the way, there's so much data and there's a richness of information out there, right? And the information on its own is helpful, but it's not as very helpful unless you're doing something with it. And the AI tools are great at pattern recognition and are great at being able to synthesize huge amounts of data that a person could never, right? The SEMA that worked in SQL Server, you know, 20 years ago, I could never do what we're, you know, the AI agents are able to do now. And so it's easy to get overwhelmed and it's easy to feel like you are behind. And my answer to that would be, there's no better day to start than today. And start simple and start to build up that confidence, not just in your own skill set, but in the confidence in the actual LLMs and the models because they can hallucinate. You do, you know, need to kind of deny out on what's going on. But the best time started now. It's a good Chinese proverb today, take on today. Yeah. I think it's so true that when you think back, kind of, let's say I've been in marketing the last 15 years or so, I remember kind of like mobile phones being introduced, I remember social media being introduced, I remember seeing keywords inside of Google Analytics. So also I'm dating myself a little bit there, but there's these things that kind of change that were kind of big, but AI just feels even bigger that some of these other playing feels and I was just saying so I've seen big changes in the past, but this still feels more seismic than those. And I like within your technology, I think at the moment there's this period where the powers are great, but the adoption and the accessibility of them are not where they will be in five years. So there are for those trail by places like yourself that that goes on early, they will have massive wins because right now it's not as accessible as you would see it when everybody, every company is using it in five years. So I'm at least trying to preach to my team to say, I do think about whether there's an AI solution for the things that you're sitting with, not because for them to turn off their brain, but for them to maybe become more effective in what they do. What are the kind of, we have to like start stereo, typically from how you see it, what are tasks that are good to put AI on and what are where you want to be a little bit careful on putting AI on it? Yeah, I would say structured repeatable tasks, great places start, right? And we all have those, we all have a weekly report that we send out, right? Like, you know, start there, we all have, you know, things that we need to go and pull the data and run the analysis on, let's start there. The other place, by the way, that I think, you know, and you mentioned that sad of 25% of our pipeline at six cents coming from AI agents, that didn't happen overnight, right? We had an early start there, we were probably, you know, over two to three years got to that point. And we didn't jump in having the agents reach out to our customers and prospects. We started with a very low, sort of a low risk use case, something like we had limited headcount in our BDR team, right? I don't have unlimited budget and resources that if demand is coming up, let's go higher 10 more headcount. No, and so we had a challenge where there were, there was probably qualified demand coming in or high intent accounts that we just weren't able to get to. Yeah. So the difference is they're either never going to get a response from us or they'll get an automated response for us, right? Low risk, let's at least, you know, make sure these people are having an interaction with our brand. Let's at least try and make sure they have a great experience. The other early use case that we identified was sometimes, and every company has this, every B2B marketer out there is probably getting inbound demo requests or interests from accounts that might not fit your ICP, right? They're not a good candidate for your product, but again, they're interacting with your brand and rather than ignore them. Why not at least have a automatic email from an agent that goes out and lets them know, you know, sorry, you might not be the right fit, but here's maybe two additional partners you might want to work with. Or here's an additional asset that maybe where we talk about how, you know, companies in your industry or size work, you know, or could, could accomplish something similar. So again, start with the, either the easy, repeatable use cases or the low risk ones. And then build on that confidence. That's super smart, Sam. Yeah, I think the, I can definitely recognize the easy, repeatable stuff that has kind of very well-suited for it. Before we get into the nitty-gritty of how to do all these things, I wanted to ask you kind of how are you kind of like making sure you upskill yourself, but also that your team kind of, let's say, stay up to date with what are the latest opportunities with AI. Do you have any kind of systematic approach to that? I think I don't have a systematic approach, I guess, to answer the question. I am constantly reading, watching, learning, listening. I mean, there's such an abundance of information out there. There's podcasts coming out every day. There's folks on LinkedIn. There's things like this, right? This live stream that we're doing. There's no, I guess, excuse to not be able to follow someone who does what you do or is in the general sort of, you know, area of the scope of your role, doing excellent things. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. And I tell this to my team all the time. Let's see what's working out. What's out there? What's working? What people are doing? Let's learn from the content, the blogs, the podcasts. Build connections in your industry. Build connection in your sort of work area. Be curious. And just start to ideate from there. I will say there's, we do, for example, at work, human have formalized training that we are putting in place where we have within each function, we've got AI ambassadors who are actually taking specific courses. They represent different functions. They're going to go back to those functions and kind of be, you know, maybe those early experts who can guide or at least identify specific programs that are really great for AI use cases. But like I said, you shouldn't have to wait for that. If you're curious and I like to hire curious people who want to learn and do better, we should be, you know, there's no excuse. There's so much information out there. And frankly, if you on your own and your role have done something the same time, the same way three or four times, you should start to think about how maybe you can improve it. Now, learning is one thing, ideating and testing is one thing. I do want to just go back and say, there's a responsibility we have with these tools. And so companies and organizations should be very clear about publishing their AI policies, what's allowed, what's not allowed. Do we have a ring-fenced sort of blessed instance that we can play in? You know, we have to be responsible about the data that we're using and how we're using it. And I think that goes beyond maybe some of the marketers in the room, but really at the organizational level of just making sure that if you are encouraging AI adoption and you were a believer in the benefits and you want to really drive this, make sure you're creating the infrastructure and the playground for people to be able to do that in a safe and secure way. I think that's the last bit about a very healthy way, healthy, advice, it well. I think that's also just something about kind of how you deal with sensitive data like people's emails, people's phone numbers, etc. If you're just sitting in chat, GBT on your own account, you can't just stuff it into chat, GBT because then it's going to be used in training materials all over the place. Absolutely. And also then that's kind of nice, you know, for maybe a personal use case, but how do you scale that then? How do you scale that across a marketing organization, across a sales organization? You can't, right? Or at least not in a secure way. And so I think everyone at this point is probably using chat, GBT to improve their emails or maybe help them write, you know, a better blog post. But we've got to, if we're thinking bigger, if we're thinking, you know, having sort of the magnitude of impact that AI can bring in terms of driving 25% of your pipeline, it really needs to be much more systematic and much more part of the fabric of the organization. Yeah, I agree. Another thing you said is that you also mentioned to follow people that are in your role for inspiration, which I think is kind of really good advice. In our marketing team, we try to do a monthly meeting where everybody has to show up and do a demo of something they dated with AI the last month. And we do that because like if you talk with an engineer, the use cases that they're going to talk about will be like way different and probably also much more technical than the abilities that you sit with. Whereas a marketer will be doing something like adjacent to what you're doing. And if you see what they're doing, then it's probably quite easy to copy that over to the scenario you're sitting with. So maybe just a shout out to marketers inspiring other marketers as opposed to like finding AI inspiration amongst very qualified, but also very technical engineers. Absolutely. I think the days are gone of us giving a project to a technical team that will take six months to come back. And then by that point, our requirements have changed. The world has moved on and we're onto the next project, right? The speed at which we can take advantage of these tools means that we need to be involved. And I will say it starts somewhat from the top as a CMO. I am there front and center. I'm working with the SEO team or at least, you know, as they're building net new capabilities or IDating, they're running it by me. We're talking through, you know, how to improve it. You have to set the culture. I haven't done this yet in my new role, but, you know, AI hackathon set aside a day or two as an organization where you are not only like I love what you said about your showing demos, but also IDating because what somebody would do on the content team is very different than what somebody would do on the design team or the product marketing team, you know, and so having everyone IDate within their organization, setting aside the time and the days to do that is this helpful and everyone probably is either going through new year planning or setting up the strategic initiatives for their orgs or just just ended it. We all probably have an AI initiative that we're tracking towards. And so make sure you're covering out the moments for that. And at work, human in particular, I'll just say because we sit on, you know, recognition data where people are recognizing each other every single day for helping them with something or doing something in a great way, it becomes really easy to understand who those early adopters are of AI because we see those messages fled in every single day. What use cases they're working, how it helps save someone time or streamline a process. When you have that visibility to where the work gets done and who's doing it and where the earlier adopters are, you can then continue to foster those, those people and foster what they're doing and maybe even scale what they're doing to different organizations. So there's no excuse. Like I said, start now if you haven't already, as long as you've got those sort of broader, you know, those broader things in place to make it. Yeah, that's super good advice. If we change chapter and then drive to drive, dive a little bit more deep into what we promise with the headline of our conversation here. Now to use AI to automate, go to market workflows to drive pipeline. If you are to kind of set the baseline of like, what's your world of thinking when you say this? Yeah. So I would say marketers in general, pipeline is our end goal. We will win or lose as a marketing orgs in terms of how we deliver on the pipeline plan. That is, you know, and by the way, not marketing source to pipeline. We're responsible for the pipeline number of the company. Yeah. Now, anyone who's done this, especially the growth marketers, they know that there's so many areas of leakage in your funnel. AI is a great way to solve for some of that. I mentioned a couple of use cases, right? You've got demand that is coming in that you don't have capacity to follow up on. Yeah. Now, you have accounts out there that are surging on high intents that again, you don't have capacity to follow up on. You're putting out great programs like webinars and physical events and you're spending all this money at booths and the follow up isn't happening or if it's happening, it's a very generic sort of, it was nice to see you or you didn't show up, right? It's show no show versions. Those are all areas where you can automate and improve on the follow up. So the first couple of use cases that I mentioned, right? And on just, you know, in making sure that there was no lead left behind. Yeah. Start that now and work with we now this was at six cents. So I use the six cents AI email agents to automate our inbound flow. Our SLA was really tight. Somebody comes in, they raise their hand, you know, I want a demo. Our SLA was six minutes. That's a very sort of, you know, lofty goal. Not everyone can hit it, but AI can. And so having the agent there to understand that a demo request has come in, this is an account owned by a certain rep. This is the industry that they're in. Let's follow up and make sure we're scheduling time with the right person and just loop in the AI when the meeting is booked done, right? You've taken that six minutes that like was maybe hit 50% of the time. Automated it. And by the way, the email agents were able to have a back and forth conversation. So you know what specifically would you like to hear about? If you haven't gotten a response, maybe it'll follow up again, right? So it's able to read the emails and follow up with a response and get it to the point of meeting booked. That in itself, guess what that did? I had 45 BDRs at at six cents at the time. We didn't let go of our BDRs. We took all this busy work off their plate. They didn't have to now, you know, do that sort of email writing part of it. They were on the phones. They were doing social touches with these inbound accounts. We know that we don't sell to a person in any B2B marketing motion. You're selling to a buying team of five, 10, 15, 20 people. And so understanding that, you know, some of that initial work is happening, freed up the BDRs to multi thread early in those deals, freed them up to again, get on the phone, maybe go higher in that account or wider across the Oregon to the buying team and work in partnership with the agent. So it wasn't humans versus agents. It was humans plus agents. And again, back to setting up the right sort of programs, the humans always had visibility into what the AIs were reading and writing. And so they can jump in. There was always a human in the loop, right? If the AI wasn't clear or able to understand how to respond to an email, the BDR could jump in. And so that partnership allowed the reps to control their outreach and their process. But when, you know, for the most part, take so much of the busy work off of their plate. It sounds about both fantastic and a little bit dystopian with the two agents talking together. But also like, yeah, immensely effective if you can get it to work well. Just because you know the six cents mailer so well, I would love to hear kind of just a little bit more about what context do you need to provide to what did you call that six cents product? AI email agent? Yeah. I haven't used it myself. I'm just super curious about what do you need to feed it for it to do it that kind of interaction well. Yeah. In the world of AI context is king. Yeah. That is it, right? Otherwise, everything starts to sound the same. When you can produce thousands of pieces of content at the press of a button or a click, everything starts to sound the same. So the context and the information that you give the agent is the most important thing. This includes obviously the tone of your brand, all the content, the blogs, the sales, one's, the differs case studies of companies that, you know, again, public information that you know, you want to be able to have the agents tell your story. Secondly, and again, back to scale and how AI allows you to scale. How do you cover the entire buying group? If you're selling to a marketing audience, you need to talk to the CMO very differently than you would talk to maybe the marketing operations person or the demand gen leader or the BDR leader, providing that context to the agents so that it's not just doing outreach to one person is doing outreach to the seven people in your buying group in a way that meets them where they are in the moment and provides value to them. And again, I keep going back to it's not about automating for the sake of automating and just because, you know, use the tools for what they're good at. As long as you're giving it the right context, it'll allow you to scale and personalize in a way that you were never able to do before. It'll allow you to serve your prospects and meet them in a way that you weren't ever able to do that. And so providing all of the collateral, both the marketing and the sales collateral, some of the behind the scenes collateral around, you know, like I said, competitive battle cards, I think case studies are a great way to show social proof. And then I will say early on in our in our journey, we always had even our demand gen marketers involved in crafting and approving the emails that the AI would write. Like, you know, this is not a set it and forget it. You have to be constantly optimizing. And so take use of the AI, but I'm still a fan and I still require humans in the loop, whether it's the demand gen team that's writing or crafting the emails, whether it's the BDRs that are having oversight to how the how the AI is functioning in the real world. It's not enough to have a marketing operations team be the only one that's deploying the technology. We've all kind of got to lean in and take advantage of the tools. So interesting. So I guess what you then for every role that is typically in your buying committee, you'll probably write out a documenting if it's if it's the cinema, this is what they care about. And if it's a marketing ops person, reference these things instead. Yes, I would say persona level personalization and industry and vertical level personalization. Those to me are table stakes, right? Again, CMO of a manufacturing org versus a CMO of a high tech marketing org versus healthcare, right? You would want to meet again case studies you would show up would be different pain points would be different, right? So use the power of the scale of the AI to at least get to that point. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be a six cents pitch, but it sounds like they're a male at least can kind of handle all that context together. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I mentioned we automated our inbound flow as kind of that first, that's your goal. That's the pipeline that you know, they're ready for a demo. You just need to make sure you're capturing it. The second piece was automating our outbound. So when you know that there's an account that's high intent, either they're anonymously on your website or they, you know, they're researching keywords that are valuable to you. You want to get in ahead of them as they're doing their education. You want to make sure that they're maybe doing the education and learning from you or at least including you in that short list of vendors that they'll eventually get to. And so proactively reaching out to again, the six seven personas in that account is proactively triggering paid media that you know can can be in the places that they are proactively sort of blanketing those accounts again in a way that is personalized and intelligent and automated is another way. The most successful campaign, I guess to generate in quarter pipeline that closed fairly quickly was what we called awake in the dead, which every company has. Yeah, yeah. Close lost opportunities that kind of go off and live in the CRM and you know, go to die. And while CIS, while BDR's, you know, the best BDR's did go back every six months, not everyone did. And so we had an automated campaign called our awake in the dead where we looked at is this, what did this opportunity close because of budget timing or no response? You know, look at the close last reasons. We had a couple of flavors of the week in the dead that campaign that went out. And to re engage it and again, re engage in a way that you're not just talking to the one or two people that were on that opportunity. You know, you're buying group. Talk about the fact that you were engaged with us six months ago has anything changed. You know, here's a new offering. Have you seen this new analyst report where we're number one, right? There's always something to share to talk about. And so I auto moving something like that though, that's that's pipeline that you went pretty far down a path with. They're not educating themselves from stage zero now. You have an opportunity to re engage them. And again, this is where scale comes into play. AI is great at scaling. And so you can set it up and make sure that it's always going to happen. And then follow that through so that you can get it to book a meeting. It's such a good idea that I'm almost getting tics that we haven't set something up like that right now. We've got to do it. Yeah. It's going to be again, the best sellers and the best BDRs will always do it. But you want to always fix any leakage in that final and mature that you're just guaranteeing that the follow up happens in a timely way. But in a way that is still quality, you know, and in context to your buyers. And you're so right because if it's a lost account, you'd have all the history of the conversations you have. But then if you have a good hygiene in the serum, you'll have the close lost reason. And maybe then you have the typical counter for that close lost region. And then there's a repository of things that happen since the last time that they can then go back and offer them. And share. And one thing that worked really well. And again, I'll talk about a company that isn't six cents because, you know, you can incorporate things like gifting in those, you know, the best tools will integrate with a reach desk with a sendo. So so maybe it's step two or three of that awake in the dead cadence. If you're not getting the interest back, if you're not able to secure a meeting, offer up something, right? Something small and just see, you know, how it's all about cutting through the noise. And take advantage of the tools and the integrations to do that. That's such a good idea. So I've been hearing this statement a bit more that like everyone's wants to do AI go to market, but not many wants to be the receiver of AI go to market. How do you avoid slipping into that kind of where you just kind of makes makes noise inside of people's inboxes? Because I think we've all tried had receiving these, okay, you clearly didn't invest any time in in writing this email to me. Yeah. I would say that's not even an AI problem. That's a marketers problem. Anytime you are in a prospects inbox, what are you doing to earn their eyeballs, earn their time and earn that visibility? What is what are it so many marketers? Focus on what do what I need? I need the click. I need the form submission. I here's what I need. No, what are you giving to them? What is the resource? Maybe the research report. What are the three main takeaways that might tie directly to a pain point that they're solving? Those sort of communications need to again have that context there so that you are providing a value ad. And then if they end up filling the form or you know, taking the demo, that's great. But nobody's going to do that. Think of how you buy outside of B2P Stefan, right? You're looking at reviews. You're talking to your friends or your peers, your understanding. That's where we have to show up. It always has to be a value ad. And so context, even when you're feeding the AI agents, it is just so critical. But always thinking about short, simple, what is the give? And then if they're interested, you know, hopefully they would follow. So that's whether you're using AI or not, I think you really need to be focusing on the give aspect of it, which goes back to, you know, making the content widely available, not maybe behind a form. You know, if you're giving someone a valuable asset, give it to them. And then they'll reach out to you when they're ready. Buyers control the journey at this point as much as we like to think that we do. Yeah. No, we're just part of it. We're actually funny. You say the same. We're doing like a weekly, sorry, a yearly benchmark report about customer journeys. And when we did it the last last year, it's 70% of the journey happened outside of the sales pipeline. And this year's number without spoiling too much is like, it looks like it's 80% of the journey that happens outside the sales pipeline. So for me, it's great news for us in my as my as markets is because our job matters a lot in terms of actually getting on that list of winners that are being talked to. But it also needs tells us that we really need to get our job done and push our way into the lives of these prospects. And we control that 80%. That's us. That's marketing, right? And sales, let's be honest, if we're doing things right, we're working as a unit. The content that we create, the value that we're providing, the information that we're providing those prospects as they're doing their research, as they're identifying that they have a problem. And here's how you solve it. And here's companies that have solved it well. And here's the social proof. And the case studies that show that they've solved it well. Or they know me. Those are the things like your website needs to the home page of your website needs to again, show me you know me if there's personalization again through AI tools you can do there. That's a great place. Companies want to be able to see themselves in what you are doing. And they want to have the confidence that you can solve their problems. Show me you know me. That sounds like good advice also for outside of B2B as well. There you go. Yes. That's funny. You've already said so many valuable things, Asaima. The AI thing here, we're not talking about like getting people like getting AI to help fixing spelling mistakes, etc. We're talking about deliberately making AI become like a large driver of pipeline for us. As somebody who if there's a company that is not doing it today, kind of what is the recipe or the kind of one to three things that should be I give you a to design going from zero to one as a company to use AI to drive pipeline. What would be your advice for them? Yeah. It's a great question, Stefan. I would say find the lowest hanging fruit. So the biggest sort of friction in your funnel. Is it top of funnel where you're not able to you know capture demand or create demand? Is it middle funnel is the bottom of funnel right where you're getting demo. Request and you're not able to service them right fine. I guess the one place. I think AI can help in all of those areas of the funnel. And I would say again, the biggest benefit is being able to scale and personalize your content and your outreach. So if you have one nurture stream that just performs really, really well. Let's build on that. Let's build refine that message to now fit the three other person is that you need to reach out to or the two new industries that you haven't had maybe traction in before. But now you have one great customer and you want to start to scale there. I think companies need to think about how to not just improve their current ways of doing things like I said. But what that should do ideally is free up the time of your people to actually ideate and find net new ideas like the Awakened the Dead campaign. Make maybe how to craft a really compelling webinar follow up that you know wasn't happening before. I mentioned AI and our BDRs worked together. Believe it or not, Seth and we promoted more BDRs when they started to work with AI. We promoted more BDRs to an AE role than in company history because they weren't doing, you know, let me write the email and let me personalize. They were on the phone selling. They were having real conversations. And so I think the one thing that sometimes gets missed in when you deploy an AI agent is if you're not being smart about it, you're going to miss the feedback loop of which things are working. Sometimes when you automate things, it's almost set it and forget it, right? You can't do that. You need to again, always have a human in the loop. But make sure you're refining based on what the feedback is. If there's a certain persona or industry that is not responding well, if there's an awake in the dead campaign that is not working well, if there's webinar follow up that is not like, let's fix that. There's things by the way where you can again think think of tools like Gong and chorus and whatnot. You have the conversation. You have the questions that are being asked from your prospects to you. Use that information and help that feed the AI and give that additional context, right? You're going to run something for like three months. Don't just assume that it's running smoothly. The world is changing so fast. Take the insights that you're hearing, the questions that you're hearing and make sure you've got blog posts written about it. Let your customer tell you, right? They're telling you in different ways. Everything has been transcript at this point, right? Use that to then ideate and define net new ideas of campaign content, ways of working. That's such a intriguing thing as just like Gong would also have already diagnosed what were the pains that the customer came with 10 months ago. So you can do right a follow up mail based on what were the pains that they described the last time and here whether they have resolved these pains by now. It will feel relevant because it's the exact words that the client came to you and already told you. Exactly. And again, without that context, I keep saying, "AI can help you scale." But if you multiply something by zero, it's still zero, right? You don't want to be scaling things that we just think are important or we talk a lot about ourselves and what we think is so great about us. No, always put the center, the customer at the center of what you're producing. And again, I've said it a couple times, there's no excuse because the data and the information exists. It's all about how we're taking that information and data and then turning it back and using that feedback loop to improve every experience, right? If you've got a boring webinar, creating a blog off of it and creating a social post off of it is also still going to be boring, right? Fix this course. That's what marketers do really well. And hit the auto button. That's why we brought you in, Simon, so we know we get good content to ship out afterwards as well. But you said something from a leadership or a management perspective, which I think was super relevant as well, which is to actually make sure there's room in your busy employees schedule to come up with new ideas and to have team-wide brainstorms about what can we do to achieve X outcome? What would be the ideas we have? And then have them talk about what are the best ideas, what are the most resource-intensive ideas. But if you do not make these pauses in their schedule, they'll never have time to come up with new ideas. Yeah, it's true. And at this point, if companies aren't adopting AI in some shape or form, they're going to fall behind. And so it's imperative on every company to at least have some sort of a strategic initiative. It doesn't have to be like base it on your existing go-to-market. If you have a very high-paced transactional, short-sale cycle, that's really right for AI in different ways than if you have a very long complex high average selling price go-to-market motion, right? But build the time and set that strategy from the top and then reward and recognize the wins, right? Recognize them either if you have something like a work human through the recognition data that is coming out there. If not, you know, give kudos in other ways, but find the people who are really those sort of spearheading those early initiatives and then celebrate them. Make it part of your team meetings. Have the hackathons, you know, set that time aside. And by the way, make sure you're measuring the right things. Setting a strategy is great. What are the outcome? And it's unfortunate, but I do think many companies go to that very sort of like we're going to replace headcount because we now have AI. There's so many studies out there showing that over 80% of AI pilots are failing, right? So it's not like a shift in replace. It really is about letting humans do what humans do best and letting AI handle the rest. And so the metrics become time saved. Efficiency is gained. Process is automated. The even from a marketing perspective, right? You're when you're able to create more content. So quickly, it's not about page views and impressions and who's hitting those web pages. It's scroll depth, right? It is our people actually going through and reading it. Are they sharing it? It might be less about pipeline creation even, you know, which is funny. Given the conversation that we're having, but if you can automate so much of that outreach, maybe you're creating more pipeline, but is that pipeline progressing and moving through it? The funnel. So pipeline velocity becomes really, really important. Win rates become really, really important because all of a sudden that'll give you a lens into is the content and the value that you're creating actually helping you win more. And then another maybe earlier leading metric. Because pipe creation and win rates are a little bit more lagging, I would say an early metric that we should be looking at pretty standard is buying group penetration. If you have seven people in your buying group, have you engaged with all of them? Do you have, you know, are you doing outreach to them? Are they responding back? Build those buying groups in your CRM and your systems and make sure that now that you've personalized content, you're getting out in front of it, you've automated things. What is that penetration like? And ideally that then takes you into those lagging metrics of pipeline creation, pipeline velocity and then higher win rates. That's fantastic. Simon, I guess it was just sitting and pondering whether I could get you to say something about what numbers to follow, but that was a perfect. I'm a number girl. I'll always start. I'll start with the end in mind. Here's what we're going to do, but here's what the what success will look like. Even if it's a very small little use case you're testing, start with at least some sort of a measurement criteria so that you know what you're working towards. Yeah, I'm really good. I think it's interesting that you mentioned also to mention success, not just in pipeline created, but also in time saved because like some of these AI stuff are things where you just kind of, you say 15 minutes or 60 minutes every week, which you again, you gain so you can use that time on something else instead. It's huge. Absolutely. It's the time saving is the by the way, it's the one that people will feel most personally. Guess what? I'm not doing this repeatable thing that I was doing every week for the last, you know, 50 weeks. I'm now able to spend my time on more creative endeavors to spend my time because there's things AI will never do well. It'll never have that, you know, think of like the best ads that you see or the best copy that you read. What word better describes your company? Is it innovation or is it something else, right? That human insight and strategy, at least not yet, AI can't replace it. And so we want to free up our team's time to hone in on the things that AI can't do. Yeah. Because the humans at the end of the day still buy from humans. Yeah, I was speaking to her name is Martina Luchengo, a really famous product market for last week. And she was saying the same thing that AI is always like in terms of writing, trying to average out some kind of thing where maybe you don't need to average it out or AI is where all sometimes going too specific and humans can just catch that. The copy writing here is not written by a human and it doesn't really hit home for us. Yeah. I linked in a user, let me see who this then goalie is writing always an education when listening to Simon speak. I agree. I probably somebody I've been I have worked with him before he did. That's great. And Simon if we open up like the like the ending chapter here, which is what could be kind of looking and when you kind of think about. I can these days we should be careful about thinking a year ahead, but let's just say like where will this AI and go to market a technology B and like just if you think about it, when we reach the fall. In this time period, what do you think will change if any? I can't even tell you what's going to change next month. Every new model that comes out, every new version of the AI that comes out is unique. But I'm just going to bring it back to look, think about the things that you're good at. Think about the things that humans, you know, the taste level again, the words used the pain points, the specific pain points of your buyers hone in on those things and then feed that context to the AI. I think there's such a difference in terms of our company or early adopter companies that like companies like Sixth Sense where we started this three years ago versus companies that might be dipping their feet in. And I think again, they need to start with the outcome that they're looking to deliver because we talk a lot about vanity metrics and marketing. There's vanity metrics with AI adoption too. How many AI prompts we ran? How many things that we automated just because the automated it doesn't matter. It should be, it shouldn't be. You can write more white papers, right? The question should be, if you can write 100 new white papers, what topics would you write about? What do our buyers care about? That's what the marketers and the humans need to be thinking about and then have the tool to write the 100 white papers, right? But it still comes back to what is that pain point and where do we want to go? So less obsession about the things that are happening and more obsession about the outcomes that we're driving. How much faster did we move a deal through the funnel? How many more of our prospects were we able to get in front of with a relevant personalized message? I would say wherever we're going to be in the next year, I would say those things still need to be at the heart of it. Marketers are great at telling a story and telling a compelling story. We have to anchor on that and then use AI to scale. Perfect pitch. Is there anything that we should be expecting from the work human team? Do you have any projects that you can mention that you're going to test? Oh my gosh. Listen, I think the piece in this whole AI conversation that gets lost is we can measure and monitor what the agents are doing. But your strategy can fall flat if you're not having a pulse on what the people on your teams are doing and where the work is happening and who's doing it and what's working and what's not. Recognition data at work human gives you an insight into that. And so so many of our customers are able to take that recognition data and understand where the AI initiative is really taking hold and taking foot and monitor that. So you're setting your SI at the beginning of the year. Oh great. We need to have AI adoption across the earth. Where is it taking hold? Where does that strategy actually move into outcomes? Recognition data gives you that. At work human, we have seven and a half million customers. We have recognition moments published every two seconds. Think of the richness of that data and its ability to not just tell you where the work is happening, who the leaders are, where there might be gaps by the way. It's equally important to find out right where our initiative is not taking hold. And so you're going to see a lot in the next two or three months, even around how AI and the human intelligence part of it can actually be up leveled and really how companies are able to not just set the strategy, but then make sure they are actually monitoring it and then giving their people the tools to hone in on it and identify not just where the work is happening, but maybe where your future leaders are hiding. You're really a very equitable person, Simon. Well done. Thank you so much for this, Simon. If people want to continue to follow and learn from you, what would be the path that they should take? Reach out on LinkedIn. I'm a. I typically tend to be an open book there. I post a lot about what's working, what's not working, 30 days into my new role. I'm sharing the things that I'm doing. I would love to hear from folks too. Like I said, I'm a curious person in general. I love following folks in the industry and just learning from the great work that they're doing. So it's a mutual benefit. Please connect and follow on LinkedIn. I'd love to learn from you. Fantastic. Thank you, Simon. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me and to those who are listening. And I just want to say thank you to everybody for spending the time here today with me and Simon. And if you did enjoy the conversation, to go and subscribe to our podcast where you listen to podcasts, we'll much appreciate that. Simon, thank you so much. Have a great day going forward and stay in touch. Thank you. We hope you like listening to us. Subscribe to our podcast and the ones that we have been guests on. And if you have any feedback for us, just do let us know and should there be a guest that you think we should be talking to, then like, pitch us. We're looking forward to seeing you.