In this episode of the AI Edge Podcast, Yadin Porter de León is joined by Liza Adams, an AI advisor and fractional CMO, to discuss the strategic value of marketing in the age of AI. The conversation delves into how AI tools are transforming marketing strategies and enabling marketers to demonstrate their strategic value to organizations. Liza shares a compelling case study where she used AI to facilitate a data-driven market segmentation process, leading to clearer strategic direction and improved cross-functional collaboration. Key highlights include: 1. Using AI for strategic market segmentation: Liza describes how she leveraged ChatGPT and Claude to analyze multiple criteria and create a heat map for evaluating market segments, enabling real-time adjustments during executive discussions. 2. Democratizing strategic thinking: By creating a custom GPT for the segmentation process, Liza demonstrates how AI can make sophisticated strategic approaches accessible to broader teams. 3. Enhancing cross-functional collaboration: The AI-driven approach helped marketing align with other departments, including product development and sales, showcasing marketing's strategic value beyond tactics. 4. Overcoming data challenges: While AI tools offer powerful analysis capabilities, the podcast highlights the importance of clean, well-formatted data for optimal results. 5. Embracing AI literacy: Liza emphasizes the importance of marketers becoming AI-literate, encouraging experimentation and curiosity when working with AI tools. The discussion underscores how AI is enabling marketers to scale their strategic efforts, shift perceptions of marketing from tactical to strategic, and drive more impactful business decisions. Liza and Yadin stress that while AI is a powerful tool, human expertise remains crucial in guiding its use and interpreting results.
Liza Adams - Consultancy: https://www.growthpath.net/
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:40:17
Liza
I think we need to push AI to its fullest potential and go beyond thinking of it as an intern, go beyond thinking of it for content creation only. Push this thing. Unlike in collaborating with humans where there's a fear of being judged, this thing will not judge you, so be stupid with it. Ask it crazy questions.
Yadin
Welcome once again to the Edge podcast for Enterprise Marketers, a show dedicated to sharing insights, strategies and experiences from a group of experts who have successfully implemented AI solutions in a large enterprise B2B software company.
00:00:40:21 - 00:01:03:18
Yadin
Specifically, when the context of global marketing how that effort can connect to sales, its product, and the rest of the business, I am meeting in Porto de Leone and I am joined today by a very special guest, Liza Adams, who is an A.I. advisor. Fractional Como and generally amazing person who speaks at me con and lots and lots of other places.
00:01:03:20 - 00:01:23:09
Yadin
Liza, welcome to the show. Are you doing it so awesome to be here. Very excited to speak with you and your audience.
Yadin
Well, yes, it's a wonderful, enthusiastic group of enterprise marketers and also B2B technologists. So super fun crowd. I should actually take a moment to thank everyone who's reached out and told me all sorts of wonderful, fantastic things.
00:01:23:12 - 00:01:52:21
Unknown
I love the support out in the community, I love the support the listeners. So all those listening, all those who provided me feedback, thank you so very much for all of your support. Now it is Liza, not Liza. So making sure everyone remembers it's Liza Adams.
Liza
Leaning Tower of Liza, right?
Yadin
Liza Yes, exactly. And so today we've got a really I feel like a really great topic, and that is surrounding the strategic value of marketing.
00:01:52:23 - 00:02:13:07
Yadin
Now, there's always been a question surrounding what is the strategic value, what is the focus of that conversation. So since we're in the topic objective section of the show, as we do each time those who listen to us and or those who haven't listeners before, we do multiple topics. The show, we got topic objectives, then we go through strategies and tactics, teams and tools, business impact, and in the end we do a lightning round.
00:02:13:07 - 00:02:31:13
Yadin
So right now really sort of what's that topic vectors. Who's it for? What's it for? As I like to say, this is sort of, I think, really leaning into the marketing leadership because that's that segment of the marketing organization and effort that has to have that board level and C-suite level conversation with regards the strategic value of marketing.
00:02:31:15 - 00:03:14:06
Yadin
Give me your perspective. Liza As CMO and advisor and you talked to a lot of companies, what has been previously that conversation around the strategic value marketing.
Liza
I have a very personal perspective on it. I obviously talk with a lot of CMO's and executives, but I came across it firsthand and I knew that there were some perception challenges of marketing, but I didn't realize the magnitude of it until I was in the situation where I found myself really wanting to lean in on serving on boards and finding the right opportunities to network with the right people, to figure out what it means to serve on a board.
00:03:14:08 - 00:03:42:10
Liza
I do have a lot of passion for getting more perspectives, different perspectives into the board, whether it's from women or women of color, just different backgrounds. And I realized as I went through that journey that there weren't a lot of marketers on boards. In fact, there are only 41 marketers. Unfortunately, 1000 boards, very small. That's a sponsor. Stuart Study stat and that there are less than 3%.
00:03:42:10 - 00:04:20:21
Liza
I believe it's like 2.8 2.9% of board members that have marketing experience. So I was disheartened.
Yadin
2.8 2.9%. Yeah, that is I would say disheartening. Yeah. And that goes to tell user what the focus or what the value is perceived by the Board of Marketing that experience needed on that board level conversation.
Liza
That's right. And in fact, there is a Forbes article, I can't remember the gentleman's name, but he sits on multiple boards, started a number of companies, and basically said there's no room for marketers on boards.
00:04:20:23 - 00:04:43:15
Liza
So I read a little bit more deeply. My goal. Let's Revolt. Okay. I'm going to read the rest of this article. So I dug it and I read it. And basically there are many reasons why we're not on boards. But I think one of the biggest reasons is that we are perceived as tacticians rather than strategists. In fact, he said there is no room for tacticians on boards.
00:04:43:17 - 00:05:11:23
Liza
So what that really tells me is there continues to be this perception that there's a lot of weight placed on the tactics of marketing. Yeah, so people see the ads, the websites, campaigns, email, social posts, but there is very little appreciation in some aspects of the strategic work that needs to happen before all of those great things come to fruition and come to life.
00:05:12:01 - 00:05:37:06
Liza
So the deep market understanding.
Yadin
Yes, they do, because there's things like, for example, like when my focus was like a theme or for example, was deepening relationships with the CIO, very strategic audience, and there was not campaigns and wasn't about ads, it was about really deepening relationships, shifting perception and increasing engagement, thereby of course increasing while the chair accelerating sales pipeline, all of those things.
00:05:37:08 - 00:06:04:22
Yadin
And that was a very strategic approach. But to your point, Liza, there's still a perception problem with murder.
Liza
Yeah, and it is a perception issue. However, it's a double sided challenge. Not all marketers are perfect and we're not all good. We are human. So in the world of growth at all costs, I think we found ourselves doing doing all these tactics because we have to grab share.
00:06:04:22 - 00:06:28:18
Liza
We have to grow the business as quickly as possible. And in the process of doing these things quickly, we may have forgotten some of the deep thinking and some of the deep research that we needed to do to support our staff deeply understanding your customer. So I think there was a little bit of that of challenge in the world at all costs era.
00:06:28:20 - 00:07:04:03
Liza
But now as we move into the sustained profitability era, that should flip the script, right? That actually, in my opinion, is a gift to us marketers because now what that means is we need to pick and choose the select segments that we can serve really well rather than going after many and all segments. So we're flipping the scripts, we narrow the aperture, we understand those markets deeply, and then we personalize for those markets rather than going a mile wide and an inch deep.
00:07:04:05 - 00:07:29:03
Yadin
Yeah, And I think some of the big challenges is that scaling that effort in the past has been extremely difficult. Like segmentation, while extremely important, has been tough to do at scale and in the way that you're talking about. And also many argue that segmentation is most like a very thankless job in really, really good segmentation increases performance in results.
00:07:29:03 - 00:07:47:06
Yadin
So, so well, but like not a lot of people want to do it. And so therefore, it's one of those things that say, okay, we'll just segment by vertical, let's just do some sort of very rough segmentation and let's do a little bit more of that sort of spray and pray, even though nobody will admit that they're doing spring, that everyone's very strategic, everyone's very focused.
00:07:47:08 - 00:08:09:07
Yadin
But ultimately, it's tough. It's tough to do. It's tough to scale now with some of the new tools, some of the new generation AI tools and other tools, we can now scale that segmentation more and is that one of the components that you're seeing is giving the ability to have that more focused, more strategic effort, therefore, that more strategic conversation around marketing?
00:08:09:09 - 00:08:37:15
Liza
Yeah, absolutely. And I love how you couched it as it's a thankless job to do it. Market segmentation. Nobody wants to do it super hard. It requires a lot of research, but my gosh, we do that right? The rest gets so much easier. We do that wrong. We're throwing money at the door. And I've told people this many times, air doesn't fix the problem, amplifies it.
00:08:37:17 - 00:08:55:02
Yadin
Yes, it puts a magnifying glass on it. But the thing is, without the magnifying glass, you couldn't really see the problem or you could even deal with it at scale.
Liza
Just like we get out, exercise a bad diet. We can't outcompete a bad product market fit. So we got bad product market fit. You get the segmentation hard things to do.
00:08:55:04 - 00:09:20:06
Liza
Well, guess what? It's just going to amplify that once you take it to market. So I think it's just such an important point to create that focus around figuring out your top market segments. And to your point earlier, people think it's hard, but AI is going to help us. Let me give you an example. I did this with one of my clients and they were a COVID darling.
00:09:20:08 - 00:09:45:16
Liza
Yeah, grew significantly during COVID by post-COVID. And there's a lot of companies that kind of fall into the scam post-COVID. The growth wasn't there. It was flat to declining. And before COVID, you know, with COVID, it was like no marketing. It just grew. The product was awesome. There was demand for it because everybody went remote. Everybody was buying online but post-COVID, that changed.
00:09:45:18 - 00:10:17:06
Liza
So the leadership team said, Hey, let's go after more markets, more segments so that we could expand the opportunity. And I said, No, let's not do that. We're chasing profitability and if we go expand into new markets and go after more profitability, we'll go down. So we did a lot of work marketing to you and product marketing in particular did a lot of work to help the leadership team understand how we choose the right segments, because the CEO said, Oh, we should go after health and beauty because that's a huge market.
00:10:17:08 - 00:10:36:06
Liza
CPO said, No, let's go after food and beverage because our product better aligns, our product roadmap, better aligns with their needs. And then CFO said, No, let's go after electronics because that one has higher growth rate. So each one of them had a different point of view, but from one perspective, each one was right, but very narrow perspective.
00:10:36:08 - 00:11:03:02
Liza
So what we did as a marketing team is, okay, let's deeply understand the market, not just for one perspective, but multiple perspectives. We actually had eight different criteria by which to evaluate these different segments market growth, market size, competitive intensity, win loss rates that we've had with those customers strength of our ecosystem in those markets, number of reference customers.
00:11:03:06 - 00:11:31:14
Liza
And there were a number of things, right? So you could imagine if you could have been based on a matrix. We had the segments on the columns and the evaluation criteria on the rows, and then we used A.I.. In this case it was chat chip teams. We put the data for market sizing that we had from an analyst redacted that data and asked A.I. to essentially do a forced ranking on the market size.
00:11:31:14 - 00:11:49:09
Liza
So let's just say we're evaluating eight market segments. Highest market size gets an eight, most market size gets a one. And then we asked it to do a force level ranking. And then how did that a heatmap.
Yadin
That's fabulous And so I we're in I think now the strategies and tactics section of that show which I think is great.
00:11:49:11 - 00:12:06:18
Yadin
So we're really getting to the meat of it because I was just about to ask you like how is A.I. like helping you scale this effort? This is a great example of leveraging this as a tool. It's not the hero is not the AI. The hero is not the technology. The hero is you. And those that you are working with, the marketers are.
00:12:06:18 - 00:12:26:06
Yadin
They are the story. And I think we're going to continue to serve drive that point to the people because A.I. is a phenomenal tool, but A.I. is a new strategy, just like Internet isn't a strategy and electricity isn't a strategy. Water running to your building is not a strategy. It's just another tool to build, to do something that'll now you have a different perspective on doing things differently.
00:12:26:06 - 00:12:50:09
Yadin
You, in that case, if you didn't have chatty, pretty teams, you may not have been able to suggest that as a way in which to accomplish the goal. And you may have had to choose a different road, but now you're able to scale that effort. Whereas before, classically you would say, okay, great, yes, we want segmentation, we want it to be really personalized, but we don't have the resources or the time in order to be able to actually do it in the way that you're suggesting that it needs to be done.
00:12:50:11 - 00:13:07:09
Yadin
So this is what we've got. Okay, You go and do it by vertical and this other two other criteria and then boom, where you go in your campaigns. And that's just the way we have to do it. But now that's different. So now marketing has a different way to approach things. Therefore, the conversation around the marketing is different.
00:13:07:11 - 00:13:32:07
Liza
Yeah, that's absolutely right. The framework or the thinking and the approach was the human. The product marketing team came up with that framework. We have key principles by which to evaluate segments. We just trained A.I. or we just guided A.I. and prompted it to help us do it a lot faster because we had done this before, done this multiple decades in the past. But my gosh, it's like a spreadsheet nightmare
00:13:32:07 - 00:13:47:08
Yadin
No, God, I like that A.I. is starting to fix spreadsheets because that's been the one thing I wanted to do. Can you just not I don't want to do the spreadsheet thing anymore. I love spreadsheets and I love what you can do with them. It's just one of those things like we have to do the the heavy lifting.
00:13:47:10 - 00:14:07:11
Yadin
Oh, there was this one agency that just did nothing but just these sort of little tasks where you had to do just churn through lots of spreadsheets or you'd have to just change different things on branding material. And it was all these like little detailed work and you just like you have to throw money in an agency. Now you have this tool where you can scale the effort and also the agility of being able to do that.
00:14:07:11 - 00:14:21:21
Yadin
Because if you had to go like to an agency, for example, and explain the project to them and understand it would never be multiple meetings about what you need to get in the you evaluate the data later like, well, it's not really what we're going for, but you were able to, like you said, come up with a framework.
00:14:21:23 - 00:14:41:11
Yadin
You're to then execute with a tool that allows you to do things that you could do before. And how did that change that conversation then? Does that shift the perception of those that you were working with to say, Oh, well, marketing is something different than I originally thought it was?
Liza
Let me just go back to that example. So if you could follow the train of thought.
00:14:41:11 - 00:15:03:21
Liza
So we did that for each one of the different evaluation criteria, and then it added it all up and then it came up with a force ranking and it said, Oh, these are your top three segments. That wasn't the answer. That was just starting point. Now, I in my team had to go into the executive leadership team and say, All right, now we have a basis for discussion.
00:15:03:23 - 00:15:30:20
Liza
Now we can look at the opportunity from a 360 degree perspective. Yes, CFO, you're right. From a market size perspective, yes, you're right from this perspective. But now we have this analysis across eight criteria. Let's look at this. And that was the start of the healthy debate between the different people on the executive team. We now looked at this heat map and determined, hey, does that make sense?
00:15:30:23 - 00:15:57:12
Liza
Let's apply human oversight on top of this data that I have, this forced rank. Let's have a discussion and then let's see. Do we agree with the results? During that discussion, we actually said, hey, let's have I change the waiting on the criteria, because not all of these criteria are created equal. So straightforward partnership might be more important than the number of reference customers.
00:15:57:12 - 00:16:20:13
Liza
Who knows? So we applied weights and then when we applied weight, I was able to help us analyze it and change the answers. At the end of that meeting, we had a really healthy discussion and we said, okay, we have hypotheses for our top three segments. We didn't stop there. We didn't say that's our answer. We basically said we are going to do some validation into the market.
00:16:20:13 - 00:16:43:04
Liza
We're going to talk with partners, we're going to test this with some customers, some prospects with some analysts. And then after that and a couple of weeks to come back together and let's see where we are with this stepping back two weeks later. And we decided on our top three segment at that point, this whole thing lasted. I don't know, a month, and two of those two weeks were validation.
00:16:43:05 - 00:17:06:10
Liza
At the end of that month, we had a crystal clear strategy around who we're going to go after. That was a gift, not just a marketing, but everybody in the company. Yeah, because everybody knew exactly the ideal customer profile, the exact audience to persona out those buyers for marketing. We didn't have the peanut butter our marketing budget anymore.
00:17:06:12 - 00:17:41:14
Liza
We knew where to double down because we knew exactly the segments that we wanted to go after.
Yadin
That's fabulous. I love that example because it talks to how the bra was a tool that allowed you to gain mindshare rather than it being a competition of opinions and ideas or egos. Potentially. It became a very data driven, fluid conversation in which you were able to paint a very clear picture of the value of the various decisions that could be made.
00:17:41:14 - 00:18:08:21
Yadin
And then that facilitated, like you described that discussion. Were you the marketer? The human was able to leverage a tool to be able to take them on that journey? And everyone arrived at someplace where, like you said, you were able to very specifically target your marketing dollars and not just so you know, they would have the most impact, but all those involved would be able to clearly understand how those were being used, why they were being used, and the value that they were going to be created.
00:18:08:21 - 00:18:26:00
Yadin
And that I think is super powerful. So I think at this point, let's switch to the next section of the show, which is the teams and tools, because I think what a lot of people are listening right now saying, Great, that's fabulous. I love the story. I love the impact. How did you do it? We know the tool was shot, CBT and teams specifically.
00:18:26:00 - 00:18:46:13
Yadin
So this is the pro version of what some would say is quote unquote best music because of course of the podcast best frontier model, people have different opinions, but choosing teams could you just walk your listeners through at a high level? I mean, could you get to super detail because I'm sure there's probably a lot in there like how you actually sort of accomplish this with the teams.
00:18:46:13 - 00:19:13:16
Yadin
What's the team marketers accomplishing with the tool? How'd you do it?
Liza
So I kind of described it at a high level earlier, but I talked about the eight different criteria, let's just say market size as the basic example. We had market size for each one of those five market segments uploaded those market sizes to catchy beat and basically simply said, here are the market sizes for the following verticals.
00:19:13:18 - 00:19:38:09
Liza
Create me a worst ranking based on highest to lowest market size and then create a heat map based on that and did that for each one of the parameters and said we had a table with all the forest rankings, all the heat maps, and then at the end show me the total across all of these things, across all the evaluation criteria.
00:19:38:15 - 00:20:00:12
Yadin
So the scoring said at the end, each one got a score.
Liza
Yeah, each one got a score. Even thing like win loss analysis. That was data taken from HubSpot because we had HubSpot as our CRM, we also had a partner portal. So that's where we tracked the leads, the conversions as a result of doing business with a partner.
00:20:00:14 - 00:20:31:04
Liza
So in the evaluation criteria that said strength, the partnerships that weighed in to how we evaluated that particular criteria, there were some qualitative ones like Fitbit Roadmap. Well, that's a discussion that's understand the key requirements of these verticals. And then we had to tell that GP here's roughly the ranking that you need to do for that. So for those that are not quantitative, we applied just human judgment and said, All right, give this one an eight and get this 1 to 1.
00:20:31:06 - 00:20:50:03
Liza
And then in the discussion, we actually collaborated with Chad JPT during the executive meeting, and I started changing the numbers
Yadin
In real time. That's amazing because it's so the speed at which I think that people I mean, I have an appreciation for it's not just time saved when you're doing individual contributor work saying, Oh, you can do this three hour thing in 15 seconds.
00:20:50:05 - 00:21:14:03
Yadin
Now you can have a meeting differently. Now you can present data and then dynamically interact with the data, ask questions of the data in real time that humans just can't answer. It's too much to answer on the fly in a meeting, but you can do it with tools.
Liza
Yeah. The other thing about this is we turned it into a custom JPT because we knew that we're going to be doing this again and again.
00:21:14:05 - 00:21:38:14
Liza
So I've turned it into custom GP, I've put it on the store. People could actually use it. And what I love about custom GP is, is that democratize strategic thinking.
Yadin
Nice. I like that concept.
Liza
Yes, that approach, that process can now be used by anyone on my team in the company or even outside the company. Now that I put it on the store, that it's challenge is not the tool, it's not the approach.
00:21:38:14 - 00:22:02:00
Liza
It's really data because the data comes from different places there. It took us a while to get it to the right form so that we could feed it into Chachi beat teams because we had to format HubSpot data, we had to format our partner portal data and so on and so forth.
Yadin
Was that manual. The formatting was a manual or…
Liza
Yeah.
Yadin
Getting your data in shape and a lot of the times is a manual process. Yeah.
00:22:02:00 - 00:22:26:09
Liza
Leaning it. So…
Yadin
A lot of people are realizing too that it's one of those things that great, the tool is fabulous. Just like all sort of analytics tools and observability tools and other data analysis tools are great, but they all then force you to do things like clean up your data, like connect systems, like go through and make very important decisions about what's important, what's not important.
00:22:26:14 - 00:22:45:07
Yadin
And I think that's one of the things is that it's so good at this that it's shining light. Like you said earlier, it's shining a light on what isn't working or what is broken and very much hyper focused. You like people before they say, Oh, no, we can't do that because it's too complex and it takes too much people and all that stuff.
00:22:45:09 - 00:22:59:06
Yadin
Now you can say, okay, that's not an excuse. So now you have to take a close look at, okay, we can do it now. So no, we have to look at the things that we need to do the things with. And oh, look, this data is a mess. Oh, look, this system is out of date or it's not connected to the other system.
00:22:59:08 - 00:23:19:19
Yadin
And we're starting to see that the processes are in place and the data is not cheap and we've got to fix those things.
Liza
Yeah, garbage in, garbage out. Right. So…
Yadin
Yes. Oh, my goodness.
Liza
I always suspect when somebody says, oh, Chatty Beaty or Clyde or Gemini did not give me a good response, it's average response. I have that.
I'm like, Well, look at ourselves in the mirror. Did we guide it well enough? Did we give it data, give it expertise that we have, that we share that expertise, which at UBC, just like if I was to impart something to you and I want you to do something for me, I need to give you context. I need to.
00:23:38:07 - 00:23:57:06
Liza
Got you. I need to give you the framework.
Yadin
Yes.
Liza
Same thing with AI.
Yadin
And it's a dialog sometimes, too. And before you can have a dialog with a lot of the data analysis tools and other thing, they were either you'd coded, you'd make other things in there, you'd make requests, there'd be some automation or process around it, but you then could have a conversation.
00:23:57:06 - 00:24:13:15
Yadin
What's it outputted, something you couldn't ask it a question about the outputs. Now it's completely different. You can have a conversation with someone, we output something and you say, okay, it looks interesting, but the data looks a little bit off. Did you include this in that? Did you consider X, Y, and Z and then say, Oh no, actually didn't?
00:24:13:15 - 00:24:32:12
Yadin
Now that I do choose the information and that is just a tectonic shift from what we had to work with before where you had to ask like train, have a process happened on data, get an output and then try and figure out is this good, is this right? And let me check the settings and now you just have a conversation with it.
00:24:32:14 - 00:25:14:03
Liza
I will up that one more. You can go beyond doing a dialog. You can do a trilogue or multilog.
Yadin
Trilogue. This is good. This is good. Let's have a multi log right now.
Liza
Let’s have a multilog, right? So and that particular situation we had both chat cheap and clod helping us both sets of data were fed to chat CBT and Clyde and I asked them for their key takeaways and insights and then fed each other's answers to the other and asked it to cross-reference and said Clyde Chatty, Beattie said this.
00:25:14:04 - 00:25:34:06
Liza
What do you think of its response? What are the pros and cons of its response? What do you think is good about it and what do you think it forgot and what are some of the weaknesses? And then vice versa. Here's what Clyde said.
Yadin
Yeah. What do you think about Clyde's critique chapter like? Ooh.
Liza
Oh, exactly.
00:25:34:06 - 00:26:00:00
Yadin
Claude, I feel, is totally wrong. Only open A's chat CBT is right.
Liza
Actually I love doing this multi log because they are very respectful of each other's responses even when they disagree.
Yadin
Well, see it’s respectful. See humans can start to learn from this. Look at the eyes being respectful to each other when critiquing each other's work. And so that's a wonderful healthy dialog between two individuals, so.
00:26:00:00 - 00:26:30:00
Liza
So it is. So help me this week could you would say something like I respect Clyde's perspective. I didn't think about that.
Yadin
Yeah, just congeniality there. I like that you bring up the point of using the multiple frontier models because any time that I've got something, especially something really important, I run it through multiple models and do this, especially because this is probably like the only times in human history will you be able to just open like a whole bunch of models, not have to pay for them and just see what they all output and then see what each of them thinks about each other.
00:26:30:00 - 00:27:01:09
Yadin
So I have perplexity open and sometimes I'll have Jasper run it through. PY Check out Google's Gemini. What is clogged, think what is chatty beauty up to say? And then what is writer going to do with us? And you get interesting different perspectives. Some have internet access, others don't. Some know certain things and others don't. And so I think it's really interesting to try to experiment and try these out, do different things that allow you to get different perspectives because you can just get stuck on one model and one output.
00:27:01:11 - 00:27:21:17
Yadin
And like you just show there's tremendous value in using multiple models. I want to switch to sort of the last section right before a lightning round, which is the impact. So you talked about in this example how impactful it was to be able to do this work in order to be able to get crystal clear guidance on exactly how you were going to go after as far as segmentation?
00:27:21:19 - 00:27:46:00
Yadin
Well, market, you're going to head dollars are going to be focused. But I think just taking it one sort of level higher from the topic, an objective of the show, which is flipping the script to change that conversation about the strategic value of marketing. What are you seeing as the impact of this example on the specific company and the perception of marketing strategic value?
00:27:46:00 - 00:28:10:00
Yadin
And then how do you feel like this example, along with others, is changing the narrative throughout multiple industries?
Liza
I think this example in particular shows that marketing is not just all about the tactics of marketing. Marketing cares about the business, the growth of the business.
Yadin
It makes the whole purpose of marketing. It's like their number one hand is the growth of the business. That's pretty strategic.
00:28:10:06 - 00:28:33:00
Liza
Yeah, and we are leading into our North Star, the North star of marketing is about deeply understanding the customer. So we deeply understood the customer and shared our insights with the executive team so that the executive team can make decisions not just for marketing. We're for the entire company.
Yadin
I love that point. That's a really good point because that's a big part of shifting that conversation.
00:28:33:00 - 00:29:09:14
Yadin
Marketing is giving the leadership of the business the perspective it needs to make decisions, not just marketing decisions, but business decisions.
Liza
That's right. And in fact, we put our money where our mouth is because we actually even said, oh, given that we're going after these three markets in some areas, we don't need this much money to market to these segments because we already have brand recognition, we already have deep relationships with our where we need this money is in product because in product we're going to be able to enhance the product.
So for at least two quarters, we shifted the dollars there and it made sense. So now marketing is viewed as a team player, rather that, no, I want more money so I can do more, more tactics,
Yadin
Everything. Yeah, I need more ad buys. Any more banners at the airport, I need more everything.
Liza
That's right. So I think with that kind of a strategy and marketing, say let's shift the dollars there and actually amplify the results of marketing, because now we have a product that better matches the needs of the market versus us trying to market a product that is not matching the needs.
00:29:50:17 - 00:30:17:09
Liza
So it just makes so much sense when we think about this more as the business purpose of growing the business in service of the market.
Yadin
I think that's fabulous to hear. Connecting things that have classically been not as connected where you have marketing and then you have product over here and then marketing sales usually have a really nice tight relationship, but marketing product doesn't have that same type of relationship, which I've always found a bit strange.
00:30:17:09 - 00:30:42:00
Yadin
And marketers would scratch their heads and say like, Well, why don't we need to talk to the product? People were marketing people. We're off doing marketing. We don't have time for the product people. It's like they're kind of one of the most important people in the business as the product people because you're marketing it. And so I always think it's interesting that there is even a schism between like, let's say, global corporate marketing entity and then a product marketing entity which is very much aligned to the business unit or the product and engineering team I thought was interesting.
00:30:42:00 - 00:31:07:13
Yadin
Like there are certain disconnects not everywhere, but you know, in a lot of places.
Liza
Well, and then same thing on the funnel. So maybe we have challenges on conversion, maybe we have challenges on retention. Perhaps we shift some of the dollars to sales, perhaps do some joint initiatives with customer success to help fix whatever challenges might be in those areas, because we don't fix those things.
00:31:07:13 - 00:31:40:18
Liza
And let's say marketing is doing great. That is like trying to market when you've got a leaky bucket
Yadin
That’s right. Just trying to put more dollars is stuff's just kind of coming out the bottom.
Liza
Coming out, right? So let's plug those holes. Then we can really lean on more marketing. So there's just such an opportunity for marketing to really think about this more strategically, think about leading in on our deep market knowledge and using that to drive conversation and ultimately alignment at that leadership team.
00:31:40:20 - 00:31:58:18
Yadin
Yeah, and I think in the past everyone said yes, What you just said, Lisa, is exactly what we want, but we don't have maybe the talent, the time, this resources in order to be able to accomplish that. But that's not an excuse anymore. And I think that's sort of at the core of sort of the air technology component of this is marketing is a strategic function.
00:31:59:00 - 00:32:25:02
Yadin
But now we're having a tool that allows more marketers to be able to have that strategic focus, whereas they didn't have it before. They were just given constraints. Had they had to deal with those constraints and then serve up things that were, yes, pretty tactical because of the strengths, you know, under which they were operating. And it just became a vicious cycle of that perception of marketing being tactical so that they didn't get the dollars on the resources are needed to do something strategic and therefore they conducted to do things tactical.
00:32:25:04 - 00:32:45:13
Yadin
And that perpetuated the stereotype. So this has been great. Let's head to the Lightning Round segment of our show. We're just getting give it just a quick thought about distilling sort of the big take away what you think people should just walk away with at the end of the show. It could be something about that topic or it could be something that's really specific to you or something that you just a conversation has been having a lot recently.
00:32:45:15 - 00:33:09:05
Yadin
We all start just to give you a little couple of seconds to think about what you want talks to be. And I think the big takeaway for me is scalability. This is a unique to market is just across the board, especially being in a B2B space, which a lot of our listeners are in that sort of B2B marketing space, we talk about helping technologists, I.T teams, CIOs, technology teams, customers do more with less items, have to do more with less.
00:33:09:05 - 00:33:31:04
Yadin
Do we as marketers have that same constraint? We have this budget, we have these resources, we have this time. What can you do with that? And we're finding now that we can be more strategic or engage in more strategic activity because now, like you said, there's democratization of strategic thinking, there's a democratization of intelligence that some people like to call it.
00:33:31:06 - 00:33:57:18
Yadin
It's a bit of a hot topic, but it allows you to plug into a resource that you didn't previously have is and do things that you couldn't previously do. We're not possible because you needed humans, you need agencies, etc. to be able to accomplish them now. Now you have those at your fingertips. But the big point of my lightning rod topic is it's because you know, what good is, is because you are the strategic thinker in this loop, not because the AI is giving that to you.
00:33:57:18 - 00:34:21:04
Yadin
It's because you know what needs to be done. You just need the resources in order to accomplish it. You can evaluate, know if it's good or not, and then present it to others. That's the big takeaway. I like people to sort of think about it. That's what exists now. But we need people who know what good is junior people are potentially replaced by artificial intelligence or lems or or these different things.
00:34:21:06 - 00:34:59:14
Yadin
Where are the senior people going to come from in the future if we're not training those senior people who know what's good right now and bring them up in the ranks. So we need good people who are great at what they do so that they can leverage the technology. Otherwise, the technology isn't really worth anything.
Liza
So for a lightning round, I would say first of all, that comes to mind all the time is I think we need to push AI to its fullest potential and go beyond thinking of it as an intern, go beyond thinking of it for content creation, only use it as a partner, use it for ideation and collaboration, for automation, for
00:34:59:14 - 00:35:29:15
Liza
personalization, and then research and analytics for deep market insights. So those are my five things.
Yadin
Love it.
Liza
I also believe that we need to be so intensely curious.
Yadin
Yes.
Liza
Push this thing. unlike in collaborating with humans where there's a fear of being judge, this thing will not judge you, so be stupid with it, ask it crazy questions.
Yadin
I love that because that's one of the intimidating pieces, like, Oh, I'm not a prompt engineer.
00:35:29:15 - 00:35:45:11
Yadin
I don't know how to prompt this. Well, ask it what the proxy. Hey, look, I'm just using you the first time. This is my job. Here's my job description. And what should I be thinking about? Even like, because some people even have a concept of even how to interact with it. Just start asking it just questions about what questions you should even be asking.
00:35:45:11 - 00:36:03:12
Yadin
What question should I ask you? Yes, be curious. And that curiosity will lead you into all sorts of different ways. I love the thought.
Liza
Be completely transparent about what you don't know, what you do know. I talked to Claude and I said, Claude, I have an idea. I just want to brainstorm with you. I have not fully formulated my thoughts.
00:36:03:12 - 00:36:27:02
Liza
This is my stream of consciousness. I'm not even saying it grammatically correct. Is that okay? And it says yes. Just tell me what you need and I'll help you. So like, it starts literally with that kind of conversation. And then the last thing which I tell people a lot is just give ourselves some grace. Oh, my God. Like this fear and this anxiety.
00:36:27:02 - 00:36:49:17
Liza
I know it's real because I have it, but I have gotten to the point where I say I cannot have imposter syndrome because nobody is an expert. No one is in a good position to judge. We are all simply in this journey, all together, learning from each other. So share, learn from others and be vocal about what you believe in.
00:36:49:17 - 00:37:10:11
Liza
And A.I. literacy is just so important. When we are literate, when we understand it, we are in a much better position to make decisions for ourselves, our families, society and the world, versus when we're not understanding of it, then we are at risk of relying on being influenced and others who may or may not have the same values as us.
00:37:10:11 - 00:37:37:20
Liza
So that is my guidance to everybody. Just understand it and get your hands on it to the extent that you can.
Yadin
I like it, and I think that a good way for people to wrap their heads around that as well, too, with Air literacy. Because sometimes air literacy can be intimidating for people. And like I said, some expert on high and large learning models and know how to train like, no, no, just think back when the internet was new and we just needed internet literacy and then like, Oh well, yeah, that's not internet.
00:37:37:21 - 00:37:55:13
Yadin
I didn't have to be an expert on, you know, domain name servers and TCP IP and all that. No, you don't have to be a technical. You just have to understand what it means. The technology means what its value is, what it can or cannot do, how it was designed on a very, very, very, very basic level. So just think of it that way.
00:37:55:13 - 00:38:14:17
Yadin
Like if you talked about Internet literacy now and you're teaching like your kids or others right now about what that means, just see this. It's kind of that simple, just approach in the same way, but understand what the eyes. And I think that would be good.
Liza
I love that. I love that, Yadin.
Yadin
Excellent. Well, Liza, where can people find you?
00:38:14:19 - 00:38:42:23
Yadin
Find more about you, what you're up to and reach out to you. How can people interact with you?
Liza
Yes. Well, be on LinkedIn. So it's just Liza Elysia Adams and you can also find me on my website. Growth path dot net. Excellent. Fabulous. Well, Lisa, thank you so much for joining the Air Age podcast.
Liza
Thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here.
The End