Month: September 2023

The third episode of our podcast “Launch Codes” is officially live.

This week, Andy Caron joins the show for the first time. Our CEO, Joe Peters, kicks off the episode with a special announcement that Andy is being promoted to President of RP!

They discuss some very exciting AI news, an interesting Gartner report on how (and why) MarTech stack utilization is dropping, answer some great questions from the MO Pros community, and more – including a taste test of Coke’s new AI-created Y3000 flavor!

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

Massive AI Announcements

For this segment, our focus was originally intended to cover OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 announcement and the approaching release of Microsoft’s Copilot feature.

DALL-E 3’s ability to use ChatGPT text prompts to refine the image generation process is a big step forward and has major implications for other AI image generation models like Midjourney. Microsoft’s Co-Pilot, to be officially released this week, also brings a slew of AI features to Windows 11 and Microsoft Office 365.

But seemingly out of nowhere, OpenAI put out another massive headline right before we recorded this episode: “ChatGPT can now hear, see, and speak.” This is major news that became the focus for this segment. These new features, rolled out over the next few weeks, will allow us to have full-blown conversations with ChatGPT – speaking directly to it through the iOS and Android apps. It’ll also view and understand photos and videos that we show it. For example, imagine you are on vacation and you send ChatGPT a picture of a landmark. It’ll identify the landmark and give you information based on the image alone.

Joe iterates how this level of seamless interaction will take our engagements with LLMs to an entirely new level – especially after relying exclusively on text query prompts for so long. Andy also highlights how this is a game-changer from an accessibility standpoint; visually impaired people who couldn’t use the text chat functionality before can now take full advantage of ChatGPT using vocalized prompts and dialogue. Both Joe and Andy agree that it is too early to fully appreciate the potential of this new feature and the mind-blowing implications it has for how we’ll use LLMs going forward.

And if all that wasn’t enough, Spotify also announced a partnership with OpenAI that will allow podcaster’s voices to be emulated and translated into other languages. Not to mention, Amazon announced they will be investing up to $4 Billion into AI startup “Anthropic”.

It seems like every day, a ground-breaking AI development is happening. Joe closes out this segment by emphasizing how all these amazing tools are further enabling us to create higher quality, original content that will stand out from the tsunami of lower level content to come.

Martech Stack Utilization is Falling

Gartner recently surveyed 405 marketing leaders in May and June of this year and found that organization’s martech stack utilization fell from 42% in 2022 to 33% in 2023. And not only is utilization low, but spending is increasing as well.

The Gartner report also included survey responses on what marketers think are the biggest reasons preventing higher utilization:

• The complexity/sprawl of our current martech ecosystem.
• Lack of strong customer data foundation to enhance business value of technology.
• Inflexible governance that inhibits new or innovative business processes.
• Difficulty identifying and recruiting marketing talent to drive adoption/utilization.

Andy expressed that, given the economic uncertainty of the last few years, organizations have reduced headcount – turning to technology to make up for it. The result has been an increase in spending on technology without the necessary internal knowledge and talent to manage and utilize it. She uses the analogy of this tech being a Ferrari you drive to the grocery store. Joe resonates with this sentiment and takes the analogy further, saying that a lack of clean data will cause further speed bumps and potholes; Andy relates the problem of dirty data to pumping unrefined, crude oil into your car and expecting it to continue running – eventually the engine will fail, just as tech will fail to be effective with poor data input.

Both Joe and Andy empathize with the reasons marketers believe are preventing increased utilization; they are all problems that RP’s clients are facing on a daily basis.

 

MarketingOps.com Community Question

This week’s question from the MO Pros community has two parts:

1. “What is the best practice for syncing an MQL from Marketo to Salesforce?”
2. “What is the best practice for alerting Sales that an MQL has been generated in Salesforce?”

Andy offers her extensive experience and expertise in this domain, offering practical insights and advice in her response. One of her points was how she is a major proponent for syncing viable leads into Salesforce as soon as they’re created in Marketo – rather than the older practice of keeping MQLs in Marketo until they have reached a qualified status. This allows you to keep track of campaign engagement, membership, and other data that’s going to be useful not only in having the correct time/date stamp for syncing that data out of Salesforce into an attribution platform, but also to help your salesperson understand the breadth of what that lead has engaged with.

Andy’s response goes much deeper than this, with Joe prompting her with some follow-up questions including:

How does this impact the dynamic and relationship between Marketing and Sales?
What is the best threshold scoring rule you’ve seen for MQLs?
Do you think the concept of the “MQL” is dead?

Tune into the episode for the full response to these great questions, and thanks again to Mike Rizzo and the MO Pros community for providing them.

Hot Takes:

• Andy tries the new AI-Created Coca-Cola Flavor: Y3000
• Adobe Marketo Engage September 2023 Product Updates
• Marketo Interactive Webinar Event Program
• Dynamic Chat (DC) Updates
• Compute Formula Flow Step Service (October)
• Americans don’t want AI that’s smarter than humans, a new poll reveals.

 

Read The Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was created by AI using Descript and has not been edited.

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: All right. Welcome to episode three. I’m your host, Joe Peters on today’s episode. We’re covering new developments in AI and their impact on content, a new Gartner report on declining MarTech stack utilization. We’re going to take a question from the mops community, and then we have a few hot takes for.

[00:00:22] Joe Peters: For us to run through one about some Marketo updates and super intelligent AI. So today I’m joined by my colleague, Andy Caron. We have a pretty special announcement that I’d like to make. It’s going to be a surprise for. For everyone, actually. And today we have a big announcement that Andy is going to be taking a new role with us here at RP as president.

[00:00:52] Joe Peters: So Andy has been leading our consulting practice for many years now, and really is truly a leader, not only in our organization. But our space she is a beacon of insight for everyone who knows her and just a real pleasure to work with. So congratulations, Andy. How about that as an introduction to the podcast?

[00:01:19] Andy Caron: Thank you, Joe. It is a one time introduction. I have to say it’s not, it’s never to be repeated, right? Really podcast today.

[00:01:34] Joe Peters: Well, well, thanks, Andy. And congratulations. And obviously we have more celebrations to come, but it is a really great day for us here at RP. So, not that we can talk about any topic that would be more exciting than that, but of what we have on the agenda today, what are you excited about

[00:01:56] Andy Caron: covering? I mean, I’m always excited about AI developments.

[00:02:01] Andy Caron: I think things are just happening so fast. There’s always new stuff coming up and it’s always surprising to me just to see how quickly that’s happening. I, I, but I have to say just the, the mops nerd in me I’m truly always excited to answer community questions. I think the, the questions that people have and the helping people face the struggles that they’re seeing in their own, you know, instances in their own organizations that always, that’s what.

[00:02:27] Andy Caron: What gets me up in the morning?

[00:02:29] Joe Peters: Awesome. Well we’ll, we’ll have some skill testing questions coming in hot and heavy later on in in the podcast. But I think we can almost say that every single day there’s an exciting new AI announcement. And so we do just for those listening. We kind of do all of our editorial prep going into the end of the week.

[00:02:53] Joe Peters: And then we sort of look at things in the morning and then start recording. But this morning there were new developments that even trumped our AI developments from last week. So you might’ve seen last week that Dolly three is coming to chat GPT. I don’t think the specific date has come up, but the idea that you’re going to be able to text prompt.

[00:03:17] Joe Peters: GPT to generate images is just an incredible leap forward and kind of gives you the old RIP to mid journey in terms of all the messiness that there is in terms of getting image creation there, but not to nerd out too much on that. There’s a little video that they produced about Larry the Hedgehog.

[00:03:39] Joe Peters: We’re going to put it in the notes. Originally, we were going to play it, but there’s too many new things for us to cover. So it gives you a sense of just how elegant and how smooth it is to have this interaction and refinement and generation of images using the Chat, G p t interface with Dolly three.

[00:04:01] Joe Peters: So the, the, the content potential there is incredible. But before we move on to that, and before I un unleash Andy on this topic, just this morning, some major, major announcements from open AI and. The idea now that chat GPT is going to be able to see, hear, and speak. Okay. Like just mind blowing here in terms of the leaps in capabilities.

[00:04:34] Joe Peters: So within the next couple of weeks. You’re going to be able to talk to chat GPT sort of using your, your phone interface, the, the, the app will allow you to do that audio input, but you’re going to be able to upload images. Videos and have interactivity with GPT on the fly. So imagine you’re on a trip to Europe, you take a picture of some building maybe the Eiffel tower and GPT will be able to recognize and tell you something, or imagine you’re at home and take a picture of your fridge.

[00:05:16] Joe Peters: What’s for dinner tonight? What’s in the pantry? It’s endless here. So Andy, like, how do we even think about this?

[00:05:26] Andy Caron: Yeah, I mean, I just heard about this this morning, right? So I think I’m still figuring out how to think about it. And I think that that probably will be the approach I continue to take as I expand.

[00:05:39] Andy Caron: It’s applications where I can use that how it best helps me in my day to day, my work, my home life, et cetera. But I think the reality is that this is probably where we’re going to start to see a little bit of backlash. Honestly, I think people are going to be a little scared of this. They’re going to be reticent to, to dive into it.

[00:05:57] Andy Caron: A large percentage of the population, even people that have already played around with the chat GPT and other, you know, systems, I think that they’re going to kind of, I don’t know about that. Right. So that. Would not surprise me, but I think the, the, the capacity to have a system say back to me, I’m looking for clarification.

[00:06:19] Andy Caron: Is this what you meant? Or is this what you said takes the ability to collaborate? Within the framework to a new level, and it opens it up to populations of people who can’t use the text version, which I think is really cool this idea of people who, you know, are blind and they can type, but but the interaction with the voices is so cool.

[00:06:45] Andy Caron: Those capacities I think are really Awesome. And they’re very exciting for me. And also, I mean, depending on whether or not you want to unleash this for young kids, right, this takes us to a place where they don’t need to be typing yet in order to iterate and have this interaction with AI and start to understand it, which is super cool.

[00:07:06] Joe Peters: Yeah, like a dialogue. I think that’s what I find interesting here. You know, we’re so used to. You know, it’s only been a year, not even a year, actually. And we’ve been prompting and whether, you know, putting our queries in no matter how long they are, but the idea of now being able to have a dialogue for me is just such a whole new world to explore and it’s like, you know, mind blowing in terms of what this is going to be.

[00:07:37] Joe Peters: I don’t think, I don’t, I don’t think we can even fully appreciate what this is going to mean. Not

[00:07:42] Andy Caron: yet. No, I don’t. I don’t think we really have the capacity to fully explore all the applications and things that this opens. It’s going to be

[00:07:51] Joe Peters: fun. I can’t wait. I know there’s going to be those that are going to be a bit reluctant, but I’m definitely going to dive right in headfirst as soon as this is available.

[00:08:03] Joe Peters: And then, you know, if that wasn’t enough, we have Microsoft Copilot coming out tomorrow in terms of their Full integration of chat GPT and their co pilot features within all the Microsoft suite within the windows 11 operating system, this is going to be. An amazing week for, for new developments.

[00:08:28] Joe Peters: Like, and then we just saw as well this morning, Spotify has just announced that with their partnership with open AI, any podcasts now can be translated or will soon be able to be translated into other languages. And you and I, Andy, our German is just going to be spotless in a couple of weeks.

[00:08:55] Andy Caron: Just what I’ve always wanted.

[00:08:58] Joe Peters: Well, I, I think it’ll actually be pretty fun to hear our dialogue going back and forth in German and not fully even understand it. And then you know, I think the, the China, the final. Cherry was was the translation on Spotify, but if we put another few sprinkles in there, another massive announcement with Anthropic and Amazon and a massive billion dollar partnership that they have launched as well.

[00:09:29] Joe Peters: So just every day there seems like there’s something mind blowing that’s coming out and pretty exciting stuff for
us. And when we get to that idea that we talked about last week, and any, you and I have had a chance to talk about this in terms of the pyramid of content and the idea that there’s just going to be so much of this content for us to wade through, and we’re going to need to really try and focus on how do we get that content that’s original and breakthrough, we’re going to have some really fun stuff over the next little while.

[00:10:01] Andy Caron: Absolutely agree.

[00:10:04] Joe Peters: Okay now we’re going to shift gears a little bit into a recent Gartner study that just came out, and this was a study of marketing leaders going back to May, June of this year, and the key finding was that they found that MarTech utilization declined. From 42% in 2022 to 33% in 2023.

[00:10:33] Joe Peters: And, which is kind of shocking because one of the quotes that came outta that study was not only is utilization low, but it’s declining year over year while people are buying more. It’s a big problem when I talk to CMOs. They all know it. They all feel it. And that’s a A A C E O quote coming from the study.

[00:10:57] Joe Peters: Any quick takes on that before we get into some of the

[00:11:00] Andy Caron: findings? Well, I think we’ve been in a year of economic uncertainty. It has definitely led to a lot of organizations reducing headcount, but they still got to get business done. So they’re turning to technology. But the crux of the problem is that they’ve purchased this technology, but not necessarily fully accounted for each tool that they’re onboarding, needing a human or a part of a human’s time to manage, optimize, and run the day to day on it.

[00:11:30] Andy Caron: And so of course, utilization is going to be low, even though they’re buying more tech. So they’re trying to solve problems with technology and then not backing up the problem solving with a human to do it.

[00:11:41] Joe Peters: Yeah. Yeah. And when you dive into more of the data here, it becomes really apparent. So when we, the survey respondents told their main reasons on why utilizations was falling, the top one was the complexity sprawl of the current marketing technology ecosystem at 41% at 40%, a lack of strong customer data foundation to enhance the business value of the technology.

[00:12:09] Joe Peters: Next in a 40 percent as well inflexible governance that inhibits new or innovative business processes. And then the last one here in terms of the highlights at 37 percent difficulty identifying. And recruiting marketing talent to drive, adopt and adoption and utilization. So we’re seeing a lot of things that Andy, you and I, these are near and dear to our heart in terms of some of these challenges we’re seeing.

[00:12:40] Andy Caron: Absolutely. The, the reality is that for over a decade now, CMOs have been spending more on technology than CIOs or CTOs. By a large percentage. And so if the bulk of technology is sitting inside of marketing, but they don’t have the resources either in headcount or internal knowledge and talent to manage them, the full capabilities of these are just going to sit on the shelf.

[00:13:11] Andy Caron: It’s a Ferrari you’re driving to the grocery store. It’s not going to actually perform at the level that you bought it to perform at because you’re not. Driving it anywhere or with a driver capable of pushing it to its limits. It’s going to underperform.

[00:13:28] Joe Peters: And if we take that road driving analogy a little bit further and we kind of look at the road ahead, we know that when you’re not really focused on ensuring your data is in a good place and the focusing on making it sure we talk about dirty data all the time, if, Your, your, your road is only going to be bumpier ahead.

[00:13:55] Joe Peters: You’re going to need to have that data hygiene in place. If you’re going to take advantage of any of the new AI opportunities that are going to be presented to CMOs, you may want to do things you may want to take advantage of some of these LLMs and what they can do for you. But if your data is not in a good place.

[00:14:15] Joe Peters: You can expect some potholes and bumps,

[00:14:18] Andy Caron: Ahead. If I can steal the car analogy, it actually, to me, is almost like you’re pumping unrefined crude oil into
the vehicle and then expecting it to continue running. Right? Of course, the engine’s going to blow.

[00:14:35] Joe Peters: For for those, Andy and I can take analogies forever.

[00:14:41] Joe Peters: It’s literally one of our favorite things to do on calls. So there’s no, no shortage to us building on each other’s stories here, but yeah, like these. These points that are coming out in, in this study are basically our day to day life. I, I feel like our, our clients are feeling this, we’re seeing this and and so there really needs to be some focus and prioritization if these issues are going to be addressed.

[00:15:13] Joe Peters: Okay. And for those wanting to take a deeper dive into this, we’ll put a link to the show notes. Now, moving on to our next segment, and we loved this last week, and that was looking to the Mopros community for a question not that we’re going to be able to stump Andy at all on on any of these Questions, but this is a fun one from marketing ops.

[00:15:49] Joe Peters: com. And thanks to Mike Rizzo and the gang for giving us permission to take a question and address it here on the podcast today. So if diving right into it, here is the question we have this week. What is the best practice for syncing an MQL from Marketo to Salesforce? And then the secondary part to this is what is the best practice to alerting sales that an MQL has been generated in Salesforce?

[00:16:21] Andy Caron: Yeah, I love this question. Or both of them, to be honest, but the first part in particular, because it. Reinforces an older practice of gating MQLs and keeping them in Marketo until they have reached a qualified status. And I am a huge proponent for syncing anything that’s potentially viable. Obviously not the garbage, get rid of it, but sync anything that’s viable when it’s created from Marketo into Salesforce, because this gives you the capacity.

[00:16:51] Andy Caron: to start keeping track of campaign engagement and membership and other data that’s going to be useful not only to have the correct time date stamp and other pieces for syncing that data out of salesforce into let’s say an attribution platform but also for Arming your sales person to understand the timeline of this person’s engagement and the breadth of what they’ve engaged with.

[00:17:14] Andy Caron: If you’re only sinking at MQL, then you won’t have any of that data or the time date stamps will be wrong because they’ll represent when the person was synced to Salesforce and not when those engagements actually happened. So that’s the first piece. If you’re syncing earlier though, how do you alert sales that an MQL has been created or flagged?

[00:17:34] Andy Caron: So typically we do this with a lifecycle status value change to change that person into MQL. I love having a standing report for people that’s a call list that they can work off of first thing in the morning. So this is owner. And then status is MQL. And then any other information in that report, there’ll be useful for them.

[00:17:53] Andy Caron: Obviously you need to have a lead report and then in a contact report as well inside of Salesforce, since you can’t put both in the same report, if you are MQL in contacts, which I think you should, because there’s a lot of meat left on those bones when they’ve been converted. Right. But it is, how does your sales team work and how does your sales leadership want to.

[00:18:15] Andy Caron: Work with you on addressing dispositioning outreach to those. And what is the, the agreement between those? So are you going to be sending them a notification in Slack, which has an integrable point to say, you have a new MQL, go call them. Is it going to be off of a call list? Is it going to be generating a, an open activity for that salesperson to action on inside of the system?

[00:18:40] Andy Caron: I think there’s a lot of different ways to alert. sales, but you can’t just say, this is how we’re going to tell sales or somebody that they need to action. There needs to be collaboration there and an understanding on this is how sales works. This is how they want to hear about this. And also being prepared for if the system breaks, what happens if.

[00:18:58] Andy Caron: Somebody puts in an accidentally scores 100, 000 leads and sales gets inundated. Are they going to be pissed at you that they just got a hundred thousand slack messages? Is that what’s your volume? Right? So there has to be a conversation there on the best practice. The best practice is whatever’s going to get those leads actioned in the most expedited, efficient, and potentially sales driving way.

[00:19:24] Joe Peters: Now, how does this kind of relate when we’re thinking about the sort of positive or negative organizational dynamics between sales

[00:19:34] Andy Caron: and marketing? Yeah, this is a tricky one because organizations. Sometimes, even unmeaningly so, we’ll sort of pit sales and marketing against each other when really you are an extension of each other’s function.

[00:19:46] Andy Caron: Marketing is putting the golf ball on the tee and sales is hitting it and hoping to get a hole in one. That’s what we ultimately want. But if it’s not that collaborative, if there’s conversations around credit, this is sales Sale versus marketing’s sale, you’re working together, you’re a team. And so the data, the processes and the discussions all need to reinforce that synergy rather than the separation of the two.

[00:20:15] Andy Caron: And I find that in organizations where they’re looking at something like a rev ops team that has both under its umbrella or there’s less of the siloed effect happening, that there is a more positive dynamic. But again, you, one step begins, you know, the journey of a thousand, right? If you are taking that step to saying, how do you want us to let you know that there’s somebody that is sales ready, or at least as far as we can tell is sales ready, that begins that positive journey toward a dynamic where you’re not at odds with each other, but you’re actually collaborating.

[00:20:52] Joe Peters: Right, right. And that collaboration is really where. That that’s where the magic happens when it’s, it’s seen as a collaboration and not as an obligation or, or even worse on the adversarial side, but not to, not to really Blow the brains or have a face melting experience for the, the, the, the community member that asks this question, but kind of taking a next level thinking through MQLs, what is the best threshold scoring rule that you’ve seen for MQL?

[00:21:27] Joe Peters: Yes.

[00:21:28] Andy Caron: So. I think that having data points that point to buying behavior should set your threshold. So it’s not necessarily a hard and fast number. Oh, they hit a hundred points. It is more around the combination of are they… the type of client in your ICP that typically buys or that you see the best yield from, and then are they showing buying signals?

[00:21:55] Andy Caron: And the combination of those two things needs to be your threshold for passing people across. And the only way that you’re going to get to that refinement is by creating a feedback loop on what you passed. through as an MQL and what actually then converts and eventually turns in to a sale without doing a data analysis on what passes through.

[00:22:16] Andy Caron: You’ll never refine your threshold, but you have to draw a line in the sand and start with something and then go from there.

[00:22:23] Joe Peters: Cool. And then this is a fun one. And, you know, this is not to be too controversial here, but do you think the concept of the MQL is dead? Yes, I do.

[00:22:41] Joe Peters: Maybe we should have started with that.

[00:22:44] Andy Caron: So in the sense that there are going to be people that marketing is flagging as sales ready. I absolutely don’t think that that’s dead, but I think that we’ve moved into account based marketing, account based buying, and that there is this sort of legacy concept of the MQL that just won’t die, but it needs to, in my opinion.

[00:23:08] Andy Caron: I know that’s probably controversial to say, but the reality is… We need to be able to identify qualified accounts, or if there’s a single individual that’s really hot and heavy all over the content, the website, whatever, definitely to flag those. But the idea of the MQL is to say that somebody is marketing qualified.

[00:23:27] Andy Caron: Right. And the reality is we need to think about the funnel as a whole and take MQL out of the equation. Because if someone comes in because sales bought the lead and then they engage with marketing and then they do something with sales and then they do something with marketing. And then we say that they’re a marketing qualified lead that already puts us in a position to have a negative dynamic between sales and marketing on who owns the lead.

[00:23:51] Andy Caron: There’s an. Ownership inherent to this idea of the MQL, as opposed to following something like a serious decisions, waterfall or revenue model, right? Which looks at a prioritized individual. And it doesn’t matter whether sales prioritize them, they prioritize themselves or marketing prioritize them. They can then go through the same funnel.

[00:24:11] Andy Caron: And then you. Overlay attribution on top of that to understand where engagement interaction impact budgeting optimization should occur to repeat rinse, you know, all those things, right? But it doesn’t mean that marketing created the lead. It just means that their last touch was marketing. And I think The MQL fallacy is the idea of this bottleneck in the funnel that says that it came from marketing and stamps ownership on it and essentially tries to make the funnel do dual duty as attribution.

[00:24:47] Andy Caron: When that’s not really what we should be doing as marketers.

[00:24:50] Joe Peters: Yeah, it’s more dynamic than that and you lose the dynamism by just calling it an MQL. Agree. Okay. Well, that was fun. And I’m sure the the, the question from the community, the, the, the person who asked that got a lot more than they bargained for with that response, but that was, that was amazing.

[00:25:10] Joe Peters: Thank you, Andy. And let’s, before we move into our next segment, we’d just like to thank our friends at Knack for sponsoring today’s episode. Knack is a no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes. And you can use the Knack Inspiration Center to find hundreds of real world email and landing page templates.

[00:25:31] Joe Peters: It’s pretty cool. You can actually go in and browse and see some of the best templates in the world and then use them in your own environment and adapt and use that. I find that absolutely incredible. So empower your team to be more creative and bring campaigns to life faster. Visit knack. com to learn more.

[00:25:54] Joe Peters: That’s k n a k dot com. Okay. So we’re going to move into our hot takes, a segment, and this is Andy’s first time, and we’re going to talk about a couple of changes coming to Marketo and some other fun conversations related to AI. But first, for those of you that listened last week. Matt Tonkin and I explored the idea of the Y3000.

[00:26:24] Joe Peters: That is the AI flavor created drink that is supposed to give you a glimpse of what the year 3000 is going to taste like. So now that may be a good or a bad thing. We don’t know, but Andy has done a little bit of homework coming into today’s episode and got herself a can and it’s going to do a live tasting for us.

[00:26:54] Joe Peters: And describe the year 3000 for all of you.

[00:26:59] Andy Caron: We’ll see how this goes. All right, here we go. Get a good pop on it. So I haven’t tasted it yet. I have no idea what this tastes like. I have to say that the can itself is very. Sort of what I feel like this is going to be in a couple years looking at something like what we thought 30 years in the future to back to the future was going to look like.

[00:27:21] Andy Caron: It’s, it’s, it’s like snazzy, but also I don’t think that the 3000 will look like this. Okay. So here we go.

[00:27:32] Andy Caron: It’s very sweet. It’s not as full as the normal Coke flavor. It’s a little lighter, I guess. There’s sort of a berry forward and I want to say it’s like sort of a bitter vanilla. It’s not unpleasant, but it’s not something I would.

[00:27:52] Joe Peters: We take a sec, a second taste just to make sure

[00:28:00] Andy Caron: it kind of reminds me of. A went to like the drive thru and got watered down vanilla cherry Coke.

[00:28:15] Joe Peters: Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if that is a a huge endorsement of the year 3000 well co

[00:28:22] Andy Caron: created with artificial intelligence. It says so futuristic flavored. I don’t know. Maybe this is what the kids will be drinking in 1000 years. Or

[00:28:30] Joe Peters: maybe it’s what space unicorns drink. And that’s, that’s what we can it

[00:28:35] Andy Caron: is our colors. I will give it that.

[00:28:38] Joe Peters: It’s got some good, good branding. I listen, I think it’s, it’s fun that they’ve jumped in and are trying some things out and if the one thing we can take away from it. If they haven’t nailed the taste, they’ve really nailed the idea of experimentation, which is something that we’ve been preaching for a long time.

[00:28:59] Joe Peters: You gotta, you gotta play around a little bit, see how this is going to work for you and your organization and Coke taking this and saying, Hey, let’s, let’s create a new flavor. And experiment with this a little bit. I think it’s pretty cool use of AI in the really, really early days.

[00:29:17] Andy Caron: Well, I mean, the marketing’s on point when I got to the grocery store, the shelves were mostly full and the spot that this came in a sort of small can 10 pack, there were three boxes of it left.

[00:29:28] Andy Caron: I took the third to last, so it was flying off the shelf. I think it’s fair to say.

[00:29:35] Joe Peters: That’s cool. And unfortunately us north in the great white north we don’t get to have access till tomorrow. So we’ll be hitting the grocery stores.

[00:29:46] Andy Caron: It is quite carbonated. I’ll say that.

[00:29:51] Joe Peters: Amazing. Well, I, that was a real surprise for this weekend.

[00:29:55] Joe Peters: Thanks, Andy, for doing that. A little bit of homework for us yeah, cleanse and giving us

[00:30:05] Joe Peters: giving us the Somali a take of what the year 3000 is going to be anyway, I’m, I’m still pumped and I can’t wait to, to force my family to try it at a dinner tomorrow, hopefully. Okay. So let’s move into our hot takes. Some new releases coming out in September and the two, two that we want to just touch on.

[00:30:33] Joe Peters: And the first is on the interactive webinar event program as it pertains to Marketo. And so. And you do want to talk a little bit about the localization and user access management elements there. Yeah.

[00:30:49] Andy Caron: So the two pieces from the September release that I found most interesting for their big quarterly releases really are following this trend that we saw at summit of this do more with less.

[00:31:00] Andy Caron: And one of those is the updates to the Mercado interactive webinar event program. So this is a new program type. The Marketo has brought to the fore. Pardon me. So Marketo has brought this to the fore to essentially allow people to off board with their existing webinar vendors and to use Marketo as their actual webinar vendor at a certain scale.

[00:31:25] Andy Caron: It’s free. You don’t have to pay more for it. And so that do more with less piece is very present in this. They are adding in September localization for interactive webinars. So this idea that you can either set the desired language or the user who created the event program, if their language is specified, that can be applied is very cool.

[00:31:47] Andy Caron: It’s an automatic application. And then also they’ve added user access management for interactive webinars. So that means that you can give permission to someone to come in and manage the webinar piece without giving them access to the entirety of the system. And that’s great because I know, you know, Marketo isn’t necessarily the, the top of the, like, they’re not the best, the best with access management.

[00:32:15] Andy Caron: And so people sometimes struggle with this on who they even give access to any piece. So having a user that’s specifically set up for this function is, is really powerful.

[00:32:27] Joe Peters: It’s funny to think of this localization element and then Spotify is going to allow us to do our podcast in German in a few weeks.

[00:32:37] Joe Peters: So, but an interesting development and advancement, and I, I do appreciate that more with less element so that the other element that you wanted to. Talk a little bit about was the dynamic chat updates for conversational forms and meeting bookings and smart list targeting. Do you want to? Yeah. So

[00:32:59] Andy Caron: there’s a, there’s a whole slew of updates coming for dynamic chat.

[00:33:04] Andy Caron: And again, this is a functionality that exists. It’s for users of Marketo Engage. If you have Marketo Engage, you have access to dynamic chat, which is huge. It may mean the difference between retaining a headcount or being able to spend that budget on another tool that you really want or need if you’re using chat currently or thinking about using chat and you need to build a use case and a business case for it.

[00:33:28] Andy Caron: They’ve added conversational forms, which is really cool. They are giving you the ability now to customize the meeting booking settings. So when they’re allowing people to book meetings via the chat bot, not just a standard one size fits some approach to that, but actually having that be customized. And then the other one that I really love is this idea of being able to set the dialogue criteria or how these

[00:33:58] Andy Caron: And then I’m going to see the person based on their being in a smart list inside of Marketo. And so that means if I have my top targeted list or other things inside the system where I want to really focus on these, or if I want to give a different chat experience to customers, that I can build smart lists inside of Marketo that allow me to do that natively inside my chat tool.

[00:34:21] Andy Caron: And that’s really cool.

[00:34:24] Joe Peters: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. And then I know you’re pumped about this last one coming to October, regardless of the fact if it’s built on Adobe’s IO runtime

[00:34:34] Andy Caron: platform. So many of us that particularly have gotten into Matrix scoring will likely be somewhat excited to see
that October, a little mini side release outside of the big quarterly release.

[00:34:47] Andy Caron: A note about the compute formula flow step service. So if you have Adobe IO runtime or have acquired it or planning on acquiring it, you can use it or will be able to in smart campaigns to do a formula. So this plus this, this field plus that field, which simply has never been possible. You’ve always had to have a web hook that uses an Excel based formula to do that prior or purchase a service that allows you to do that.

[00:35:14] Andy Caron: This, Takes that out of, out of the play and gives you inside of the Adobe verse, the capacity to do this inside of Marquetta, which is great.

[00:35:24] Joe Peters: Yeah. Well, some fun things coming in October and what we’re seeing now with the quarterly release. So thanks Andy, for running through those with us, our next hot take topic is.

[00:35:37] Joe Peters: One that Andy and I have chatted about a few times now the idea of the super intelligent AI. And so there was a new poll that came out by conducted by you, gov 1100 Americans asked them some questions and 63 percent of those surveyed said regulation should aim to actively prevent AI super intelligence.

[00:36:02] Joe Peters: And so we’re starting to see some skepticism growing, if not fear growing. And Andy, please give us your mission impossible take on, on this one.

[00:36:17] Andy Caron: We have fully substituted the super villain as AI in media. It was around, right? You’ve got the terminators and the matrixes of past eras, I guess at this point, but.

[00:36:31] Andy Caron: It is now, you know, Mission Impossible, Bond, like all of these, we’re seeing A. I. as the supervillain and it is permeating the culture in the same way that we used to automatically cast a Nazi or you know, a terrorist is a supervillain. Now it’s A. I.

[00:36:51] Joe Peters: Yeah, it’s absolutely fascinating, right? The the pulling on the.

[00:36:56] Joe Peters: Fear and the heart the, just the phobias that we have. And, you know, it’s interesting, 63%. And what is their frame of reference for feeling that they’re worried about AI superintelligence is it. Because they saw Mission Impossible this summer,

[00:37:17] Andy Caron: I think it feeds it. I think that the cultural zeitgeist becomes a feedback loop for how we position things in media like villains and films, and they know that there’s a fear there.

[00:37:30] Andy Caron: So they play on the fear. It’s just like a horror movie, except it’s a slightly different.

[00:37:37] Joe Peters: Well, we do love good segues here. So we’re going to segue into our pairings section of the podcast and our musical guest this week is a band called waves and I thought it was fitting because. Andy is making waves in, in our organization and our mops space and they’re a band from San Diego. I, I’ve, I love them and they have some nice.

[00:38:11] Joe Peters: Pink vinyl for us today because, you know, it is slightly on brand for us. And the song that you’ll be hearing is called sinking feeling, which is a segue back to the sentiment that. Americans have now on ai. That record looks surprisingly like Joe. It could be the year 3000 .

[00:38:35] Andy Caron: The, the, the record in the can look like they could have come out of

[00:38:38] Joe Peters: the name

[00:38:40] Joe Peters: Yeah. And the sleeve is kind of like a blue too, so. Waves, waves were ahead of the game, but just a great album and super fun, really great hooks. And if you want to give it a listen, I, I, I highly recommend it. So Andy, we’re going to move over to Andy’s part of pairings, which. And I’ll let you take it away, a new segment for us on Launch Codes.

[00:39:07] Andy Caron: Yes, so I have brought in a book. It is by professor and author Daniel Suskind, and it is called A World Without Work. Have you read it, Joe? I have not. Okay, so it’s fascinating. It focuses on when humans, much like Horses in transportation potentially are no longer needed to do work of any kind and how we continue.

[00:39:37] Andy Caron: Seems

[00:39:37] Joe Peters: like WALL E is come to life

[00:39:39] Andy Caron: here. It is a little bit. It looks at that conundrum of automation and also some of the fallacies around that. So as we’ve automated, we’ve created new different kinds of jobs and work has evolved. There was always the assumption with AI that it would be, it would be used for repeatable tasks and that only jobs that had repeatable tasks would be at risk.

[00:40:02] Andy Caron: But just as we see with, you know, AI can write a kid’s book and give you the… The illustrations now, that’s not necessarily a repeatable task. And this book really dives into what it means for our identities, how tied they are to our careers, our work, and how we sort of future proof ourselves from making ourselves obsolete in the same way that Horses were made obsolete, obsolete you know, over a hundred years ago.

[00:40:34] Joe Peters: it’s fascinating. It’s a super important thinking to be done there. And I know Sam Altman has explored this in the idea of the universal basic income. That’s something we may need to explore.

[00:40:49] Andy Caron: So, fascinating, fascinating book. Highly recommend it.

[00:40:53] Joe Peters: Yeah, well that’s a great one. And we’ll make sure we get the cover for all of you to have a look at and the details in the show notes.

[00:41:01] Joe Peters: Yeah,

[00:41:01] Andy Caron: I highly recommend the Audible version. Cause Daniel actually narrates it himself. So you get to hear it from the author, which I think is always an extra layer of nuance in the content on how they think about it coming through their reading of it.

[00:41:16] Joe Peters: Yeah, I do prefer that as well. Unless they have a slightly irritating voice.

[00:41:21] Andy Caron: Oh no, he’s got a beautiful British voice. It’s, it’s nice.

[00:41:25] Joe Peters: Always sounds more interesting when, when those those Brits do the reading, that’s for sure. Okay. Well, I think we’re close to wrapping this up this week, but thank you, Andy, for being such an amazing guest and for participating this week, congratulations on your promotion.

[00:41:47] Joe Peters: But. Thanks to everyone listening. It’s been fun to put together launch codes this week. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review. And you can find us on Spotify, Utah YouTube, Apple podcasts and Google podcasts, and as always stay connected with us on LinkedIn and by joining our newsletter. You know, coincidentally called launch codes to keep up to speed on things that are happening.

[00:42:15] Joe Peters: And as always, thanks mom for watching and listening. Have a great week, everyone.

On our second episode of “Launch Codes,” Matt Tonkin (Sr. Director) returns from illness to join our CEO, Joe Peters, as they have an important conversation on how organizations can adapt to the evolution of AI. Matt and Joe also discuss some interesting topics from their time at INBOUND 2023 together, answer a MOPs community question, and more!

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

The AI Evolution Model

One important thing that Joe’s been obsessed with lately is the “AI evolution model” and what it means for organizations – specifically, how organizations are going to adopt AI, when they’ll adopt AI, and what that adoption will actually look like in practical terms. This model is represented below, where there are two trends: “Benefit to Organizations” and “Risk to Organizations” over time. The “AI Tipping Point” is where the benefits of AI innovations start to outweigh the risk, signaling the right moment for companies to go all-in.

Imagine you’re a CMO of a large enterprise. When it comes to AI, you might be thinking about several things such as privacy, experimentation, guidelines, or even the general AI literacy of your team. But the next step is to think about preparation: How should you prepare your data as the “AI Tipping Point” gets closer?

This is an important question to consider right now, because with how quickly AI is currently changing and advancing, it’s too early for organizations to make a major call on which LLM to fully invest in. Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Meta’s LLaMA, etc. are all competing viciously with continuous improvements over each other. So in the meantime, companies need to focus on preparing their data so it can be used for training the eventual LLM they choose down the road.

Matt also raises a great point that the conversation around data preparation isn’t exclusive to AI. So many teams get excited about a new CRM or MAP that will magically solve their problems, but it won’t be effective if their data isn’t properly prepared to use it. And this ties back to the longstanding topic of data privacy, dirty data, and other data-related challenges companies continue to face as well.

 

INBOUND 2023: The Future of Content

Matt and Joe discuss a topic that came up several times at INBOUND 2023 a few weeks ago which was: Will AI replace our jobs? And if it does, what does that mean for us? One quote that stood out at the event was “AI will take your job and give you a better one”.

Both agree that AI will certainly take jobs – and this is particularly evident in the media and journalism space already. When it comes to giving people “better jobs”, Matt and Joe interpret this more as the “improvement” of jobs; as AI can automate repetitive tasks and speed up our work so we have more time for creativity and innovation. One of the Jasper representative’s at INBOUND commented on this sentiment as well, asking the audience what they will do with all the freed-up time AI gives back to us.

They also discuss a session on the “Pyramid of Content” model, which essentially illustrates the different levels of content creation quality: low-effort content on the bottom, good content in the middle, and revolutionary content at the top. Joe predicts a surge of low-effort, lazy content through the use of AI, which will further emphasize the importance of ground-breaking, original content. Matt mostly agreed, but believes AI will nearly eliminate the lowest tier and expand the middle tier of content quality.

 

MarketingOps.com Community Question

MarketingOps.com, created by Mike Rizzo, is an amazing community that we are huge fans of. One of the questions from a community member there was: “Do you have any tips on how we can reduce the number of failed syncs”?

Matt answered this question primarily from a Marketo-Salesforce perspective, but it’s a pretty platform-agnostic solution. One standout point was that while there are never going to be zero sync errors, it’s important for Marketo users to pay attention to their notification panel to stay on top of errors before they build up – specifically formalizing who is in charge of this is important. This is quite a deep topic that Matt explores much further in the episode – be sure to take a listen!

 

Hot Takes

• 10 Channels B2Bs Should Invest in 2024 (According to 160+ Marketers) | Databox Blog
• The most popular response was SEO! This is surprising given the impact that AI will have on SEO going forward: Forget SEO: Why ‘AI Engine Optimization’ may be the future | VentureBeat
• Coca-Cola introduces a new mystery flavour, made by AI. What does the future taste like?

 

Read The Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was created by AI using Descript and has not been edited.

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: Welcome to Launch Codes, the podcast about mops, AI, and more. Each week you’re going to hear from experts and they’re going to share their insights, stories, and strategies with you.

[00:00:16] Joe Peters: Welcome to episode two. I’m your host, Joe Peters, and today I have my colleague, Senior Director, Matt Tonkin here. And, uh, Matt, what are you excited about us covering today?

[00:00:29] Matt Tonkin: So I think most for me is talking about HubSpot Inbound, um, and some of the things that went on there. It’s been a little bit, uh, we’re a little bit out from there now.

[00:00:38] Matt Tonkin: Unfortunately, uh, I was sick last week, so I wasn’t able to record with you. Um, so I’ve had some time to sort of digest this and think about this. So I’m pretty excited about that. And then, um, Towards the end, we’re gonna be doing some pairings that you and I have, uh, provided. So I, I’m excited to share that there, but I’ll, I’ll leave the surprise out for that.

[00:00:56] Joe Peters: Awesome. Some of those pairings are not good for your waistline either. , never . Anyway. Okay. So we’re gonna talk about a few things today. Uh, first this AI evolution model that I’m a little bit obsessed with and get, gonna get Matt’s take on things. Um, We’re going to also answer some questions from, uh, the mops community.

[00:01:21] Joe Peters: So a question for Matt to tackle. We’re not putting him on the spot. He’s got a chance. He’s had a chance to review it in advance. And then there are some headlines around AI and marketing, and we’re going to. Cover those at the end in our sort of rapid fire section of the podcast. So let’s get started.

[00:01:43] Joe Peters: One of the things that I’ve been slightly obsessed with is the AI evolution model within organizations. And what I mean by that is how organizations are going to adopt AI and when they’re going to adopt, uh, adopt AI and what that’s going to look like. So. If we really think about it and take it from an organization’s perspective.

[00:02:08] Joe Peters: So imagine I’m a CMO of a large enterprise. I’ve got a lot of things to think about right now in terms of when and what we’re doing with AI. So right now, I might be thinking about things like privacy, um, experimentation, maybe some guidelines and principles. Uh, I might be thinking of. Governance or the general AI literacy of my team, kind of think about those and kind of that experimentation mode, but I think the next preoccupation that I’m a little bit obsessed about is with is the whole area of.

[00:02:52] Joe Peters: Um, preparation and how data needs to be prepared moving into this AI adoption phase, because no one’s making a big call right now that they’re going to go deep into chat GPT or the open AI model, or they’re going to go with Google or they’re going to go with cohair or any of the other providers that are making Splashes right now, but it’s, it’s, what are you doing right now to get prepared?

[00:03:22] Joe Peters: What do you, what do you think about that, Matt?

[00:03:24] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, it’s interesting because that, that’s sort of this topic. That’s not unique to AI, right? We, we keep hearing that like data preparedness, data preparedness. Um, the cliche phrase is garbage in garbage out. And it’s interesting to think like, how does that apply to AI?

[00:03:41] Matt Tonkin: Because I’ve sort of seen this in the past with other tools, where I think a lot of people think, you know, this is just going to solve all your problems. Um, this tool A comes in and, you know, great, we’re going to use this and you see the demo and everything. And the reality when you get it set up is that if you didn’t plan for it and prep for it, it’s not going to work how you expect.

[00:04:03] Matt Tonkin: And I see a lot of similarity, I think, in AI and these tools. I think a lot of people think like it’s going to solve everything off the bat. And. AI probably has a lot more flexibility in being able to counter for some of that dirty data and the junk stuff in there. But I can definitely see like, if, if what you have in your systems that you’re feeding into this tool isn’t useful, it’s not going to be able to give you the results you want.

[00:04:32] Joe Peters: Exactly. And, and We’ve been talking about dirty data

[00:04:36] Matt Tonkin: for years,

[00:04:38] Joe Peters: if not, if not even a decade now, uh, pretty much since, um, marketing operations, uh, started coming into play, we’ve been dealing with data challenges. And so. I really think that for organizations to get their house in order as it pertains to their data, you know, whether that’s cleaning and preprocessing or figuring out your data warehousing play, like, where’s this all going, um, What does that look like for real time, uh, processing or batch processing?

[00:05:14] Joe Peters: Like, how is this all being thought through? So when you’re doing your AI adoption and starting to train your own LLM, let’s say, what are you training it with? And what’s the state of readiness that you have right now in either marketing operations or marketing writ large. If you’re that CMO of a mid market or enterprise organization.

[00:05:39] Matt Tonkin: Definitely. And, and with that dirty data, a huge part of that is always scaling is always, you know, you can have clean data at one size, but how do you get that growth? And with AI, whatever form of growth you’re going to have is exponentially bigger. So it, it just heightens that, that if you can start with something early and get, get that structure in place, you’re, you’re going to be well ahead.

[00:06:04] Joe Peters: Exactly. And, you know, We’ve been dealing with data privacy for a long time and, you know, international standards, whether it’s, um, uh, you know, whether it’s European or North American, uh, standards, uh, how many of those, uh, uh, how many of those, um, preference centers have we set up?

[00:06:29] Matt Tonkin: Exactly right. And there’s so many, so many variations and being able to standardize for global organizations is.

[00:06:38] Matt Tonkin: I mean, it keeps us in business. Yeah, exactly.

[00:06:41] Joe Peters: But you know, whether it’s GDPR and, and we can only expect, and while they probably are lagging out, there are going to be new data privacy standards that are going to come into play. 100%. Uh, Whether it’s pertaining to personal information or to copyright information, there’s gonna be a whole legal switch here, too.

[00:07:06] Joe Peters: So keeping your ear to the ground as a as a CMO is also gonna be important here, but I think that idea of data privacy is probably over indexed right now from reality because it’s always a thing and people don’t want everything trained with. Uh, you know, there are confidential proprietary information, but imagine you’re training your own private LLM, then, you know, you’re not as concerned there, but there’s still going to be challenges and issues you need to think through as it pertains to privacy and what you’re training with.

[00:07:39] Matt Tonkin: Yeah. That’s a good point in that, you know, these are new issues. These are things that companies have already been fighting and battling with, um, internal private information, whether it’s, you know, fear of cybersecurity attacks or things like that. That doesn’t, the core concept doesn’t change. It’s just how, how you’re using the tools and how you’re protecting yourself.

[00:08:01] Matt Tonkin: Right.

[00:08:02] Joe Peters: I, one of the things that I’m kind of slightly obsessed with, and we have a little chart here that there’ll be a few blogs coming out of this over the next little while, is this idea of, if you think of, uh, uh, uh, you know, a simple chart where you have your X access and let’s just pretend your X access is.

[00:08:24] Joe Peters: So change over time, and then your Y access is an increase in AI innovation. And then if you were plotting on that risks and benefits, um, you know, you could imagine that benefits are going to increase over time with increases in innovation, that’s kind of like a pretty easy thing to follow and you would.

[00:08:44] Joe Peters: Presuppose that if we’re going to have the exponential growth in AI innovation that everyone is pretending that risks might start high, but they can’t actually move at that same exponential level for an organization. So when we have that tipping point, where the benefits and the risks cross, and then you’re moving into a.

[00:09:05] Joe Peters: Place where the benefits are really outweighing, um, the, the risks to the organization. That’s going to be that sweet spot. That’s going to be that tipping point for each organization to consider, but to, and, and I think this is like wrapping a bow on this here. If you have your data ready. Then, when you want to take advantage of those benefits, when you see those innovations that are directly going to improve your, your operations or your outcome for your organization, you’re ready to go.

[00:09:40] Matt Tonkin: Do you think that for each organization too, there might be multiple of those same charts that, you know, but for different purposes for, you know, average employees, like the just asking questions into chat GTP? There’s a certain level of risk to that, sure, but it’s much lower than maybe full on implementation of a very large native LLM or something like that.

[00:10:03] Matt Tonkin: So there’s almost like you’re going to have to look at that from so many different perspectives as well. Yeah,

[00:10:10] Joe Peters: but if you think of like something like whether it’s Google’s duet for the Google work space or Microsoft copilot, whenever that comes out and you’re. You know, you’re 1000 person, 2000 person organization, and you’re going to decide to turn on 30, 40, 50 a seat per month, AI integration into your suite, those are going to be, those are going to be the big questions, like, who’s ready, that’s just a training and literacy and people being ready for it that way, that’s not even thinking about, Using it, creating your own LLM or anything like that.

[00:10:50] Joe Peters: Anyway, we can, as Matt knows, we can talk about

[00:10:54] Matt Tonkin: AI forever. Joe can talk about AI literally forever.

[00:10:59] Joe Peters: All right. Let’s just slide into our second segment here on, you know, continuing our train of thought on, on AI. But Matt, what were some of the. Big things that you took away from inbound now that we have you on the podcast.

[00:11:16] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, glad to glad to actually be able to share my thoughts on it a bit later than I expected, but happy to be doing it now. Um, I mean, first and foremost, continuing from what we were talking about before, everyone said just get using AI. Um, so. Obviously, that’s sort of the key thing, but I think, I think one of the things that came up was this concept of will AI replace our jobs and, you know, if, if it does, what’s that going to look like?

[00:11:48] Matt Tonkin: Um, it’s a natural fear for, I think a lot of people, especially creators to think, you know, suddenly, is this machine doing my job better? And that’s, that’s not a new fear, right? That’s been going on for centuries. Um, and. The quote that I think really stood out to me was AI will take your job and give you a better one

[00:12:10] Joe Peters: Yeah, dude, I don’t know about that one.

[00:12:12] Joe Peters: What do you think?

[00:12:12] Matt Tonkin: Well, I know you and I have had a different read on that and I’ve had some time to think about it And I mean, I think the first part AI will take at least will take jobs I don’t know if we can say your job and your job and be so granular with it But I think that’s fair right? AI is going to take jobs And we’re already seeing it

[00:12:32] Joe Peters: in the journalism space, right?

[00:12:34] Joe Peters: So when, when people are like, Oh, AI isn’t taking as many jobs as we thought, well, then talk to some media organizations and people who are working there and see what they think about that.

[00:12:48] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, it’s, it is, it is going to take jobs. So I think the, the part where it’s open for argument is this, is it going to give you a better job or is it at least going to make your job better?

[00:13:00] Matt Tonkin: And, and this idea of how you use a AI to make your job better and not lose out. Um, and one of the, oh, sorry Joe, I think you were going to say. No, you know, like

[00:13:12] Joe Peters: I think, I think the one thing that you’re, you’re, you’re getting at here that I really like is. It can make your job better by doing maybe some of the repetitive things that you don’t like doing or, or some of the heavy lifting things, uh, that we all have to do sometimes.

[00:13:28] Joe Peters: And I think that that’s the case, but remember we heard that other presentation where I think it was a woman from Jasper and it was one of the more profound, um, statements in, in the sessions that I attended, she said, okay, it’s going to free up more time. Yeah. Uh, maybe making your job better because you don’t have to do all these repetitive things, but what are you going to do with your free time?

[00:13:53] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, yeah, that was, that was huge, right? And that’s, that’s so clear. If suddenly a task that used to take you eight hours is suddenly taking you two, you have that six hours to do, to do what? That’s the question, right? That’s the big question is, is it to do more of what you’re just doing? Is it to find a way to make what you’re doing better?

[00:14:16] Matt Tonkin: Um. The way it really tied and resonated with me, um, was when I actually went to the HubSpot booth and saw some of the demos of the new AI, um, you know, generating content on landing pages. And I flashed back to, let’s not date myself too much, but I flashed back to when I was actually essentially a one man marketing team for a small startup.

[00:14:37] Matt Tonkin: You know, I was going to trade shows for them. I was running the HubSpot instance. I was running Google AdWords. Ends. Thinking about getting a campaign out the door, building the emails, building all this content, and that would take me, you know, several days, and it’s a one man team, and it’s like, the end of the week, I’m like, yay, I got this one campaign out the door.

[00:14:57] Matt Tonkin: To think that I could probably have done all that work if I had the HubSpot AI stuff that is coming out now, I could have done that in a couple hours, and then how much more I could have done. How much, you know, I could have done to expand on that. That really took me back. Thinking, okay, I’m not just executing emails anymore.

[00:15:20] Matt Tonkin: What, what’s that same wow moment except in my current role? Um, and that’s something I still need to figure out.

[00:15:27] Joe Peters: I think one of the things that we’re going to see is, and this was kind of easy to predict, is the tsunami of content that we’re going to be, uh, exposed to. So, if it’s easy for everyone to generate it, Say in your HubSpot instance and, uh, your campaign assistant is helping you generate your emails, your landing pages,
and your ads.

[00:15:52] Joe Peters: Well, okay. How are you breaking through? And I think we saw that a really cool, uh, there was a session on the pyramid of content. Do you want to dive into that? I, I love

[00:16:05] Matt Tonkin: that. Yeah, it was a really great visualization for. Both modern current like content structure and what we’re looking at going forward and if you think about it as almost like the um, oh and I’m blanking on but the uh, The hierarchy of needs structure.

[00:16:21] Matt Tonkin: Maslow’s?

[00:16:22] Joe Peters: Maslow’s.

[00:16:23] Matt Tonkin: There we are. Yep, exactly So you can think you can see this like bottom most tier, which is what they defined as lazy content So essentially the stuff that for lack of a better term is kind of junk content. It’s just stuff that’s filler and it’s there and then you have The more executional side and that makes up the bulk of the pyramid, which is, you know, it’s good, good content.

[00:16:46] Matt Tonkin: It’s getting out there. It’s doing what it needs to do, but it’s not, you know, really turning the needle. It’s not some amazing new advancement in terms of how you’re communicating and then that top small percentage of the pyramid is that more revolutionary content that that game changer stuff that really the real thought leaders are producing and that good content.

[00:17:10] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, and and what AI is doing is it’s not suddenly just generating those new ideas and those new thoughts for everyone It’s it’s that supplement and it’s helping Build that out So it’s really going to essentially eliminate that lazy content because suddenly you have no need for that Right, like anyone can create that lazy content using AI So it really expands out that that middle bucket where you know, it’s the the bulk of the content we’re seeing And it expands that exponentially.

[00:17:41] Matt Tonkin: But then you have that top of the pyramid where it’s, okay, what’s this good content that really is driving revolution? Um, and, and that’s, who’s going to benefit the most is the people who can really take that and go with it. So

[00:17:55] Joe Peters: great content isn’t going to go away. It’s going to be critical to breaking through.

[00:18:01] Joe Peters: And that as, uh, for marketers is. the critical insight here, which is, okay, you can join the tsunami or you can be that surfboard on top of it. Okay. And unless you’re thinking that way, uh, it’s going to be pretty hard to break through, but, uh, that’s a, that’s a good segue into our next segment in terms of breaking through.

[00:18:28] Joe Peters: Uh, we have a, a new edition here, which are questions from the community and. We’re gonna put, uh, Mr. Tonkin’s, uh, MOPS knowledge to the test. And, so what we did is… We went into the marketing ops professionals, their slack channel. And, uh, for those of you that aren’t familiar, you should really dive into this, uh, marketing ops.

[00:18:55] Joe Peters: com. It’s great community guys that are really, really, um, dedicated to advancing the community. And so we. We chatted with Mike Rizzo, who’s one of the, um, who’s the founder of the community and asked him if we could take some questions, uh, that are being posed and answer them on the podcast. And he was really excited about that.

[00:19:19] Joe Peters: And so, uh, we’re going to do that today and just one other plug for them because we love them. Mopsapalooza is coming up in November in. Anaheim, it’s going to be a great group of people getting together, pretty much focused on marketing operations. And that’s really different than, you know, what we would have saw say at inbound Matt, or what we even saw at summit in, in March, this is really, really hyper focused for those of us in mops.

[00:19:53] Joe Peters: And, uh, what, what is, are some of the burning issues and challenges that we’re facing? So let’s dive into the question. So we took this one and we’re not going to say who, who, who asked the question, but we will post this back in the community. So they have it. So the question is, do you have any tips on how we can reduce the number of failed sinks?

[00:20:18] Matt Tonkin: Take it away. And I’m gonna, I’m gonna start by saying I’m going to approach this primarily from a Marketo Salesforce perspective and, and from, for context, the original question was sort of relating those two systems. But this is information that’s pretty cross platform agnostic, but I’ll, I’ll focus specifically on that.

[00:20:38] Matt Tonkin: Um, and I think the, the key thing is really figuring out causes first and foremost, um, what Marketo has. Notification platform where you can actually see what’s happening and why look into some of the details on why those things are happening. So generating your list of the whys, first and foremost, that’s key, but, but there are some sort of general, general reasons why we see a lot of failures.

[00:21:05] Matt Tonkin: Um, one might be, um, difference in data structure from Marketo to Salesforce. Um, one of the most common I think I’m seeing is restricted pick list in Salesforce. That are connected to fields in Marketo that are essentially free type. So, you know, random data, and this goes way back to the, uh, dirty data we were talking about before, right?

[00:21:26] Matt Tonkin: Where random information gets in and, and Salesforce says, yeah, this isn’t allowed and breaks the sync. And because maybe that field is required. Whatever the case is, looking at those rules and those validation rules are important. Um, but it gets more complicated than that. You could run into situations where there’s processes happening on the Salesforce side, whether it’s a, um, like a validation process or some sort of data, um, processing, whatever the case is happening.

[00:22:01] Matt Tonkin: And while Salesforce is doing those processes, it tends to lock the object. And then if in that same moment of time, Marketo’s thinking. Or, or doing something with the object, you can have that sync failure again. Sometimes it’s going to be transient. A lot of other times it can be much more serious. And, and you’re losing that data parity across the platforms.

[00:22:24] Joe Peters: And so how common is this, Matt? Like, should people be, uh, uh, shaking in their boots when they see these, these errors? Or what do you see?

[00:22:35] Matt Tonkin: Every instance is going to have errors, probably every day. There’s going to be some errors. You’ll, if you go into your sync logs, you’ll see errors. It’s not about who has it.

[00:22:47] Matt Tonkin: It’s about how detrimental it is to your operations. Um, if it’s, you know, one field not getting written properly and then it’s a transient error and five minutes later it gets updated. Um, the damage that that’s likely to cause is much lower than if you have 100 MQLs that just don’t get pushed across the sales.

[00:23:10] Matt Tonkin: And then they sit there for three weeks before someone says, Hey, what happened here? And your window of being able to, you know, maybe have a good opportunity and have a conversation with a prospect is gone. Um, so how do you

[00:23:23] Joe Peters: stay on top of it then? Like where, where do you go?

[00:23:27] Matt Tonkin: Um, so in Marketo, um, there is the notification panel.

[00:23:31] Matt Tonkin: There’s a little like a bell, um, notification icon on the top, right? 100 percent the most, the least utilized feature in Marketo. And I’m guilty of it too. The number just keeps ticking up and then suddenly it’s like, Oh, 600 notifications that are, so, so check that daily. Um, but I think especially with larger orgs that have a larger marketing operations team, it’s, it’s formalizing who’s in charge of that.

[00:23:56] Matt Tonkin: Because a lot of the time it’s just sort of there and, you know, sometimes we click and see, but if you have someone who’s in charge or multiple people, ideally, who’s in charge of, you know, checking, seeing where there’s errors, seeing if it’s something that’s having an effect, um, that’s sort of the, the key to staying on top of this.

[00:24:17] Matt Tonkin: And this is a, this is a two way thing to where the sales ops team, um, that’s where you see a lot of issues is that mops and sales ops aren’t communicating. So if you have different numbers, but you’re not communicating that, you don’t even realize it and don’t know there’s a problem. So

[00:24:34] Joe Peters: basically improving communications and someone being on top of the bell.

[00:24:40] Matt Tonkin: Right, exactly.

[00:24:43] Joe Peters: All right. Well, I’m sure that will be hot, uh, hot content and a response that the community is going to love. So we’ll be happy to share that there. Thanks, Matt. So just before we move into our hot take section, I just want to. Thank our sponsor Knack. And, uh, they’re the sponsor of today’s episode.

[00:25:05] Joe Peters: And for those of you that aren’t familiar with them, Knack provides email and landing page creation for enterprise marketing teams, uh, and no coding is required. That’s their, that’s their sweet spot there. So allows organizations to get to market about 95 percent faster. with Knack and Matt knows this.

[00:25:25] Joe Peters: Think about a template creation, uh, if you’re coding away and how fast it can be done with Knack. And so learn more by visiting knak. com. That’s knack. com. So let’s move into our final section here, uh, before we, uh, have a little bit of fun. And this is an interesting article. We, we, we’re always combing, uh, the universe for new articles Marketing ops and AI and, um, and we like to discuss those here as well as in our newsletter.

[00:26:03] Joe Peters: For those of you that want to sign up for that also called launch codes. Uh, but here’s the, here’s the headline, uh, B2B should invest in these 10 channels in 2024. So according to 160 plus marketers, which is what are those 10 channels? So started with SEO on top blogging, search ads, website updates, social ads.

[00:26:33] Joe Peters: And then there’s, it sort of goes on from there, but Matt and I both laughed at the SEO and, you know, obviously we. We’ve all invested in marketing, uh, uh, some significant time and effort on SEO historically. But when I see this type of article in this survey of 160 plus marketers, um, what, there are two questions I have one, when was the survey done?

[00:27:04] Joe Peters: Was it like March or February? Uh, because two. Where’s AI coming into this play and how does this affect some of those things? So Matt, what’s what it what’s your

[00:27:16] Matt Tonkin: take? Yeah, I I think I have that same sort of feeling with you It’s like how how valid is this very important time and and before I get into the full take I always want to stress Too is don’t look at these lists for your true like what you’re gonna go to market with right?

[00:27:33] Matt Tonkin: Figure out, use your internal data and your attribution to figure out what’s actually working for you. Probably SEO is important, and, and all these other pieces, but really, you know, dive into your own data first. But, to your point, Joe. Yeah, great. What what’s the new stuff that’s coming out and changing?

[00:27:53] Matt Tonkin: And I think I’ve had this conversation about three times in the last two weeks, which makes me realize that more people are thinking about it. But okay, we have search engine optimization. Over the last few months, I rarely go to Google anymore, unless it’s something in the like, after September 2021, or whatever the chat, gtp cutoff date is, I go and type it in there.

[00:28:16] Matt Tonkin: And I I get feedback there and that’s becoming my new search engine in a lot of ways. Um, so to me, it’s not what’s search engine optimization. It’s what is AI optimization and is that a thing or is it going to be a thing or is it already a thing and I got to figure it out?

[00:28:35] Joe Peters: Yeah, 100 percent it’s going to be a thing.

[00:28:37] Joe Peters: You know, I find it interesting cause there’s all these privacy and copyright conversations going on and I, how everybody’s updating their, uh, robots, text files on their website saying, Hey, uh, we don’t want you crawling our website. Well, what’s that going to do in the future for your AI optimization when your site hasn’t been, um, trained on the next, uh, LLM, like people have got to start thinking

[00:29:06] Matt Tonkin: about that.

[00:29:08] Matt Tonkin: And, and thinking about how, right. There’s not like. At least it doesn’t feel the same as when we’re like, Oh, we got a trick, the Google algorithm into putting us first. Right. It does. I mean, the concept feels like it should be the same, but there’s this big gap that maybe we’re just not there yet in our understanding of how we’re going to.

[00:29:34] Matt Tonkin: You know, how we’re going to set our information that we’re putting into these models out there so that we come out when, when we ask, you know, what’s, what’s the best, uh, RevOps agency, Joe, what are we going to do to make sure that we’re, uh, we’re put out number one, right? Yeah, well,

[00:29:51] Joe Peters: we’re, I did a little bit of questioning to see where we, we stood and we’re definitely happy to be in the top three, which is pretty, pretty cool to see.

[00:30:02] Joe Peters: But, uh, yeah, I think some of the things that are never going to go away is, uh, having high quality content that’s resonating with your audience. The AI optimization is going to take that into account too. So if you’re doing really great things and you’re not doing the mail it in content or that. Trying, trying to get that content that really engages is going to be just important in the future as it is, uh, today’s, but, um, Anyways, it’s funny to see those lists because the world is, is changing fast and
you’ve really got to keep your ear to the ground in terms of what that means for you and your organization.

[00:30:42] Joe Peters: All right, let’s let’s shift gears quickly into what is a pretty funny thing that we saw last week. And that was Coca Cola introducing a new mystery flavor made by AI. Matt, what does the future

[00:31:00] Matt Tonkin: taste like? Um, I, I’m I like this. I actually really do, but like it’s, it’s in a weird way, um, because it, it feels gimmicky and it feels like, you know, the, the company hopping on the trend, which is AI.

[00:31:18] Matt Tonkin: But at the same time, the thing that hops into my mind is, you know, Coca Cola, how much, how many, like, how much resource is put into trying new flavors all the time? And, I can just picture this giant robot being like, Oh, let’s try these three flavors and get feedback from this test group. And then, oh, yep, that was good or not, right?

[00:31:38] Matt Tonkin: Like, that entire process of developing new flavors and, and new, like, foods, like, fast food, um, companies that, you know, put out a hundred new products every five years and two of them make it. Right? I can just see a whole area that’s taken over by AI. Um, in terms of, uh, this Coke, I want to try it. Uh, I’m interested to see, I’m interested to see

[00:32:05] Joe Peters: what it is.

[00:32:05] Joe Peters: We should have a live tasting on the podcast when they come. We’ll have our follow up. Yeah, if you’re in the U. S. It’s available now. If you’re in Canada, I think we have to wait till September 26 to get our

[00:32:17] Matt Tonkin: uh, into the course Hot

[00:32:20] Joe Peters: little hands, but uh, yeah, I I I love that. They’re not shooting for they’re they call it y 3000 which is The year 3000.

[00:32:30] Joe Peters: So I love that they’re shooting big too, not the year 2100 or 2200 year 3000 flavor. That’s that’s pretty

[00:32:38] Matt Tonkin: funny, but does it feel like a miss? They didn’t go Y3K.

[00:32:45] Joe Peters: Yeah, we did invest a lot of resources in Y2K. That’s for sure. Um, all right, well, uh, let’s, let’s move on from there into the final segment of.

[00:32:59] Joe Peters: This week’s, uh, episode of Launch Codes and that’s into our pairing section. So as always, I’m going to, uh, introduce, uh, an album and, uh, you would have heard it at the, at the intro and, um. We’ll have it running in the background as well for you, but I love this album. It’s by a group called Jungle. Uh, they, uh, you know, started in, uh, 2013, uh, in the UK and, uh, they really have, uh, stolen some of the sounds of soul and funk from, um, you know, earlier eras and every album is their masterpiece.

[00:33:44] Joe Peters: Every one of it. When I have it on in the background, people are like, this. This is super cool. What is this? Uh, and it really gets everybody in a sort of good mood uh Party vibe and uh, they just did some cool, uh vinyl on this one with an orange and white one Kind of reminds me a little bit of a pokemon a bit, but I I had it as the orange for um for hub spot Uh last week, but I saved it for matt for this week.

[00:34:14] Joe Peters: So we have uh The album is called Volcano, just like our, just like our podcast, Launch Codes. We’re ready to explode here. Um, and, um, and the track that, that you’re hearing is, uh, Dominoes, which is another kind of fun play in terms of getting everything in line and those, uh, dominoes, um, Uh, cascading into each other and we’re starting to see the little pieces of marketing and AI intersecting now.

[00:34:47] Joe Peters: So that was the thematic link to this week’s episode, but let me turn it over to Matt and he’s going to share, uh, his, uh, part of pairings this week. And, um, and I’m pretty excited about it. All

[00:35:05] Matt Tonkin: right. Yeah. So first thing first for me is that I am. A fan of craft beer. Uh, I also like to brew my own beer. Uh, I, my brother in law and I sort of pretend we’re brewmasters.

[00:35:19] Matt Tonkin: 60 percent of the time you just, you drink it cause you made it and you feel proud of it and occasionally you get one that you’re like, Oh, that’s really good. Um, but for me, the, the beer I’m going to show off, uh, and it’s actually not one I’ve had yet, um, is called Castronaut. Uh, Session Hazy IPA. Uh, it’s from Refined Fool, a brewery out of Sarnia, Ontario.

[00:35:43] Matt Tonkin: So, the reason I chose this particular beer, um, and why it ties in well with what we’ve been talking about is, I was actually, um, getting groceries and I was pushing the cart and my daughter was in the cart. So, I’m walking past the beer aisle in the grocery store and she points out and goes, Daddy, there’s, that’s a beer for you.

[00:36:01] Matt Tonkin: And she’s like, the one with the cat on the label. And, and that was her entire logic was, Oh, there’s a cat on the label. And…

[00:36:09] Joe Peters: So they’re marketing to kids. That’s basically what you’re saying. Yeah, right.

[00:36:14] Matt Tonkin: Yeah, the, uh, yeah. Uh, that, well, that’s a whole other topic we can get into. But the reason it resonated with me when I was preparing for this was, Um, I’ve, I’ve already got someone telling me exactly what I want and what I like.

[00:36:26] Matt Tonkin: So, uh, I don’t necessarily need AI to be telling me. I’ve already… I’ve already got my four year old

[00:36:33]Joe Peters: doing that. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, you’re going to have to crack that baby open and let us know how it tastes, but um, we won’t put you on the spot, uh, to have to do that right now, but okay.

[00:36:45] Joe Peters: Well, I think this moves, uh, to the closing here. So I just want to thank you Matt for coming on the. On the podcast this week. And thanks to everyone who’s listened to this point. Uh, it might, uh, as again, thanks mom for getting to hear. And, uh, so be sure to subscribe, uh, rate and review and stay connected with us on LinkedIn.

[00:37:09] Joe Peters: At a revenue pulse RP and join our newsletter, uh, you know, coincidentally or not coincidentally called launch codes, where you can stay up to date on all the things that we’re talking about, but until next time, keep learning, keep growing and keep being amazing. And we’ll see you soon.

[00:37:28] Matt Tonkin: Great. Thanks.

We are incredibly excited to kick off our brand new “Launch Codes” podcast!

The show will be released on a weekly basis, featuring cutting-edge conversations on the latest in Marketing Ops, AI and more.

It will feature our CEO, Joe Peters, as he’s joined by a rotating cast of:

• Matt Tonkin (Sr. Director)
• Andy Caron (SVP of Consulting), and
• Lauren McCormack (VP of Consulting).

For our pilot episode, Matt Tonkin was out sick, so our Marketing Manager, Matt Burtney, stepped up to fill in! This episode comes fresh off of HubSpot’s INBOUND 2023, covering a wide array of exciting speakers, surprise sessions, and much more.

 

Listen Below

 

Episode Summary

HubSpot and AI

When Joe saw the opening keynote at INBOUND 2023, it was pretty clear that AI would be the star of the event. HubSpot went on to unveil some astounding AI features and innovations they’ve been working on. One of them was the evolution of ChatSpot, their current AI-enabled bot.

While it’s not a new feature (we first saw it back in March 2023), it has now reached a point where users can train it on a host of information including their blog, content, and even sales information. It can even be embedded straight onto your website and really represent your entire organization – HubSpot has said it can eliminate the need for almost 80% of customer inquiries.

HubSpot also introduced a range of AI assistants and agents to help expedite work within the platform. Joe had a chance to get a demonstration of the Campaign Assistant which quickly creates landing pages, emails and ads with generative AI. It works pretty well but requires some heavy human intervention. It won’t provide the brand control that many organizations will require, but it is 100% a step in the right direction. Campaign Assistant will only get better with time.

Going forward, Joe expects many companies to follow HubSpot’s lead to create a “one-stop” AI integrated CRM – we are now entering the era of what HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah calls the “Smart CRM”.

 

TikTok For Business

Perhaps the biggest surprise at INBOUND 2023 for Joe was the TikTok deep dive session. During this presentation, it was revealed that:

• There are over 150 million TikTok users in the U.S.
• They use TikTok for an average of 90 minutes per day.
• Users open the app an average of 17 times per day.

These are astounding numbers. And Joe goes on to say that a lot of brands and companies might dismiss TikTok as a platform that caters to a much younger audience. But when you’re talking about numbers like 150 million (half the American population), there is certainly a user base or community on there for your brand to connect with. Some of the business features TikTok has established were very impressive as well.

For example: Users now have the ability to integrate a lead gen form within a content piece that is submitted directly into HubSpot upon completion. In terms of service offerings for businesses, this is a massive step forward for TikTok and represents an incredible opportunity for companies to take advantage of.

With that said though, it’s important for brands to cater their content to the TikTok platform expectations. In other words, instead of posting a traditional ad or asset, brands need to approach TikTok with an “entertainment lens” and think about what will truly engage your audience.

 

The $1 Million Pitch Competition

One of the more unique events at INBOUND 2023 was the $1 million pitch competition. Essentially, they had 6 VC’s (including HupSpot’s CMO) set up “Shark Tank” style. There were 6 companies who each had 2 minutes to do a pitch, with some time for the VC’s to ask some quick questions.

Here’s a quick rundown of the companies involved:

Stack Moxie: A testing platform that allows you to test your forms – such as lead gen – to make sure they’re all being executed properly.

NLX: A conversational AI platform with mobile UX support. So if you lose a credit card, for example, you’d have an entire visual interface provided as part of your support experience.

Chatdesk: A social conversation engagement service that uses AI to analyze engagement opportunities that are passed on to human agents who facilitate organic conversation.

ServiceBell: A service that provides live call integration into your website. Leads engaging with a form on your site (for example) may have a live call opportunity appear in real time.

Doola: A service that helps companies start doing business in the US – taking care of all your corporate compliance requirements for an annual fee.

Tavus: An AI video personalization service that will actually create videos of yourself talking based on a script you provide (and a 15 minute audio and video training process/sample upload so it can learn your voice etc).

All of these companies had exciting ideas with a lot of promise, but the two winners turned out to be:

Doola and Tavus!

 

Rapid Fire Questions:

• Which speaker resonated with you the most?
• What was the best hook for attracting people to a booth?
• Did any of the speakers surprise you?
• What new feature that HubSpot announced will have the biggest impact on Marketing Ops in the next year?
• What was the most exciting AI feature you heard about at Inbound 2023?
• What was the most memorable swag?

 

Read The Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was created by AI using Descript and has not been edited.

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: Welcome to Launch Codes, the podcast from Revenue Pulse, also known as RP. It’s a podcast about marketing operations, artificial intelligence, and more. I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Joe Peters, CEO of Revenue Pulse, and each week I’ll sit down with an expert. In the marketing ops space to discuss the latest news, insights, and concepts.

[00:00:26] Joe Peters: So be sure to subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find this podcast. This is our pilot episode. I’d like to introduce you to my colleague, Matt Burtney. He’s joining us today. He’s stepping up for Matt Tonkin and Matt Bertany. Not to confuse. We have too many mats in the organization. Uh, not to confuse things.

[00:00:49] Joe Peters: Matt is our marketing manager and, uh, the wizard behind our production of launch codes. So, um, over to you, Matt. What are we going to cover today?

[00:01:03] Matt Burtney: Thanks, Joe. So on today’s episode, we’ll be covering our trip to Inbound 2023, which is HubSpot’s marketing and sales conference. So the big things that we want to talk about are the new AI releases from HubSpot, TikTok for business, the million dollar pitch competition, the good and bad of Inbound, uh, the takeaways and insights.

[00:01:25] Matt Burtney: And, uh, a few of our hot takes. And, uh, for everyone who’s watching or listening, be sure to stick around for the end, uh, because at the end of our conversation, Joe is going to have a delightful little surprise for us, uh, that you don’t want to miss, and it’ll better explain our time at Inbound.

[00:01:43] Joe Peters: Well, I’m not a hundred percent sure about that, but, um, it will, uh, add a little flavor.

[00:01:49] Joe Peters: You may have heard it at the intro, uh, some of our quality background, uh, music. Before we jump into today’s conversation, I just want to shine a bit of a spotlight on a game changer in the world of email marketing. And that’s our fantastic sponsor, Knack. Knack provides email and landing page creation for enterprise marketing teams in minutes.

[00:02:14] Joe Peters: And the best part is there’s no coding required. So Knack makes it easy for marketers to expand their creativity to create stunning on brand emails and landing pages that customers will love. Learn more by visiting knack. com. That’s K N A K. com. Alright, so back to you, Matt.

[00:02:39] Matt Burtney: Perfect. Well, so there was quite a few things going on at Inbound this year.

[00:02:43] Matt Burtney: I was watching it back here on Twitter, or X as it’s called now. Uh, and one of the things that seemed to really stand out was, the artificial intelligence piece. So Joe, do you want to talk to us a little bit about HubSpot and AI?

[00:02:59] Joe Peters: Yeah, for sure, Matt. Um, sitting in the opening keynote, it was pretty clear that the star of the show was going to be AI.

[00:03:09] Joe Peters: Uh, no doubt about it, actually. And, Uh, when you sort of open up the hood and have a look at what HubSpot is doing, there are some pretty serious investments and innovations related to AI. So, um, in particular, what you can see are the campaign assistants and agents that they’re introducing, um, The chat spot, which is their AI enabled bot and, uh, in highlighting how those integrate into the platform to allow marketers to create, um, content better and to allow customers to access, uh, knowledge bases faster.

[00:03:56] Joe Peters: So, uh, I sat down with. One of the, um, uh, HubSpot, um, uh, gurus at their, at their booth at the show and had a really good look at how the assistants and agents are working right now. So the interesting thing is there is a little bit of a difference between. Uh, with the functionalities and and they’re almost like separate infrastructures.

[00:04:28] Joe Peters: So you you would see chat spot is probably the most sophisticated element when it comes to AI and they’ve are they introduced that I think back in March of this year and it continues to evolve so you can train it on a whole host of information. Uh, not only in your from blog or knowledge based content to sales information so that, um, chat spot, uh, uh, bot, uh, can be embedded on a website and really represent the organization.

[00:05:02] Joe Peters: One of the key things that they said, it can eliminate the need for almost. 80 percent of the inquiries. So that was, that was pretty interesting. And if we flip it over to the other side, uh, and look at the, uh, agents and, um, and assistants, those are a little bit on the lighter side. Um, uh, very easy to use.

[00:05:29] Joe Peters: You could create emails and landing pages, uh, and, uh, full campaigns. Transcribed with, uh, using, uh, GPT to generate content for you, sort of embedded right in the platform. It works pretty well, uh, but it doesn’t allow you sort of the brand controls that you would get from, uh, a Jasper. You’re only going to be able to.

[00:05:52] Joe Peters: Pick thematically what your, um, interest would be. Would you like to be friendly? Would you like to be witty? Would you like to be helpful? Um, like it’s those types of tone controls that you would have. So that was pretty interesting. What does that sound like to you, Matt? Like, are those the types of functionality you wish we had embedded right into our site?

[00:06:14] Matt Burtney: Yeah. So this sounds like it’s instead of having to go to five different places to create it, it’s all coming into the one spot, eh?

[00:06:22] Joe Peters: Yeah. Yeah. There definitely, definitely has that one stop integration, which I think we’re going to see a lot more of. Um, as, uh, as these platforms evolve in their integration with, uh, A.

[00:06:39] Joe Peters: I. Um, and then a kind of a final note on this, uh, Dharmesh Shah, um, the CTO and one of the founders of, of HubSpot, uh, he, he made a post last night talking about, You know, what do we call these CRMs now? Is this an AI CRM or is this a smart CRM? And, uh, that’s a very interesting, uh, way, because even a taxonomy for talking about what we’re doing, um, uh, is, uh, and what is being enabled here within these systems is, is is a pretty interesting, um, challenge today.

[00:07:20] Joe Peters: And so the prevailing wisdom today is that we’re entering into the smart CRM era.

[00:07:27] Matt Burtney: Well, it seems really smart too, because even just the amount of time you spend as like a marketer, just switching tabs to all of these different things that are supposed to be saving me time. It’s. Still spending more time and so to have it all in one spot to know that you’re having good technology behind it, I think it’s genius.

[00:07:52] Joe Peters: Yeah, exactly. All right, well, why don’t we move on to our next topic then?

[00:08:00] Matt Burtney: Yeah, so one of the things that sounded like was a little bit more of a surprise for you when you attended inbound was TikTok for business, so Can you walk me through what we’re working

[00:08:12] Joe Peters: with here? Yeah You know, it’s really interesting Just to see the maturity that’s happening with the platform and TikTok and, uh, my colleague, uh, Matt Tonkin, uh, not to be confused with, uh, Burtney here, um, and I, we had some different experiences.

[00:08:35] Joe Peters: I got to go to a really great, uh, session. Uh, he had a not so good session that he attended to, uh, attended and that, that’s kind of one of the funny things about these conferences. Um, You know, if you’re talking about table stakes or introductions, sometimes, um, the deeper dive sessions, uh, can be pretty interesting.

[00:08:56] Joe Peters: And, and that’s one that I went to, uh, and was just kind of blown away. I, I feel like I should know these things, but I didn’t know these things, but I didn’t know that there were 150 million users of TikTok in the U. S. Um, that’s pretty much half the population and, uh, they’re using the app for 90 minutes a day, uh, which is, uh, pretty incredible on a, for an average, uh, along with 17 opens of the app, which really is kind of mind boggling.

[00:09:31] Joe Peters: And I think, uh, a lot of. Brands and, uh, kind of dismiss TikTok as, you know, a platform for youth or a platform for, you know, a much younger audience. But I think when you’re, you’re talking about numbers like 150 million or half the population, well, that doesn’t really connect to that. So you’re seeing.

[00:09:53] Joe Peters: Really interesting communities form within TikTok and incredible opportunities now for business to connect to these communities. Uh, I think some of the fundamental differences that, uh, you have to see here is that there’s an. entertainment expectation. So, you know, it can’t just be posting, uh, you know, our traditional type of ad or asset within the platform and think you’re going to get away with that or that’s going to resonate.

[00:10:24] Joe Peters: No, you have to kind of think with an entertainment lens, uh, and how you’re going to engage. So, um, I was really, really impressed by some of the business features that they had established, uh, especially as, um, for asset creation and content promotion. I think as well, another thing that was really surprising was looking at something like lead gen and having lead gen forms.

[00:10:57] Joe Peters: Integrated into, uh, a tick tock, um, content piece that is when that is completed is being submitted directly into HubSpot. Now that to me is, you know, kind of taking it to the next level of that kind of integration and real business service being provided. So I think. We’re seeing it, it, it was giving me flashbacks to, I don’t know if it was 2008 or 2009, where the na naysayers were saying that, you know, Facebook and then Instagram, we’re not gonna be places for business or weren’t gonna provide real opportunities.

[00:11:37] Joe Peters: And, and the real, um, The real truth in that is that this is a platform that’s got a humongous audience and there’s a real opportunity to engage within it.

[00:11:51] Matt Burtney: And do you think there’s the same opportunity for B2B, or did they talk about B2B, or is it largely? For B2C

[00:11:58] Joe Peters: companies. Uh, well, that’s where I feel like that lead gen form really provides B2B companies with a, uh, a tremendous opportunity there.

[00:12:09] Joe Peters: Uh, and remember, while, you know, there are going to be certain communities, like I’m, I can only assume the Taylor Swift community would be a giant community within TikTok, uh, and, and that might be millions or hundreds of millions, uh, of. Of members of that type of community. But if you have a community of, I don’t know, 000, that is really connected to what you’re doing.

[00:12:36] Joe Peters: Um, then, then why wouldn’t you kind of explore this as an opportunity? It’s. Especially when you have kind of that opportunity to capture that important lead information for follow up, if someone wants to get more information. So I think it’s, it’s, it’s a time, uh, for, uh, Exploration and an opportunity kind of evaluate and, and think of TikTok as being a real opportunity for, uh, businesses, whether it be B two C or B two B.

[00:13:14] Joe Peters: Um, uh, it kind of won’t really matter. Cool.

[00:13:20] Matt Burtney: All right. Well, thank you for, uh, yeah, bringing us that little surprise from Inbound. And, uh, our next segment we’re going to talk about is the Million Dollar Pitch Competition. So I saw this one quite a bit on, um, on Twitter. Uh, there was a lot of excitement for it.

[00:13:38] Matt Burtney: Uh, so what exactly was it? And, and walk us through the whole, the whole idea.

[00:13:42] Joe Peters: Yeah, this was a real, uh, surprise session for me. I really enjoyed it. Uh, it was entertaining and interesting and they did a really great job of putting together this kind of, I’m going to say kind of shark tank, um, uh, type of process, uh, within a very short period of time.

[00:14:05] Joe Peters: So there were six VCs. Uh, and I’m going to say some of them were VC light. Like there was the, uh, CMO of HubSpot, which I’m not sure he’s a. He’s a VC, uh, you know, uh, in pure function, but, um, they’re, they’re, they’re an interesting element is that both HubSpot and AWS have a venture arms where they kind of, uh, fund different startup opportunities, um, uh, as an organization.

[00:14:39] Joe Peters: So that was news to me. I didn’t, I didn’t know that. And so, but there were some other VCs outside of HubSpot and AWS as well that were in the conversation. And so there were six companies that had two minutes to do a pitch and then there, each of the VCs could ask one quick question. So it was kind of like.

[00:15:00] Joe Peters: Eight to 10 minutes for each, uh, organization. And, um, and it was, it was really entertaining. So let me just kind of run through a few of the companies, uh, so that, uh, and give you a little sense of who they, who they were. So the first was Stack Moxie. Uh, we’re big fans of Stack Moxie. Um, and, um. So she, she did a great job pitching, uh, the company.

[00:15:32] Joe Peters: Uh, and so that was fun to, to see, uh, them in the game. There was this, so for those of you that don’t know, stack Moxi is kind of like a testing platform that allows you to go through and make sure. All of your forms, whether it’s for different lead gen or are all being executed properly. So someone doesn’t have to go in and manually error test to make sure that nothing is being lost.

[00:15:59] Joe Peters: Uh, it’s pretty, pretty incredible, robust platform for doing that. Uh, the second was one called NLX, which was a customer service experience thing. So imagine you call. I don’t know, American Express, and you’ve lost your credit card. There would be a phone interface and a goo, and uh, imagine your phone would transform, and you would actually have a visual interface to your customer support call where you could do certain things at the same time being navigated through that.

[00:16:32] Joe Peters: I, I, I think there are tons of applications for that, and that was really interesting. The third was one called Chat Desk. Uh, and that was social conversation engagement. And so what happens is there’s a listening function with AI that triggers it to be queued for a brand to respond to organic conversations happening.

[00:16:59] Joe Peters: And then there’s an army of human agents that can be mobilized to engage in conversation. So you start sort of starts a natural brand consumer. Engagement in the platform. So kind of really interesting how they set up with AI analyzing opportunities and then humans starting, um, to engage with those opportunities on social platforms.

[00:17:29] Joe Peters: Uh, the next one was a service called Service Bell, and that was live call integration into your site, which is pretty cool. So imagine someone comes to your site. And, uh, they fill out, uh, a lead gen form or they’re on your pricing page and you know a little bit about them and, uh, so imagine it’s connected to HubSpot and then would fire up a video call opportunity right on the site.

[00:18:04] Joe Peters: So instead of a chat spot. Bought or, um, you know, looking at a calendar link and trying to find a time, you could actually speak to someone right away and it routes it within the organization, even to who the deal owner is, if you have some kind of ABM process or existing customer play, uh, there. So pretty cool stuff.

[00:18:24] Joe Peters: Um, but the last two were the ones that, uh, were very impressive. Uh, a company called Dula spelled D O O L A, uh, which is. Sounds a lot like a doula that you would have if you were, um, expecting a child and, uh, it’s kind of had the same concept. It’s like giving birth to your company if you’re trying to have operations in the U S so all the.

[00:18:51] Joe Peters: Legal incorporation, all the compliance things, even banking access, all of these things that are hard for companies outside of the U S to set up that can, uh, you know, cost lots of, uh, of dollars in accounting and legal fees. And they kind of have like a 3, a 300 incorporation fee, and then a 2, 000 a year to do your compliance, um, for IRS and things like that.

[00:19:18] Joe Peters: So really, really cool, uh, service that they’ve. Wrapped into all into one there, and then, uh, the last one was one called Tavis or Tavis. Not really sure. I can’t really remember the exact pronunciation, but it’s spelled T A V U S, and it’s AI video personalization. So we’ve all seen these kind of video pitches that we get from BDRs, where you kind of create a little customized video and send them off to people.

[00:19:48] Joe Peters: Well, imagine. That instead of, um, you having to record 100 or 1000 or 10, 000 of them, you kind of trained an AI, uh, by performing a sort of video and audio test for 15 minutes. And once you’ve trained the AI, you can actually just put your script in and it will know your voice. And move your mouth and make it a real natural conversation while you’re making your pitch and then it’ll green screen in the background.

[00:20:26] Joe Peters: Well, not really green screen, but kind of overlay in the background, a small video window. And then if you’re talking about a company’s website, it can kind of scroll in the background while you’re talking about it. Super cool for creating personalized videos at scale. Uh, the only thing is, I mean, I kind of feel like.

[00:20:46] Joe Peters: I don’t know, Bert, you might think that this might I kind of feel like this is one of those AI innovations that in the beginning will be super cool, but we’re going to be super saturated by this. You know, let’s say a year from now. Yeah, I was just thinking that. Yeah. So, um, all right. Based on my introductions to those concepts and do you know who won or, uh, can I, can I get you to guess who you think would be the winner?

[00:21:18] Matt Burtney: I’m hoping that number four, the people who you can do a video call with them after you filled out the form one, I love the concept.

[00:21:25] Joe Peters: Okay. Well, unfortunately you’re not where the VC money went. And, and so , the winners, they actually made two winners, which was the doula and the TAUs. So the Oh, okay. Giving birth to your company and the ai, uh, video personalization.

[00:21:45] Joe Peters: So, um, really, really cool stuff. And, uh, I think, um, they looked like all of the technologies had promise and. Definite use cases, uh, today.

[00:22:02] Matt Burtney: Oh, that’s cool. And I, I haven’t heard of them doing this before at inbound. Uh, I’m not sure if this is their, their first go at it, but I think it’s a great idea for adding a little bit of excitement to, uh, to the conference.

[00:22:15] Joe Peters: 100%. 100%. It’s going to be really funny to, uh, with, um. Our listeners in the U. S.,

[00:22:23] Joe Peters: you’re going to hear, uh, Matt say A at the end of questions. So, you know, it’s, it’s not going to be hard for you to tell that, um, there is some Canadian influence to this.

[00:22:35] Matt Burtney: Yeah, that was, that was my thought both times I’ve done it.

[00:22:40] Joe Peters: But, you know, that, that, that’s fine. And I also like teasing, uh, Bert because he, um, He can’t help but flush a little bit when I, when I do give him a good, uh, good, uh, little tease every now and then, but, um, yeah, so I, I don’t know, I don’t remember this from last year.

[00:22:59] Joe Peters: Uh, I don’t remember being on the agenda. If it was, I definitely missed it, but this one was really, really quite interesting. And they did a great job of curating some interesting, uh, companies to, to pitch.

[00:23:15] Matt Burtney: Yeah, yeah. There’s quite a diversity in that.

[00:23:18] Joe Peters: Yeah. The also hilarious thing is they were only supposed to have two minutes, but there was really funny to see, like.

[00:23:24] Joe Peters: Them blow through those two minutes and just do longer pitches. Cause what were they going to do? Like just cut them off. Like it was pretty funny. So some of them kind of, some of them stuck right to the two minutes, which obviously they got a little bit penalized by because they didn’t get to do like a five minute pitch, like some of the other ones.

[00:23:43] Joe Peters: So anyway, it’s kind of a funny, uh, funny, uh, little. Uh, loophole that some of them, uh, found and, and went through, but, um, it was really good stuff.

[00:23:56] Matt Burtney: Yeah, When a million dollars is on the line, I guess you’re willing to skirt the rules a little bit.

[00:24:01] Joe Peters: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

[00:24:05] Matt Burtney: So I guess we will, we’ll, uh, transition into our big thoughts on inbound.

[00:24:11] Matt Burtney: So, uh, what was the good and the bad of your time there, your week in Boston?

[00:24:18] Joe Peters: Yeah, having been to, you know, quite a few conferences now in the, uh, since our post COVID, uh, lockup, I have to say, I really love the format of inbound, the way they kind of integrate the trade show into several main stages and, and activity centers so that, um, it’s not like you’re just.

[00:24:43] Joe Peters: Going to the trade show or going to a session. There’s like a real opportunity to, you know, just move around and see things and have conversations at booths. Uh, so I liked that design. Uh, so that was excellent. I thought some of the, some of the sessions were really, really good. Um, the one problem that they had and which was slightly frustrating was, uh, you go in and you book and reserve a seat.

[00:25:16] Joe Peters: Um, I, there was a session that I reserved a seat. I wanted to see Pierce from, uh, from NAC give a session and, uh, I had reserved my seat. I was there 15 minutes before with about 450 other people that couldn’t get into the session. Uh, so. That was a little bit frustrating, um, when you’ve kind of done that and and didn’t get access to, um, to a session.

[00:25:44] Joe Peters: So, yeah, I think they could do a little bit better on that. Um, but, um, yeah, that was that there were some funny sessions like telling you AI is important. It’s time for you to experiment. You know, those those were Those kind of table stakes conversations were a little bit funny because, you know, there was probably, I was in a session, they said, how many people are using chat GPT, there’s probably 1000 people in the room, and every person put their hand up.

[00:26:17] Joe Peters: So why do you give a presentation that says, you know, it’s time to experiment. You know what I mean? So those were some of the, um, some of the cool and slightly, you know, maybe frustrating parts of it, but, um, there were some, there, there was a, a couple of other nuggets that came out. Uh, I was at a one session.

[00:26:45] Joe Peters: Um, that’s a couple of different speakers, but there was a speaker from jasper. ai that there and she was excellent. I’m sorry, I forget her name right now, but she said with all of these AI productivity enhancements, uh, and if you’re freeing up time, well, what are you doing with that time? What are you doing with your free time?

[00:27:08] Joe Peters: And I thought that was a really important question because she said, if you’re just going and doing eat more email, uh, or, you know, what are you going to do with your free time? And I think that that was a really great, um, point in, in, in, in question. Um, and then there was another session that talked about, we’re just going to have, like, Mail it in marketing or me too, or following, you know, following the leader kind of marketing and those are going to have a lot of trouble moving through the volume of content that we’re going to see from a, from a marketing perspective that is supported through AI and really solid original content.

[00:27:56] Joe Peters: It’s going to be so important. So, which is a challenge. How do you create great original content? Well, that means you’re going to have to spend the time and resources and AI isn’t necessarily going to advance that. It’s going to probably give you the kind of follower, follow the lead or mail it in kind of.

[00:28:21] Joe Peters: Content that, um, people won’t really be interested in.

[00:28:26] Matt Burtney: Yeah, especially if, you know, the sound of, of what is coming with Google is that, uh, it’s going to be so much harder to rank in that first position. So creating that high quality content matters so much more and hoping you can find your audience who wants to keep coming back for it.

[00:28:44] Matt Burtney: So it’s definitely something to keep in mind for, uh, people attending either HubSpot or just in marketing in general.

[00:28:51] Joe Peters: Yeah, yeah, 100%, 100%. But, uh, yeah, those are some of the, the takeaways from, um, from my experiences.

[00:29:05] Matt Burtney: And, uh, the one last thing we’re gonna do about Inbound right now is, uh, speed things up a little bit with a rapid fire session.

[00:29:14] Matt Burtney: So, uh, basically the goal here is to, uh, in just a few words, give us, uh, your feedback on a few of the topics that we were curious about. Uh, so first off, which speaker resonated with you the most?

[00:29:27] Joe Peters: Yeah, I, this is an easy one. Dharmesh Shah, uh, the CTO and founder of HubSpot, is just an incredibly, uh, entertaining and, uh, provocative, uh, speaker.

[00:29:45] Joe Peters: Like, I just, I really, I’ve really enjoyed, uh, every time I’ve had the chance to hear him speak, and he never kind of, uh, fails to, um, Uh, uh, fails to impress. Like he, he, he’s, he’s, if you ever have a chance to see him speak, you need to.

[00:30:06] Matt Burtney: I’ll co sign that. So, you know, a couple of times he’s great. Um, what’s the, uh, best hook you saw for attracting people to a booth?

[00:30:16] Joe Peters: Well, our friends at Chili Piper had an amazing booth design. Um, they. They drank their own champagne in the sense that, uh, you could get a free professional headshot done at the conference in their booth. And you had to like sign up for a time slot, like they were doing them every five minutes or something like that.

[00:30:38] Joe Peters: And then after they had the headshot and sent it out to you, they kind of said, Hey, wasn’t that easy? And that’s because it was all being done with the Chili Piper platform. So I thought that was super smart. And a really great way of booth platform integration, like, I give them two thumbs up for that.

[00:31:03] Matt Burtney: Yeah that’s genius. Um, did any of the speakers surprise you this year?

[00:31:11] Joe Peters: I would say I was really blown away by the group from TikTok. They did a great job. And there’s probably five or six different members of the team that kind of did this overarching presentation, and they did a fantastic job. So, I would say it wasn’t just one, it was that, that one really surprised me.

[00:31:33] Matt Burtney: And what new feature that HubSpot announced do you think will have the biggest impact on marketing ops in the next year?

[00:31:40] Joe Peters: Yeah, I think it’s pretty clear that these assistants and agents, like the campaign assistant, uh, is really, really going to provide, I’m going to say companies on the smaller side, you know, uh, with a real opportunity to integrate AI into their work and their campaigns, like generating, uh, um, The content for emails and landing pages like that.

[00:32:17] Joe Peters: It’s definitely worth, uh, keeping, um, track of the innovations that they’re adding and HubSpot seems to have no end to it’s the innovations they introduced in a year. I think they, they showed quickly like this funny screen that just flashed up like 250 things that they integrated last year of new features.

[00:32:37] Joe Peters: So they’re really continuing to advance. Uh, Vance it like, and I’m only joking, but like some of them might have been like, we now allow font sizes to be 12 or 18 like some of them were not super humongous, uh, changes, but, but some of them were quite significant, especially their, their AI integrations.

[00:33:01] Matt Burtney: Yeah. Um, and there might be a little overlap in the next question, but, uh, most exciting AI feature you heard about at Inbound 2023?

[00:33:08] Joe Peters: Uh, I, I would say just what I, uh, just kind of following up on the HubSpot side, which is that, um, The campaign assistants, uh, I think are really going to be, uh, helpful. And if we see this is just the beginning of them and they’re only going to get better from here, that, uh, that’s pretty, that’s pretty great stuff.

[00:33:39] Matt Burtney: And the hardest hitting question, what was the most memorable swag?

[00:33:48] Joe Peters: There was these guys, and maybe we’ll like make a, uh, a social post on this. We’re walking around in these adidas. Blue Adidas, uh, track suits and they had a giant QR code on their back. Like this, and these were tall men, like maybe six, four, six, five. So imagine like a basketball player walking through the

[00:34:16] Joe Peters: You know, convention floor, they have these giant QR codes on their back. Um, so that was, that was, I don’t know. They weren’t handing out those, uh, track suits, but it was something that was pretty memorable. I’m not really like a booth swag, uh, collector. I kind of find that most of the time it collects dust.

[00:34:37] Joe Peters: So I don’t do that, but that was something like that was, I’m going to say swag and action. That was pretty funny.

[00:34:47] Matt Burtney: Yeah, that’s a good way to get some attention. And, uh, we’ll move on to our pairings section. So, uh, Joe, do you want to, do you want to take this one over?

[00:35:00] Joe Peters: Sure. So with each podcast, uh, we want to show a little bit of personality. So Matt Tonkin was supposed to be on and he was supposed to show us his favorite beer of the week, his craft beer of the week, he’s not with us.

[00:35:14] Joe Peters: So we’re not going to put Bert on the spot to have to. Uh, respond, uh, to, to pull something out of his hat. Uh, but, um, as you, as you heard in the intro to this, uh, podcast, uh, a little bit of background music, and so I want to showcase, um, You know, some classic music, every, uh, session. So in every episode that we have.

[00:35:42] Joe Peters: So this week we have the smile, uh, opening things up with a song they have called the smoke amazing album. Had the chance to see them a couple of times over the last. Uh, two summers and they do really great production on their vinyl. Uh, like this is an example. They have some real sweet, uh, yellow vinyl here for you.

[00:36:05] Joe Peters: Uh, but, um, really great sound and great production. And, um, and if you ever get the chance to see them live, well, just for those of you that don’t know, it’s like Tom York. Um, and, uh. Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead. So it’s kind of like a mini Radiohead. Uh, uh, with, uh, this band is, I kind of feel like they were just like bored during the pandemic and just started to record some out, uh, some music together and they came up with that.

[00:36:37] Joe Peters: So, uh, give it a listen and, um, it’s, uh, it’s really just a great album to have in the background while you’re cranking through, uh, Reports or emails or projects that you’re working on.

[00:36:57] Matt Burtney: Awesome. Thank you very much. And, uh, yeah, so I guess we want to thank our audience for joining us on this, on our pilot episode of, uh, Launch Codes.

[00:37:08] Matt Burtney: And, uh, uh, you know, a reminder to everyone to please subscribe and rate and review. Uh, you can stay connected with us on LinkedIn at Revenue Pulse or by joining our newsletter at the link in the footnotes. And, uh, Joe, I’ll pass it off to you for final thoughts.

[00:37:24] Joe Peters: Well, thanks a lot, Bert, for stepping up and coming on to the podcast today.

[00:37:30] Joe Peters: Um, we knew we really wanted to get this out. And, uh, so, uh, thanks for, for being a great, uh, co host today. And, um, really appreciate that. And, um. And thanks to all of
you that listened to this point. It’s probably just my mom at, uh, at, at this point that’s, uh, got through to the end, but thanks a lot for listening.

[00:37:56] Joe Peters: And, you know, we hope that you join us next week too.