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Great Marketing Should Reduce Your Sales Calls · Selling AI

• Warren Kucker: Hey there and welcome to another episode of Selling AI. Today we're diving into one of the more under explored questions in B2B Go-To-Market. What is the impact of AI on demand, Jen? I have Jen Chaney on the show today. Jen is the head of marketing and business development at Integrity, the global leader in crowdsourced security. Think like 100,000 ethical hackers testing your systems before the bad guys do. Here's what makes this conversation interesting. Jen owns both marketing and BD at Integrity, which means she's not just handing leads over the wall and hoping for the best. She is the wall. She's the demand Jen leader. In today's episode, Jen and I talk about what a modern demand-Gen motion looks like, how AI may change that over the next few years, and how to position your brand when every competitor is also yelling about AI. ⁓ All right. I'm super pumped to get the conversation. Let's get to it. Jen, welcome to the show. Jen Chaney: Cool, thanks for having me. Looking forward to it. Warren Kucker: Awesome. Well, you've built marketing programs across some pretty interesting range of companies, Criteo, Dun & Bradstreet, Abley, Sedna, and now Integrity. Walk us through your career arc. What's the through line and how you've thought about marketing and evolved throughout those roles? Jen Chaney: Yeah, sure. I think if I look at the arc of my career on paper, it might look quite varied. So ad tech, developer infrastructure, tech, SaaS, cybersecurity, but I think the through line. has actually been very consistent. So at every company, my job has really been to answer the same core questions. Who are we for? What problem do we solve that genuinely matters? And how do we turn that into repeatable demand and long-term brand value? So I think what's changed from business to business is the motion, right? So for example, at Dun & Bradstreet, it was a lot more about data, trust, credibility, and partnership marketing across complex audiences and products. At Ably, the challenge was more product-led and developer-focused, so marketing had to be very technically credible, very clear, very tightly connected to the product experience because developers certainly don't want to be marketed to and learn that the hard way. They want to be educated so that they can build their own code and their own apps. And I think at Sedna and kind of my most recent role in cybersecurity, there's been an even ⁓ stronger emphasis on enterprise buying dynamics and building confidence in markets where the stakes are high. So I think for me, marketing has never just been about campaigns. It's about building a bridge between market insight, customer need, and ultimately business growth. Warren Kucker: That's ⁓ That's great. Cool. Well, let's dive in. Let's talk about your overall, let's say, demand generation philosophy. A lot of marketing teams are still chasing MQLs, which isn't a bad thing. ⁓ What's shifted? What's different now in the next two years that you think is different, let's say, than typical SaaS has been over the past five to seven? Jen Chaney: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, if we go back to like 10 years ago, the 2015-2016 playbook of bait and capture is totally dead, right? So forcing a buyer to download a PDF, assigning them... 50 points and then immediately sticking an SDR or BDR team on them, doesn't generate demand, it generates annoyance, right? So I think today, I just read recently, it's 70 to 80 % of buyers do their research in the dark funnel long before they ever reach out to you. So ⁓ as we all know, that funnel has never been linear. But I think in 2026, the modern demand gen has to shift from lead volume to pipeline velocity. I usually kind of look at three rules around this. So the first is intent over identity, right? I don't just want an email address. want active buying signals that I can also then share with the sales team. Revenue over marketing qualified leads. again, marketing and sales really should be working and sharing the exact same North Star metric, which for many businesses in mind today is closed one revenue. If a campaign doesn't build actual pipeline, it's just vanity. So we kill it. then fewer sales conversation. So I think this is maybe a contrary take, but I think a great marketing engine actually reduces the number of calls that sales needs to take. So to me, sales shouldn't be wasting time exploring what what the category is, marketing's job is to kind of ungate the knowledge, educate the market in the feed, and then by the time a prospect clicks book a demo or contact us, they should already know our value, our differentiators, and our pricing. So I think in a nutshell, today we have to optimize for buying readiness and not just MQLs. Warren Kucker: Interesting. All right, let's pull into a few things and things. When you say that 80 % of the, let's say, our biters are doing their research in the dark funnel, what does that mean? Jen Chaney: Yeah, it just means that like they're looking at peer reviews. They're kind of ⁓ talking to people in their communities. Before they even hit your website, perhaps. They probably know who they're going to buy from. ⁓ So, you know, everyone's kind of like trying to build to this, you know, first touch sales. But ultimately people are doing this research in the background before you know that they're potentially, before you're able to get the intent signal. ⁓ it's quite important that you're ungating content and you're actually educating people and of course building a strategy that brings the right traffic to your site. Warren Kucker: So that's a key differentiator there to keep it really tactical and probably oversimplifying it. It's like when you before you're getting content to get someone's Understand a signal from them, right? I they want to speak to you and then you would just hammer them no matter what and speak to them ⁓ Now that you want to ungate it because you want to foster that research ⁓ In a way that is different than it was ten years ago. It's not like the keys with that. Yeah Jen Chaney: That's it. There was a real kind of, remember, you know, because I've been in this for almost 12 years now, there's a flip between lead gen. Oh, we got to bring in the lead. So we're going to gate all of our content and that's going to be a name and an email address to demand gen, which is we're going to ungate. We're actually going to educate. It's harder to measure, but you generally say you don't see what's going on in the background, but it's much easier and more accessible for the prospects to get the information they need. And then ultimately, yeah, fill in those more high intent form fills like request a demo or getting in touch. Warren Kucker: Gotcha, and I'll ask a real tactical question that has a simple answer to most marketing folks, but not to some sales folks. So you have awareness, right, where you have to make sure, especially when I say series A, series B, series C, your entire team doesn't necessarily know who you are, right? They've maybe never heard of you. Then you have this stage where, let's say you've passed awareness with a lead, but they're in this, let's say, ⁓ research mode. What do you call that stage of the buying cycle? Jen Chaney: Usually the consideration stage. you know, yeah, yeah. So every funnel looks different, but they all throw out ultimately the kind of awareness stage. Either they know they have a problem or they don't know and need to kind of educate them. Warren Kucker: Consideration. Yeah. Jen Chaney: this is a problem. Then the consideration stage where you're building trust and you're really trying to, this is where maybe you will have case studies. And then you have the conversion stage. Of course, that's more bottom of funnel solution buy-in. This is where a lot of product marketing comes into play. So you're, you know, looking at objection handling and supporting sellers with cheat sheets and these types of things. Warren Kucker: Do you, let's say, because obviously stage of company matters here, let's pretend series B, series C, so like relatively immature compared to ⁓ 20 year big companies, but more mature than a startup, right? So like in that growth cycle, do you feel that as a marketing leader, you spend more time on awareness or consideration? Like, it like, listen, we've shifted this awareness is pretty good, we were able to pummel them, they know our brands, they have some position in the market once I'm at this stage. and I spend 80 % of my time on consideration, or is it still like a pretty good split where awareness is still a problem that needs to be solved? Jen Chaney: Yeah, great question. I think awareness is always a problem that needs to be solved. I think each company is different. But so for example, in my current role, it's just us and two other large competitors. So we're not overly saturated. But the other competitors are heavily, well, they're headquartered in the US. if we want to, we are breaking into the US, but we are European. We're headquartered in Belgium. So it's a matter of looking at the strategy, looking at expansion, looking at regional awareness as well. We might be really known in Europe. really need to do some work in kind of getting our name out there as the trusted crowdsource security provider in the US and globally. Warren Kucker: Great, so I agree. Awareness always seems like a problem. I'll say this may not be true, so prove it or not prove it. It seems like either you just don't quite, it's always like an unknown problem, right? So until you're like Salesforce, you're probably just always worried about awareness, I would assume, right? And you don't quite know. Is there any measure? Is there any metric that you can figure out that's like, great, actually like 80 % of our TamSam or SOM is aware of our brand and we don't have to worry about this as much? Is there something that you can measure from a getting a standpoint there. Jen Chaney: Yeah, and awareness is a little bit more difficult to measure than of course, know, it's very tangible when you get leads coming in. But it's, know, ⁓ so for example, if we go to the top of the funnel, we look at impressions, we look at, you know, if you have a PR strategy or share a voice, so, you know, how many kind of articles are your competitors in versus yourself in different regions? You can look at, you know, brand sentiment as well. You know, if people are aware of your brand, how are they talking about it? How are they engaging with you on your social media platforms? ⁓ So things like this, there's like Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Jen Chaney: a lot of different variables that go into it, but awareness is a little more tricky to measure than the lower parts of the funnel once that lead is actually coming to the business. Warren Kucker: Yeah, my guess is that like we probably over index for awareness at some point in the growth cycle, right? Not early stage, nobody knows who you are early on, right? But like once you, let's say Sedna's your last role has been in the market for 12 years, it's a relatively small market. I can't imagine that they'd have to be worried about awareness anymore and I bet you they are. Just because there's no, there's no like, all right, we're done with awareness. That's like focus on a different part of the phone, right? Yeah, it's always a undercurrent. Great. Jen Chaney: Great, as always, Warren Kucker: Cool, okay, lots of pull out in that last one. Where do you think maybe let's say AI is kind of helping us most in this stage of the year, again, marketing view of the funnel. I like that we're aligning it to sales as a sales guy, so we'll talk more about that. But where do you think AI is making the biggest impact or could make the biggest impact over the next year or two? Jen Chaney: AI shouldn't just be creating more volume. It shouldn't be creating ⁓ content just for content and activity sake. I think for warm lead generation, I see real value in three areas. ⁓ Better audience and intent analysis, first of all. Faster content production and campaign execution. So again, before AI, when I looked at content, you spend a lot of time in the production stage. Now you can spend more time. brainstorming and being creative about the prompts you're putting into AI, for example, and then it produces for you and now you can take the time at the other end to edit, to tweak, to sanity check, to ensure that what you're saying is true. So that's where I see AI supporting. And then also more personalized follow-up. So I think AI is useful for spotting patterns in buyer behavior, ⁓ surfacing accounts, showing early intent, improving segmentation, and then ultimately helping teams tailor messaging based on that industry, the role of the stage. We could do this before AI. but AI certainly helps us do that better. ⁓ I think it's also genuinely helpful in speeding up content repurposing. So testing creative variations and enabling sales and marketing to respond faster and with more relevant outreach. you know, again, where it's mostly noise is the generic AI generated content. And as I mentioned, you know, mass personalization that doesn't feel personal and using AI to automate bad strategy. if the positioning is weak or the audience targeting is off, AI just helps you scale the problem. ⁓ So yeah, I think in a nutshell, my view is it's ⁓ It's very powerful as an amplifier of good marketing fundamentals. It can absolutely help generate more warm leads, but only if it's grounded in clear ICPs, strong messaging, and real buyer signals. Otherwise, it's just more noise in the system. Warren Kucker: Cool. Great. let's we got practical. So for my company, SEMrush suggested 30, I think they're called topics, right? And then each topic had maybe 20 pillar pages. And then each of those pillar pages had like 15 recommended sub pages. So I ended up with about 1300 keywords or 1300 articles that I could write from this one. Hey, this is what I do. This is what my competitors are suggests them. And I'd say like 80 % of the topics were good and 20 % were off. So ignore that. So now I'm at a thousand. articles to write. Why shouldn't I? I could write those within weeks, all 1000 to have that all written in my voice, keyword optimized, not sounding like AI. And they'd be like, relatively interesting things for people to read. They may make some of it may be common knowledge. Why shouldn't I do that? Like, and what should I do to cut through that 1000 to get to the right 20? Jen Chaney: Well, first of all, think, yeah, so. Google has a lot of algorithms that changes all the time, we know like content duplications, the first thing is you might have a thousand, but make sure that they're all different and unique, otherwise you're penalized for duplicate content, et cetera. So that's the first thing to look out for. ⁓ I think you wanna ⁓ also check out the research, right? So there are marketing tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs that we can look at long tail keywords to say, okay, what are the problems that my prospects are actually searching for in this space? out your competitors. But now with AI, we have other tools that have actually given you how Chat GPT for example, what are people searching and putting in the prompt and then what is actually being suggested. So this is where you need to your point, you need strong articles, you need articles on your ⁓ website that have citations that are kind of credible. ⁓ So content is important, but you can also saturate and ⁓ anything kind of turned up too strong can become a weakness, right? So I think it's just important to ensure that your content strategy is, it makes sense and you're not just hammering ⁓ for content sake. Warren Kucker: Yeah, and so I think that what you're talking about here then, so production probably was too slow beforehand, but like ⁓ it was what it was. It could take, you have an idea for like a piece of content that you want to write and it could take one, two, three months to get it into the field, right? Not because you're overwriting, just because it just takes some time to get everyone's input and get that output. The production side of things, we should be able to shrink the amount of time the team is spending on that, but doesn't mean that we should be. also combating that with more content. In theory, what you're saying is that you could spend more time on like generating the right content for the right audience because you have new data sets and like more analysis to look at like truly what are my customers looking for when they're looking for something where they may buy our product. Is that the right summation of that? Yeah. Jen Chaney: Exactly. And then using these AI tools to support you even further than what previous tools to date did. So now we can start having, you know, these kind of, uh, uh, Gen AI platforms referencing your website. So that's another inbound channel outside of Google and the other channels. Warren Kucker: Right? That's awesome. When you're, and I'll probably get this off, but it's always interesting thinking this here. When you're doing this, like, what are my prospects searching for? Kind of like research and you're doing this more intensely now with more, an additional channel with let's say, AEO, right? Jen Chaney: Mm-hmm. Warren Kucker: Is it, are you in a meeting with like five people in marketing and sales where you all talk about this several times or is it just Jen, head of marketing, that's doing all this work and sitting there and be like, hey, we should write this piece of content and you hand it to like a copywriter. What's the normal process here and what should it be? Jen Chaney: So it definitely is cross collaboration, right? So, ⁓ but ⁓ it's largely research. So, you we have a great digital marketing manager who looks after a lot of really cool research tools for us that helps us uncover the problems that people are looking to help solve. Then we have a great content marketing manager who will create the content based off of keywords that we're gonna try to rank for, for example. But we'll also, ⁓ we create a content calendar, we speak to sales, we speak to product, we have product and feature releases again ultimately mapped to solving customer problems. it's a there's a there's at any given time an ecosystem of content that can be written and we have to me, it's always like, this going to either talk us through how we solve a customer problem or is it ⁓ thought leadership? Is it actually adding value? And we have ⁓ our current audience are more technical. They're cybersecurity chief information security officers, for example. They don't want fluff, right? They don't have time. They've got to manage infrastructure and they've got a lot of kind of critical important things going on. So if we can't offer value, then it's likely gonna ⁓ get ignored. ⁓ Warren Kucker: flat. Yeah, that's great to hear. This is really helpful because I think that I've always felt from a sales standpoint that this like, great, you should figure out what your customers are searching for when they have an intent to buy a piece of software like you. I've always found this to be a borderline impossible process that everyone's just getting guessing. I think there's much more information out there that you can get a better view of how to write more targeted, less widespread, but like better content to get better signals. So I like that this shift is happening. Jen Chaney: Yeah. And it's also writing content to the persona. not in every organization, but a lot of the companies I've worked for, you've got your user buyer, you've got your technical buyer, and you've got your economic buyer. The user buyer is your day-to-day, hire-solving problems, and they generally influence up into the business. And then your technical buyer is concerned with compliance and is it going to integrate easily with my systems? And then you've got your economic buyer. ultimately is the budget owner and wants to know the kind of bottom line. you should always kind of ensure that you're hitting the different buying groups when you're going to market, especially if you're looking at enterprise sales and kind of ⁓ trying to penetrate one enterprise business, almost as its own market. Warren Kucker: Right, call. Okay, cool. Let's pivot a little bit towards ⁓ something you touched on earlier. So you said that your role is moving away from how many MQLs or how many leads am I generating? And you're much more aligned with the revenue target. This is wonderful to hear. Do you feel, one, this truly what's happening in your role now? Two, do you feel like that's a shift across the market? Or do you think you guys are a bit ahead of this? And then three, ⁓ how is that working for you at the moment, right? So how is that working, the juxtaposition between, let's say, the VP of Sales and the head of marketing can get a little challenging there. Jen Chaney: Yeah, so I think the kind of like the only way I can kind of answer this is like Marketing for me 12 years ago looked like a different thing. It's it was events and brochures and things like this It wasn't really part of the revenue engine. You had to mark it brand but it you know for probably from like six seven years ago and it could have been the size of business I was in etc, but it is you got revenue targets. And so, you know currently today, you know, we have three primary revenue engines, which is marketing, sales, and customer success, because customer success will upsell ⁓ or ensure that there's no churn. Sales does its thing, marketing does its thing, but together we share a common goal and that is revenue, right? So I think ⁓ maybe to answer your question around that kind of relationship between sales and marketing, ⁓ yeah, it's, think. If we're clear on who we're trying to reach, ⁓ why an account is being prioritized, we have the tools in our toolkit to help sellers prospect and ultimately sell better. know, sales, VPS sales is looking after BDRs and other people in the sales team. I want to know the feedback, what they're hearing in real conversations, what's resonating, what objections are coming up and where the lead quality is off. And then that intelligence from those feedback loops should be directly shaping marketing's next campaign. And when that loop is tight, the whole system, you know, generally improves quickly. I think what breaks it is when marketing optimizes for volume, right? ⁓ here's a marketing goal, get hundreds of leads. BDR is optimized for speed, I gotta close quickly, I wanna get my commission. Neither side agrees on what good looks like. I think the best relationships between sales and marketing that I've seen, treated as one team with one number, not marketing's MQL target, sales is pipeline target, it's one shared revenue goal. And then when the goals and behavior align, then everything else is just mechanical. Thanks. Warren Kucker: No, I agree. I think that, again, thrilled to hear that this shift has happened. ⁓ I think the key is... There's always a full blend between sales and marketing and CS in my framework, like mindset here, right? Like there's no separation. Like if there's not enough pipeline, it's a problem for both, right? Like if I've never been a fan of attribution, doesn't like, whatever the final touch was to get someone to take a meeting is quite irrelevant. There's a whole bunch of touches on both sides, right? If you have like 74 impressions on the ad from an individual, from a marketing standpoint. And we've made like over the course of a year and a half, they've gotten 15 cold emails and 27 cold calls. And then they click a button to fill out a form like who cares? Like that's both of those things happen in conjunction. And that was just the last step. I've always found this to be like a foolish way to measure folks. And it makes it combative, right? Like it is a misalignment of incentives, right? I think the key for me would be like, marketing is a part of the entire revenue life cycle all the way through CS. I think this is still where we missed a boat, right? Jen Chaney: Thank you. Warren Kucker: you have CS as an upsell and expansion motion, right? That means there's a play for your customers to be seeing content that helps facilitate that. So if all three are in agreement of like the two areas of the revenue life cycle, a quarter, let's say, that are the most efficient, then all three should have plans to fix that area together, right? It's not a ⁓ one thing. if that doesn't, like if one of those functions says they're gonna do stuff and they don't do it, that's the deficiency. Everyone says they're going to do, does what they say they're going to do. They come to an agreement and it still doesn't work, then you're back to the drawing board. Or if it worked, then all three were successful. Like you can't, you can't separate these three the way I think people can. Tell me a bit about how you've seen that in practice. Jen Chaney: You ⁓ got it. Yeah, I mean, it's a really good point. even, so again, my kind of recent company, I don't think this is a new term, but I've tried to introduce all bound. You know, you have inbound, you have outbound. To your point, it's generally been marketing saying, oh, sales are lazy, where's the activity? It's sales saying. Marketing's generating rubbish leads. Come on. So we're trying to break down these silos and say let's get together We're all working for the same goal and to your point, you know attribution is it's one of those funny things because if you don't accept a cookie and the pixel doesn't drop I don't I can't see where they've come from. Anyway, just kind of looks like direct traffic. So we know that again It's kind of this this type of approach. So I think there will be a shift There already is a shift, but there's gonna be more of a shift you know, where it is looking at alignment across the revenue teams, you still need to have accountability, of course. So I think, think targets, you need to make sure that marketing is performing and therefore it is important in terms of reporting to understand where stuff's coming from. Was it off the back of an outbound call or was it off the back of an inbound form fill? But we know that, you know, and at most companies, if the activity is there and people are hungry and they want to be there, it is a, it's a, it's a married up approach. Warren Kucker: Yeah, think it's, and again, if you look at areas of your overall like revenue process, right? So let's say ⁓ too many leads are dropping off on the justify stage of the sales process, right? Where they've like investigated that there's a problem worth solving. They've sized the problem, but then they can't justify the cost or the time to spend to do that, right? So like this is a deficiency in what's happening on these sales meetings, right? How is the rep framing the cost of doing nothing, right? This is a deficiency in case studies, customer referrals, Like, and from your, this is, if you talk about deep research, this is where the dark research or the dark funnel happens, right? And then if you take another area in CS where it's like, great, we have this product, it's like secondary product, but we're not upselling enough, right? Like, this is an awareness problem for our customer base, right? They shouldn't be only hearing about a product that we could be upselling from them, from the CS person when they bring it up once a year, right? So like. Take those things, get in a room, agree what should be done and remove the territorialness because what'll happen is like, I think sales treats marketing like you're doing something for them and then sales tells marketing what they're going to do at the same time and that's not how it should work, right? This is a leadership problem that really needs to be broken down because to me, if I'm not hitting my revenue target, then I'm getting rid of everybody, right? Like I don't know what to tell you. like, it's just like, there's no, I don't want to hear marketing is not giving me something, I don't care. Jen Chaney: That's it. That's it. Warren Kucker: right, like we're missing it, right? So like fix it, right? Yeah. Jen Chaney: That's it. And yeah, and to your point, you think a good marketing team supports that full funnel. know, so if it's, kind of identify as a business, you know, if you're scale up startup, you're probably looking at acquisition, but you should still be supporting customer success, throwing up complimentary ads, for example. You know, there's really cool tools in the market where you can actually advertise at the contact level. So you don't have to just, you know, go after the IP and kind of business level. And yeah, it's, it's, once you have happy customers, they just refill that funnel for you, you know, brand evangelists that keep that going. there's a lot going on, but yeah, from acquisition through to referrals and ensuring that our customers are happy, it's all part of the engine. Warren Kucker: That's awesome. Cool. Okay. Pivoting this a little bit. I've been in a room where you pitched like lead scoring and attribution software to me. I don't think we ended up buying it. It seems like you don't worry about this in your role anymore. Is that true? Have you shifted away from worrying about this? What's the new? I hear a lot about buying signals. I'm skeptical of buying signals as well. Walk us through that shift. Jen Chaney: Yeah, yeah, so I think. ⁓ Uh, okay. Again, years ago, it was like a warm lead with someone that hit the score threshold. They downloaded something. Maybe they opened an email, maybe they attended a webinar. So all of these then have points. I don't know who came up with that, but every marketer kind of got on board with it. I think marketers still use it today, but for me today, it's much more about context and signals. So I want my sales team that I work with to see not just that somebody engaged, but how they engaged, what topics they cared about, whether there's account level intent, you know, are there multiple stakeholders? that are active across our site and how well that account fits our ICP. So it's this nice strategy versus here's three actions that were taken, here's 50 points, go check it out. So I think the handoff is less that, ⁓ here's a lead and it's more here's an account showing by your behavior, ⁓ here's who's involved, here's the likely problem they're trying to solve and then that gives BDRs or the sales team something much more actionable than a score and then we've kind of moved from handing them a list of names to handing them more of a curated strategy. Warren Kucker: Cool, let's dive in to the buying signal piece where my skepticism comes around buying signals is I don't think there's nearly enough for companies to survive on buying signals, right? And I don't expect their whole revenue cycle to be there. But I would agree, great. I'd be lucky from a sales standpoint if I had four people in a month give enough sales, and again, at a more robust, I have a $5 million target, four people a month gave me, looked like a buyer, and everybody else says that. tell me where I'm wrong and how you're kind of presenting these signals to the sales team and like how you understand, give me a practical like way of like you actually see how they interact with your content on this, the signal journey there. Jen Chaney: Yeah. Cool, so again, it depends on your target audience. We have a lot of our strategy as enterprise buyers. That's a long sales cycle and that's multi-threading, You're a lot of intent signals. It's all one person. You're not gonna get the user-buyer doing one action and then it's like, hey, we should go after this account. Yeah, you should open the door now that there's some kind of interest, but now you need to actually be serving them personalized content that's gonna help them make the case and make them the hero, right, to kind of speak to other. ⁓ stakeholders in the business. So ⁓ I think the intent signals, every company should also define that kind of aha moment. What do we know, what have we identified makes this company sales ready? So we're not going after a cold lead, because leads can still be cold, right? One or two touches, you shouldn't really be, as I said earlier, kind of sticking that sales team on them. So it is a combination of each company has its own target audience, its strategy to after that target audience, and really understand ⁓ who in the buying group needs to be involved. And then for us in integrity, we also look at account level intent. So it's not just looking at marketing qualified leads, but marketing qualified accounts, and then bringing in the signals from each of the buyers to understand the activity, the engagement. ⁓ Ultimately, we want them reaching out to us if they're not picking up the phone when we call. So ⁓ we try to drive them to our requested demo or content forms. Warren Kucker: Awesome. This is great. Well, I'm excited to, I mean, in a perfect world, all this would work really well and this would serve the buyer as well, right? Like we could stop cold outreach to non-ICP or borderline ICP customers would be borderline eliminated, right? And ⁓ we can go on a... three, four year journey with our prospective buyers, right? Rather than trying to force them into a process that they're not ready for. So that'd be great. So I'm super excited about this shift. Cool, sounds great. ⁓ Awesome. If you were, let's say a couple last questions here. If you were advising like a marketing leader who is being asked to do like more with less, which everyone's being asked this now. ⁓ What are a couple things that you do that you think you've gotten more efficient with, you spend less time on, and it's driven a bigger impact for the revenue cycle? Jen Chaney: Okay, so yeah, I think this. This does happen, especially with AI. People kind of say, how can we fill the pipe? What AI tools are out there? right now the market is saturated with AI tools, some that do what they say on the tin and some that are just buzz. So I think first I would tell the team to kind of just take a pause from chat GBT. Don't use AI to flood the internet with more kind of mediocre top of funnel blog posts as we talked about earlier. I think if a lot of people want immediate pipeline impact, I think look at, and now just talking about AI, for example, and what you can use. Look at how you can use AI at the bottom of the funnel to fix that leaky bucket. And so this might look like using AI-driven lead routing to connect high-intent demo requests to your best reps in seconds rather than hours. ⁓ It might look like using conversational AI to mine GONG calls or your CRM data to identify deals that are stalling so that marketing can trigger those hyper-targeted error cover. ⁓ marketing efforts to those specific accounts. in a nutshell, my advice would be to kind of use the tools that are out there on the market. to really kind of research the tools. If you're going to go for AI, use AI for operational efficiency and data hygiene first, not to create more activity. And I think the best use is helping the team ⁓ focus on the highest value work and execute on that faster. Warren Kucker: That's a really good call. I like that framework just in general. Use AI to get more operational efficient and produce a better result, not more of the same result. Like, great, I could do 5X more of the same work. Let's get better at it. Because I do think the attention of our potential buyers is really valuable and they don't have enough of it and we don't get enough of it and we have to be truly good stewards of that. So I really like that approach. Cool. Sounds great. ⁓ Well listen, that was a really helpful overview, especially for a sales guy like me, is always in this kind of in-between space, so really helpful for our listeners. ⁓ Great, where can people find you if they wanted to connect with you and hear a little bit more about the work you do? Jen Chaney: Yeah, of course, please find me on LinkedIn. So you can find me, Jennifer Chaney on LinkedIn. I would love to connect. If anybody has any questions, I also really enjoy peer knowledge sharing. there's always a learning curve. There's a big learning curve right now with AEO, GEO that me and my team are on. So yeah, very happy to share and connect with peers. Warren Kucker: Awesome, great Jen. Thanks so much for being on the show. Look forward to seeing more of your journey along this kind of shift from, know, stuffing the top of the funnel with leads to actually really good revenue optimization. So I'm pumped to see this shift in the market. Jen Chaney: Me too, awesome. Thanks, Warren. Thanks for having me. Warren Kucker: Thank you.