GTM Innovators: Ditching Buyer Personas – Mastering Hyper-Personalization in Modern GTM

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In this episode of “Ditching Buyer Personas: Mastering Hyper-Personalization in Modern GTM,” host Kyle James sits down with serial entrepreneur and content aficionado Nick Zeckets the CEO at Air Traffic Control to explore the evolving landscape of AI-driven marketing.

From delivering the right content at precisely the right time to automating relevance at scale, Nick shares why traditional buyer personas are losing their power—and how organizations can embrace hyper-personalization for more meaningful engagement.

Tune in for a deep dive on leveraging real-time data, refining your content strategy, and empowering teams across sales, marketing, and customer success to create truly individualized experiences.

Subscript to GMT Innovators Series on the following platforms:

Transcript:

Kyle James 00:00
Kyle, All right, welcome to another episode of the GTM Innovators by 3Sixty Insight’s. I’m your host, Kyle James. Today we’re diving into AI automation, go to market, all sorts of interesting stuff here with my guest, Nick Zeckets, I’m probably mispronouncing it. I never assume I get anything wrong. Did I get close? Nick

Nick Zeckets 00:28
nailed it.

Kyle James 00:29
Awesome. Awesome. And Nick is, gosh, you’ve done a lot of stuff. Super entrepreneur, founder of your new company, you know, why don’t you maybe be better? Because you and I have never really met before, even though we work in a lot the same circles, why don’t you give us the the origin story, instead of me trying to, like, bubble through it?

Nick Zeckets 00:49
Yeah, happy to and it’s not, you know, I’ve shared it with with people, one to one, but I’ve never really written about it. But I, you know, I came up. I am a, I am a sales guy masquerading as a marketer, and in kind of started my career. We’re just chatting about this for a minute, but started my my professional career at a place called the Corporate Executive Board, a million years ago, and we had this incredible content, right? These best practices for C level executives and various functions like finance and it and things like that and and back then, there was really no marketing. I mean, marketing was not really a function. And we were a public company, and we had, you know, we had some events type stuff, but, you know, really not much. There was no newsletter support, no life cycle, and we weren’t doing webinars, but we had all this incredible content which was our product, and I would go and take that and my first job was to set sales meetings for my boss. And I would take one of those studies. I would photocopy three or four pages out of like a 10 page report. I would stand by the fax machine, and I wouldn’t fax machines were a thing. And I would fax those three or four pages to 100 people, and then I would do a mail merge with Outlook to those 100 people, asking them if they wanted the other seven pages. I worked about 10 hours a week for being really honest, and I was at 400% a goal, you know, basically the the minute that that made sense to me, and I figured that out. And so ever since then, I’ve always kind of understood the power of content, right? It’s, it’s always been a leading proposition for me, that and this idea of A, B, A, V, always be adding value, which felt like this really incredible point of connection across sales and marketing. And so I went on to, you know, work in some larger places with some, you know, larger roles and responsibilities. And really kind of got to lead a revenue function for the first time, of a at a division of WPP, after having been at Nielsen, and kind of figured out what large enterprise deals look like, and that experience, and then started a company that was kind of like a HubSpot for higher ed, a little bit called quadrangle 2011 was all about content and activating the content across a university enterprise, which was really cool. You know, a place like Georgia Tech produces, like, 1000 pieces of content a week, but it’s in these departments and these teams and these programs, and nobody knows about any of it. We just grab it and then say, alright, Kyle, here you go, buddy. Like this is the best email for you this week. This is the best web page for you. And everything that you’d want to happen that would be good happened, right? More donors, more engagement. And so when we sold that in 2018 you know, we kind of had this epiphany of God. We spent an exorbitant amount of time building all these features on top, you know, a content management system and email marketing and, oh, God, just a ton. This is way before AI made any of these things reasonably quick to develop. This was a huge lift. But the epiphany at the time was, oh my god. What if I wonder if we could just plug that in as an API into some other big system? And started looking at hubspots, APIs and Marketo and Salesforce and everybody else, and was like, oh my god, we could actually build an interest graph off of the API endpoints, we could dynamically create new properties in these systems. We could populate those properties programmatically with the very best content from across an enterprise. This is way cooler as an approach to making huge ecosystems 15% better than trying to replace an ecosystem. And I know that there are some people who are doing that, and I do think that there’s energy for it. Right now, kind of we’re at that inflection point where I think there’s opportunity, but, but that was really kind of the journey. I’ve always been a content guy and just always believed that if we’ve got good stuff in most scenarios, it’s. Remarkably underutilized and and if you put it to work, it makes everything from demand gen to customer retention better, yeah,

Kyle James 05:07
yeah. So that’s kind of what y’all are doing air traffic control now, right? Yeah. So to me, like, I’m curious, there’s two obvious paths we can take in this conversation. Is one, like you introduced like you were doing automations before anybody even knew. It’s called automation. And like, how y’all are building those automations and delivering unique content to an audience of one now, right? Or do you want to talk more about, like, how you remix and take all this content libraries and, like, produce interesting snippets with Where do you want to go? Like, I think both will be super interesting. And I’m curious, but you probably, yeah,

Nick Zeckets 05:43
you know, I think, I think, for me, what is most interesting is kind of like a mix of those, where it’s kind of modern GTM and where people are going. There’s a lot of stuff we don’t do that we should be doing as an organization if you’re out there trying to sell. And I think it’s really kind of cool to think about some of the more exciting things that we’re even trying, you know, internally, and that we’re seeing our customers start trying, where ATC plays a role, right? But again, we’re not, we’re fundamentally not an end all be all solution, right? It’s like, you don’t have HubSpot, I can’t help you. Yeah, right.

Kyle James 06:24
You’re probably not generating all the content for them either. They still have to have the content.

Nick Zeckets 06:27
That’s exactly right. And we’ve got some cool insights to help an organization kind of think about we have kind of like a sim rush, but for the people that are in your HubSpot account, right? So rather than going and understanding organic kind of keywords that might generate traffic from anonymous but maybe useful visitors. You know, we have this other part of the package that goes well. We know what they’re engaging with and what they care about and what you’ve written about. So here’s a gap analysis, right? These are the topics you got to cover in order to shoot your relevancy up, which is, I also think is remarkably interesting, the volume of effort and the number of like technology companies that are being introduced right now that are super focused on top of funnel. I can’t tell you, if you talk to a reasonably mature marketing organization, they’re not talking about top of funnel. Why do you they’re talking about the middle dude? Yeah, zero innovation right now, around the middle, around life cycle, around nurture, and that’s really where we actually see most of our use cases. But I think that, like overall GTM, there’s really interesting things happening. There are things that are working to generate signal. There are things that are working to to collect signal, and then there are things that are working to action signal, right? And I think we do a really nice job on actioning signal, but we don’t create it and we don’t harvest it, right? And I think there’s so much cool stuff happening all the way through GTM right now. And I think what’s, what’s happening for a lot of revenue leaders is their their heads are on a swivel, dude, because everything’s pitching top of funnel, hardcore. And this isn’t a knock on, like, clay or whatever, but it’s like, Dude, I like, I don’t want to send more emails, Cole I don’t, I really don’t want to do that. That’s not my problem. I’ve got 5000 prospects that have been engaged by us at some point. Like, what do I do about them? And how do I generate more interest? And how do I take care of them? And how do I get them through a funnel? You know, because they’re way more valuable than some cold lead that’s, you know, just getting to know us, and we’re going to spend a fortune just getting into the database. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. So

Kyle James 08:51
let me ask this is this is interesting, because this on, on the last episode, had a conversation with Sherry Otto. We were talking about this, and I’m going to ask you some more question, right? Because the way people do attribution, it’s either first or last touch, right? So those are easy, right? Like, I’m curious. Like, do you think the reason there’s this, all this garbage in the middle is because people don’t know how to attribute it, or they’re just not sophisticated? Do you think that’s why they just kind of, like, don’t go there?

Nick Zeckets 09:19
Um, I dude, I think it’s for two reasons, one and again, lots of cool people trying to build lots of really smart software to help with attribution. And I think we are moving into a world where the technology that we now have access to in generative tools, we might actually start to get to truth on attribution. But there is no one who, behind closed doors, and I’m doing it here in public, who actually thinks our history of attribution has actually been useful for anything other than explaining why we’re spending the money that we’re spending to the CFO fair. I don’t believe in it. I just don’t I think. It’s all nonsense, right? And some of my favorite marketers in B to B talk deeply about brand. How are you supposed to measure that dude? Give me a break, right? So like, what is that for attribution? So much of his quote, unquote dark and what? Forget it, right? But I think we’re moving into a world where we actually might be able to start measuring it and having real insight. But I think the reason that the middle gets avoided is because it is complex. Yeah, it’s incredibly challenging, right? Going for a micro campaign, or, you know, I’ve got an audience and I’ve got a really cool offer or new product release or whatever. It’s such a straight line, and I know that if I hit 1000 people great copy, clear targeting, that I’m going to move 10 through to a deal, right that’s linear, and sure they they’re going to consume and be bounced on and off of lots of things during the course of that conversion, and will have in advance, probably as well, if I’m a reasonably mature brand. But like, I know if I hit 1000 with a proposition that I believe pretty strongly is going to matter to them, I pop 10 out the other side thinking about how to take care of the other 990 Yes, I’ve been there. You’re like, Oh my God, how much branching logic, segment based content do we have to produce this, this, this, this, and I’ve got one person in life cycle, if I’m lucky, I

Kyle James 11:25
wonder if anybody actually thinks about it that way, because that’s a great way to think about it, like, as a consumer of these emails, like, right? Like, I wasn’t the five. I wasn’t the five. 10% of the people that were supposed to convert on this delete, you know what I mean? But like that, that’s essentially what you’re saying when, when we get those kind of emails like this one wasn’t for me delete, hopefully the next one will be the one that gets me there,

Nick Zeckets 11:45
yep, yep, yep. Or even, or even, if I did look like a great prospect for that, and I had a sales call for a larger ACV opportunity, and it’s just timing wasn’t right, or my boss wasn’t on board, or crap, you know, we’re going through, you know, some other kind of a business thing, a transaction that’s keeping us back like, Okay, you got all the way to a call. What are you doing for that person? Because if you’re not spending more time and effort on them than you are on someone who’s not even in your database yet, I think you’re failing as a revenue organization. Yeah, that’s nuts to me. Your market is finite, right? Okay, sure, if you sell something for 15 if you’re Calendly, your market is endlessly large, although on their enterprise product, not so much, right, right? So, like, even there, how are they taking care of all the deals that don’t convert? Right? Because there’s more money there than there is on the deals that haven’t even come into into some kind of a database positioning. So I mean, shout out to all the lifecycle people who are out there. I feel for them, and I think that they are getting a fraction of the resources that they should be receiving relative to something like demand gen who also needs the resources that they have. I’m not saying that that should shrink. I’m just saying life cycle needs to grow.

Kyle James 13:07
Yeah, yeah. So talk to me. Like, tips, advice, you know, like, how AI can help solve that? What are you thinking? Like, what is the where’s the sausage making happening and kind of resolving those problems? Yeah,

Nick Zeckets 13:21
I love it. So there are some, there are things that we do here at ATC, Natch, right? I’m obviously, you know, biased to some of the things that we do, of course, but I think more like foundationally, we spend a lot of time creating buyer personas, largely on people that we don’t know yet we need to be doing regular iterative research on the people who are already in our database right? We need to be mining their LinkedIn posts. We need to be running research on the companies where they work, right, and pulling that information into our marketing and sales systems, which there are tools that now do that. That’s the kind of use case stuff for a clay or a Bardeen who I freaking love, right? That stuff is incredible, and it can go right into the CRM, right into your marketing automation system. And that research has a number of opportunities to play out right. One, you can do meta analysis against that. And if you’re not doing meta analysis to understand, there seems to be like a foment of of like subject matter, interest and change and whatnot within our market. Yeah, I don’t need to call it, you know, you know, you know, buyer, Benny or whatever like, I don’t need to call it a persona. If I know that people that I’ve worked hard to get into my database to have some degree of like interest in me, overwhelmingly starting to talk about a subject. And. We’re very lucky in that LinkedIn has given us a place, if we’re selling in B to B, right? They’ve given us a place to actually go get that information, right? So, you know, I look at, you know, tools like aware that give you incredible capacity to kind of go and just know what’s happening with a large list of people that can just upload, track, what are they talking about? Download it, take that big body of knowledge and just drop it into chat. GPT be like, What are they talking about? This is, it’s just not that hard, right? But there’s just a couple manual steps in there. It’s like, what are they talking about? What do they care about? And okay, once you’ve identified the key themes, tell me what they’re specifically saying. This is a $20 solution, aware is like 50 bucks a month, and chat GPT paid is 20. So 70 bucks in total, $70 and I don’t know an hour every other week, and you should absolutely know what the people who are in your funnel, who haven’t converted, who have shown some interest, that’s a list that you have in HubSpot or Salesforce or whatever, are talking about and and just, are we in that conversation? Because if we’re not, we need to find a way in,

Kyle James 16:17
yeah. I mean, essentially, what you’re talking about is like building an agent that goes out and does these things for you, because it’s, it’s, it’s a data enrichment. And I had conversation few weeks ago, and I’m curious how this lands with you, with with John Marcus third, who basically pitches a, i, Q, l, right, like, and I think the cool thing about this is a person cannot go do this sort of research on hundreds, not even, not even dozens, right, much less hundreds or 1000s of of individuals and or companies. But AI can, and you can do it in minutes, hours, half a day, and if it enriches your database. So, so going to that, like you mentioned kind of buyer personas earlier, I’m curious. How many buyer personas do you do? How many say, like? Do you break it down all the way to like a buyer persona of each individual? Or how do you group that and think about that to deliver out the content? Or maybe,

Nick Zeckets 17:20
yeah, I was just going to say, I’ll be real honest. We don’t, we don’t do buyer personas. We know where our budget lives, yeah, and we know who’s impacted by our existence in an organization. But I think the problem with buyer personas is some of the same stuff that holds the impact of segmentation back right. It holds the impact of, you know, workflows and workflow logic back right. You know, you start to talk to, you know, larger organizations that have multiple products and segments and Biron and you and if you go and look at how their like life cycle campaigns are built, or their outbound campaigns are built. It is an absolute bull spaghetti with a whole bunch of like lines. And if this, then that statements and everything else, and with greater complexity comes greater risk, right? And it becomes impossible to update, which is why large marketing organizations in particular really struggle to be innovative in marketing, because there’s so much plumbing that to change one piece has the potential to break dozens of other downstream pieces. Yeah, right. And so, you know, one of the things that I think is is really the big opportunity right now, is the ability to, at scale, understand who humans are, what they care about, and what their organizations are experiencing. Right this stuff is all out there. If you have a world class BDR, what are they going to do? They’re going to do? They’re going to look at the company website. They’re going to read up on the company. If it’s public, they’re going to go through the 10k and the SEC filings. They’re going to go look at the person’s LinkedIn profile. And if they’re really bad ass, they’re going to be like, has Kyle ever been on a podcast? Oh, cripes. He has one. Let me listen to the last couple of those. That’s a world class BDR, and if you’re worth 100 grand a year, that actually might be worth the time, yeah, but very few companies have that kind of ACV at the person level, so it just doesn’t work, and you just don’t have that many BDRs that have that skill set. But I think that’s where the AI tooling that’s out there has this incredible opportunity to provide value, because it can scale that quality of research and and that’s where I get back to harvesting signal, right? And so then marketing’s job becomes creating signal if I’ve harvested and I know what everybody’s caring about. And then I can create content when it’s a web. Our podcast or, you know, a resource or a blog that really speaks to and adds value to that conversation. Now I can actually get intent based signal, because now these people who told me what they care about are engaging what I’m putting out there. We actually have a workflow that we use with Bardeen, that when people talk about us, we grab that automatically from LinkedIn, we put them through an ICP filter. Do they, you know, have the technology that matters for us? Do they have enough content for us to be useful, etc, etc, and then we can automate a follow up flow to them, right? But it’s that content, that information, that really drives, I think, the modern GTM machine, and people are just they’re using it too much for outbound and not enough for listening and then reacting to what they’re hearing. Yeah,

Kyle James 20:47
so it’s, I’m going to try to repeat some of this, because this is fascinating, but I’m sure it’s it can get complicated for people, and I just try to slip a lot of things as much as I can, but you’re destroying the BI persona. Throw it away. We’re getting down into individual, unique cohorts. You know, kind of have them? Think of synthetic population cohort of one, yeah, right. To build that knowledge base about them, you’ve got all this content. You’re not meta tagging it anymore, because the AI is smart enough to, like, understand what it is and make the matches across those between those two, decide there’s signal here, you put out a new, new piece of content. This database of 10,000 people, here’s the 75 that would find that interesting. Let me, let me write up a unique way to introduce it to them based on how they like to be communicated,

Nick Zeckets 21:36
straight up, straight up, straight up. I mean, that’s the future, right? And we’re kind of living in that future now. And I think the thing that’s really interesting to me, you know, people will knock a lot of this, like martech sales tech startups, is just a, you know, a chat GPT rapper, not one of them. I consistently, I’m like, who cares? Like, this is just, I could just throw that in as a prompt in the chat. GPT, I don’t even go buy that tool to do that, right? Where I think they are adding value is when they’re building workflows against it. Yes, right? So I look at like a copy.ai. And those guys are out there saying we are kind of infinitely capable. Or writer is the same thing, right? We’re infinitely capable from a generative AI standpoint. But this is not just us throwing a piece of software over the fence and then saying, you know, good luck. We’re going to map your value continuum end to end, and we have the tooling right that allows you to stitch all that together with an LLM and Zapier is kind of like trying to do more and more of that, right? But I think it’s the it’s the workflows, it’s the business intelligence. Of stitching all this stuff together is where almost all the really exciting innovation is at this point, the app layer, right, right? Because we kind of commoditize, we’re like racing to the bottom. Now, on, on, you know, these LLM models, they’re improving at an incredible rate, and they’re getting cheaper at an incredible rate. But if you just hand chat GPT to an enterprise, they’re like, Okay, cool. This is fun to play with. And I was, like, able to help my kid with his math homework. But now what Right? Like, how do I solve a real business problem? And I love tools that solve specific ones. Like, laudable just got acquired this, this most recent week, and their entire thing was, if you have a conversation with a customer, and it went well, we will turn that into a case study. Yeah, super discreet, incredibly discreet use case that you absolutely could have manifested with, you know, a couple of of days of effort in your own chat GPT instance, but then they didn’t have to. You could just pick up lotable And then be able to deploy that, and then you had that part of your content problem solved, yeah, but copy.ai comes in and says, we’re going to go, end to end, dude, right? Writer comes in, we’re going to go, end to end, right? And build out the entire continuum of operations, with a lot of the cogs being LMS, right, and then get you to a whole bunch of really powerful business outcomes. And that’s that, to me, is what’s so exciting, and it builds on what you were saying before. Of that’s how you get down to the person level. But you still need process. Yeah, you still need workflows. Like this doesn’t just, like, magically happen because you got a clot account. You just

Kyle James 24:32
have a lot less rigid, duct taped together workflows because some of these gray areas you can handle LLM to handle it, like, figure out the right thing here. That’s

Nick Zeckets 24:44
right, that’s right. I don’t have to create 12 branches that, by the way, I’ve guessed that as a human, yeah, and then categorize people into 12 branches of a workflow, right? I’m just telling the LLM you. We have these six different propositions. We have these five different features, and we know all these things about Kyle. Yeah, that today, taking the Kyle piece off, that’s 30 different propositional road maps in the workflow. Very true. Now it’s 30 propositional roadmaps with contextual relevance for the specific human, all taken care of at the LLM level. Yeah, right. Like this is where I think all of marketing and sales is getting so exciting. It’s like, Dude, we were never good at this. We were never good at the 12, 3070, propositional workflow branches, like humans are fundamentally terrible at it, because we can’t process that volume of data. We pretend we can. We just can’t. But an LLM perfect use case. So let’s,

Kyle James 25:55
let’s, let’s go there, because that’s kind of where my head’s going too. Is like, how do you measure it? Do you even need to measure? Because if the LLM can kind of get open rates or get conversion rates on some basic steps throughout here, it’s obviously going to be constantly optimizing based on the feedback loops there. But how do you as a manager of this thing, like, does it really just become a gray box that you don’t know what’s going on or, or, you know, like that wild, right?

Nick Zeckets 26:22
Yeah, yeah, I love that question. Here’s my deal. I think the source material is more important than it’s ever been, right? You talk about an LLM, it could only do as well as you have helped it to understand its job, yeah, and its environment, and the people that it’s going to

Kyle James 26:44
touch 100% I tell people all the time, like, they don’t understand prompt writing, like, can you write a good scope of work, then you’re an excellent prop engineer. That’s that’s what it is like. If you could give it detail, give it good content to pull from, it will do a great job at the thing. But if you don’t know exactly what you wanted to do, garbage in, garbage out.

Nick Zeckets 27:03
Dude, 100% and this is why, I think, you know, there’s all these, like, SEO content shops, like, Ah, we’re going to automate, you know, with with generative AI, you know, the SEO value of your cup. Dude, who cares? Yeah, like, I don’t care. I don’t care. Because here’s the thing, access to my buyers has been completely commoditized. I can get the email address of anybody on the planet that I want, and I know before I ask for that email address if they’re even potentially interesting to me like this, I don’t that game’s over. That game’s over, right? And also, the LLM search tools are also making it more difficult to serve. But my my point is on that, right, that what those people are looking for is incredibly credible, unique, quality content. I think the mandate around humans inside the enterprise being able to listen at scale and understand what’s important, and then be able to turn around and produce something powerful, right? That then gets fed into all those LLM workflows that, to me, is where I think a lot of marketing’s time is going to be shifting interesting, right? For the most successful marketing organizations, they’re going to figure out the machinery, but that machinery demands unique, credible inputs, and if you’ve been writing all your content to generate organic search traffic, but not really around conversion, I have bad news for you. Your 600 blog posts are not going to be very useful in the new world of conversion.

Kyle James 28:47
Yeah, yeah, because there’s 400 other articles similar to that, that’s generic and doesn’t Yeah, your value proposition, the thing that’s right. So it’s just that’s right, content

Nick Zeckets 28:58
that’s right, right. Get to the middle. I think product marketers are going to be more important than ever. You know, I think you’re, you know, the the days of outsourcing a lot of your content production, I think it’s going to shift, and it should shift back in house, right? You know, I look at one of our customers is spec it, and these guys have phenomenal content, phenomenal content. And they’ve got lots of different formats and types, and their content leader, she is brilliant and doing a bunch of really cool stuff. And she was just talking to me recently about some of the new content, like formats that they’re introducing soon. I mean, they are so cool, like, I love seeing when companies introduce things like courses, right, like super detailed playbooks, right? It’s like those things don’t exist anywhere else on the internet, right? It’s why I love when companies have podcasts, right? It’s like that conversation, this conversation we’re having right now has never happened before in a. Never happen again. This is the only time, right? And so but, but the derivative value of stuff like this, if you truly invest in it, is like 1,000x right? So where should we be spending our time sending out a whole bunch of like briefs for, you know, garbage SEO articles, or pulling more of our resources internally around this mandate to have truly differentiated content that feeds all this machinery. And I think it’s number two, for sure, like, I don’t even think there’s an argument that anybody should be having about this, but it does demand that some uncomfortable things are going to have to happen across revenue organizations.

Kyle James 30:39
It’s fascinating. And let me, let me pitch this, because this is product person in me thinking about this like there are tools out there. Gong, read, AI, there’s a how many different fathom? There’s so many different transcript record calls like this during transcript, that content, that that data, is being produced at scale, 100 hours a day for any decent sized company, right? It’s just something to bring it all together and say, and a marketer, in this example, what are the 10 most important thing pain points that somebody discussed on a call this week? Spit it out. I write that great, amazing content. There you go. It seems like that workflows not that hard anymore. To your point, how do you listen at scale? This thing’s listening at scale. You just have to get good at asking it the right questions to surface up the right things. And then if you want to, you know, check it with a handful of your reps, like, hey, are these the right things they’re going to tell you? But then, interestingly enough, it seems like that probably also breaks down some silos and the marketing sales tension, because you’re collaborating again

Nick Zeckets 31:44
and also across CS, right? I mean, like the marketing, because it is a scale operation, doesn’t actually get to have that many conversations with the market directly, and they kind of pretend to on some kind of a cadence. They’ll do a handful of customer calls, right, and then they’ll come back and they’ll revise their persona definitions, and then back to the mill, right? And that’s not a knock on marketing. As a marketer, that is not a knock on us. It just is kind of our mandate has been very volumetric, right? Have time, and I think it’s really fascinating when you look at like a gong, Gong arguably should be, you know, playing one of the most critical roles for any marketing organization that is a customer of that tooling on the sales side of the house. I think there’s a lot of sales tooling that has an incredible opportunity to impact everything from cold demand all the way through to customer retention, right? And all those customer calls, oh, my God, this is how I’m using it. This is the proposition. These are the problems that we’re dealing with. Like, why do we say the

Kyle James 33:01
product teams, right? Like, there’s no reason product teams don’t get all the same value. And maybe that’s to your point where this product marketer is what comes out of this morph, yeah, man, like you’re writing the content because you’re listening to the customer that’s also writing the user story that engineers to go build. Like, exactly. That makes a lot of sense we’re seeing. Where does the product marketers sit, right? And their strong opinions both ways about that. And maybe this is Whoa. All right, we just went there a combination of how product and marketing becomes the same thing.

Nick Zeckets 33:34
Yep. 100% right. I mean, and what else are we building for other than market demand? Yeah. So, so, you know, and I believe that to be deeply true, and I love the call out that it has an incredible impact on product we have in our long term roadmap to actually have some functionality that serves the product organization directly, right, but based off of these exact same things, right? Like, we have a partnership with the guys over at Air call. Air call has awesome, you know, real time SDR transcripts that come right back. And what’s really cool about that is that if you take that information in and you pull it into an ATC that’s connected to HubSpot, that’s connected all your content, you can have a follow up email automatically drafted for the BDR, with your best case study and your best webinar totally and using the transcript to provide with an LLM prompt the context as to what like, Hey, Kyle, glad I was able to catch you on the phone. I mentioned I would follow up with a couple of things that would be helpful based upon you having said X, Y and Z, here’s a case study, quick summary, here’s a webinar. Quick summary, I’ll follow back up in a week. That is truly world class SDR behavior, and it requires in most organizations that aren’t selling in truly enterprise six figure plus deals too much work to ever occur. We are now living in a world where that is automatic, right? But it demands that the case studies exist and the webinars have happened, right? So it gets me back to my same point as I had before. You want your SDRs to be super relevant. You want your AES to be able to crush and close everything all the way through the funnel and have a high conversion rate. You need to give them the assets to make that possible. Otherwise, they’re reinventing the wheel for 10 hours a day, which is insanity to me. So what scales the most? It’s the content. Yeah, and absolutely content, the other tooling doesn’t scale either, by the

Kyle James 35:37
way. Yeah, content is still king, but the kind of content that we need to create is going to be changing back to business focus, product focused, company focused, 100% Yeah, customer

Nick Zeckets 35:48
problem focused too, right? It’s it like, doesn’t even necessarily have to pitch. It just has to be unique, and it has to be relevant, yeah, like, truly useful, right? And then everything else comes out of it from there. But, you know, I just in a world where we do have these these generative AI tools, and they’re getting deeper and smarter and better workflows. The one thing that is going to hold every revenue organization back is the quality of the inputs, because now everyone can automate the same synthetic research that you can sure I know your site activity. I know what you said in public. I know this, that and the other thing, what do I have to say? Because if your answer is, I’m going to use an LLN to spin tax 2.0 my way to relevancy in the inbox you are already losing, yeah.

Kyle James 36:44
So all right, we’ve already got a great, great, I mean, this has been fantastic. Well, let me, let me kind of ask you one final tough question, because we’ve covered a lot, and we’ve covered a lot of like, what can be and what is becoming, but what do you see coming around the corner? AI go to market, personalization, data analytics that maybe we haven’t talked about, maybe you wish, or maybe like, you know, because you guys are building or something like, what is the next big thing? Yeah,

Nick Zeckets 37:10
yeah. So I will say that the thing that I am most interested in watching right now are the folks that are building systems that are poised to take on Marketo and HubSpot and marketing cloud and those types of tools that are AI native. They’re not quite out there yet. They’re a little bit out there. They’re starting to exist. There are some that are not yet that, but they will become that, right? You know, you look at, you know, tools like tofu, they’re doing site personalization, they’re doing all kinds of cool analytical stuff, like, they’ve got this really interesting end to end set of features, but they don’t send emails. They don’t have a CMS, right? They’re not a marketing automation system, but like that stuff’s pretty commoditized, right? You don’t have to squint very hard to go, Hmm, like that might be a complete system, right? You know, you got guys like John Miller, who’s been out there, who was one of the co founders on Marketo, and founded engageo, and he’s been out on LinkedIn, talking a lot lately about what he sees the future looking like. He is describing the end of days for Marketo, a difficult to use platform that has no true AI functionality whatsoever, and saying, if we reimagine everything from the ground up, this should all work very, very differently. We should take humans out of making high volume data based decisions and get them back to doing human things like having customer calls, interviewing, talking, building, creating truly unique things, which will be enabled by AI, for sure, right, sure, but, but that, to me is where, that to me is, is like, I don’t think people are really getting how foundational a shift these AI native tools are going to be, not, not, you know, outreach, adding AI, I mean, things that didn’t even exist until 12 months ago, or don’t even yet exist, that are starting day one. You know, with that feature functionality built right in to the DNA. 100%

Kyle James 39:30
100% Wow, wow. Nick, this has been a fantastic conversation, super insightful. I’m sure our audience will probably need to go listen to it twice to kind of absorb everything that we’ve talked about here. So let me, let me kind of ask you here to kind of pitch like, how can people find you? How can people help you? You know, give us kind of the pitch on your company, what you guys are doing more deeply, so that, you know, people like, Okay, this guy knows what he’s talking about. What is he doing? I want to be a part of it. Yeah.

Nick Zeckets 39:59
Yeah. Do I love LinkedIn. I’m there all the time and post quite often. Please come find me so Nick zeckets, z, E, C, K, e, t, s, I’m only one of two on planet Earth, other than my son, who’s 12 and doesn’t have a LinkedIn account.

Kyle James 40:14
There’s a lot of Kyle James’s. I wish I was that lucky. Yeah, well,

Nick Zeckets 40:18
you say that my name has been misspelled, and I’ve been at the end of the alphabet my whole life. So

Kyle James 40:24
success for last, right? Well, you know what, buddy, I appreciate that.

Nick Zeckets 40:27
But also last to the water found in third grade. You know what I mean, that kind of Craps and air traffic control, right? I mean, we’re a relevance engine. I’m obsessed with content relevance, and so what we do is we, right now we only integrate to HubSpot. It’s the only map that we’re concerned with. When we do so, we look at all the engagement data, build an interest graph, pull in all the company’s content, figure out the very best of all of it for every individual, stick it right back into HubSpot is custom properties, so that when you build email templates and landing pages and chat bot responses, Kyle’s going to get what he should get. Nick’s going to get what he should get, etc, etc. So you can really automate relevance at scale with those content assets, which is a lot of why I kind of have the the energy and the heart around that idea that we need to be creating better, more, higher quality content. Because I can’t tell you how many times we’ve worked with a new customer and they’ve gone well, you know, I don’t really know if I want to recommend that. Then take it off your website. If you would proactively share a piece of content on your website with someone, get rid of it. I don’t care what the SEO impact is. Those are metrics that don’t matter anymore. That’s right. Pro tip, right there. Totally, totally. I say it all the time, and it’s like people just don’t have the bandwidth or the time to take stuff down, but they really ought to Nice.

Kyle James 41:43
And it’s air traffic control.io right. Yes, sir. Awesome, awesome. So thanks everybody for joining. I hope that everybody got something out of this that you can go really chew on. We’ll be back next week for another go to market innovators. Until then, everybody, keep growing.

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