GTM Innovators: Unlocking GTM Success – AI, Behavioral Science & Demand Gen with Sheri Otto

Posted on by

In this episode of GTM Innovators, host Kyle James sits down with Sheri Otto, founder and CEO of Growth Lane Strategies, to explore the evolving role of AI, behavioral science, and demand generation in modern go-to-market (GTM) strategies.

As businesses struggle to connect content to revenue, Sheri shares her expert insights on how AI can go beyond just content creation to drive real engagement, improve segmentation, and optimize the customer journey.

From identifying high-intent buyers to leveraging AI for strategic decision-making, this conversation is packed with actionable takeaways for marketers, sales teams, and product leaders looking to elevate their GTM motions.

Tune in to discover how AI is reshaping demand generation and why the best-performing companies are embracing it as a strategic growth partner—not just an automation tool.

Subscript to GMT Innovators Series on the following platforms:

Transcript:

Kyle James 00:00
All right, welcome to another episode of GTM innovators by 3Sixty Insights. I’m your host, Kyle James, and today we’re diving into go to market frameworks with my guest Sheri Otto. Sheri, thanks for joining the show today.

Sheri Otto 00:23
Yeah, thanks for having me. Kyle, this is gonna be fun. I’m super excited to finally connect with you and talk.

Kyle James 00:29
Sheri is the founder and CEO of a new consultancy for B to B brands called Growth Lane strategies. You can find it growth. Growth Lane strategies com, where she helps businesses connect their content to revenue using behavioral science AI, it’s a big thing I love to talk about and automation and demand marketing techniques that generate more pipeline. So Sheri, like you and I connected about six months ago, just through the HubSpot alumni network. Could never really even like talk face to face until kind of this call now, so I’m super, just excited to really dive in with you. Been following a lot of your great frameworks and advice and tips that you’ve been putting on LinkedIn. So yeah, let’s jump in, if anything, before we kind of get going about your background that you want to share with the audience, before we just start to worrying about No, I think, I think

Sheri Otto 01:18
you nailed it. Kyle and again, super, super cool to connect with another HubSpot alum. Yeah, no, you got it, right. It’s like, how do we with AI now and all the content being created everywhere all the time, there’s this growing need for SaaS companies, technology companies, just really companies and in an industry, to figure out how to connect that content to a strategy that actually grows the business and drives demand. So, so that’s basically all encompassing what we do. I think companies really need to embrace AI. We’re a little and when I say a little, I mean a lot slow to adopt how we really interact with AI and embrace the use the real use cases actually just posted today about that, about how to actually look at AI more than just like an unpaid intern, but instead of a strategic growth partner to do a lot more heavy lifting than we’re actually really using. So there’s some things under the hood that we can dig into, and then how to take the insights from AI to apply it to your go to market frameworks and motions, whether that’s a product led growth motion, your sales led growth nowadays, Kyle, it’s community led it’s a thought leadership led growth. It’s founder led growth, because we’re moving into this space where people are really wanting those connections, and people do business with people, especially when there’s so much, you know, jargon or like, the AI kind of out there, people are trying to filter through what’s real, what’s feels authentic. So those new motions are coming up. So these trends are happening, and I think it’s cool that were able to talk about it from today. Yeah, awesome.

Kyle James 03:02
So let’s you brought in a whole bunch of interesting things, but maybe the place to start is the company. There’s obviously a lot of resistance, right? People don’t always love change, even though the only constant is change and AI is coming incredibly fast. It’s 10 times better than it was a year ago. What it can do? Yeah, how are you working with companies to kind of get them to take that first step or dip their toe in the water? Or are there certain things that you’re seeing that you can get set up and and find quick wins and really helping those companies like with their go to market strategies?

Sheri Otto 03:40
Yeah, absolutely. So what people are using it for now is a lot of the top of funnel processes. So that’s just media content creation and how to, like, distribute it more efficiently across platforms. And so what I’m beginning to help companies with and having more conversations around and actually building products around in my business is just, how do we then take that top of funnel content, and then how do we understand who becomes a hot lead from the content you’re creating, and so we’re able to and when I was at HubSpot, we had our internal chatgpt So you can take the internal database information from your actual contacts, those customers that really converted. Why did they convert? So we’re able to build some of these applications internally, inside of these companies to then ask it to identify trends. For example, reverse engineering the perfect customer out of these last 10 customers that converted pretty quickly. Maybe it’s a shorter sales cycle, like, what? What went well here? AI and asking it to identify trends, commonalities. Was there a touch point? And there’s some tools that can do this even, even Salesforce. Ai Einstein, like, there’s some things. Can kind of tell us correlations and trends and even outliers, like, Hey, this is something that’s very different from the norm we’ve seen, and it can pinpoint that. And now the marketer Kyle becomes really supercharged in their ability to pinpoint the biggest opportunity for ROI, because AI is really giving those deep insights that we’re probably under utilizing today. Nice.

Kyle James 05:26
So what I heard you say, and like, I like to do this for the audience and myself, just to, like, make sure we’re picking up what you’re putting down, okay, is like, you’re breaking best fit customers into, like, these cohorts, right? And then you’re helping the AI kind of say, what are these common themes between them? And then maybe, kind of, what are the outliners? Are you building personas from them? And, well, hey, am I getting that right? Like, like, tell me more 100%

Sheri Otto 05:51
so the goal is, and what I’m starting to talk to some developers on is just using AI for the that niche segmentation. There’s going to be a group in businesses that just like to consume content through podcasts and social media, like they’re never going to read an email, they’re never going to download a white paper, and that’s fine, like you said, that could be a cohort that we didn’t build the strategy around. So AI can kind of pinpoint these people for us, these groups of how they like to consume content, the path they like to go through, to take, to do what I call the six jobs to be done. And I’ll tell you what the six jobs to be done are when it comes to a go to market process so for your audience. So there are six jobs to be done that a customer needs to take in order to really enter into your business and be a viable asset to your business. Number one, they have to discover your product. Okay? They have to then learn about your product. They have to evaluate your product. They have to buy your product. Number four, they have to, they have to engage with your product. Number five and number six, they have to, then it would be nice to become an advocate of that product. So all these jobs to be done, has to happen. And then you can break it down, Kyle in each job. How can AI support that? And I think what I mentioned earlier is that we’re doing that pretty good with the Discover part. Some some people are just struggling a little bit with like how to get more content on different platforms and what that looks like. But for the most part, we are creating content to get discovered that first job. But we’re not really creating content, and this is backed up by statistics to help people evaluate your solutions better. So I think there’s a stat that says that people are 47% of content is really consumed in that consideration phase of the buyers journey. So it’s really those case studies, Kyle, it’s those product piece. Yeah, right. It’s really that deep nurturing that we don’t necessarily if you look at like our effort and our time stamps, and how we’re able, how we are a lot allotting our resources for marketing. We’re doing a lot of the other stuff, the social posts and but we’re not really doing that. How can we bring people in the middle of the funnel and really nurture them there, and then start to use things that you mentioned about me, like behavioral science, demand strategy, sales strategies, inside the middle of the piece of that funnel for your go to market plans and elevating intent and calling forth intent inside of those pieces. And that might be an automated demo. It might be a lunch and learn. It might just be like some deep nurturing. It might be a three email series, whatever the case may be. Or, I think we’re kind of missing out on that, that deep nurturing, but in a way that they like to consume information. So that’s where the AI piece comes in as well.

Kyle James 08:47
So one thing that I’ve always joked and I’m curious, like, pick it up and run with this idea that it’s so easy, like, how you produce content for sales reps that take the 10 questions that the sales reps get asked all the time on calls write content for them, right? Like, that seems like the low hanging fruit. But, like, I’m sure there’s a lot more that you can do with that, but that’s the product marketing. Like, if they tell you that this is the pain that they have, yeah, talk about how you solve that, and then you drive it back for them

Sheri Otto 09:16
100% honestly, I think that’s probably a starting point that we all just need to go to, like sales. So we know sales and marketing, it’s been a long standing like thing with the alignment is not there. The alignment between sales and marketing is not really strong. But so the question becomes like, how do we strengthen the alignment between sales and marketing departments? And the thing is, if you just have a meeting and say, Listen, what are you hearing on these sales calls? And what I used to do, even at HubSpot, and this is something that we did on a weekly basis, was we would listen to the gong calls, the sales calls. This was part of our I was on the demand automation team, and we were creating demand. We were getting people in a pipeline. So we knew about sales and marketing. And so one thing that I suggest is, if you can’t. Have those conversations, go ahead and start listening in on those sales calls. What AI can do is start to, like, transcribe all of them. Like, tell AI to pull all the transcriptions from the last quarter of sales calls. You want the best ones and you want the worst ones. And then tell me again, synthesize this data, because I’m an out of computer, but you are like, so synthesize this data and tell me what are the key moments in the winning sales calls or the losing sales calls that are indicative of how I can then use those inputs for my marketing, and then verify that with a human to human conversation, like, here’s the bullets that I have here on what really works well, what was the trigger, or what they’re saying they’re missing in their journey? Yeah, and so I think we should just, I think we need to get marketers becoming more analytical. Marketers are becoming more put in the Revenue Department. So we’re getting pushed into like, how does the marketing team and the marketers now develop revenue now, become really closely aligned and adopt some data analysts aspects of their function, but yeah, that tight alignment between departments is going to be key, and it’s really how we can, like, look in under the hood and synthesize data to understand the story of data. And I have a HubSpot story for you, too, if you want to hear about it. This was before. I think this was before we even had the internal chat DBT, where we can actually pull down our customer data and then synthesize and analyze it. So this was before. So I was doing this sort of manual link, but the concept is still the same pile. So when I first got to HubSpot, my first two months in the company, like, I’m still, like, bright eyed and Bucha looking around, and I’m saying, Wow, this is really cool. Everyone’s like, a rock star here. And then we literally get called into a sprint. I’m going to call it a sprint. It was called something internally different, but it was, it was a sprint. It we all, like, the entire marketing department, had to stop and like, come together on a call and create demand. It was a demand sprint we needed, and we call at the time. We called it qls, qualified leads. Things are changing now, but this was back then, so we all just needed to create a certain number of qualified leads quickly. We had two weeks to develop a campaign on our own to drive demand and create qualified leads. So what everyone started doing was just like kind of looking around what’s available, and everyone was just tweaking copy and optimizing what was currently there. They might have been iterating on some things or pushing more volume on some other things. What I did differently, Kyle, was I stepped back and I did what I kind of were talking about today, which is like, analyze the data, figure out the stories being told in the data. So I started asking questions to to the product team, like, how do we understand activation in the product, right? And so after, if you’re if you’re doing a certain activities in app or in the CRM, in the free tool, then that then correlates, that gives you a higher correlation to convert into a qualified lead. So I looked at what was there. So there was a couple things that we had set up as an automation for whenever the contact recognized value and activated on the product. But there was one key milestone that wasn’t developed yet. So we had three. So they there was an outline, there was a document, there was everything was documented, and they had two out of the three activation follow up messages. And so I created the third one like we didn’t have it. So when contacts, I’ll just go ahead and mention it. When contacts import their contacts into the CRM, that’s an activation trigger that says that the contact recognizes value of the CRM because they recognize value, or it was like there’s a metric called time to value. Once they understand value, now they’re become exponentially more likely to convert into a qualified lead. So I set up the imported contacts demand generation workflow, and that became the top three out of 80 demand triggers. And it’s because I understood that there was something missing, and we built something new versus iterating on something that was existing, and it was just because I was digging into the data and understanding those insights there, and we can do that at scale when we use AI, yeah,

Kyle James 14:29
that makes total sense. And so if I’m once again recapping and repeating like it, you identified, what is the valuable thing that a customer did that was valuable to them and to HubSpot, and that was like, giving, like, leads your money, right? Like, they’re indirectly money, so they’re giving their leads into the system. So that’s a really high signal that they’re really serious about it, right? 100% that’s what you’re saying, is like, so they did this. How do we, how do we identify that and do a lot more with it? And I love that for anybody out there, like you might not necessarily have leads or or even whatever it is in your system, that is the high value thing. How do you tie that value to the customer, to what you want them to do? And, like, pull it out and like, build more, right?

Sheri Otto 15:15
I love how you’re elevating the story, because now it’s making me even expand how we think about it in any scenario, and even going back to the jobs to be done, it’s like, okay, you’ve got people around your marketing ecosystem. You got people maybe on your email list. You got people hanging around your company. How then do you identify which of those contacts are activating? Recognizing the value. And how do you identify which contexts are ready to move forward with a deeper CTA? And I’m not necessarily be a sales call at the moment, but they are ready to move forward with something more. It might be an invite to a webinar or something like that. So you’re absolutely right. I think the game, the name of the game, is, kind of what we’re saying here is, at some point, contacts are going to recognize the value of what you have to offer. What’s your system and your business to quickly identify that, and then what’s your follow up process when it comes to that?

Kyle James 16:15
Yeah, so this goes back to let the jobs be done, right? Like this is their job to be done. This is a marketer at a company. Well, they need to generate business, so they need to start sending emails or something to do those things too. So you’re just tying all that together and and moving this is helpful for me. Yeah, that’s what’s helping you do that in

Sheri Otto 16:33
this case, no, it’s so good. I love it. It’s so awesome. Yeah, um,

Kyle James 16:38
you mentioned I want to go back and, like, double click more into kind of the content piece, right? Because that seems like to so many people, the low hanging fruit opportunity of of AIS, because it could generate content, but there’s so many like, pitfalls there, right? Because, yeah, somebody was just telling me the other day that it well, if AI generates content, there’s no copy protection around that or, or, you know, it’s not remarkable and special. It’s been kind of like normalized. So do you have any tips or practices or things that you direct people around in general content? Or do you more, like, make, you know, write your powerful piece and use it for all of the iterations, for channels and shares and stuff, or how do you I don’t know, I’ll shut up. I’m like, no, no.

Sheri Otto 17:26
I do have a process, and I do share my process as well with my customers and my clients. And I think you do need to have a process, especially like it’s more important now to understand how to partner with at AI, to do, to do content creation. And in my business, I do content creation for demand. So it’s not just what one mistake that I see, and then I’ll get into more of like your question, but one mistake that I see beforehand is that we are creating content to check off boxes. A lot of SaaS companies that I’m I’m kind of connecting with. We’re just creating content. Or they might hire an agency to build, either, like a case study or a video project for them. And it’s like, well, what’s the strategy behind it? What’s the CTA? Where will, where will it be placed in the funnel? There’s no strategic approach to it. So before, yeah, before we get into process, I would say, Listen, let’s have a strategy for how content will work for you to drive demand. And that’s what I sort of, that’s sort of, my platform is content marketing for demand, like, let’s create content that’s compelling, that is aligned with where your contacts are on the buyer’s journey, or those six jobs to be done, and then let’s create a process. So now let’s talk a little bit about the process piece, especially when it comes to AI, because if you just go into chatgpt Kyle and then they’re just saying, Hey, make me a block, even if you’re doing a little bit further, like, create a blog, create a social post that looks like this other social post, and use these tips, like, even if you’re doing that, it’s just still not good enough. Because, generic,

Kyle James 19:05
special, right? Good, but it’s not great, you know, right?

Sheri Otto 19:08
And so I literally try so hard. It’s funny, I think I try to even overcompensate, like, I’ll, I’ll throw in my extra phrasing, like, I like to say certain things, like content without outcomes is, is what do I say? I say, Yeah, content without outcomes is just noise, or like, what I would try to encourage my content, my clients and my customers to say is just try to infuse your personality and your brand voice into everything that you’re creating. What I call is like, if you can capture your IP, your intellectual property, your expertise, and your personality and phrasing, and if you can encapsulate that, and it’s something that I’m doing for my clients, encapsulate all of that, and then have a tool, an AI tool, help you scale it. But you want to start with the core of everything. That you have done. And you can pull your transcripts. You can pull everything, but that’s about you, your trainings. I could take this transcript from your podcast Kyle, and put it inside of my IP. So if I want to create content from it, they have my phrasing and how I’m using you know. So what you want to do is have that first, and then you can filter it through a framework that is that works well on social media, different platforms. You can filter your IP through how whatever type of content you’re looking to create emails, and then that can help you with scale. I like to batch my content like, there’s no way I’m going to do one post or just one email. Like, you want to be really efficient with your process. So I think to summarize, it would be, really encapsulate your IP I do that, or enable my clients to do that, or we do it for them. Then find a winning framework, like you’re going to have to have a hook no matter what everyone and I’ve been told, Oh, I don’t want to sound like someone said hooky. And I was like, oh,

Kyle James 21:06
okay, with your content. I was like, Oh, I don’t want to

Sheri Otto 21:09
sound like I’m like. I was like, Listen, this is not bait and switch, but you’re gonna have to capture attention. We’re all running on autopilot. Behavioral Science tells us that we’re all cruising around on autopilot, and if you’re not saying anything that captured their attention, like, I don’t know, like, that’s just the that’s the name of the game, you’re gonna have to do it. So we create, I create hooks in my business. We give them hooks, get them that, get their IP, and then you have a process which does include batching your content, scheduling that out. And there’s tons of tools to do this with, but that’s the overall process and the methodology before the process. But yes, use AI to help use it in a very specific, tailored way, and it’s just beyond what we’re currently doing. I think so

Kyle James 21:56
so many directions we could go right now. Maybe the right way to keep, like, doubling down on this, and I think it’s the, maybe even the most important is you mentioned we’re all in all these directions. Like, how do you grab that attention? Right? Especially when AI is just making more content to get created at a faster rate, and it’s not always great. So, like, no, it sounds so bad, I kind of stand above and make it super remarkable and engaging and impactful.

Sheri Otto 22:26
That’s a good question. Let’s talk about the bad real quick. Like Kyle, have you seen like bad, like, beginnings of articles, like, in the world of A and then this new digital transformation era? I’m like, Oh, I stopped reading. Like I can’t. There’s common phrases that I know AI wrote that I just it just takes away, like, the novelty for me and like, it’s just hard. So when I So, when I see that, I’m gonna say, like, AI pulls from what’s on the internet, and we’re all using it, so just be really careful about that. So in order to stand out and really rise above the the noise, the crowded space, when it comes to creating content, I think it goes back to a little bit about what we said about these new motions. Kind of the trends are going where we’re thought leadership trends, so we’re going to have to do more storytelling, and this is something that I’m working on. Yeah, and I’m working on this more. I’m not very good at this. I’m starting to tell a little bit more of like my HubSpot story. I could tell you that now, I don’t know how much. I don’t I don’t say that. I don’t know why, but you need to tell more stories in order to separate yourself from the all the noisy content out there, because your story is unique. And there are storytelling frameworks, if you get stuck, and I’ll just give you one really fast. It’s really like the and, but there and, but therefore storytelling. And it’s super simple, and you can do this in three sentences, it’s situation and situation, but there’s a conflict. There’s always a conflict in a story. So there’s your butt is in there, then you’re therefore, therefore solution, therefore we have this thing go to the next step. Therefore, so here’s the situation, here’s the conflict, and here’s the solution. You could just do that, and that tells a story. You could do that in three sentences. Good. So we need to do more storytelling. We need to do more thought leadership. And yes, you are going to have to use hooks. There are hook frameworks and a hook, okay? What does a hook look like? What is a hook? A hook is can be a universal statement that we all can get behind a hook is really, you know how you have a comedian is really good because it says some they say something that no matter what where you’re from, or what journey you’ve been on, like you can relate to that nostalgic thing. Like everyone’s like, yeah, it’s, it’s funny, because it’s, there’s truth behind it. If you can create a hook where people are either stopped in their tracks, so that’s that pattern interrupt, or there’s a universal truth. They can all agree to and like, lean into like, yeah, that feel that like. Or if there’s something that just like, is a myth buster, like something is going to have to stop the pattern. So if you think about how to stop the pattern, but whether it’s a contrarian view a universal truth, um, something that is a myth buster, or something that allows people to subscribe to whatever you’re about to say next.

Kyle James 25:28
So that is a hook. It’s like, you’ve got me thinking going back to kind of the brand guidelines and direction. It’s like, figure out what those key phrases or your tagline is, and sure hit it, hit it over and over and over again, but make sure that it’s so compelling and industry interesting that, like, it catches them and stops them. And then I know you just,

Sheri Otto 25:49
do you struggle? Kyle, do you struggle with, like, sometimes I’m like, Oh, I don’t want to sound too like in your face, because my personality is

Kyle James 25:59
sweet and kindness, right? Yeah.

Sheri Otto 26:02
I’m like, Oh, I have to be more bold here. I don’t know, like, I just wanted you know. So sometimes I’m like, sometimes a hook is a bold, very bold statement that maybe you wouldn’t say, like, to your friends normally, but I think there’s a line that you can come up to sometimes, yeah, God,

Kyle James 26:21
getting the tables turned on me. I don’t know. I’m kind of a really weird old school you relate to this like, I very much believe, if you’re not, don’t say something. If you’re not want to say to their face, don’t say it online. But I also believe my mama told me, If you want, if you ain’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. It’s like, how do you bleed those two together? And, yeah, I probably heard it too that, like, honesty is kindness, so it might not be what they want to hear, but if you’ve got a very powerful, Bolden thing to say, Yeah, say it and say it with conviction. And if that’s part of your brand messaging, oh yeah, I like that your quarter of the universe that you are solving this problem and shatter from the mountaintops. Because you’re not shouting from the mountaintops. No one’s going to know you’re an expert at something

Sheri Otto 27:11
true. I like how you said, say it with conviction. Because if you really believe in something, and you’re really like, No, this is not good, you know, like we’re doing this. We’re doing this really wrong. And I promise, if we just switch this, we can get more revenue, more growth, like we’ve got, there’s money here. And one of the things I’m thinking about, as I say that, is, like, a lot of times, there is no lead nurture process inside the funnel. It’s like into the come into your business through whatever gateway, whether it’s a lead magnet or an event, and then then they follow up with the sales question and invite for a sales call.

Kyle James 27:52
What do you think that is? Why do you think, like so many companies like drop the ball on the nerd,

Sheri Otto 27:58
I’ve seen this so much, and I think it’s because we don’t quite know how yet exactly explain

Kyle James 28:04
this is this is straightforward. If you know the pain that you’re trying to solve, you just keep reminding them that you’re this is the pain. This is how I solve the pain. For you, do you want that or not? Right?

Sheri Otto 28:14
Institutionally, we are trained to just drive demand. So it’s really about like, whatever the sales reps need go enable them with product marketing and demand marketing, which is what I did at HubSpot, like give them the tools and the frameworks to get them a meeting. And then part of it is like the content department in these companies create the social post. Great. Okay, have something for them to opt into your funnel. Great, but there is it. It’s so hard to measure the performance of a lead who goes from cold to warm and warm to hot. And this is why that function does not exist very much in B to B SAS companies, yeah, I’m gonna call

Kyle James 28:59
out. Well, you think that is because there’s either the first touch attribution or the last, and it’s hard to, like, do every touch absolutely gnarly, hard, yeah.

Sheri Otto 29:10
And it’s funny, I began to touch on this. So I started in the man team at HubSpot, and I moved to the life cycle team, and I started working with we call we, we literally built out a persuade function like it was not exist. It didn’t exist. And so what happened was I would partner with the person who was like the middle of the funnel, person who we just created this function in there, and we began to understand how to measure that. And so we would have a workflow that was more of the high intent workflow. They weren’t ready for a sales call, but they were past, just reading blocks, right? So there are past and those jobs to be done. They’ve moved on from learn to want to evaluate. Okay, so, so we’re there. So what do you do with those contacts? So what I would so what we started measuring, and I think we started solving those problems, which was, okay, they. Read maybe three, four blogs, and they’ve been on your social Okay, so, like, let’s put a communication in front of them to see if they want to do the next step. And if they do, they get enrolled into that persuade workflow. And we would measure the frequency of enrollments there, and that’s how we measure performance of a life cycle, or a middle of the funnel marketer, is the rate at which a contact goes from a hot top of funnel or higher in the funnel workflow into a more of a demand or middle to bottom of the funnel communications. And again, those are all different types of content, like maybe your case studies and things like that. So if we measure if people were able to measure how we enroll folks down funnel, I think we would do that more, and that whole lead nurture process wouldn’t be so vacant, because right now it literally is an onboarding sequence. Welcome. Here’s five emails to warm you up, and then, oh, they checked out the pricing page, send them an automated email to check to connect with a sales rep like that is the process, and I think we are trying to crack that code. And I would say, definitely crack that code, because there’s so much money in the list that you’re not nurturing. There’s so much money even an ungib is a stat from MailChimp that talked about an unengaged contact is still 33% worth an engaged contact versus a non a non contact, someone who doesn’t even know about your brand. There’s still 30 there’s still 1/3 of the way to the sale, even if they’re unengaged. So if you can just start a re engagement sequence or something and get them going in the middle in that lead nurture phase, then you can, you can pull more, extract more value out of your database. I just think the focus isn’t quite there for some founders, C and C suite executives who are who are gold on driving demand and pushing content, publishing content. So I think I’m here in my company to say, Listen, guys, we’re going to do middle of all the funnel. We’re going to nurture these. We got to build relationships, because that’s what’s going to really drive your emotions right now, your go to market motions, especially in the era of AI. And we can start with the folks who are dormant inside your list. And that’s what I’m excited to tackle this year COVID.

Kyle James 32:21
Nice. So let me ask you, this is kind of a last kind of question, because this, this seems the challenge, then, is workflows and lead nurturing process are very rigid, right? It’s very hard to get fluid with them, but maybe that’s absolutely where AI can fit in, like, maybe the next iteration, generation of like, these nurturing campaigns, is you’ve got all the content that you’re producing for these different things, and how does AI, like, need the tea leaves of what it’s being given and do the Yeah, and I don’t know, like that. That seems like some it would be very good at at scale, in ways that these forking workflows.

Sheri Otto 33:01
Just, yeah, well, you know what’s happening. And I actually just watched a podcast with Kip and I think the VP of demand marketing, like they’re using AI, it’s on it’s on the other pod. I can’t

Kyle James 33:14
think the name of it, either, but I know what you’re talking it’s on the

Sheri Otto 33:17
Oh, man. So their podcast is called see now kind of, but it they just, they just released a new one. Goodness, Kyle. But the point is that they are using machine learning and predictive analytics to give recommendations based on previous behavior. So AI is doing this already. And so what happened is, AI is, like you said, reading the tea leaves of behavior, using

Kyle James 33:50
learning, marketing against the grain, is that right? Yeah, thank

Sheri Otto 33:52
you. Yeah, that was gonna bother me too. I’m glad you pulled that out. So marketing against the grain, just this is just a plug for them. Great. They are you. They are using AI to to map behaviors like, literally, a combination of behaviors and and go, I go. Watch this episode. Kip is interviewing one of the VPs of marketing, and she is sharing this case study on how we’re using machine learning predictive analysis to have aI tell us like it’s doing the work. It’s doing all the heavy lifting. It’s doing all the heavy it’s telling us it’s giving us recommendations on the best next steps based on behavioral just so it’s tracking folks on what they’re doing, content they’re consuming. And it’s saying, hey, based on that cool, based on some conversion data that you have internally, we recommend you give them this next blog post or this next newsletter, like, so it’s, it’s happening, it’s, it’s doing it. It makes, it makes you look good. Like, it’s like, I great.

Kyle James 34:58
You just have. With the content. You don’t have to worry about building these crazy, complex workflows anymore. You just have to have all the stuff ready and let it, yeah, pick it. So that’s

Sheri Otto 35:06
the use case. That is it. And I think the more we just happen to it, right? Let it recommend what you should do. Say, listen, we got all I mean, HubSpot has just a couple of blog posts, just a few, right? So, like, it’s got, it’s got a ton and so it can train these models and these machine learning tools to to understand what the path, a high converting path, is, and then recommend next best steps. I think they’re called a learning paths, or these, these next steps. And then when you do that, I think there was, like, the number was like over 80% conversion rates, customer conversion rates, which just blows, you know, it blows everything else out of the water. But we’re using technology to do that, so that’s why, is what I’m also Yes, content is king. Create the content, train the AI on the content, and then have it recommend to you as a marketer what you should do and how you should convert people into becoming customer. So I want to work with more developers on creating the platforms for this, more AI analysts and developers and software engineers, because if I can get I know there’s some free tools out there too that I actually took on my own. I got certified for AI applications for growth with Northwestern and so, but we were able to use a couple of free tools to create these models. But I’d love to, like scale this. So this is really interesting. This probably my next step, yeah, for sure, super, super

Kyle James 36:32
fascinating and insightful. This is, I know we could keep going for the next hour on this, and I hope the audience has found this is super interesting and as exciting as we have just kind of talking demand gen and ways to get content out there and parts of the funnel, but you kind of let into it, you kind of buried the lead a little bit. She like, how can people help you? How could people find you? You know, we talked about your new venture a little bit ago. What are, what are your Latin lawn, and all the different places that people can find you online? Yeah, absolutely.

Sheri Otto 37:01
One really great place is on LinkedIn under my name, definitely good

Kyle James 37:05
place to follow on LinkedIn, yeah,

Sheri Otto 37:07
I’m pretty active on there, and feel free to say hello. I’ve got some resources if you need help with your funnel or anything we talked about here today. And then also my website growth Lane strategies.com feel free to go check some of that stuff out. And I’m still on Tiktok, which is very interesting. I’m newly on Tiktok. Um, so whole other conversation, whole another thing, whole another

Kyle James 37:32
back and talk about that

Sheri Otto 37:35
undermining. Yeah, just under my name Sheri Otto, so yeah, I’d love to connect. And thank you so much for having me on your podcast. Kyle, awesome,

Kyle James 37:42
awesome. This has been fantastic. So thank you everybody for tuning in. We’ll be back next week with another go to market innovator. Until then, keep learning and growing. Everybody. Have a good week. You.

Share your comments: