Name: 2026 Customer Marketing Masterclass
Uploaded: 2025-12-10T21:02:05.852Z
Duration: 1 h 33 min
Description: 2026 Customer Marketing Masterclass

Transcript for "2026 Customer Marketing Masterclass": Hi, everyone. My name is Natalia, and I'm a VP of marketing here at Pure Bound. And it's my pleasure to welcome you to the customer marketing master class. Even though this is a webinar or we're meeting virtually, we still want this to be a community experience. So go ahead, enter the chat, let us know your name, where you work, where you're tuning in from, and please use the chat to ask questions during the sessions, offer advice to any of the other attendees that have questions, and just have fun in there. We welcome all the comments and feedback. You can even connect directly one on one with any of the attendees of the webinar today. You can go to the people tab or see who's in the chat and message them directly. So, hopefully, you can make some connections as well. Just wanted to level set that the agenda for this event came from conducting dozens of interviews with customer marketers, and listening to your feedback in CMA communities. Wanted to especially give a shout out to Mary Green and CMA Weekly where a lot of the insights were gathered on what are the biggest pain points that you are facing today. And, you know, instead of us just telling you how to solve them, we also gathered the brightest minds in customer and product marketing to answer those questions for you today. So what's in store for today on the agenda? We're gonna start with talking about sales adoption. So how do you get sales to actually use the customer proof and how to really make that process a lot smoother. We're also going to talk next about measurement and ROI and how do you communicate, the value of customer marketing to leadership. And lastly, obviously, AI is a very hot topic and sometimes a buzzword, but today, we're going to dig deeper into how customer marketers specifically can use AI in their toolset. We also have a document section, so check that out. There's some additional articles and sort of helpful content that you can enjoy after the webinar. And hardest question always is, is this recorded? Yes. We'll send an email of the recording after the event. And if you want to share this event with your peers, please make sure you send them the registration link as everybody needs their own magic link to enter. So it's the same one that you enter today, you will be entering to watch the recording. Okay. So with that, let's get started. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the to today's session. My name is Gareth Pembroke. I lead customer success and operations at Pierbound. And before we get into our chat about sales enablement today, I want to introduce our amazing panelists, Chris Dalton at Clari, and you can see Chris' picture actually behind me, and Alexi Glover at Frank Advocacy. Chris and Alexi, we'd love to hear a little bit more about your roles. And, Alexi, why don't you kick us off? Sure. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm Alexi. I'm the cofounder of Frank Advocacy. Frank Advocacy is a customer marketing and advocacy consulting agency that I run with my sister, Janelle. And together, we lead a team of consultants that help customer marketing and advocacy professionals get shit done. Amazing. And I'm Chris Dalton. I lead our customer marketing and, advocacy efforts at Clari. Clari is a platform in the revenue orchestration space. Awesome. Well, thank you both very much for joining us. And just to set the stage for the webinar today, I just want to outline a little bit of like research that we're seeing in the market. So recent LinkedIn research on the trust in the B2B buying process revealed that recommendations from trusted peers are three to four times more likely to influence buying decisions than other features or lower prices. And also Gartner released research that said that 65% of sales content actually goes unused in the market. So customer and product marketers obviously are at the forefront in delivering customer proof, but sales adoption has obviously been incredibly tough and I know everyone kind of has seen that. So despite the fact that we know this is a customer proof as a leading sales influencer. So yeah, just to get started, let's address the elephant in the room. Why do you think that 65% of sales content actually goes unused and what is actually happening on the ground? And, Alexi, I'll ask you to start. Sure. I think enablement is the biggest hurdle that a lot of people face in their roles, but specifically customer marketing, and advocacy professionals. From what I see, CMAers often are forced to sort of work as a translator, if you will. So we might have case studies about, I don't know, company a, competitor a, but that's not the language that sales are speaking. They might be looking specifically for a product or a geo or a different way that our our content is organized. And so I think that's how we end up in this cycle of being reactive to these one off requests about a case study with the a cost a cut that talks about a customer who wears blue shoes, who lives in Arizona, who uses the product in this very particular way. Right? And because I think sales cycles move so quickly now, especially in the tech space, this enablement is the the enablement function of customer marketing and advocacy professionals job is this always on requirement. Right? Like, we always need to be able to work so quickly. And I think what happens is that your sales reps end up with a deck that works for them, that works for the vast majority of their prospects and or renewals, and it's old content. It's stale content, but it's content that they know how to use. They know how to they have a spiel. And so I think that's why the vast majority of the good content ends up sitting unused. But Chris has done a really great job of solving or starting to solve this problem at Clari. So I'm I'm interested to hear what he has to say. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. I think if, like you said, sales moves fast and they're resistant to trying to have complex workflows put upon them where they need to go sort through these different areas in Highspot to find exactly what they need. If if that's how you present your content enablement to sales, then they're going to view it as a nice to have and not a need to have. I think when I speak to sales reps, a lot of them see the value of customer proof and sharing that with their prospects. But if they're confronted with this onerous process to try and find that, then they're just going to leave it unused. And maybe, like Alexi said, your best reps will have that one deck or, like, that one case study that they just go back to over and over again, but the vast majority of your content will be left gathering dust unless you deliver it to them in a very easy to consume way that that gives them no option to just leave it sitting there. And then I also think that, we as practitioners focus too much on production based goals. We, you know, most KPIs are focused around create this amount of x case studies each quarter, but then we completely abandon what happens to those case studies after they're created. You put in potentially months of hard work creating this beautiful polished case study, and then it just dies on Google Drive or in Highspot. And so enablement is just as important, if not more so, to gain all of the value and credibility out of the programs that you're offering and what your what your worth is to the business. And if you think about it, you know, you could have 50 case studies if you're lucky enough to build out that huge library. No one may know that that exists. But what's more valuable, having that or having three case studies that everyone uses and you get value out of that? Yeah. And, Chris, how do you go about building a relationship with your revenue team to actually communicate the value of these materials you're creating? What has worked for you and what what hasn't? Yeah. I mean, I think you can point to what the best reps are doing. If, if you see the top enterprise reps using customer proof and deals and it's helping them win deals faster and you can point to that, then other reps will follow along because they're all incentivized to, their commission structures are incentivized to do what works. I also think it's important to listen to how your sales team actually works instead of making assumptions about their workflow. So meeting with sales teams frequently and getting feedback on functionality or programs, rather than just assuming that they want to follow a a certain customer reference workflow process, for example. Instead hearing what would be ideal for them, you may find that some of your assumptions are actually untrue, and you're going to miss out on adoption opportunities if that's the case. So being adaptable and being willing to craft a program that maximizes both adoption and value for the people that you're trying to serve is what's going to lead to success. And then alongside that, go from being a request taker to an insights giver instead of being that person on Slack that people just ask you where to go find this case study. I found a lot of value in proactive proof from Pure Bound. They didn't pay me to say this. It wasn't even in our our prep notes. But I think having that proactive approach to sales instead of expecting them to ask for what they think they might need, deliver what you know they need based on what you've they just discussed with their prospect. That's going to give them the the best results for them, and it's going to lead to the highest uptake. Absolutely. Alexi, how about you? I mean, I think I'm in kind of a unique position because I get the opportunity to sort of, like, peek behind the curtains of many customer marketing and advocacy programs. And, also, I get a lot of people reaching out with, sort of, like, one off questions for advice. And one of the things that I think, I see people struggle with a lot is this understanding of what sales needs. Like, exactly what Chris was talking about is that, they're not asking sales what they're using or what would help them solve the problem. So one of the best things I think any customer marketer can do, whether they're new in a role or have been there for a while and are, like, experiencing a bit of stagnation or or frustration around the way that their role is appreciated within the organization is to go to the teams that are closest to the revenue and actually ask them what they need. Say, I understand that our company is working towards x goal. Maybe that's retaining more customers or launching a new prod a product. And say, what can I do from a customer proof perspective to help you achieve that goal? And often, it's not I need more case studies. Often, it's something as simple as, oh, it would be really great to have a customer quote speaking to exactly this. And maybe that customer marketer is a pure bound customer, and they can figure that out pretty quickly. Maybe that means going into your Gong recordings and looking for mentions of that pain point. I think, like, we're often putting the cart before the horse when we're just, like, producing case studies and not necessarily addressing the, pain points of the sellers. And then this process magically allows you to figure out who your friendlies are within the sales organization, within the revenue organization. And your job should be to become their best friend. Mhmm. But like Chris said, you should also be giving them those insights that you're anticipating they need based on your relationship that you're building. And over time, you should be able to build an internal case study around the folks on that team that are using your customer proof points to the best of their abilities and selling more. Have you heard any, like, feedback from sales teams around the enablement that has, like, really surprised you? And could you maybe give us some into insights into that and how you've maybe applied it over time? Yeah. I think, for the most part, we, often see people waiting to be told kind of, like, what they need or what what is coming next or what would be helpful. But if you're not asking, it probably and then if they're not asking you if you're not asking them, first of all, what that basically means, I will say, like, 99.8% of the time is that your sales team has their own system, their own deck. They have used internal stories to create something. Like, I'm sure there is a mess behind the curtain that you do not want to know about that they are using to sell. And I think for me and my clients that that teaches is to, like, let's be flexible. Let's make sure that we can adapt our content beyond just a three page PDF case study into something that actually meets the needs of the sellers. But I think my biggest takeaway always, in working with multiple clients is to just be curious. I think, Chris' approach is absolutely the right approach. Like, let's be curious. Let's be proactive, but let's not be proactive before being curious because then you never know if what you're creating is just garbage. Right? And, Chris, I know we've worked a lot on sales enablement together, and you have a very taken a very hands on approach and gotten into the weeds. How about you? Have you heard feedback that's, like, really resonated with you from sales teams on, like, the Yeah. I I think, what it really boils down to is having empathy, for the team. And that this skill will serve you well, no matter who you're trying to communicate with or what you're doing. But it's important to take yourself outside of your role and put yourself in the shoes of the rep. Because I found that even your biggest fans on the sales team, the ones that see the value of your programs, may actually have a really rudimentary understanding of how your processes work. I I've had some of our top enterprise reps come to me, asking for certain types of content, and I find that they are using a three year old case study that they saved to their desktop. And it just it it blows away your your assumptions that when you release a new case study on Slack or something, you just assume everyone's digesting it and reading it, and they'll know exactly where to find it, forever. Right? And so it really comes back to trying to ground yourself and thinking about how you're providing value. And in the case of sales adoption, how are you providing value for reps? Like, think less about how to orchestrate your program in the ideal way and just answer the the founding principles question of how can I help them do their jobs more effectively? How can I help them win deals faster? If you let that guide your approach, then, that will lead to the best outcomes. For them, it will lead to high adoption and recognition for your work. Absolutely. And, yeah, you you got into some of the the problems about this already about, like, set files saved on your desktop. You know, like, even if you have the best customer proof built for sales, like, the discover if the discoverability isn't there, it's it's it's not worth it. So, like, Chris, how how do you, ensure that your sales team can find things, from an enablement's perspective? Yeah. I think people are very logical and natural, and they will try and do the lowest friction thing possible to get what they need. And, historically, this has meant that I act as what I call myself a human Slack bot. You know, someone will just come to you and ask where this, case study is or if we have this this piece of content. But thanks to, the advent of AI, we no longer have to do that. Now we have Slack bots that can answer those questions for us, and they can do it much more accurately than we can in our own, our human repository, and they can answer it in fifteen seconds. And then even better than having a Slack bot on demand is having that predictably, proactively put it in their inbox when they need it. So coming back to proactive proof. But our sales team has loved it, and we've had fantastic adoption. The stat that you shared with me, Gareth, is that 96.5% open rate, is happening with Clari sales team after, all of their calls with prospects. So after every call with the prospects, they get an email that discusses what they what they talked about, what those prospects' challenges were, and here's what you can use to, to help solve those challenges. Here's the content, the customer you can reference to move that deal a little faster. And how has that impacted your role as, like, what you call a human Slackbot? It certainly reduces the burden on on me, just from a time saving standpoint. But I also think it's really helpful to have that, that third party source of truth, essentially. Like, I can trust that the Slack bot is going to do an exhaustive search of everything that we have and catalog that for the query rather than just hoping that I remember correctly and I can answer that. Yeah. How about you, Alexi? I mean, kind of the same. Like, I'm obsessed with the way that CMA tech is changing. I think we've moved in the correct direction, which is towards proactive, support for our teams. And I think your version where we're matching the in progress opportunities with content that speaks to it is perfect. But I think, ultimately, the real issue that we have with customer marketing and advocacy as a role is that, we often solve the problem without having a conversation with the team that we're solving the problem for. So if your content is living in your CMS, doesn't matter if your sales team is living in Slack, you're still gonna have Slack bot, Chris, responding to all of those requests with the link to the CMS. Right? So I think we're moving in the right direction. It's just taking us a little bit of time to get there. And, again, not enablement, but letting people know that, like, here's the process. Here's how you get from a to b. And that proactive tech helps ease that burden of enablement on our side. Absolutely. And, Alexi, shifting gears a little bit just into the actual content of the sales enablement material itself, how do you make sure that customer proof feels trustworthy to both the sales rep and to the the buyer and and reader of the of the proof? Yeah. I really focus on beyond just the benefits of the company solution. I think we're the the industry is not in the correct direction. Most of our customer stories are moving toward away from challenge solution results. Here's how we beat competitor a towards, like, here is Gareth. This is his persona. These are the challenges he was having at work, and here's how he solved it. And I think just putting that face and that name and that humanization behind it, really is the correct move. But I also think we are moving towards better content and opportunities when we are integrating questions about thought leadership specifically. So one of my favorite plays is to have a cut customer story interview that includes opportunities for our advocates to talk about. There's awesome feelings on, you know, AI in the industry is a big one depending on whatever industry you're in. Right? Like, talk about how you are moving your team towards better adoption for AI solutions. And maybe in a roundabout way, that conversation lends itself to you selling your product and services. Right? I think the more we make advocates seem like, industry leaders, which a lot of them are, whatever their industry may be, the more legs that content gets, the more trustworthy it feels, and also the more authority we're really putting behind, the content that we're creating because we're saying, hey. This thought leader chose our solution, and here's why. And here's what they think, you know, might be ahead for the industry, and, hopefully, we'll be along for that ride. And, also, update your story. Like, I think this one feels really obvious, but a lot of people don't do this. Like, I think, we get a good logo. We tell a good story with that logo, maybe six months after implementation. Maybe we include some thought leadership. But then, like, a year down the line, that customer has continued to evolve with us. Maybe they've added new tech to their stack that's not us, or maybe they've expanded with us. And all we need to do is, like, get a quote, and maybe we already have a quote from that customer because they've been on a webinar or whatever. And we just need to, like, pop that into the story. So the story becomes not a stale document, but, like, a living, breathing representation of our relationship with that customer. Yeah. We there are definitely people on this call who we've reached out to multiple times this year to update the story. But yeah. No. Completely agree with you. Like, the the world of tech moves so quickly that, like, different things become important over time, And it's quick to update these stories. Like, you can just add little bits and pieces here and there, but, I don't think people do it enough and you kind of end up with some old content in a on a desktop potentially just, sitting there being used over and over again. I think it's hard because, like, a story update doesn't communicate nicely into, like, a new story created KPI. So I think it becomes a little bit less of a priority where we should really be shifting the idea behind KPIs, which I think is probably a conversation with Daniel later. He loves to talk about KPIs, towards, like, this the story as a living thing versus a delivered asset, but then ages. Yeah. Absolutely. How about you, Chris? What are your thoughts? I would definitely echo some of Alexi's points. I think the key to a trustworthy story is making it about the individual behind the organization. And if you think about it from the the prospect's perspective, the buyer's perspective, if they're scrolling LinkedIn or scrolling your website, and they see that Apple did x with your product or they see that Alexi Glover, your peer, did this with this product, which are they gonna find more believable and enticing and inspired by? They want to build their careers and perform well and be recognized for that. And so I think it's not only more trustworthy, but on the, advocate side, it's just more exciting to to have those conversations with those advocates, and when you're talking about their own personal successes, and and and integrating that into your story. So that's definitely key. I think, I I definitely agree with Alexi's point that, stories need to be updated when there's opportunities to do so. I do think, at least in the organizations I've been, we focused or worry we we worry too much about the age of certain stories, and want to discard those even if they're still relevant. And I think, like, that's a trap that you can get into, which comes back to just the production based KPIs of needing to turn out new stories constantly. Ensure that your customer stories are relevant to your buyers, that they're relevant to what you're offering, to the results that your buyers are are looking for. But if you have a fantastic case study that's several years old, then by all means, you should be keep using it. Absolutely. And kind of a a a theme that we've I've had surfaced on this call is just the fact that you're obviously everyone's so busy these days and, like, creating proof that is not going to be used is it's it's not really feasible. So with with all of the demands that are there now and all of the, like, requests that you're getting from sales team, I'm sure everyone's getting a million requests a day, how do you prioritize what you actually create first and how you keep the process of creating new proof efficient? And, Chris, I'll go back to you on that. Sure. Yeah. I am a big advocate of the waterfall approach of derivative content. So try and capture the largest usable, asset that you can have. Say it's an hour long video interview, and you can cut that into a case study video cuts for social quotes for slides, try and get as much value out of every asset. That should be standard practice, especially because I found that reps have different preferences on what they want to use based on their own styles, based on what stage in the conversation that they're at. Sometimes they want bite sized content, and then I've had others ask for a even longer form case study than the 10 page white paper that they found on Highspot, which shocks me. I don't know who's actually reading that. But they think that they they, but their prospect wants to see that stuff. So be adaptive to all, sorts of assets and just try and capture those large derivative assets that can be used. I also, think that, again, with AI, it's a huge help in quickly creating assets that don't need to be polished necessarily. We don't need a case study for everything. And, oftentimes, if a quote or a slide is all that's needed, you can generate that in minutes with internal documentation. And it allows you to quickly both serve sales needs, but not not get stuck on the hamster wheel of really, time consuming, onerous content generation. Sometimes, I have had reps ask me for, like, a slide that we don't have, and I can use Glean. And using a combination of all of the internal, slide decks that we have and presentations data from the account, I can generate a customer story slide slide in five or ten minutes. And it's not going to be perfect and polished. It's not gonna be permanently featured in in, a sales deck. But if it meets the need at that moment, then you can both serve, those needs and also not make it time consuming for yourself. Absolutely. Alexi? Well, I've never heard it called waterfall approach, but I use the same approach, and I love that. I've heard modular or atomized content, and I think waterfall might be, like, the most fun version of those options. From Kevin Reed. I can't I can't remember if he came up with that. We'll have to No. Check me on that after. Well, we're just, like, saying them the same songbook because I totally agree. Like, we need to be atomizing it, squeezing every everything we can out of every piece of content. But one piece that I think a lot of people struggle with is they'll be given a list of, like, top brands from the CMO or targets from the CMO or kind of thing. And it's, like, big brands that might not be using your product in an interesting way, in an innovative way. Sometimes it's, like, it's part of their stack, but, like, one person in a thousand people are using it. Like, it's not a good story. Right? It's just a good logo. And we see people, like, really pushing for that story to get across the finish line. And the way that I recommend we address that is to ensure that, like, all customer content that's in your pipeline has to be contributing to your company's overarching goals. So if your company in f y twenty six is selling specifically to, like, one persona or selling specifically one solution and really focusing on that one product in their lineup, and that story, while it's a good logo, doesn't meet that requirement, then it's an easy way to shift your priorities and make sure that you're really focused on what's driving, better outcomes for the business. Right? So, that's one thing. I also really recommend tracking requests and specifically content requests because it's an easy way to surface trends. And so if your content if your sellers are specifically looking for content that talks about x and all of your content talks about y, it's an easy way to make that adjustment and modular content. Or the waterfall approach is a great way to address that, slightly shifting the narrative even though you're not necessarily producing a brand new full form customer story. Nice. I love that. Unfortunately, that is all of the time we have that absolutely flew. Alexi, Chris, thank you both so much. And, for everyone out there, stay tuned to the for the next session. Thank you. Hi, everybody. My name is Sani Manivanen. I'm the founder and CEO of Pure Bound. We are the only AI native customer proof platform and proud to serve amazing customers at companies like AlphaSense, Canva, Gong, Gainsight. Thank you, Melanie, and a whole lot more. And you can see some of our customers back here, in our wall of fame. Before we get into our chat about the all important topic of the ROI of customer marketing, I wanted to introduce our amazing panel, Melanie Paddock at Gainsight and Daniel Pollet at Grafana Labs. Melanie and Daniel, welcome, and we'd love to hear a little bit more about you. Melanie, why don't you kick us off? Absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me here. I'm so excited to share more with everybody today. My name is Melanie Paddock. I'm the senior manager of customer marketing and advocacy at Gainsight. If you don't know what Gainsight is, it is actually a complete customer retention platform bringing human, digital, and agentic programs together to help our best customers retain and grow their best customers. So my team specifically at Gainsight covers pretty much anything customer related. So our advocacy program named Game Stars, customer stories, video testimonials, reference matching, game changer awards. We facilitate all of the awards for both conferences, both in Europe and in The US. We just launched a referral program, which is really exciting. And then, number one, matching advocates to all business needs, across the entire company for all five products. I have to, say that I do have two amazing team members on my team. So Daviel Shorter, who is the manager of the Gainsborough customer recognition program, and then Shubra, who is my reference manager and operations specialist. So we're a mighty team of three over here at Gainsight. Amazing. Thanks for that introduction. Daniel? Yeah. Hi, everyone. I'm Daniel Palais. I do basically what Melanie does, and we can move on from there. But, but but in all but in all seriousness, I I am Daniel Plei. I am the director of customer advocacy at a company called Grafana Labs, the creators and purveyors of the open observability cloud. Like Melanie, I have a team of three, myself here in California. My amazing team members, Gina Lopez, who's based out of Europe and covers everything customer marketing from an EMEA and APAC perspective, and, Johnson, who's based in Texas, who covers does the same thing from a day to day perspective in The States. Like Melanie, we do basically anything publicly or privately that involves our customers speaking about what they do with our software, whether it is on stage, whether it is in written format, whether it is in video format, or whether it is privately in between one customer to one or one customer to many. I spend a lot of my personal time not only, you know, filling in where where we need to be on the team, but I'm a cochair of our customer advisory board, running meetings every other month, workshops, things of that nature, and, the the the engine behind our Golden Grotta Awards, which we literally just launched this week for, celebration of what you can do with Grafana, the the dashboard, both from a professional and, personal standpoint. And that means I get to spend a lot of time making grott puns. So, I love that. That's amazing. Well, listen. Great to great to share this change with both of you. Let's talk about measurement. You know, this is something that we have all talked about, I think, in several conversations and it's exciting to go now share with, the rest of our community. Let me ask you the first question which is executives, I think, still think customer marketing is case studies, references, customer logos, caps. And the way they define success, it seems to me, is just how many programs can you run? And we've all felt that pressure. And by the way, you know, I think one of the clear things that AI has done is every c level person now just believes that we should be moving five times as fast because AI can just do the other 80%. Right? But what that's manifested into is just more and more programs. Let me ask you the multi million dollar question. How do you personally educate and just talk to leadership about modern customer marketing and, you know, how do we actually impact the business? What does that process look like at your companies? Melanie, I'll start with you and then we'll go to Daniel. Numbers. Sunny, it's all about the numbers. So, saying to leadership that we publish eight case studies in a quarter, that's not going to get them excited. You need to drill in deeper and you need to understand what impact those case studies had on the sales process or on retaining customers. So develop measurable and quantifiable metrics to present to leadership for the work that your team is doing. So not only did we do eight case studies, but from those eight case studies, we had people a prospect stay on the site 10% longer, and then they ended up filling out a lead form that resulted in a demo request. Those are the type of numbers and metrics that leadership wants to hear in regards to the case studies, not just that they were published on your site. Again, another one that I can give you an example of because I I love, realistic metrics to take back with me to my desk, so that's what I wanna provide here today. So with references and reference matching, one simple question if you ask your CRO if you said, what if my team could not give you references this quarter? What do you think would happen? I bet their draw their draw would drop down to the floor. Right? Because everybody knows the impact that references have, but how do you communicate that to leadership with statistics and with numbers? So for me at Gainsight, what we are showing is the time to match. So what that means is from the time a, salesperson puts in a reference request, how quickly am I able to match that reference with an a willing advocate to do the reference, and then how quickly am I am I able to get that scheduled. So time is money. The faster that I am able to get a reference scheduled is a faster, sales cycle, a faster sales sales deal. Also, if you're able to show references, the reference impact on closed deals, that's just gonna sweeten the pot even more, and that's one of my goals next year to be able to look into that. Amazing. Daniel, what's your take? I know you have several takes on measurement in general, but would love to hear. I think it actually I like to take a much broader look and step back when it comes to measurement, which is especially when it comes to executives. Right? We as customer marketers, like, obviously, we interview for these jobs. Right? The executives that we interview with, like, they ask us, what do you think customer marketing should be? We tell them, and they say, guess what, Melanie? Guess what, Daniel? You're hired. Come run this department. We walk in the proverbial door, and we sit down and we guess guess, hey, mister and missus executive. How do you think we should measure things? Right? Suddenly, like, we're we've given away the power, of this. Like, they hired us for our for our skills and our way of running things, yet we get in the door and suddenly we forget that we're actually really awesome at what we do. And we let them define the measurements that they wanna see, which is how we kinda get to that that starting point of, like, numbers, numbers, numbers. Right? Like, output, output, output because that's what people who haven't been in customer marketing for a while or know, like, oh, case study this or reference that. Like, just give me 10 of these and 12 of the those. It's much more fundamental that we take something that, you know, the way Melanie has packaged this up and walk in the door with that and say, no. This is the way we are going to run things. This is what we are going to deliver. It's gonna take some time to get there. We have to build this base. We have to build this program. Sure. We can do some of these case studies on the side right now because AI allows us to do that. But if you're looking for value, if you're looking for impact, if you're looking for our team to help your teams get from point a to point b faster, that's going to take a few months, you know, weeks, all these things to get up get these systems going. And if you set that expectation from the beginning, suddenly these, these executives are like, oh, right. You actually know what you're talking about. You interviewed. I got you. Two, you you give yourself a little bit more leeway to and runway to get that right as opposed to get it quickly. Yep. Love that. Love that. Sorry. Go ahead, Melanie. Oh, I was just saying, yes. The ex expectation setting is is huge. When I brought on Pure Bound, immediately sales was saying, when do I get to use that Slackbot? When how do I find the how do I find customer content? But, I had to go and enable them and have them understand the stages of the process to get Pure Bound up and running and when it would actually be up and running. So that way they had realistic expectations. So I'm just agreeing with you a 100% to communicate, communicate, communicate. Yeah. Exactly. And even going back to, like, production of case studies, like, people who don't know the the weeds of them are like, oh, case study is gonna show up like that. Right? Yeah. It's like, no. It actually takes, like that's why I always tell people, like, the longest one I've ever run is eighteen months. From the moment I was introduced to the moment it was published, it takes time. Like, it's not everything's gonna take eighteen months. Right? That was with a Fortune 100 company. It happens. But you tell them, you're like, oh my god. That actually takes a lot of work. And there's only so much control we have as customer marketers on that final approval of the case study from the customer to get it up on the site. So that's also something that's really important to communicate to leadership that I've gotten it through the full funnel, but we are getting pushback from the customer or it's in security review. So just because it's in your pipeline for the quarter doesn't mean it's necessarily going to be delivered because there are humans on the other side of it that have to give that approval. Exactly. And now you're getting into my little soapbox of, like, why we as customer marketers shouldn't be beholden to producing, you know, numbers of case studies per quarter because there's just so many, like, variables that are out of our control, that you could do everything right. And then suddenly, some cranky legal person at a different company that doesn't know exactly what's going on is, like, actually, no. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's a great situation that happens to way too many of us, in the community. But listen, you know, I think the parts that really resonated with me are about just taking the ownership and the agency for your own success metrics and communicating it proactively with leadership. I think that's such a very, very crucial thing. The easy metric is to say number of case studies, number of reference calls. But just because it's easy, it doesn't mean it's the right metric. And in fact, it actually puts you in a much, you know, worse position, within the organization to just track those numbers just because it's easy. And, Melanie, I love the metrics that you shared. Hey. Are we improving the speed of the business? Are we actually increasing you know, are we actually accelerating revenue? And, you know, I think the combination of saying, okay. I need to be upfront about this. Certainly, as a leader of this function, but my challenge is I think anybody in this function that at any level should be doing this, you know, across your organization is saying, okay, how does this impact the business? And we are both in the good position of being able to come up with our own metrics based on what the company, you know, values. But it's also a challenge given all the other things that you're immediately asked to do to show the value right away. So you're like, okay, I'm gonna go do these things, but I also need to communicate why we're doing these things for the business. And that is, I think, where a lot of customer marketers tend to struggle. Mhmm. Listen, great great topic. And I wanna ask a little bit about, you know, Melanie, you got us started on some of the metrics that you track both across customer proof points, sales adoption, as well as references. What in your point of view are the most important outcomes that customer marketing is delivering for your company? And obviously measurable is great, but even if they're more qualitative, I would love to know how are you, you know, how do you think about this, and how do you communicate this within your company? And then, Melanie, we'll start with you, this time as well. Yeah. Absolutely. So a a huge problem at Gainsight when I started is we have so much customer content everywhere. It's in different systems. It's in Coda. It's in decks. It's in PowerPoints. But when a salesperson needs a case study for a quick moving sales deal, they don't have time to comb through everything we have in our repository. So one of my proudest moments at Gainsight is actually bringing Pure Bound on for our sales team to be able to easily, easily access all of the customer proof through a simple Slack query. So, ironically, that Slack channel is one of our most used Slack channels at the insight, and and reps are in there every day. It makes me so proud saying, show me case studies on x. Show me customers who look like x. And they're using it. The engagement is there, and I have now delivered the keys to all the work that my team is doing, which feels phenomenal because all this work is being done in the back end. But being able to prove it and bring it in front of the the company and in front of the sellers has just taken it to the next level of of proudness, and usability. Now now our content's there front and center for everybody to see what we're doing behind the scenes. Also super proud of the value that we're bringing. We have 400 global registered advocates in our GameStar customer recognition program. So we did an official launch of this program back in 2024 at Pulse. We have expanded to Japan and into EMEA. So over 400 registered advocates that are willing and ready to do any sort of advocacy activity across Gainsight for our five different products. And then along with that, I have to bring up the brand awareness of those amazing letterman jackets that you have all seen and loved on stage. Took off like wildfire. So, the game star program, if you hit platinum status, you are presented with a, letterman a customized letterman jacket on stage at Pulse with our leadership team. And, boy, has that just set a buzz on fire with our with our advocates and with our customers. Everybody wants that serious FOMO. I get probably 10 emails a week of how many points do I have, how do I get that letterman jacket. But it's working. People went in the program. They're excited about the program. So that that's a really cool thing to to see. And then just moving forward into 2026, I've talked about this a little bit, but I really wanna double down now that I have my baseline programs in place. I want to be able to see how these programs are making sales cycles faster, being able to get percentages. An ex a real life example would be if a case study is used in the sales cycle and and another sales cycle is is not used, what is the percentage of deals closing using a case study versus not using a case study? So that those are a couple examples of what I'm looking forward to to doing next year. Amazing. And by the way, on that last point of measurement of case study impact on revenue, we've got some cool things cooking for our customers as you know, and very excited for the Pure Bound, measure module, which I think has been a dream of mine for a long time now, as a former marketer. And, yeah, very excited to see what we're gonna help you with, as you go to next year. I did forget one thing to say. The other big, big one for especially at Gainsight retention. We're all about retention. Being able to track the retention of advocates versus non advocates. So those net retention dollars for our advocates versus our non advocates. So, again, you can see everything that I do, I try to associate back to ARR or net retention dollars, and that really tells a compelling story to leadership. Amazing. Well, Daniel, I can't think of a better segue to you because I this is something you have to treat. It's net dollar retention of advocates versus non advocates. Why are you so passionate about this metric, man? Let's talk about it. Yes. Sunny, NDR is my one of the things that I want to anchor our our metrics on. The reason there is if we talk about, like, money influenced, directly. Right? How much money does a single case study being read or a single reference call being had actually equal? Right? What percentage are you putting on that? I mean, it's not like if you if you have this deal that's a million dollars and somebody and in that process, somebody reads a case study that you could say, guess what? We affected a million dollars. Cool. That is, like, patently false because no one case study will equal that. There are so many different parts along the way. Now Yeah. Reference calls might actually have an, mark like, an actual effect on that. But unless you're the, like, the deciding person, unless you're in their head, you don't know how much of the final deal was the reference call. Was it just like a checkbox on a corporate form that, like, I must have a reference in order to sign this? Cool. That's probably, like, 1%. Or I'm really struggling with spending this million dollars. I need to talk to somebody who's been there before. That's higher. So any percentage of influence that you assign is made up, and you shouldn't be, like, held to a standard that is a made up number. However, when it comes to NDR of advocates, like, you that's actually, like, a number where you're just telling me, like, the work I am doing, the, like, programs that I am running have these people in it. Do they, versus the regular customer population, spend more money year over year? You're not saying there's a causation. You're saying there's a correlation in all of this white glove treatment. All of the special, like, things that they that they receive, like letterman jackets or trips to speak at, the, you know, trips to speak at various events or, you know, for our cab, like, time with our executives. Those are perks that the normal everyday customer doesn't get. So is there a correlation of them spending more year over year? The cooler part about NDR, at least at Edgrafana, and I'm sure it's the same at Gainsight, our CFO reports on it every quarter. So if if we start reporting on it, we are reporting on a number that gets reported up to the board. So suddenly, our team is speaking the executive language and we can talk across the business of, like, hey, look at our work and what we're doing and how it affects your bottom line. Yep. That's really cool. Well, listen, I I think really compelling arguments for NDR being a core metric, especially the last argument about the CFO reporting on it, Which again, I think, Melanie, one of the things I loved about your metrics is that I can I can almost point to the c level executive that would care about that at the highest level of the company? And anytime anybody at the company talks about that metric, as long as the sort of logic checks out of how you're influencing it, that's a big gold star in their book. And, you know, no better metric, Daniel or Melanie, than NDR on that front because especially over the last couple of years. Right? Every SaaS company is now looking at this metric and saying, can we grow the install base in a in a way in an efficient way, you know, now that finding new business is not, you know, it's not as easy as it was four years ago when everybody was buying software for everything. And I think to to to add on to it, I I I think Melanie also brought these sort of, like, softer anecdotal metrics up, like velocity. Right? And it's not just, like, velocity to deals. It's velocity of how quickly can we, as a team, deliver on certain things. Melanie talks about the the case study. Like, we were just going through, a new process of, like, AI interviewing, and we discovered that we could go from, like, somebody raising their hand to a first draft written in fifty one hours. And we, at the same time, like, we're talking to somebody via email and said, hey. Could we, like, schedule something? It took more than fifty one hours to even schedule something. And so, like, we have these sort of moments of are we, as a team, helping whoever we're working for in that one moment get from point a to point b faster? If we are working for ourselves at that moment, we check that box really damn quickly with that 51. If it's delivering a a reference like Melanie was talking about being able to fill fulfill that in a certain SLA, we are doing that. Are we delivering proof to people quicker than they could be could before? Yes. So every day when our team is working on something, it's like ask ourselves, is what we're working on helping people get from point a to point b faster? If yes, keep working on it. If no, ask yourself why. And if no, no, then stop it. And, Daniel, I have a a a tip to share with you for to go from fifty one hours to ninety seconds. That that's what I was able to do this past quarter. So utilizing Pure Bound, we do all of our recordings for our customer case studies, and then we generate a draft, the initial draft within PureGround in ninety seconds. So fifty two days to ninety seconds, that would be a great metric for your for your next QBR for for leaders. Yeah. I I would love that. And that is sort of where we're going. This one was actually really interesting because this was, an interview that we weren't even a part of. It was kicked off after an, after an event in Brazil where we don't speak Portuguese. We have this tool that allows us to conduct AI interviews in Portuguese. This one was just eye opening of, like, we don't I don't understand Portuguese. My team doesn't understand it. We don't speak it. We don't write it. You know? But somehow, we were able to to produce this in fifty one hours and then get somebody at the company who does speak and be like, can you check this out for us? Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Your your good friend, Chad, GBT, turns out to be a good Portuguese speaker. And perhaps, I don't know what you're talking about, Sonny. I I have no knowledge about this. Everything. Hand wave. That's cool. Good eye. Yeah. That's cool. Well, listen, you know, for the audience, one of the things that Daniel and I, I I think we have a slight difference in opinion is on the importance of some of these other metrics, like, you know, reference calls and customer stories. And this is not NDR. I I think all three of us agree is such a core metric and important to every level of the company especially, you know, at the c at the c level. But, you know, my thesis and this is not quantitative, I should, you know, qualify that. But my thesis is that we're entering this world where there's gonna be so much AI slop in marketing and selling. And I'll give you guys a couple of examples from my world. I've already found three company websites where the copy on those websites looks exactly like ours. And the the only difference between our website and their websites is that they have no customers listed on the website. And they have no customer proof points or stories or anything like that. And so as I think about this world that we're all entering and what makes a sales experience really great for a buyer, I really think customers, you know, being embedded into that experience is a huge huge differentiator. Whether it's, hey, you're, you know, searching on a search engine and you see relevant quotes or whatever it is, or all the way on the other side where you're taking a reference call and that customer, you know, reminds you of the challenges that you're trying to solve. I think all of those things really matter. Now, I do where I do agree with you, Daniel, is that that's harder to measure the relative impact of those activities on the final deal. And I think that was really your core point, which I, you know, do agree with. But in many ways, I think this function is a storytelling function. And again, this is qualitative, but I'm a big believer in storytelling as a differentiator, you know, for every company that wants to win. But yeah. Any thoughts? Yeah. I I think, Sonny, you're not wrong. Don't get me wrong. I love what I do. I love, seeing the customer prove out there. I just think the way we are measured on it is too like, currently, is too restrictive to the power that it has. Right? You know, I literally like, this week, I literally just got done, supplying quotes for our like, we're revamping our website. We're doing all these things and, like, putting all of these quotes front and center on these places. So I I completely agree that that part is there. But I also think this, is goes back to how we're measured is, like, do those the constituencies that you're serving to put customer proof on those websites, that's not the sales team. That's the product team. That's the content team. So if you're only beholden to you have influenced x deals from the sales team, you're actually narrowing the effect that you have. If I can help if we if our team can build systems, and supply proof to product marketing, to product, to content, to executives, to analyst relations, like, we have done our job, but we're, we are looking broader than just this narrow go to market function. Yeah. Totally. Not that's exactly it. With with customer proof, making it available throughout the entire organization because to your point, Daniel, it is not just the salespeople that need the customer proof. Product marketing, events. Sometimes even events are in the Purebounce Slack channel asking questions about customers because they're trying to identify speakers for their next speaking engagement. So by making it available throughout the entire company and not just pigeonholing it to sales and to metrics, I I agree that that that's the way to do. Your customers are your best sellers. We all know that. Customer advocacy is so important. They're your absolute best sellers. They're going to praise your products and and do it in a way that is authentic, and you will you'll see the results from that. Yeah. Awesome. I wanna talk about measurement for a little bit longer, but I also you know, the topic that's been on everybody's mind in 2025 is just AI. And we're not gonna you know, this is not one of those broad beating AI AI AI pitches. But I wanna ask I wanna get to that and ask what has been the impact of AI on your team and function? And I see several flavors of AI's impact on companies from okay, we should all be using AI to you should be building your own agents and everything sort of in between. What's been the messaging from your leadership on AI? And Daniel, this time I'll start with you. And then, Melanie, I'd I'd love to hear your thoughts on what what has changed for you in this function because of it? Yeah. It's a great question. It's sort of like our marketing leadership, has always been, very much of the mind of, like, AI is not gonna take your job. Somebody using it correctly will. And so how do you, like, make AI a first class citizen in everything that you think like, every problem you approach? Is there something that you can, automate away so that you can do the thing that the human in a loop needs to do. Right? An AI cannot prepare a speaker for the stage. Right? They can listen, but they cannot give them all of the human touch. They cannot help them. But they could, to to Melanie's point, create a case study in ninety seconds. Right? Like, those are the things that, we want to I don't know if AI is a verb, but we're just gonna use it now, AI away, if you will Yeah. To to help you get that time back so you can spend it in the most impactful way that only a human can. Yep. You know, I think that's the that's one of the areas that we're really, diving into. And like you said, Sonny, it, like, runs the gamut of, like, use it in your day to day life or, and, like, Gina is actually doing this right now, building AI agents to to help people find both public and and private proof and sort of connect the dots and all of these different things. So, you know, there there's time, there's space. Like, you know, if you wanna do this, we will, like, figure out a way to give you that time and space and Grafana to to do that. So the sort of build first, ethos is is big at our company. But, you know, I think there's also the, like, everyday AI ness, if you will. And I think I just use it as an adjective as well. So we're just gonna use AI as every, like, every everything in high school English. I love it. That's right. Love it. I'm all my company I'm we are all in on AI. We're, building out agents for for Gainsight. I, also am all in on AI for the tools that I am using, which I can give a couple of examples of. But after I say, I'm not scared about AI because in our jobs with advocacy and building customer advocates, it is all about relationships. If you talk to a group of my game stars, they're not there for, you know, the the AI bot reaching out to them. They're there because they know Dabi. They know myself. They know Shubra. They know Gainsight. They know, you know, formerly Nick Mehta, now Chuck. They are there for the people and for the connection. How I use AI and how I visualize AI helping is taking away the repetitive tasks that used to take up so much of my day, and streamlining things like the case study process. So instead of a draft in weeks, we get it within ninety seconds. And by using that process, I was able to get, the the story draft back from our writer within twenty one days when it was taking up to sixty days by that initial pass coming back within ninety seconds. So that's huge. That shows, with those numbers that we are more efficient. We are going to be able to turn out more case studies, which then we'll have to attribute revenue to. But, and then also with champion, like, with reference management, we had an 80% decrease in our time to match. So that that's just huge. By using AI through different partners, it is making my job more streamlined, and I am able to focus on the more important things like the strategy and taking programs to the next level, launching a referral program, etcetera, etcetera. So I I think all customer marketers should lean into AI and really see how you can best use it to take away the mundane parts of your job, the spreadsheets, the the stuff that's not as fun as being in front of people and doing human connection. Love that. But, listen, I wanna thank you both so so much for navigating customer marketing leadership, navigating AI, navigating SaaS, navigating all these crazy things that are happening in our world, and taking the time out of your, you know, very, very busy schedules to join me. And I think more importantly, just really talk to the customer marketing community, which, you know, I think we all know is fast moving, especially in this AI era. And, you are running some incredible programs. You get to work with some amazing people, on your teams, not your companies. And, it is such a delight and a privilege to learn from your experiences. So huge thanks to both of you. Thank you, Melanie, and thank you, Daniel. And to Thank you. To the audience, stay tuned for the next session. Hi, everyone. Hi. We are at the last session of the day, and it's gonna be an exciting one. We're gonna be talking about AI for customer marketing. If you missed my intro earlier, my name is Natalia, and I am the VP of marketing at Pure Bound. And before we get started into our chat, I wanted to introduce my co panelists, Jane Menya Gong and Courtney Diletski at g two. I hope I said that right. You know, we both have the Polish last name, so I always pronounce the Polish name. The Polish name. Yep. Jane actually is on the wall behind me. I know all the panelists. One of them is up on the wall. So, Courtney, you will be up there soon. But yeah. Jane, I'd love to, you know, have you start the intro. Yeah. Amazing. Well, thanks very much for having us here today, Natalia. This is a very exciting topic, so we can't wait to dive in. I'm Jane. I lead our solutions marketing over here at Gong. So really helping us better understanding all of the different use cases and applications for a lot of our customers across our product portfolio. I've been in b to b tech pretty much my entire career. So, I've worn a lot of different hats in marketing, including customer marketing and really a lot of the ways that, has shaped for me the way that you can be really close to your customer and how powerful that can make a lot of your marketing both from an expert expertise perspective as well as how you can bring a lot of that proof to market. So yeah. Excited to to talk about this topic today. Great. Courtney, you wanna give us an intro? Yeah. I have a very similar background to Jane, actually, so I'm really excited that we're both here today. I spent most of my time doing b to b marketing, but also very fluent with b to c. So really just passionate about the full customer life cycle, how channels and program marketing really impacts that and makes it meaningful, and unifying teams and audiences around shared goals that really drive value and results. And I've only been doing that at g two for less than a month. So really excited to kinda walk through it today both from my own perspective, but also what we're doing here at g two. Good through you right in the deep end. I love it. Love it. Love it. Well, just to kick off our convo, I think, you know, the reason we picked this topic is because there's a lot of fear around AI, a lot of confusion around AI. A lot of times, we're scared to ask the question about what it all means for our careers and our skill sets because we think everybody else has it figured out, which is definitely not the case. But, hopefully, we can share a few tidbits in this conversation that will help you in your day to day. A wild stat that I heard from Graphite, study recently is that half of online content is now created by AI, and that number was actually even higher, and it's gone down. It's plateaued a little bit. And I think it's because performance of a lot of the AI content that's been produced to date has been really subpar, and there's sort of, like, a revolt taking root against AI slop. I think buyers are really seeking authenticity and, you know, this sort of intimacy economy as some experts call it, which I think puts customer marketers in a great seat to deliver around that. I think this conversation is specifically important because AI can be slop, but it can also empower marketers to really create authentic experiences at scale and find a lot of those advocates in a way that we haven't been able to do in the past. So my first question, for both of you is there's so many AI tools out there. I mean, it is so overwhelming. Like, every day, I'm like, should I be demoing this or that? How do you decide which ones to actually adopt or even look into? Like, what criteria do you use in your role? Jean, I'll let you kick it off. Yeah. Awesome. Natalia, and then yeah. That's such a a fascinating stat and sort of trend that we're seeing. And I think, maybe just to sort of add into that, I think we are seeing not only, you know, consumers getting smarter about making sure that they're indexing for the right kinds of content and learnings, but also a lot of the algorithms that we're using for search. And so that no longer includes just, you know, the Googles of the world. We're also seeing that, like, ChachiPT and all of the LLMs are now some of the predominant search engines. And they're getting a little bit more sophisticated of using more reliable resources. So, you know, g two for us is one of those areas where we see, like, a lot of opportunity to really lean in on authentic content. So I think more speaking more broadly when I think about AI tooling and, you know, solutions that are out there is it really is that sort of technology that can empower us to do our jobs better. And so, you know, for me, I got my career. I started out in actually, like, demand gen and a lot of, like, marketing automation work. And, like, back then, like, Marketo was, like, the big shiny new, like, game changer in the space. Right? And so kind of, like, leading with a lot of this mentality of, hey, if there's something that I'm doing that's incredibly repetitive in my job or I'm constantly beating my head against the wall over, how can I look to potentially, like, some AI solutions to actually alleviate a lot of that pain? And so I think for me, it's it's kind of starting with a little bit of that problem of, like, what you're solving for and then working back into how am I gonna go find the right solution and thereby, like, provider that'll actually accomplish that. I think if you try to just go out widely and say, hey, It's in a corporate mandate. I have to drive a, like, AI solution now. You'll probably get a little bit lost in actually, like, what you're gonna be able to accomplish. But knowing that you have a pain and that there's a a clear goal of what you're trying to solve for, I think you can find a lot more success there. Yeah. I totally agree. I mean, you hit the nail on the head and and that's exactly how I feel. Going back to Natalia, what you said about a lot of people just having a lot of concern about what does AI mean for us, I really just see it as a tool. Right? It's it's helping to drive efficiency. What I like to say, working smarter, not harder. And the ways that we can leverage that, like Jane was mentioning, it's it's really based on the problems that you're trying to solve and what those challenges are in order to adopt the right products to help us move faster. And for me, just not even by nature of being here at g two, but voice of customer is super impactful to me just as a marketer, but even as an individual. So I often turn to other colleagues I've worked with in the past or other, you know, brands and partnerships that I've had and say, you know, hey. What are you guys using? What are you adopting? And and what kind of success are you seeing from that? And I think that's really been where I've seen the most success, in adopting new tools. Customer proof. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's great. Yeah. And I think it's so interesting to go back to your point how there was, like I remember a few months ago, like, companies were, like, part of our reviews at the end of the year is gonna be, like, how many AI tools you're using and which is such a silly way to go about it instead of, like, what are you actually solving with those AI tools. So moving on, I think, traditionally, you know, as customer marketers, we've relied really heavily on interviews and surveys and, like, going out to customers and expecting them to sort of give us that sentiment. But with AI, we have so many so many more ways to actively listen to what they're saying and not just relying them on telling us. What impact have you seen AI have on customer marketing? Like, what are some innovative ways that, people, like, companies are leaning into AI to achieve these new results? Yeah. I mean, I think that the the use cases and applications for AI are so broad. Right? And there's there's so many different ways that you can really, like, go out and approach it from anyone perspective. When I think about it from, you know, broadly speaking within revenue orgs and revenue teams, I think what's really fascinating is how we've actually been able to take essentially natural language and turn that into now data. Right? So if ChatJPT was trained on, you know, millions of YouTube videos, and that's how it started to learn language skills and understand what people people are saying, what the intents and the outcomes are of that. It's similar, like, how can you go better understand your world by taking, like, truly, like, language. But now we can actually leverage that as more, like, data points. And I think that's where, like, the signals component comes in. If it's not as much just hard coded fields and ways that we actually need to be able to go out and quantifiably organize ourselves, we can actually go in this more nebulous world, which for customer marketers has always been the area of struggle. Right? You're sort of floating the world between being very relationship driven, as well as trying to be more aligned with the traditional marketer who's much more organized based on KPIs and results and outcomes. And so I think in this way, it's as the markets are evolving and teams are evolving, you're starting to see a little bit more of that shift for customer marketers. And so for me, I think it's it's really the the impact on customer marketers is the way that you can actually go out and look for more signals than we traditionally have had in the past of more limited fields of data or, like, NPS scores. And actually, they'll try to find more moments of, like, true sentiment that allow you to move faster or a little bit more deeply. Curious. That's fine. Courtney too. Yeah. You perfectly segued into kind of my feedback about that. We really try to capitalize on that natural language and just the overall positive natural sentiment that, our reviewers provide to our sellers and our customers. So, shameless plug, but, g two, you know, we really try to leverage AI to capture and convert what would typically be that unstructured kind of black hole feedback, especially from calls and turn it into a really meaningful review content. Not only looking for, like, that positive sentiment again, but just being able to provide more credibility and volume back to our customers. And it's been really powerful because not only does it significantly reduce the friction of review collection and nobody has time these days with how crazy just life is and adding AI into the mix of already being tight on resources and bandwidth. The more we're able to kinda use AI to reduce that friction and and really drive that data collection, we are to have a lot of these customers capture the content that they're looking for and be able to put it out into the world for, in our case, buyers. Yeah. Definitely. And I feel like the the listing part of making it really easy for people is so important because, I don't know, some people are like reviewer takers and some people aren't. So you're able to just get intelligence from folks that maybe especially, like, c level that maybe wouldn't have filled something out before. Absolutely. Yeah. It's really it's it's just such impactful data that, I mean, you had dozens of people before manually going through, making phone calls, taking quotes down, and now you can really just do it in a matter of seconds, which is really amazing. Yeah. Definitely. Jane, since you're at Gong, you know, and you're probably listening to a lot of calls, what's something AI has surfaced from customer calls that, like, completely changed how you thought about customer proof? Yeah. And it's funny. I I have to admit, I don't listen to a lot of calls myself, actually. And maybe maybe hot take care. But I would say that I think what is really, again, like, compelling about how AI can actually ingest conversation data more broadly. So whether that's calls or emails or text, you know, that kind of information. Those exchanges between a revenue team and a customer are sort of gold for a customer marketer. Right? And those are the the pieces that you're really looking for. So when I think about the way that we can use Gong's technology more broadly, the ability for our own sort of revenue graph behind our AI technology that actually ingest a lot of those conversations. You're actually now able to use AI tooling to get more aggregate information about an account at wide. So for me, what's really exciting is that ability to actually then go and look and say, you know, like, let's go actually, like, better understand an insight from an account. I'm gonna go and I'm gonna find, you know, why did they buy? Who's the key stakeholder? What are sort of the, the key use cases they have for our product? What outcomes are they driving for? And from there, you're actually when you're going to engage either with the account team to, like, get introductions to the customer or actually directly with the customer itself, it's less about that learning, that kind of coordination process. And it's really empowering you to come in with all of this intel that you're really just more so focusing on the relationship building. And actually just to get that proof on the record, by having so much more knowledge at your fingertips. Yeah. I love that. I also mentioned this before, but I have used it to sort of look for specific signals. Like, I led international marketing. We were looking for specific regional info, and it's really nice to be able to get very specific over that. Yeah. And I and again, like, my role is sort of a solutions marketing. So it's understanding personas and and and, yeah, industries and in, regions too. And so actually taking, like, groups of data and then actually starting to better understand, like, kind of the trends behind those. It's there's a lot of of power of what you can understand that's really relevant and targeted to your business. Yeah. Definitely. I know we all have access with so many data sources, like feedback from teacher reviews, sales calls, case study interviews. But given, like, the volume although it it really feels like sometimes you don't have access to a lot of things, you really do. But given the volume of it all and, historically, none of it's sort of living in one house, how can marketers think about using AI to sort of consolidate all that data, identify advocates across all these channels, and really turn that into actual revenue? Yeah. Maybe maybe, Courtney, I'll start and then if you wanna follow-up. But I think, when I think about customer proof done well from a marketer's perspective and, again, looking at it from the lens of sort of the full funnel of, like, all the ways that you can activate customer proof. For me, I've always sort of believed that the best customer proof is just pervasive. It's in all of your marketing collateral. It's in every sales pitch deck. It's on out all pages of your website. And I think that's definitely the trend that we see today is people leveraging customer validation throughout a lot of their content and campaigns. But the the the good and the bad of that is it leaves you with a place, especially from a traditional way of tracking impact tied to marketing, is you're you're peanut butter. And so because you're peanut buttering all of your content, you have no direct ties into influence, which is a core way that a lot of marketers, operate. And so for me, I think it's it's the good and the bad of it is, like, you know, I'm not gonna put a gate on my case study just because I need the credit. Like, it's not the right thing to do for the business. And so you're actually looking for, like, different ways that you can measure the impact and the success of your work. And a lot more I think about in terms of, like, how are we better optimizing conversions, how are we better optimizing performance within the campaigns because we have the proof or perhaps better proof, maybe that bigger logo versus, you know, ways that we can sort of elevate our our opportunities. And then also too, a lot of it is really like looking to the sales side. And so when we see the the place where customer proof in our business at least sits most strongly, it's a lot of the time in helping us get that validation to the close. And so we're looking to how do I better enable our sellers to have the content and the things that they need to be able to do their jobs and serve up more targeted content to them. I think in a lot of ways, like, we've traditionally had, you know, all of our content. We spent a lot of cycles together, like, all of the case studies and all of the slides. Highspot pages with, like, every page organized, and we didn't know if anyone was using it. Right? We get anecdotal feedback from sellers. Right? Now and, you know, plug for for Purebound, a lot of that we have empowered on the back end with Purebound, and our sellers can actually go with leveraging our our Slackbot, query to find exactly the the most relevant piece of proof that they need, and triage based on, like, what's existing versus what may be able to pry them blinded today. And that gives us more, not only availability to help serve them better and know what's working, but we also know where we have gaps and where we need to be focused more on on building more. Yeah. Definitely. Actually, just a small note on that. We'll pop it in the chat. But, we just did a query of all the, like, pure brown Slack box queries from sales and, like, analyze what they search for the most. And it's super interesting just to look sort of at that data from, like, a house. Courtney, what about you? Tell us more about how you did that at g two. Yeah. I mean, obviously, reviews is the the bread and butter of our business. Right? It's really the heart of g two. So we focus very heavily on how we can improve the time and effort it takes for someone to leave a review for our customers. And we're continuously optimizing, you know, whether that's a manual review, an AI assisted review. Just making it easier for them to submit what our customers has kind of deemed as required, but also enabling them with tools that help them with their calls and their text, like Jane was mentioning, so that they can aggregate everything and put it together, and they can generate their own reviews. That's been a really big growth area for us recently. And in addition to some of the custom reports that we provide where we're combining our own data with AI market research and providing more comprehensive insights back to our customers that we typically, you know, would spend months doing. We can now do it in a couple days, right, to help provide actionable insights to help meet their business needs. I love that. Create your own review. Actually, one of the reasons I really wanted to have g two on this webinar is I think facilitating, like, customer feedback on review platforms in the past has all been about achieving leadership status. I think as marketers, we know we put that little badge in our sales decks and announce it on LinkedIn, but I think now those reviews are actually affecting whether buyers are even discovering you in AI search. I mean, I've searched, you know, for PureGround, and it's like half the results are g two reviews. And I think this is fascinating, and I think it's a game changer in how customer marketers can think about their review programs and the value that they're delivering to their organization. So, yeah, I'd love to sort of get your thoughts on how you think that's really changing customer marketers' behavior around that. Yeah. I love this question. We are definitely seeing that a lot right now, and we have a lot of case studies coming out about just how a lot of our customers are using their review content to help power AI and LLMs. And they favor all the natural language and tone, like we've been talking about, conversational FAQs, question based headings, anything listicle that's easy to digest. So I think for customer marketers, you know, it it really just reinforces the importance of facilitating customer feedback, and making sure that it's, like, you know, more digestible content, which is exactly what g two provides and how we're powering a lot of those search results. So really continue to be keen on on driving voice of customer and having a constant flow of what those reviews are and making sure that they're added to your g two profiles. You know, just continually appearing that helps us continually appear in in both SEO. But as that kinda starts to dwindle down and AI continues to increase, making sure that you're showing up prominently there. Yeah. And I think this it's interesting because, just going to our next question, I think there is a sort of new KPI coming up for customer markers where they're actually driving growth, you know, and can creatively drive growth through those reviews. So how are you both thinking about measuring the impact of AI or, like, whatever you're implementing, all those tools? Are there any interesting ways you're seeing companies implement new marketing KPIs? Like, you know, you wanna show your managers AI has done x, y, and z. So, Jane, I'll let you kick up this one. As the dust is settled on, you know, what are some of the AI use cases and the early value props and, like, the ways that we will use it particularly as marketers. I do feel like a lot of that is still sort of centering on productivity elements and ways that we are driving more automation and augmentation to really help us scale our work and the impact there. And so I think that from the most part, what I've really been seeing, I I would say, kind of boils down into, like, more more productivity focus. And so I think for people, when they're thinking about looking towards what kinds of measurements you could use to show your impact and how we are solving for you, I think it's to start small and just to start really closely looking at some tangible metrics of what are you actually, like, have a thesis. You know, go back to, like, your your high school science, you know, chemistry class. If you're like me, that's probably as high as your science level went. And, you know, you you started with a hypothesis. Right? Like, I have an idea, and I wanna see if this is correct. Right? And so we we did that, and I'll just give the example. And it it sort of serves us Pure Bound and and g two in this use case. But, ways that we are actually leveraging peer bound to help us take Gong conversations and turn those into recommended reviews for our customers and actually drive reviews on our site. And so, you know, in the first pilot that we ran, we actually saw a significant impact there from the types of reviews that we were getting. The reviews were, you know, over two and a half times longer than our traditional review. So again, going back to the impact of what that means for SEO and AEO, and how that actually will serve us to be shown up in a lot of those places. But it also had twice as many product mentions and five times more value prop mentions. So the depth of the review content that we were able to get by serving up just the kinds of conversations the customers have had with us already directly back to them led to a lot more depth. And so I think that was an example that we found of, hey, we're using an AI tooling set to be able to help us better drive an impact. And therefore, we believe that this is gonna have more longer term business impact. I don't know how am I gonna quantify, like, the SEO value on that yet today. So that's like a bigger meatier piece, but I do know at least from the quality of the reviews that we can see, that piece is definitely gone up. Yeah. And fun fact, I drafted a review for g two for Jane Yeah. In here about, and it was very that's like it just makes it so easy. Just send it over, and the the customer doesn't have to do all the work. But that's It was awesome. It was so cool to be on, like, the other recipient side of that experience, you know? Yeah. Yes. According to that, I don't think about it. Yeah. I mean, that's similar to Jane. I think, you know, there's just so much hype, like, we've mentioned around AI and what is it doing, how is it helping. There's still that human element that is absolutely necessary when when using AI tools. And I think most companies know it's super critical to stay current and adopt AI tools throughout their business. But I think the biggest challenge right now is is really being able to measure that impact. And I kind of I know we talked about this offline before we kicked off, but I kinda think about it going back to when social media marketing, like, that was not a thing yet. Right? I started my career out in direct mail, before, like, really digital marketing took off, and then we had social. And it's really hard to quantify what the impact is of, you know, an an Instagram story or Instagram interactions. Right? You can track engagement with the post or a story, but how does that really impact your bottom line? It was a very gray area for a long time, and and for some companies, it really still is. So I kinda think back to that and part of why I think we're seeing a huge brand marketing resurgence right now. You have to really maintain your visibility. You need to constantly show up wherever your audience is, and you just really need to really market yourselves, honestly, in in this day and age. And I think the more we kinda get used to this these tools and and how users are using them and what they're using them for, you know, then we'll be able to kind of quantify the impact a lot better and more accurately. But, you know, I would say in general, it's it's looking at SEO traffic versus AEO traffic and seeing what that trend is and then looking at your bottom line and and how does that kinda shape up? And what do we need to do as an organization to help our product, you know, kind of evolve to that data trend? I love that comparison to brand marketing. Because when I think about, you know, big brand marketing campaigns, like out of home and other ones, the way, like, we always measure that is to see, like, the website traffic go up. Right? It's not a direct correlation. Like, nobody clicked that at home ad, obviously, but you can sort of infer something. So I think that's gonna be the challenge is how are we inferring some of these results. And I think, you know, it's not just about brand marketing anymore. Right? Authentic brand marketing, and that's what I think customer marketing brings to the table in a totally different new way that hasn't been really thought about in the past as valuable as it is today. Alright. Well, we're almost at time. So to close the session, I think there's a lot of AI tools that are coming out that are really exciting, and and I love, like, these sort of roundups that people do of what they're looking at. What's the most exciting AI capability or tool that you've seen recently that you think has really, you know, the potential to help customer and product marketers? Yeah. Yeah. Well, my turn for a shameless plug here on Gong. Although, I think I've been speaking to it at a length. But, we we just launched a new feature called AI Builder, which is pretty exciting. And I think, again, for a lot of customer and product marketers, similar just like ways that you can actually go and build a lot of like sales or enablement or content based on all of the conversations that your customers are already having. And so for me, it's really impactful to think about how we can actually start to take a little bit more segmented conversations that we're having with our customers. So let's look at financial services and the types of conversations that we're having there. How can I better scale up the creation of a discovery guide or a questionnaire that we can use to really make that grounded and something real and try to drive a little bit more performance out of that? So I'll have to dig into that. What about you, Courtney? Yeah. I mean, plugging into g two, we have a a really cool, AI assisted tool where we do take phone calls and, you know, help the customer then create a script for a review. I think that's amazing. Like, we've been talking about, it just really cuts down on a lot of time and helps streamline that review volume. But I'm an email marketer at heart, and I nerd out over that kind of stuff big time. And I recently demoed an AI tool, that integrates the design and marketing platforms to help streamline localization. So for companies that are sending in multiple markets and multiple languages, it takes all of your visuals and text, automatically pushes the content into unique campaign templates, whether it's email or, even, like, SEO content through, like, WordPress. And it really helps turn SLAs from, like, weeks and months depending on the type of campaign into literally seconds. And that's where I just kinda nerd out over AI. I think that's amazing that there's tools and functionality out there that can really help customer marketers do their jobs quicker. Okay. So that's all the time that we have for this session. I think my biggest tip for the audience is allow yourself to wander AI tools so it becomes a lot less scary. Thank you, Jane and Courtney, for joining me today. This was an amazing conversation. So insightful. And thank you to everybody else in the audience for tuning in as well. A recording of this webinar will be emailed to you with some additional resources. 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