This episode features an interview with Jean-Christophe Pitié, CMO and Chief Partner Officer at Contentsquare, an experience intelligence platform that helps you gain a deep understanding of your customers’ whole online journey.

In this episode, Jean-Christophe shares his approach to merging brands while minimizing friction and negative impact. He also discusses the future of SEO and how they are experimenting with influencing LLMs.

Key Takeaways:

• The future of SEO may shift to thinking about how to influence LLMs, and what they say about your brand. While it’s currently unclear how to do this, it will likely become increasingly important in the coming years.
• When merging multiple brands, move slowly and very carefully monitor your work to look for friction and negative impacts.
• Investing in the martech stack is uncuttable since data is essential to the modern marketer.

Quote:

• We did two major acquisitions in the last two years, and we had three websites under three brands. So we are going through this major rebranding, combining and merging the three brands and phasing out two of the three brands. And so I would say that's a massive project and experiment too. It's like, how do you merge these brands and which have followers, minimizing the business impact, minimizing customer friction? Break things along the journey, so you have to take things. So this, you can identify what you bring to customer journeys or customer flow you're breaking. And as you shift the traffic, for example, SEO, as you start to rebuild SEO, it takes time. Paid search, you cannot do it all. So we said the main learnings are, we knew that would be things breaking and it's happening. So take it slowly, monitor, monitor, monitor very quickly. And we have a weekly committee where we monitor how it's going and the transition is happening. So yes, be slow and patient. Don't break things, or as little as possible.

Episode Timestamps:

*(03:04) The Trust Tree: Useful organizational design structures

*(08:57) The Playbook: Influencing LLMs

*(31:51) The Dust Up The challenge of monetization

*(33:54) Quick Hits: JCP’s quick hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Jean-Christophe on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Contentsquare
• Learn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Drew Chapin, CMO at Certinia, a platform that connects all aspects of services operations, from services estimation and delivery to customer success management and financial planning and accounting.

In this episode, Drew discusses monitoring buying signals and generating the right traffic to your website. He also dives into inheriting a rebrand and some of the nuances of marketing in a private equity owned company.

Key Takeaways:

•  Cold calls, cold emails and the days of expecting someone to fill out a form to get content are over. B2B marketers need to stop making friction or blockers.
• Nothing fails like success. If you just continue to execute what has worked in the past, you're going to miss innovation opportunities.
• Aspire for a champagne flute funnel over a martini glass funnel. Maybe not as many leads are coming in at the top, but they are higher quality and converting and much higher rates through the funnel.

Quote:

• “85 percent of the time the buyer will go with the first vendor that they contact. So, building that trust with the buyer over time is critically important. And so, you know, in the old days, you put a form in front of every piece of content and we would optimize around the contact information. And then you'd pass that along to some BDR and they would just be banging their head against the wall, calling people who weren't on the buying committee. They weren't ready to talk to a salesperson, you know, and it just was waste so much waste. And so what we're trying to do now is we're trying to monitor the activity at the target account level and look for buying signals”

Episode Timestamps:

*(02:51) The Trust Tree: Stretching the dollar in a PE-owned company

*(06:28) The Playbook: Generating quality traffic to the website

*(24:28) The Dust Up: Proving ROI to the board

*(26:59) Quick Hits: Drew’s quit hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianfaison/
• Connect with Drew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapindrew/
• Learn more about Certinia: https://www.linkedin.com/company/certinia/
• Learn more about Caspian Studios: https://caspianstudios.com/

This episode features an interview with Niloy Sanyal, CMO at LeanTaaS, a growth-stage company that creates software solutions combining lean principles, predictive and prescriptive analytics, and machine learning to transform hospital and infusion center operations.

In this conversation, Niloy and Ian debate the merits of last touch versus multitouch attribution models. They also dive into the potential of AI SDRs and the benefits of ungating the content on your website.

Key Takeaways:

• While reporting last touch attribution may help CMOs establish credibility, there are benefits to thinking in terms of multitouch and how to best determine the next best touch.
• B2B still has a way to go to fully leverage the capacity of our current LLMs, not to mention the new versions coming out. There is immense opportunity in AI SDRs and BDRs.
• If you may the CEO fill out a form on your website, you’ve lost them. Ungating content allows high level prospects to consume the information they need.

Quote:

•  I am absolutely bullish on the impact of generative AI in the tactic of, to start with BDR and AE sales motions as part of our broader ABM execution. But very soon our comms execution, and every part of the marketing execution. But right now, early days, so I don't want to oversell it. But, the promise of what this can do without any improvement on the LLM. Like we were having this debate last night with another thought leader and I don't need chat GPT 5 to come out. I think 4. 0 or 4 is good enough and it's actually great. We just haven't caught up in a B2B environment to take advantage of it. And what I'm seeing from our early experiments, we've been at it now for three, four months, is absolutely astounding in what it can do. It's not going to replace BDRs. Let's be clear, you're in the Bay Area. If you drive from, you know, Peninsula to the city, I almost feel half the billboards these days are on like AI-automated SDR, BDR type of a thing. Not in my space. It's not going to automate that any, replace rather, but it can supercharge. Those individuals and it can supercharge. So I'm very excited about where we are.

Episode Timestamps:

*(04:00) The Trust Tree: Last Touch Versus Multi-Touch

*(30:07) The Playbook: The Potential of Gen AI SDRs and BDRs

*(44:05) Quick Hits: Niloy’s Quick Hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianfaison/
• Connect with Niloy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niloysanyal/
• Learn more about LeanTaaS: https://www.linkedin.com/company/leantaas/
• Learn more about Caspian Studios: https://caspianstudios.com/