171: Exploring AI in Marketing

Episode 171 March 28, 2024 00:42:08
171: Exploring AI in Marketing
B2B Revenue Acceleration
171: Exploring AI in Marketing

Mar 28 2024 | 00:42:08

/

Show Notes

AI is quickly becoming an essential tool in any marketing professional’s kit, boosting productivity and revolutionizing the way campaigns are conceptualized, executed, and optimized.

In this episode of B2B Revenue Acceleration, host Catarina Hoch, VP of Global Marketing at Operatix/memoryBlue, sits down with Austin Distel, the Senior Director of Marketing at Jasper, to delve into the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing. 

This discussion sheds light on how AI can enhance marketing campaigns, including their effectiveness and efficiency. From optimizing customer engagement to automating mundane tasks, Austin outlines how AI empowers marketers to achieve remarkable results.

Yet, as machines become more integrated into creative processes, the question arises: How can marketers maintain a personal touch? Austin addresses this concern, highlighting strategies to blend AI with the irreplaceable human element that connects brands with their audiences.

This episode contains a number of expert insights for marketing professionals eager to harness AI's power while preserving the authentic connection that brands strive to establish with their audiences.

Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just starting to explore the possibilities of AI, the information in this episode will help you pave the way forward.

View Full Transcript

Episode Transcript

[00:00:01] Speaker A: You're listening to b two b revenue acceleration, a podcast dedicated to helping software executives stay on the cutting edge of sales and marketing in their industry. Let's get into the show. [00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to b two b revenue acceleration. My name is Katerina Hoch and I'm here today with Austin Distow. He is the senior director of marketing at Jasper. How are you doing today, Austin? [00:00:24] Speaker C: Hey, I'm doing great. And hey everybody on the b two b revenue acceleration podcast and whoever's watching as well. Excited to talk about AI and when it comes to marketing and sales, oh. [00:00:36] Speaker B: It'S always an exciting topic, isn't it? Can you just tell us a bit more about Jasper, what the company does and also your career and like what have you been up to? [00:00:45] Speaker C: Yeah, sure. So been with Jasper since the start. What's been really fun is to see the evolution in this very fast paced world of AI. You all know it's very competitive and that drives innovation. Over the last three years we've been really fortunate to be a part of this whole technology era. A new wave of really interesting use cases on how non technical AI implementation as a marketer, that gets me jazzed because in the past AI has been all so behind the scenes and finally it's in the forefront of my daily work. And so Jasper got started by being a we trained on how to do direct response advertising copy, how to do advertising like we did as past agency owners and now multi time software creators in the marketing niche. So that has been really interesting. We were teaching all of our best practices when it comes to writing marketing copy and started off with Facebook ads, LinkedIn, post email marketing and then eventually got into really long form SEO articles. Those are like our major use cases that we started with and it's really expanded for the full go to market sales, marketing, etcetera. And so after working on this for about three years now, Jasper has become the AI marketing copilot for enterprise marketing teams and supporting over 100,000 businesses. We're actually about one year now since we raised our Series A of $125 million at a 1.5 billion valuation. [00:02:25] Speaker B: Amazing. [00:02:26] Speaker C: Really cool to see like, yeah, the support system, the team, the technology, the customer base all really kind of coming together over the last few years. [00:02:37] Speaker B: Exciting and cool that you've been there from the beginning as well. You know, I think AI became just, you know, it's always been like a buzzword, but then with chapgpt coming along I think it just gave much more visibility to it. So yeah, really cool seeing the product and the solutions being developed and just used across the board. So I think to start the conversation then, can you just give us a bit of an overview of how do you think AI contributes to making marketing campaigns more effective and efficient? I know AI can be used in multiple ways in marketing, but how does it affect the efficiency and effectiveness of campaign specifically? [00:03:17] Speaker C: So Dave Gerhardt is a customer of ours who's also in the b two B marketing community. And he quotes Jasper's the best AI tool for creating campaigns. This is something that I personally think about on a daily basis. Our team is constantly innovating Jasper for campaigns specifically, and we even have that feature. The most important part of this is that the end user uploads a campaign brief that's factually accurate to what's, what you're promoting. And so there's so many kinds of campaigns, right? There's product marketing, whether you're releasing a new feature, there's press releases announcing some news, there's events. You know, it could be like a Black Friday event or it could be an upcoming webinar, a content creation event. It could be a virtual summit. There are so many campaigns that someone might run, but what the AI does not know is the details of that campaign unless you tell it. So, first and foremost, and I'm really speaking from the lens of Jasper here and because if I try to think about every other uh, tools, features or lack of features, we could go on all day every week, there's innovations. So I will speak mostly from my experience using Jasper. You upload a campaign brief and then knowledge assets to the AI in a secured space. So never trains the large language models when you're using Jasper. This is really important detail because sometimes campaigns can contain very sensitive information that you do not want to leak privacy into the llMs. So that's why large companies look to us as this kind of safe zone, right? And you can upload your company knowledge into Jasper and now it's sitting there for being referenced with the AI. We have some opinions on how content briefs should go, who's the audience, what's the timeline, who's working on it, what's the outcomes you want, et cetera. And so we have kind of catered and helped you with that and the onboarding. All right, so now that you maybe at a leadership level, a manager, a VP, a CMO would do this work and it's the same work that they would do in a kickoff call, right? So we're all here on a kickoff call. We're on Zoom, we're saying hey, who's our audience? Who's our buyer? Who's, how's the buying process? What event, what time, when does it end? What are the details, the faqs, all of that stuff. You just put that into a Google Doc or whatever, a notion doc and you can upload that into Jasper. This is the most important part of your work because everything else is so easy. After this. We've done all the hard work where we have fine tuned Jasper for each of the marketing pillars in the promotion content creation phase. So if you need email sequences, if you need advertising copy, if you need LinkedIn post for internal and external communications this means for example would you like your affiliate partners, your agencies, your employees, the leadership level all to activate their social media? Well we've created ways that you can remix the same piece of content for different channels and different people sharing it and they're all fine tuned for the individual piece of social media. So obviously LinkedIn is totally different than Instagram and so on and so forth. So after you upload your knowledge, your campaign brief, you just start selecting all of the assets that you need and then within a few seconds it's generated the first draft of all of those assets pretty quickly. And you just assign the people in your workspace to go and review that their statuses. There's Kanban boards, there's calendar views so you can get really a visibility on where the content lines up. And I think when we look at campaign management a lot of the tools that we're already using today I think are awesome. Like I love Monday.com, I love Asana, I love all of these great Kanban calendar views. But one thing that we've realized as marketers using AI tools is that those tools are disconnected from the actual work. You have to still link to your Google Doc or your notion or it's like really just, it's project management tool, right? You're just routing people and content to the right places. And so we decided to take a different approach where the content is associated to the people and the metadata and the timelines and the statuses and all of that within Jasper. So it's right there connected to the work. [00:08:11] Speaker B: Got it. And is it more focused on just generating the content and adapting it or does it also create graphics or. I don't know. You put in what the budget is and it will tell you where you should spend it. I mean I'm going a bit outside there, but just out of curiosity is it more focused on the content? [00:08:31] Speaker C: So what we're known for most is copywriting and really well written, original content that's factually accurate and always on brand. So that's what Jasper is really known for. What I have seen though as well, kind of a rising use case, is evaluating existing content, evaluating reports and documents. And so what I found people originally are doing, you know, is they're uploading a campaign brief and then they're creating content from that. That same logic, people are now uploading documents, reports, other information like an ebook or a recent trend report or something like that. And then having Jasper analyze that and then ask questions and start like playing around with hey, so what insights can you gather from this data? What opportunities do you see in this report or this information, this data that can influence future campaigns and better performance? And so you have struck on a chord because in Q one of 2024 we're releasing analytics and insights. So Jasper is now plugged into Google Analytics and Semrush to analyze web content creation on how well it's performing. Gather insights from that and then within that same view turn that data into actionable strategies. So you'll have one click campaign saying hey, based on what I'm seeing as an AI from your content, you might want to look into an audience campaign around this or you might want to double down on content that's this length. And so here's a few examples based on your keyword strategy you uploaded. And so if you have, let's say you uploaded your keyword strategy, maybe there's opportunities to improve your search query bidding and things like that, right? So there's so many interesting ways that I'm finding customers are using it more and more and I'm really speaking the b two B technology language right now. But I want you to just realize the scope of using AI in marketing specifically. And even in b two B marketing specifically. When we think about the real estate use cases, the insurance use cases, I was just looking at how media publishers are using Jasper. This really is a rabbit hole that can go in so many directions. So I want to make sure I keep it narrow here for b two B marketing. It's so interesting on a daily basis the innovations not only with the technology but how people use the technology because look, it's just a tool, it's not a replacement, it's not a takeover. And so who wields that tool that's more interesting to me, the person that acquires the knowledge and has the creativity to see a hammer and find new ways to use that hammer on a daily basis. [00:11:49] Speaker B: And that actually leads me to my next question, which is there is a lot of talks about AI replacing humans and things like that. And often you hear as well that AI ends up taking away the humanity from the content or from everything. So how can marketers use AI without losing that personal and human touch in their campaigns? [00:12:13] Speaker C: I very much believe that if we do not address this problem, we will, like, ruin this for all of us. If somebody has set up a robot that just generates content without any human review, if it's just out there creating more content that does the world no good and actually does your business no good, it might even hurt your business. AI has done a great job at helping put pen to paper. But what happens before and after that? So you think about just writing in general, creating, write like creating content, writing books, for example. Books are not good if there's no thought that goes into the book beforehand. There's no preparation, no thinking, no reporting. No good reporting journalism. Like, if there's no firsthand research, if there's no experience being inputted into the pen to paperwork, then what good is the actual words on the page? They're flat. There's no meat to it. Then just because you have the work done, just because you've had good ideas, put pen to paper, doesn't mean anybody's going to read it. Doesn't mean if they read it, they're going to like it, if they're going to find it interesting, if they're going to actually continue reading it past the headline or past the first paragraph. And it doesn't mean that it'll be widely distributed. So here's what we have in marketing. We have ideation, creation, distribution. AI has done an incredible job at saving us time on a daily basis, putting pen to paper, turning our ideas, our direction, our editorial review into pen to paper. So now, just as if we've hired a, an assistant, that person can take art, great ideas and put them into elegant words. And then we can have our promotions team promote that media as far and wide as possible and making sure that it's resonating with the audience. So where AI fits right now, it's really good at pen to paper. It can be our brainstorming buddy to brainstorm ideas on ways to make our ideas better. Also to help us research and get that knowledge on how to give color to our thoughts. So we might have an inkling of what our beginning way of writing is, and we might get stuck in writer's block. We're looking at our cursor and it's blinking. We're stuck on that blank page. And so we're trying to figure out, how do I continue my thought so I can brainstorm with my AI and chat. Chat's really amazing for that. So here I'm just, you know, coming up and brainstorming different angles, different arguments, different, bringing in different pieces of evidence. And so I find that what I was used to doing with Google, I go and try and, like, navigate all of these different pathways on Google, and that just took forever. I'd spend the entire day researching to just try and make a good article. Now I'm pinging chat back and forth, and I'm drilling down into information that's distilled. That's not just one piece of evidence, not just one supplier of knowledge, but rather it's read the Internet, it's read all the forums, it's read all the papers, it's read all the blogs, it's read all the stuff. Now it can give me a holistic view of what I'm asking, and then I can keep drilling in, and it's like I'm getting so many different authors to kind of wound up together to give me pinpointed information of what I'm trying to say. [00:15:53] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense. I think it's. I like what you said about the idea, process, and the distribution, and then obviously, AI taking care of the creation. And I also agree with you that you can't just fully rely on AI. You have to kind of add your personal touch to it, review it, make sure it's aligned with your brief as well. And I guess the better the brief is, the more accurate AI will be, right? So I think us, as marketers, we need to become very good at writing prompts and breathes and then using AI to really make the team more effective and take away the heavy lifting of the process. Interesting. And I just wanted to also talk about common mistakes that you've seen marketers making when using AI. Do you see companies relying too much on it, or any kind of tips of pitfalls or mistakes to avoid when using AI? [00:16:48] Speaker C: Well, here's what's interesting. So we surveyed a thousand marketers on how they use AI, what they use it for, what their pain points are with it, et cetera. What we found is only 18% of marketers are past the experimentation phase, and they have not yet gotten any colleagues on it at their company. So it's an individual effort and not a team effort, then they haven't gotten, definitely haven't gotten to the third phase, which is company outcomes. So seeing real revenue attached real cost savings attached to the use of AI. Only 18% of marketers, one out of five people, have gotten beyond just the individual use. What that tells me is that a lot of people are using it more as a toy or a shiny object, that it's not really a part of their daily workflow. It's more of something that they're trying to go and use and see what the news is all about. But they're not necessarily finding productive daily tasks and daily savings and daily better outcomes. So that's what I'm here for. I'm here to help. I create so much content on helping marketers and marketing teams find daily tasks that AI can help with and practical ways to use it. So some ways that I find help improve adoption is one remembering that it's there. So the easiest way to remember that it's there is not to have it just on an island in a tab that you kind of bring up and you randomly use inside of daily tasks instead. I would recommend using Jasper's Chrome extension because when you add it to chrome now, Jasper works inside of any text box. So if you're inside of Gmail or LinkedIn or Salesforce or HubSpot, you can literally just call up Jasper. It's on the other side of your cursor and you start typing and you type a command just as you would a prompt. You say, hey, write an email response to this saying, cool, I'll see you next Tuesday. But then it just go ahead and writes the email. Or let's say that I wrote a really good post for LinkedIn and I want to highlight that post and say, hey, rewrite this for Twitter as a Twitter thread. And so, you know, it's, it's literally just so native in my daily workflow because normally I'll like some news comes out, I'll get like a press release from the blog, copy that, and then use the remix tool and say, hey, remix this blog post in my tone of voice for a LinkedIn post. Remix it now for a Facebook post. Remix it now for Instagram caption. I do the same thing with communication via email for my different audiences. So for sales enablement marketing, what I'll do is I'll be like, hey everybody, we have a webinar coming up on January 15 and I want everybody to promote and I've gone ahead and created some email marketing swipe files for everybody. So what I'll do is say, hey, customer success, here's what you say. And a p's whenever you're talking with customers and you want to invite them over to the webinar. Hey, sales team, if you have any active conversations that might, you might want to get onto this webinar, here's how you would say it on a marketing front. We have our enterprise customers and then we have our self serve customers and the way that we talk to them is different. So here's how we'll be use kind of enterprise tone of voice, and then here's how we'll use a entrepreneurial tone of voice. And so these are just practical ways that I'm doing it. It's the same message, hey everybody, we have a webinar. The marketing message changes for each of my audiences and then whoever's saying it. So if it's a company message, Jasper as a company is emailing everybody. That sounds differently than when our account representative emails their account and sends that email. The message is really similar, but there's nuances of who it's coming from and who's going to got it. [00:21:16] Speaker B: So would you say that the most common mistake of marketers with AI is just not utilizing it in m four, not being aware of how to use it? And do you think that this could be, I don't know, people trying to protect their jobs or, you know, because I had in my team before, they're like, I want you to think that I'm being lazy because I'm using AI. And I don't know, I think, I think there's still a bit of mindset shift that needs to happen for people to actually realize that you're not being lazy, you're being, you're working smarter rather than harder. Right? [00:21:50] Speaker C: Most of the world is used to taking orders, not giving orders. Most of the world is not in a leadership position where they are delegating all the time. It's not a muscle that they've developed. And so now we're asked everybody, we've given everybody in the world an assistant. For the first time ever, somebody has a new assistant, just as if you hired somebody else, a real human as an assistant, and you're like, what do I do with this person? Like, what do I send them? What is okay to send them? What's not okay to send them? How do I give them good directions? Like it's, this is weird for a lot of people, but this is a muscle that all of us can flex, and the more we flex it, the stronger we get. So notice that a lot of those examples that I just mentioned about repurposing existing content and all of that, it did not require much prompt engineering as like the AI talk would say. And in layman's terms, that's just giving good directions. That's just being a good delegator of tasks, saying, hey, can you do this job for me? And then communicate, can you do that job after you do this job? And so one, it's can you give good directions? Act at. So when you would do a, write a prompt. And in Jasper we actually have like an instant prompt enhancer. So you just have to say the job. And then we, we've, our data scientists and AI engineers have figured out how to maneuver your prompt and make it really good for the AI. But if you're using a free tool like chat GPT, here's how you would do it. So you would say something like, you're doing an upcoming trend report, right? So you'll go act as a marketing analyst and study this report and garner insights that might be tangible and insightful for this audience of real estate professionals. Make sure you're descriptive in helping it become outcomes, not just activities. And make sure you're don't, you don't focus on the data and you make it simple for anybody to learn the punchline. So it's like, you know, you're really trying to say like give them good directions of what a great outcome looks like. So forecast the future of what the best outcome looks like. Don't get too caught up in the how. This is what a lot of first time delegators and this is, this is a leadership principle, by the way. So what you're applying this to AI Sherbet, this is a leadership principle. Don't tell people how to do it, just tell them what the brilliant outcome would look like. So then they'll figure out the how. You just say, here's what I want to have at the end of this process. The way that they get there, you don't need to get too caught up in the how. You know, when you're creating a prompt, just be outcome focused and then give them a Persona to enable. You got to give them, say, act as this kind of person and add on as many descriptors as you can because that will improve the prompt dramatically. If you say act as a social media expert versus act as a direct response copywriter, the way that the writing ends up is totally different. Think about your social media person. They're often very brand heavy, very excited, emoji heavy, all that direct response marketer is very action focused now, urgency, scarcity, social proof validation, evidence like pushing the sizzle not the steak. Right. Like you can have say, hey, do marketing, and it doesn't know which one to do. It doesn't know what this audience receiving it is. So that's why your directions are so important. And that's where a lot of marketers fail, is they're not giving good directions, they're not being outcome focused, they're not telling the AI who to be, who to act as, as a Persona. Yeah. So I feel like those are all shortcomings that marketers have, along with, of course, not using it because they forget about it, they get frustrated because it didn't come out great the first time. And they don't realize that this is an interval process laborator, that it's not like a one time, you know, set it and forget it. This is actually like, here's how I view it. You are dribbling together, working your way down the court to ultimately score. And so you pass the ball to them, they go forward. You review that, see if it worked. If not, you might have to backtrack a little bit, but then you can actually ultimately go forward, forward by improving it, refining it. So I find this, especially with image creation. Normally when I'm using mid journey to create my images, this takes 30 images to ultimately get to what I want. And I'm like, zoom out now. Increase the color, remove the greens, increase the blues, whatever, all the stuff. Make it futuristic, actually more popular pop culture, and just like you're starting to refine it, and then eventually you see, voila, this is something amazing. [00:27:16] Speaker B: Interesting. Obviously we've talked a lot about Jasper here, but is there any other AI tools that you would recommend for marketers to start exploring? And I think one of the things you mentioned is about the lack of adoption. So any other tools that you feel like could be interesting to be part of marketers toolkit when it comes to AI? [00:27:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm always happy to share my toolkit because I use so many AI tools, recognize that what I'm going to say is so temporary, it's like every day there's a new tool and the features competitive market. It's like so interesting. But what I'm currently using right now for image creation is mid journey. I like how easy dolly is to use instead of chat GPT, except I just don't find the quality is there and I'm encumbered by a lot of like, limitations that OpenAI is imposing upon the AI. So I just find mid journey kind of fits what I'm looking for. The way that I'm using that most often is to prototype my ideas. It's not for the end use case. Like, I'm just trying to visualize something that's in my head and put it on paper. So you could think about it like a doodle, or you could think about it like storyboarding, or you could think about it as giving an audience an illustration of a story. I practically use that when I'm pitching. So if I want to have a story narrative and arc to my pitch, then I have AI illustrations that support the storyline, especially in presentations, webinars, internal pitches. Right. For an idea, selling my colleagues on an idea, trying to just get people's mind to open up and think outside of the box. And so a picture is worth a thousand words. I can show them something. It's like in the past, like way in the past, you might have to go and ask a favor from the creative department to say, hey, can I borrow you? Can you, like, try? And I'm looking to create a design that's this, like this. And normally you've pulled in Getty Images and you've pulled in crop art and you sort of like mixing something and say, hey, this is the, the framework of my idea. Can you now actually make it, like, brandable? So I recently did this, for example, I was at a, the LA office partner brand summit where I was in the room helping all of these companies trying to figure out how to use AI in their work. And so in the room, McDonald's was trying to figure out who their 2025 Happy meal is going to be. I was sitting in the room with the head of partnerships of brand at Barbie, and we're talking about ways that the Barbie brand could be implemented with other people in the room. Aperol Spritz was in the room talking about how they were doing entertainment partnerships. I was like, cool. So at this table, there's a lot of directions, right? I'm using mid journey and I'm showing them, hey, here's what a Barbie happy meal would look like. Here's what a Barbie brunch with Barbie. Aperol Spritz would look like. A private event for select, you know, people in, in Hollywood, you know, and so, like, there's all these very, I did a one for Sonic. Sonic has a new movie coming out around Christmas and Six Flags. The theme park was looking for brand partnerships. I was like, here's what a fast pass branded by Sonic would look like where you can skip the line. And here's what I created a poster of Sonic at a theme park with roller coasters in the background. And so literally I'm doing this live in front of everybody and I'm getting all of their wheels turning on like, oh my gosh, I could partner with you. Here's how we do it. And it's just beautiful to see that unlock in people because they can see their idea come to life. So anyway, mid journey, that's one of my tools. Canva is another one. Photoshop Beta, a lot of that's for visual stuff. When it comes to video, I'm using descript. I love that it chops out all my ums and ahs. I love that I can turn long form content into short form content really quickly. I like, for example, practically one way I did that recently is we hosted a webinar. I chopped up that webinar into a whole bunch of its pillar components. They're kind of chapters and for different audiences. On our email list, I chunked up that chapter and I said, hey, here's a part about where we talked about analytics and AI, and I focused on our CMO audience and sent that out to them. And so now instead of watching a 30 Minutes webinar, they watched a two and a half minute clip and they got the idea and we built demand. [00:32:33] Speaker B: Jasper, I guess. [00:32:35] Speaker C: Oh, of course, yeah. I mean, we've already talked about Jasper so much. That's like a daily thing because I just write so often. I'm writing my emails, I'm writing landing page copy, coming up with ways to generate demand. Post conference, our entire conference play at inbound and a couple other conferences, summer was all developed with Jasper. Everything from our activation at our booth to the email follow ups that we had with all the leads we captured, all of that was AI enhanced? I don't want to say it's AI generated because human involvement was there every step of the way, but it helped me come up with the idea of like doing a spinning wheel at our booth and all of the prices I gave it, all these limitations. I'm like, hey, each prize like, needs to be under $15. The swag needs to be easy to take home in a luggage. It needs to be like widely acceptable by like a large conference audience, 10,000 attendees. Ideally it's digital and we can capture leads through it and it just, and then ideally it helps him with career development for an audience in marketing and sales. So literally, like, I gave it all my criteria and then it gave me back a list of 25 different prizes that I can give away at my booth to activate passersby to come and be interested in having a conversation with me and we got like 500 leads inbound. Apparently we're one of the top collectors, lead generator collectors. And it's like, I didn't come up with those ideas. Jasper did all, I'm a medium, I'm a conduit for AI to put its ideas in action. I found that was really interesting. [00:34:25] Speaker B: Is Jasper fully paid or did you say there is a chrome extension that can be used for free as well? [00:34:30] Speaker C: There's a free trial that you like creators and pro team members like self serve can go and sign up for. Here's the buying path. I kind of commonly see companies will self serve on a free trial to kick the tires and make sure that it's a legit product and that it, you know, it's not just like a demo. And then once they realize that it's freaking awesome, then they go and attend a big webinar either with me or like or personal demo with a sales rep. They ask questions, they see something and then they start bringing in like stakeholders. Hey, I need CMO visibility. I need my CISO to approve of the security review. Maybe I want to bring in a director over here and see if their SEO team is interested in using it too. And then they build up a bunch of use cases. That's like the common path. Sometimes I see that folks are rogue and they're like, they're trying to not tell their company that they're using this tool. And then we what Jasper? On our visibility, we end up saying, hey, there's like over 100 people at Keller Williams using this. We should probably just, oh, wow, why did I do that? There's like over 100 Keller Williams using this. We should probably just talk to the company and say, hey, everybody on your team is like using this. It'd be more efficient and better security if you just like had everybody in the same account. And now they're all consistently using the same style, guide, tone of voice, knowledge, assets. And then you can actually see campaigns going out, collaborating and all that. So there's like this independent nature of AI right now where everybody's going and testing stuff. Then there tends to be at a senior level cmos, vps, directors, they are saying, I'm pointing to an individual on my team saying, hey, you're the AI champion, go figure this out. Start scouting out a bunch of AI's and then they come back and they give intel. They say, hey, I have scheduled two demos and we're going to have these two tools compete and see like are they going to define beat, you know, for this use case. And then once they're in a first six months that one champion of AI is starting to rally other teammates. And what we've called this is the AI council. So the AI council, and we've seen this really do well at VMware for product adoption. So Jessica is a keynote speaker now and she's really like become a champion of AI adoption. But she's figured out this playbook where you bring in every Friday people and you show them you do kind of a workshop and you define ethical and responsible use practices, you define how to pitch ROI to get more budget, whether it's to the CFO or to the board or to leadership. It's like, here's how we're going to get an Roi on AI. We're going to, number one, improve our performance on SEO, sales, email ads, et cetera. So here's compartmentalizing where we're going to apply AI to improve it, that channel. Secondly, where are we going to drive efficiencies and cost savings? So maybe it was like, well, we were using five freelancers and then we had other editors and all of this and now we can actually bring everything in house. And now that story arc is like we have style guide with Jasper. We have content review and we have content scoring to figure out what makes it better. Now we don't have as many needs for editors and X, Y and Z, so now they say, hey, we're saving there. Also, I saw recently amplitude case study on Jasper's site come out where 88% cost savings on SEO by using Jasper for content writing. And so it's just like here's literally outcomes and that's the third phase coming full circle here. Stage one, rogue. We're testing one out of five people has gotten beyond that. Number two, we're now getting our peers involved, figuring out what channels are the right channels to try and improve performance and reduced costs. And then number three, we're getting outcomes as a business. So we're actually driving and we can showcase on slides. Here's how much money we're saving, here's how much money we made, here's how we can improve our headcount and add more people to make all of this more effective. And so I hope over the course of the last 30, 45 minutes that you've seen literally how to go from AI nobody to AI somebody and somebody that's like really become a champion in your company and drove outcomes and you can actually hit your goals in 2024. Powered by AI. [00:39:49] Speaker B: Oh yeah. And I think that ROI element is really important, isn't it? Because sometimes it's difficult to measure the ROI that comes out of it, but also to actually get buy in from the finance team and from, you know, the team overall, the executive team, you normally have to prove some ROI. So I fully get the importance of it and I'm sure there is many different ways to measure it, but that's probably worth another episode. Yeah. Thank you so much, Austin, for all your insights. It was super useful. I think it's a great way to look at, also kind of assess what sort of stage companies are when it comes to AI and really kind of encouraging them to look more into it. So if anybody wants to connect with you or learn more about Jasper or anything that you shared on here, what's the best way to connect with you? Austin? [00:40:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I would say LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, I'm creating content helping people understand how to use AI in their marketing team every day. Distill.com for speaking engagements and partnerships and investment opportunities. And then if you're interested in Jasper, you're welcome to go to Jasper AI and learn more. Whether you're watching content or you're starting a trial, there's a lot of ways to get in and figure it out. My encouragement for everybody here is in 2024, you figure out AI like it's here. It's not a fad. You figure it out, you find practical use cases, you get outcomes, and you just commit like, hey, we're an AI powered team now. So with that, how do we dive in? Yeah, that's my recommendation for this year. [00:41:30] Speaker B: And I think it's probably a path that you don't look back, right? Once you figure it out, you're like, oh, how do I live without that? So I think it definitely helps to give people a bit of encouragement. So appreciate that, Austin, thank you so much again for your time. And, yeah, looking forward to carrying on our conversation soon. [00:41:50] Speaker C: No doubt. It was great meeting you and thank you all for listening. [00:41:53] Speaker B: Thank you. [00:41:55] Speaker A: You've been listening to b two b revenue acceleration. To ensure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.

Other Episodes

Episode

September 02, 2021 00:29:24
Episode Cover

110: Ramping Up SDRs: The First 90 Days w/ Sam Nelson

It’s harder than ever to find talented Sales Development Reps (SDRs) - even hiring the finest talent doesn’t mean they will be successful if...

Listen

Episode

February 02, 2023 00:21:40
Episode Cover

144: Mental Health in Sales: Preventing Burnout in the Workplace

People in sales are ten times more likely to struggle with their mental health, leading to burnout and chronic stress.   For managers, this means...

Listen

Episode

October 10, 2018 00:24:40
Episode Cover

15: The Importance of Aligning Sales & Marketing in Account Based Marketing w/ Tina Bean

Account Based Marketing helps you narrow your focus on your ideal clients. But it will absolutely fail if you don’t align your sales &...

Listen