Best of LinkedIn: AI in B2B Marketing CW 41/ 42

00:00:00: This episode is provided by Thomas Allgaier and Frennus based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about AI and B to B marketing in calendar weeks, forty one and forty two.

00:00:09: Frennus is a B to B market research company helping enterprise marketing teams sharpen their strategies and outreach with customer segmentation, ideal customer profiles and deep dives.

00:00:19: Customer needs analysis and buying center insights.

00:00:23: Welcome back to the deep dive.

00:00:25: OK, so if you're a B to B marketer.

00:00:28: your LinkedIn feed lately.

00:00:31: It's probably been, well, a bit much on the AI front, right?

00:00:34: Yeah.

00:00:34: A flood of news, some exciting, some maybe exhausting.

00:00:37: Totally.

00:00:38: So we've waited through all that noise for you, sifted through the Key LinkedIn posts, grabbed some conference takeaways from the last couple of weeks.

00:00:44: Yeah, the goal here is to give you the signal, not the noise, pinpoint where things are actually heading with AI and B to B.

00:00:49: And our mission today, really just distill those top trends.

00:00:52: What really stood out, I think, is this clear shift we're seeing.

00:00:55: People are moving past, just experimenting with AI.

00:00:58: Oh, yeah.

00:00:58: and are now aggressively executing, like real-world stuff.

00:01:01: The question isn't should we anymore, it's how fast can we scale?

00:01:05: Exactly.

00:01:06: And that scaling, it's not happening everywhere equally, is it?

00:01:09: We're seeing the momentum really build up in, well, three specific and sometimes kind of conflicting areas.

00:01:15: You've got the automation push on the front lines, these AISDR agents, then there's scaling creative work and underpinning it all, fixing the data mess.

00:01:24: It's

00:01:24: all connected, definitely.

00:01:25: and things are moving incredibly fast right now.

00:01:28: Okay, let's dive right into the probably the loudest topic, the AI sale development rep, the AI SDR.

00:01:35: This is where you see the massive hype, the big promises.

00:01:38: And

00:01:38: also the biggest, hang on a second.

00:01:41: Right, the reality checks.

00:01:44: But you know, the capabilities being deployed now are genuinely getting quite sophisticated.

00:01:49: More than just writing emails, you mean.

00:01:50: Oh, way beyond that.

00:01:51: We're seeing like, Full-blown marketing ops agents running complex go-to-market plays.

00:01:56: Kaichi Terraposkaya talked about warmlies agents doing precision ABM.

00:02:01: ABM?

00:02:01: Wow.

00:02:02: Yeah.

00:02:02: Automatically mapping out whole buying committees, scoring in ten signals, launching these hyper-targeted campaigns, pre-advanced stuff.

00:02:08: Right.

00:02:09: That's... Yeah, that's engineering the GTM process, not just blasting emails.

00:02:14: And the speed element, Zach Daris, showed Apollo's AI assistant basically taking a few text prompts and then executing the whole prospecting sequencing workflow build out right inside the platform.

00:02:26: Hours of work just gone, down to minutes.

00:02:29: And

00:02:29: it seems to be working, at least in some cases, it's hitting the pipeline.

00:02:33: Sir McConnell mentioned Mowgli's agent, they called it Taylor, lifted their pipeline, forty-four percent in just sixty days.

00:02:39: Remy Tuzard reported seeing an AISDR booking over a hundred and seventy meetings a month.

00:02:44: These aren't just, you know, one-off anecdotes.

00:02:46: Okay,

00:02:46: but wait, that hyper-automation part?

00:02:48: You mentioned mapping committees, but Chase Diamond and Awa K. Penn were talking about real-time qualification with AI avatars, like Kavis.

00:02:56: Yeah, that's pushing it even further.

00:02:58: The idea is these avatars to tech website visitors engage them instantly, qualify and book meetings.

00:03:04: Right there on the spot.

00:03:05: Right there.

00:03:06: And they're reporting, like, three X to eight X jumps in qualified pipeline from those pages, with no human SDR needing to be there live.

00:03:15: Are people really okay talking to an avatar for qualification?

00:03:20: Apparently, the tech is getting pretty seamless.

00:03:23: But, you know, that brings up the big paradox here, doesn't it?

00:03:26: If everyone can scale outreach infinitely.

00:03:28: Doesn't

00:03:28: it just become noise?

00:03:29: Where's the advantage?

00:03:30: That's the huge counter argument we're seeing.

00:03:33: Absolutely have to talk about the noise factor.

00:03:35: Yeah.

00:03:35: Tito Bort put it really bluntly.

00:03:37: He called the AI, SDR and oxymoron.

00:03:40: Yeah.

00:03:40: His point was, anything infinitely scalable just becomes noise, fast.

00:03:44: A great SDR stands out, interrupts politely.

00:03:47: Yeah.

00:03:47: Right?

00:03:48: Scaling that endlessly kind of defeats the purpose.

00:03:50: And the personalization attempts can backfire badly.

00:03:53: Jen Allen Muth shared her own experience getting these really poorly personalized cold emails, obviously, from AI, where the personalization felt totally forced and incongruent, as she put it.

00:04:06: Just trying to tick a box, not genuinely connect.

00:04:08: It feels fake.

00:04:09: And that's where the brand image comes in.

00:04:11: Victoria Zdipska actually did the math.

00:04:13: She showed how an AISDR, making say, ten thousand calls a day at a tiny point zero two percent conversion.

00:04:20: gets the same result as a human making a hundred calls at two percent.

00:04:23: Same output.

00:04:24: But with massive collateral damage to your brand reputation, just faster spam, basically.

00:04:30: Faster spam machines.

00:04:31: Okay, so if full automation is risky and noisy, where's the middle ground?

00:04:36: Is it a hybrid approach?

00:04:38: AI does the grunt work, humans do the human stuff.

00:04:41: That

00:04:41: really seems to be the emerging consensus.

00:04:43: You see folks like John Higgins, Frank Saunders, Louis Young.

00:04:46: All saying similar things.

00:04:47: AI won't replace your elite sellers.

00:04:49: Right.

00:04:50: It replaces bad selling, poor processes.

00:04:52: AI is great for scale, for research, for finding those intense signals faster.

00:04:57: But humans bring the judgment, the nuance, the actual connection.

00:05:00: Jason and Lemkin had a good way to measure it, didn't he?

00:05:02: He said the test for an AI SDR should be whether it surfaces deals.

00:05:06: the human team wouldn't have found otherwise.

00:05:07: Yeah,

00:05:08: has to be additive, net new opportunities.

00:05:10: Makes sense.

00:05:10: And that lines up with what Spencer Parikh noted about AI SDR loops performing humans.

00:05:17: It's not necessarily by doing the outreach better, but by pre-qualifying all those signals before human even gets involved.

00:05:24: So AI cleans the list.

00:05:26: finds the openings.

00:05:27: And the rep makes the real connection.

00:05:29: That seems to be the smart play right now.

00:05:30: Okay, so that focus shift right from the flashy AI agent itself to the signals it needs to run on.

00:05:35: that naturally leads us away from just the tool.

00:05:38: And straight towards the engine running underneath at all.

00:05:40: Exactly.

00:05:41: Because what's become super clear these past few weeks is that AI doesn't magically fix a broken GTM engine.

00:05:47: It just amplifies the problems,

00:05:49: right?

00:05:50: Are we just automating a mess?

00:05:51: If you don't fix that foundation first.

00:05:54: Yeah, pretty much.

00:05:55: Koonstam warned execs about this directly.

00:05:57: AI basically multiplies any weakness in your CRM.

00:06:00: So data hygiene first.

00:06:02: Hygiene fixes have to come before scaling.

00:06:04: Period.

00:06:05: Tom Granger said it simply, only automate something once it actually works manually.

00:06:09: Don't automate chaos.

00:06:10: And the old garbage in, garbage out.

00:06:13: It's not just a saying anymore, is it?

00:06:15: It's like an exponential risk now with AI.

00:06:17: Maria Jiang really hammered this point.

00:06:20: Bad data flows into the AI models, into the agents.

00:06:23: And you just scale the noise, you don't eliminate it.

00:06:26: And think about this, Yuri Vermchuk reported only thirty-five percent of sales reps actually trust their CRM data.

00:06:32: Only

00:06:33: thirty five percent.

00:06:34: Wow.

00:06:35: That's a crisis, right?

00:06:36: If reps don't trust their main tool.

00:06:38: It's a huge problem.

00:06:39: If that underlying customer journey data, the contact info, the signals, if it's unreliable, then any AI you layer on top is basically built on sand.

00:06:47: So what's the fix?

00:06:49: Well, Kyle Norton, who is deaf in AI implementation at owner.com, confirmed it.

00:06:54: Trying a tool-first approach just fails fast unless you first build that solid data foundation.

00:06:59: That means good first-party data on your customer journey plus reliable third-party enrichment.

00:07:04: Get the data right first.

00:07:05: Okay, foundation is data.

00:07:07: But even with perfect data, you need strategy, right?

00:07:09: Context, clarity on who you're even talking to.

00:07:11: Oh,

00:07:12: absolutely.

00:07:12: The smart leaders are pushing for ideal customer profile clarity over just raw automation volume.

00:07:17: George Costeria laid out a practical roadmap.

00:07:19: Analyze first, they're

00:07:21: right.

00:07:21: Analyze first.

00:07:22: Yeah, like use AI to scan the target website, understand their offer, their tone, their value props first.

00:07:29: Then build a structured brief before you let AI generate any content.

00:07:33: Context matters.

00:07:34: That sounds like, you know, systems thinking, finally winning out over just chasing the newest shiny tool.

00:07:39: Some may have mentioned that too, the offer, the audience, the timing.

00:07:43: Those always matter more than the specific tool you use.

00:07:46: Totally.

00:07:47: And for the actual outreach, Mafalda Johansson's advice felt key.

00:07:52: Use AI to enhance authenticity, not replace it.

00:07:55: Enhance how?

00:07:56: Like use it to research accounts faster, find relevant triggers, but don't outsource the human effort needed to actually build a genuine connection.

00:08:04: Alright, let's shift gears a bit to the creative side.

00:08:07: CMOs are facing this big strategic fork in the road, aren't they?

00:08:10: How do you get creative work done at scale, fast?

00:08:13: Without sacrificing your brand integrity.

00:08:15: Yeah, it's a huge challenge.

00:08:16: And it kind of boils down to that classic build versus buy decision for the tools.

00:08:20: Right.

00:08:20: Exactly.

00:08:21: And the posts we saw suggest both paths are totally valid.

00:08:24: It just depends on your internal setup and how much scale you need.

00:08:28: David Mayer pointed out one route.

00:08:30: Use the off the shelf AI generators.

00:08:32: Like Adobe Firefly.

00:08:34: Precisely.

00:08:35: Tools like Firefly can really speed up producing assets, plugging right into your existing marketing stacks.

00:08:42: Melanie Hu had shared how Newell Brands is doing this.

00:08:44: Oh yeah, Newell Brands.

00:08:46: Yeah, they're using AI to create these dynamic synthetic personas for global campaigns and then using Firefly to churn out the massive amount of content needed.

00:08:55: It's about speed and volume within their workflow.

00:08:57: Okay, so that's the buy option.

00:08:59: What about build?

00:09:00: The other path is building your own bespoke internal platform.

00:09:04: This gives you way more control, especially over governance and brand alignment.

00:09:07: Like

00:09:07: GM.

00:09:08: GM is the prime example.

00:09:10: Norm DeGreeve presented their internal AI platform, they call it Metropolis.

00:09:14: It's built specifically around their creative and analytics processes.

00:09:18: United Airlines, LVMH, they've also talked about having these brand first frameworks.

00:09:22: Discipline first, then the tools.

00:09:24: It sounds like there's still a lot of maybe... nervousness about losing that core human creativity in all this automation.

00:09:32: Oh

00:09:32: for sure.

00:09:33: And the consensus is you can't lose it.

00:09:35: Mathilde Delhum de Bro from LVMH was really clear.

00:09:39: True originality, that spark.

00:09:41: It starts with human imagination, human intuition.

00:09:44: Technology helps, but doesn't create the spark itself.

00:09:47: Exactly.

00:09:48: It enhances its scales, but it doesn't replace that core human element.

00:09:52: Norm DeGrive at GM said something similar, right?

00:09:54: Like, AI didn't replace our creativity.

00:09:57: He expanded

00:09:58: it.

00:09:58: Yeah, perfect quote.

00:09:59: It's a multiplier for talent, not a replacement for it.

00:10:01: Yeah.

00:10:01: Robert Rose had this great analogy that really stuck with me.

00:10:04: He said, AI might be the oxygen for content creation, but oxygen is useless without human lungs.

00:10:11: The tools amplify talent.

00:10:13: They don't manufacture it from scratch.

00:10:15: Love that.

00:10:15: Oxygen without lungs.

00:10:17: Okay, okay, let's zoom out one last time.

00:10:18: Think about the big picture.

00:10:20: How AI fits into the whole tech stack, the entire GTM architecture.

00:10:25: If the AISDR is the car and the creative is the billboard,

00:10:28: then the infrastructure is the road system underneath it all.

00:10:31: And

00:10:31: that system needs to be solid.

00:10:33: Absolutely pristine, really.

00:10:34: The big theme for strategic planning right now seems to be converging around that data infrastructure piece.

00:10:40: People like Yuri Varemchuk, Maria Jiang, they're all stressing rigorous data models, event tracking, source hygiene.

00:10:47: It's

00:10:47: the non-negotiable foundation.

00:10:49: It really is.

00:10:49: You have to start there to get any real value for AI downstream.

00:10:54: And when marketers look at tools for this stack, are they going for like One giant platform that does everything or are they still piecing together the best tools for each job?

00:11:05: It seems like flexibility is winning out.

00:11:08: Coonstam shared Zoom Info's perspective that buyers want choice.

00:11:12: They prefer connecting best-in-class specialized tools rather than getting locked into one single vendor.

00:11:17: Interesting.

00:11:18: More of a best-of-breed approach, then.

00:11:20: Seems

00:11:20: like it.

00:11:20: And we saw a practical example from Argomalarm.

00:11:22: She shared a stack using like seven different tools stitched together with any end for automation.

00:11:28: and it actually reduced the chaos in their pipeline management.

00:11:31: Okay, so connecting tools, optimizing workflows, that leads right into what Jonathan MK called the agentic shift, doesn't it?

00:11:39: Yes.

00:11:40: That feels like the biggest mindset change happening, moving beyond just using AI to say write a slightly better email.

00:11:47: Right.

00:11:48: And towards building actual agents that handle entire workflows.

00:11:52: I think, two hundred forty seven lead qualification bots.

00:11:55: or systems that manage campaigns automatically from beginning to end.

00:11:59: Automating the whole process, not just isolated tasks.

00:12:02: Exactly.

00:12:02: Automating the process, not just the text generation.

00:12:05: But again, if your underlying strategy is weak, automating it just makes you fail faster.

00:12:10: That's the risk.

00:12:11: Zizaitoli summed it up perfectly.

00:12:13: AI tools are accelerators, not replacements.

00:12:16: If you don't have a solid strategy, a really clear ICP definition first.

00:12:20: Automation just helps you drive off the cliff faster and more spectacularly.

00:12:23: Makes sense.

00:12:24: And the bigger picture, like from the recent A&A Masters conference, seemed to echo that urgency, right?

00:12:28: There's a growing gap.

00:12:29: Definitely.

00:12:30: They highlighted this widening divide between the AI champions, the ones really transforming how they work, and the late adopters.

00:12:38: David Mayer noted, a lot of marketers are still kind of hesitant, struggling to really dive in beyond just surface level stuff.

00:12:45: It's not just a feature, it's a fundamental change.

00:12:47: That's the

00:12:48: core message, yeah.

00:12:49: Jessica Aries underlined it.

00:12:51: AI is changing the way work gets done.

00:12:52: It demands real organizational transformation, not just plugging in a new tool.

00:12:57: And the ultimate goal, according to the PWC research, isn't just cutting costs, right?

00:13:02: It's about creating value.

00:13:04: Exactly.

00:13:05: Positioning AI is a true growth multiplier.

00:13:09: They found it can drive potentially two X higher profitability.

00:13:13: That's the strategic prize.

00:13:14: Which explains the urgency.

00:13:15: If your competitors are getting that multiplier and you're not... That

00:13:18: gap is going to grow very, very quickly.

00:13:19: You really have to be moving on this now.

00:13:21: If you enjoyed this deep dive and new episodes drop every two weeks, also check out our other editions on account-based marketing, field marketing, channel marketing, martech, go-to-market and social selling.

00:13:32: Yeah, take these insights.

00:13:33: Think about your GTM strategy, your data infrastructure.

00:13:36: Start applying them today.

00:13:37: Thanks

00:13:38: for diving deep with us.

00:13:40: And be sure to subscribe so you don't miss the next round of insights.