Welcome to Sacking Growth, called to action. I show for the Trailblazers, change makers, and paradigm shifters. Each week, a different marketing hero who is called to make a change in their field will join us to walk through each step of their journey. They'll cover the highs, the lows, and what's coming next.
Together, we'll help you find the changes needed for your own business to win. I'm Stephanie Ola here with Evan Hughes, and today we're excited to welcome Refine Labs' General Manager, Judy Sharif. Judy has led the Refine Labs team through their development of tangible, modern success metrics with a Refine Labs measurement framework. Judy, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you, Steph. Thanks, Evan. Super excited to be here. Yeah, I'm really excited to learn from you.
I'm excited to get front row seat to this lesson. So let's dive right into it and start with your path into marketing and some of the experiences you've had with maybe more outdated measurement tools. Okay, take a trip back in time with me to 2010. Set the scene.
I was my first foray into marketing came through an internship. It was a social media marketing internship when I was just graduating college. This was like really, I'd say the forefront of social media marketing even being a thing. I was in a class in college where we had to make a Twitter account as one of our assignments.
So, you know, like just getting launched, I think we were just starting to figure out like monetization on Facebook. My internship was at a small, to be to see e-commerce company. It was like, help us build our social media presence, and then also other things related to the internet. And like, if it's digital, it's slowly headed into my realm.
At the time I was, I was going to university of Washington, majoring in PR and wanted to be a journalist. And this is like before journalism, I don't know, changed so much digitally. And I just saw the internship was like, okay, this seems like something I can do. I'm into social media.
This seems kind of fun. I feel like I need an internship. There's like pressure to figure out what I'm going to do after college. I quickly found that actual social media management and like the posting of it all is not what I like, is not where my skill sets are at.
I'm much more funny in a one to one setting than I am in a one to many setting. But I really liked the data and the trackability of just digital marketing in general. And I was lucky this company was very open minded to my internship expansion, my role expansion. I got to set up our first Google Analytics implementation working with a developer.
It launched our first retargeting campaigns, figured out just sort of trial by error, how Google Tag Manager works and like, I had a developer helping me with that piece, but just googling at the time, like, what do I need to track our e-commerce website? And that expanded into learning Drupal, which is the website, that platform that it was built on and managing econ website in terms of like new product launches. I got hired after I graduated college into an online marketing coordinator role. So online marketing, I think is what we're still calling it, wasn't digital marketing yet.
And this was really like, I owned rev goals associated with the econ website and then promotion of the products across really any digital channels. So we were doing Google Ads, we were doing ad roles, we were really big, they just rolled out Facebook, we were doing a lot of promotions on Facebook. And I don't think at the time any other social media platforms were really monetizing. We were beat to see, so I was not heavy focused in the LinkedIn world at that time.
But I was very excited about how measurable everything felt at the time. I think there was more of a stereotype around marketing. I was like, oh, marketing's over here making posters and t-shirts. And this was like hard number marketing, these revenue, I can show sales in Google Analytics, I tied to the campaigns that I've done, like this is really cool and really trackable.
And I don't think I was really fully aware at the time that so much of it was new. I was 22, so I didn't know what I was doing. And then I was working with a consultant who ended up hiring me and I moved into the B2B SAS world after about four years in the econ space. And honestly, never like bad going to B2B was the best shift career-wise, it's a lot easier to get companies to spend company money than to get individuals to spend their own money.
And I was very much like SAS boom at the time. There was a ton of funding going on in the Seattle tech world. The company was a MarTech software, it was tracked to ad networks, it was infrastructure for ad networks, it was very technical, but I was marketing to marketers, which was really fun. And I started there similarly, like online marketing manager, demand-gen really, I own paid media, was managing our agency, running Google ads.
This is where I really started getting more into what channels work for B2B. There was more playing in LinkedIn, lots of lead gen. We were gaining content. It was primarily ebooks, webinars, long-form reports.
We actually had like a researcher on staff, it was doing really cool research reports, but all gated, everything was a lead magnet essentially driving heady topofunnel volume. I was trying to drive paid trial signups, so driving topofunnel content volume and then also looking at trials, how many trials are coming in each day. And it's interesting because I've had these two KPIs, like MQLs, or it was like target account MQLs. We want the right job titles of the right people, the right companies.
We were launching ABM for the first time. This is like the first wave of demand-based launching and tools rolling out around ABM. And so I was trying to bring in a lot of these good people. My lead scoring model was so tight.
I had the best setup in Marketo. It was like, well, every attribution software was there. I had lean data. There was campaigns for everything.
But then on the flip side of what was actually bringing in revenue for the company was this trial motion. That was a 30-day paid trial. We were trying to convert as many of those to revenue as possible. And most of these were coming from organic or direct.
Sometimes they were coming from paid search. It was pretty trackable. And depending on the region, we could get a lot of response in paid search, really cheap leads, particularly like Eastern Europe or in India. We were driving a ton of volume there.
We were a global company. And so I did this for a few years before I realized that they just didn't link. We were running all these tactics and campaigns and promotions to bring in leads that were not actually ever signing up for these trials. And I think we would see long-sail cycle deals for big companies that did have multiple touch points of content downloads and events and all these different things that they did.
But ultimately, this is over months of time converting through a sales rep. Those were really long-sail cycles. When we saw Fast High Volume, it was organic direct trials, not a lot of marketing touches ahead of time. How do we get more of those?
I think that's like the background and what led me to uncovering that I feel like there was more to how we're measuring marketing and what we're doing. And I was really right about the time of my career where I was ready to leave that company as well. I'm ready for the next thing. I've been here six years.
I feel like I want to do something new. I'm like, I got laid off. So I didn't have to try to look for something else. I was forced to do something else.
And I think at the time, Chris Walker had just launched his podcast like end of 2019. This was spring 2020. I'd been following him on LinkedIn somewhere connected there. And he'd been posting a lot of things that resonated with my what I'd been observing in terms of what I was measuring versus what was actually driving revenue for the company.
And that's really what enticed me to come here was I wanted to work with some companies who were what we would say now thinking about it as the demand creation strategy or more of a modern demand generation approach compared to a lead generation approach. That's awesome. Yeah. I wanted to get into that a little bit more too.
That kind of defining moment of that pivotal shift where you're like that and something needs to change. And I know you kind of alluded to it through some of your different roles and responsibilities and kind of seeing as the evolution because the intersection of E-common B2B right, everything was supposed to be measurable because that's just how we defined our marketing success is based off of numbers and metrics. But seeing that that inbound buying experience was evolving and the whole direction that B2B was taking the lead gen motions and stacking leads but that's not converting to pipeline. I think it was a moment of inflection for all of us in the space too.
But yeah, talk the audience a little bit through about what was that time where you knew you had to change this and kind of redefining in a measurement was the only approach forward. Yeah. Yeah. I can specifically remember this meeting.
I think it was a leadership meeting and one of our sea levels was looking at our metrics and looking at trial volume and asking me how do we get more organic trials? I want more of these. I think we had one up on the screen where we were looking at their lean data, like attribution history and it's low of like website visit, website visit, website visit, form conversion started free trial. Like how do we get more of these?
And this was coming off of the heels of cutting our events budget, cutting anything that we had anything that was a branded spend that was not directly either attributed to something I could tie to a trial sign up like pay search or something that could be tied to like MQL goals related to target accounts and if we were bringing in target account contacts at the time. And I just remember feeling like that meeting that everything we just cut and all the budget decisions that we made did not support driving more organic trials. And I remember going to our VP of marketing and being like, I don't know how to like fully articulate this but like organic is driven through recognition of our brand and we need to be sponsoring some of these like happy hours alongside events. We still need to have a presence here and no one's going to come search for us if they don't know about our brand name.
I had a lot of support from the marketing leader but the board was looking for specific numbers, see levels looking for specific numbers. They couldn't go back to the board and say we want spend that we can't show anything attributed against and this was 2019 and I would say I still see that conversation a lot with our clients now with companies that I'm working with. So I think that has not yet been solved but I do think we've done a good job of moving in the right direction and that was really the moment for me where I thought this broken when I'm doing this right and I want to fix it. Did you see a direct correlation when you guys kind of pause the events, pause the brand initiatives where organic inbound actually was tapering off or was it kind of that like flat line?
That's where some of the conversations come in our play because there's not enough time to groove out that it's actually impacting us long term because satisfaction in 30 days is like oh it's still stable so we should maintain this. Yeah it's a good point. There was a slow trajectory of decreasing trial volume so it was not as clear of like cut this huge dip. We did see that happen with paid search though.
We cut paid search really heavily and dropped organic trial volume by like 15%. It was like they were influenced by search but they weren't tracked as paid search for whatever reason because of cookies, session timing, all of these reasons that we don't always store appropriately so that was interesting. But it was not as like sort of tight of a timeline to be able to really make that correlation and I also like I didn't know what I know now. Now I would go back in with so much more data and another six years of experience talking about these things and look at the conversions over time, look at a blended cost per in a different way.
There's just a different sort of lens I would use on this metric that I know what I was doing at the time. And the way I was measuring it did make my job easier. It was not that hard to hit these MQL goals if I had a good targeting and we had a good content. It's just that they didn't actually want to buy our software.
Yeah that's the kicker right there's not the revenue component. So you got you kind of joined the mindset of measurement framework is kind of evolving and you need to think position it differently. You know you followed Chris Walker kind of got kind of into that world around 2020 joined us and like you said like you said working with clients is like the direction of like where you got to see multiple problems or multiple individuals having the exact same problem in conversation. Yeah definitely.
So I think I first went in like a little naive like great everybody that wants to work with us knows that we're fine last day so they're ready to like make the shift. They are I'm sure they're going to be totally down to ungate older leads. We're not even going to measure MQLs like we've added them in the sales process. There's philosophical alignment like we're good.
And that was true for you know multiple champions across client accounts. There's usually somebody that was very bought in and pushing like the change maker internally wanting this but it's easier than done to get people to move away from just attribution because we still want to look at attribution but it's just looking at it like more holistically and not only what it's attributed to paid and understanding the way your marketing dollars influence your organic and your direct and really like that holistic inbound funnel and not only what is going to be attributed to a specific page channel. But I think so not everybody's ready to make that shift really had to stair set the approach and we still see this today with companies that we're working with people kind of enter at different levels of readiness and maturity to start shifting their measurement and focusing on to mean creation. But I also noticed just so many gaps in general across most of the companies that we work with as it relates to their infrastructure and their measurements.
So even just outside of like how are we measuring it. It's a lot of basics that we're not or like consistently we'll find gaps in infrastructure with the bulk of companies that we're working with. And so it's been interesting to uncover what are the most sort of like foundational level things that companies should need to implement to be able to start to shift their measurement this way. And so some of it is more tactical and some of it is like leadership alignment, mindset alignment, getting the buy in from the people that actually are going to control your budget and look at the end result.
That's a real I think benefit that I don't hear a lot about agency life is being able to see those patterns emerge across so many different companies and you can start to connect the dots a little bit more easily when you have seen it in so many different places in the same way. Yeah, totally. So when you're getting started, you have all of this experience and all of these years and you say you would go back and you would start it differently. But you got yourself here.
And what were some of the tools that helped? So obviously your view on things now and the tools that you're using now have evolved. But what would be your recommendations for someone who is in that advanced stage, but also maybe someone who's just getting started on their own journey here? I wish this is going to be a shameless plug here for us.
But I wish that I'd had something like the vault and just the content that we've outlined there related to infrastructure when I was getting started. A lot of what I was doing was Googling and reading forums, reading HubSpot forums, Marketo forums, user groups, networking, chatting with people with marketing ops backgrounds, marketing ops is sort of my secret love. I liked to man Gen 2, but I was marketing ops lead for a while at a previous company and administered our Marketo system. And I think I had a really tight relationship with our sales ops leader, our sales force administrator and having that partnership and really getting into the weeds and understanding how the CRM functions is just crucial.
I don't feel like any marketer could know too much about marketing ops. Like you can't. We're not going to go more into the weeds on marketing ops just to understand how your systems talk to each other, how the data sinks, where data's coming from and how it flows through. Because I think all companies are going to be reporting revenue to some degree and all of that is going to be impacted by the initial entry point of data into your system.
But now because there's more documentation specifically out there, I think we've done a good job outlining some of the core things that you need within your infrastructure as it relates to. And we've been just like the basics of sort of tracking from a campaign perspective, starting with your ads, when someone clicks from an ad to your website, are your UTM storing? Are they there? Are you able to capture those into the form in your marketing automation system?
Are those going to map into your sales force or your CRM? I think we've done some good outlining like tactically as well in terms of like if you want to map data all the way through from sort of that initial conversion point and say it's a demo request to close one revenue, how do you set your system up so that it flows from that primary contact or the contact who's making that request all the way through to that opportunity. The requiring of contacts on ops is something that maybe 10% of the companies that I've worked with here actually doing and a lot of companies need to implement that or don't have a good way of consistently ensuring that people data is passed through to the revenue and that is a big gap from a measurement standpoint. I think some of the things like how did you hear about us and the hybrid attribution that we talk about is now I would have laughed at that when I was at my previous company and I was like, okay, yeah, I'm going to just survey them.
I trust them to tell me real info. And now I look through over the years, hundreds of clients data sets and we get so much interesting info from there. I do tell you details, not even just the channel, maybe the hedge one, but they'll type in details about the ad or a specific podcast that you were referencing on or now. It's really interesting things like chat, GPT coming up in there or cloth or other AI tools that are showing up.
So I think some of these things is just like the market maturing and coming along with us. It's a little bit more accepted now, the software and attribution. I see back in 2021, we'd signed with a new company. Basically no one would have that implemented.
And now I'd say three quarters of the companies who have come in with that implemented. So that's been a cool shift to see. I know that wasn't the question, but I just did it off of it because it reminds me of how much has has actually changed in the last six years as it relates to measuring demand generally. I think that that B2B staff space where there's kind of LinkedIn, I don't want to say echo chamber, but you know, the LinkedIn realm that is repeating a lot of these same ideas over and over again.
I guess that is an echo chamber. Just a quick thing on this area though. Yeah, everybody, not everybody, but there's a lot of individuals that push back, right? We are just our audience doesn't input information that is helpful for us to make any sort of sound decisions.
And then if we do an analysis, right, we see on average, let's say 10% of their inbound has some sort of qualitative useful feedback that to me, tell me that's much better than like just your direct attribution that you would measure success of that based off of inbound organic SEM. So even those small wins, right? Yeah, it might not be the bulk of it and you might not have the perfect story where especially marketers to marketers, they know kind of what the expectation is in that as our field. So I feel like we're a little bit more open to typing out everything, but I just, I always want to make that plug.
Even the smallest wins 10% of your total inbound can be super valuable to have that sort of information. Yeah, my favorite is to see the inputs I get when you market to like a super technical audience, like developers or it's very to the point. Mm hmm. It's a little bit of a rapping sometimes a little bit like I don't want another field here.
And sometimes it's like I was on this Linux user group and this specific topic came up and I and it's like so detailed and it's really interesting to see just how that varies across sort of ICPs and audiences that you're talking to. For sure. I love it. So we talked a little bit like the SRA and then such a good question kind of around the tools dashboard, right?
That's a conversation that ton of people like bring up. What how do you think about that or how should we think about that from like this new kind of new anymore, but like this different way of measuring success. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
As you know, we have a lot of opinions on dashboards that we're building in serum for with the companies that we work with. And I think really it comes down to looking at that holistic and bound funnel. I mentioned this before. We don't want to only see what is attributed from a attribution software standpoint to your paid channels.
I want to see anything that's coming from inbound. So I want to look at it's to say demos. Sometimes it's trials will use a demo example for this. I want to see total del demo volume by month and I want to see this from direct organic anything attributed to paid.
I would exclude events and outbound in partnership, something that I know are definitely not heavily influencing through our our paid digital, although I would be interested in viewing those pipeline sources separately, which we could talk about after, but for our kind of core inbound pipeline source, holistic demos, volume by month, how many of those are converting into meetings, meetings booked. This is a gap that I see a lot of companies not tracking as well. I definitely recommend having a time stamp on the date. The meeting was held so that you can track meetings by actual date that they occurred.
Then are those meetings during the opportunities? Total ops, qualified ops, closed ops, both lost and won. And then I want to look at things like win rate and how is that trending over time, sales cycle, how is that trending over time, ACD and how is that trending over time. And ideally, where a lot of people, a lot of companies are wanting to bigger ACDs moving up market.
And ideally, if you're running a good demand creation strategy where you are really focused on getting in front of that ICP, putting the core message out there in the market, knowing that they're going to probably come back and convert an organic or direct channel, but they're ready to talk to sales at that point in time. You typically we see higher win rates, shorter sales cycles, bigger ACDs when this is functioning well. We will, I do like to look at then sort of another layer down of particularly on the demand capture piece, so like Google search or Bing, Microsoft ads, what is attributed, what do we see attributed to the paid channels and have that lens, but always be looking at the holistic, how does it impact or direct an organic alongside your paid channels. And then the sort of cost efficiency piece of it, this is typically less like in the actual salesforce dashboard and usually calculated externally, but really looking at your ad spend against a blended number of conversions or your high intent conversions against blended.
I've seen, I was just working with a company a couple weeks ago where we were looking at data of like just what is attributed to their paid channels and the trends and then the visibility for the first time into organic and direct and so on, like just a exact correlation with huge spike in ad spend, huge spiking trend and not same month for organic and indirect conversions. That's sort of the, I guess the 101 version of it. This would be like a salesforce dashboard or a CRM dashboard. And then if you have the how did you hear about this field implemented, definitely recommend we layer in a version that's looking at your sort of attribution source against how did you hear about a source and particularly for direct and organic, what values are showing up there.
We typically recommend that you're creating your how did you hear about this field, but also a categorization field that's going to be easier for reporting instead of some automation in the back end. That's like, if how did you hear about us contains LinkedIn, L.I., LinkedIn with the space, LinkedIn ads, like any of those variations or maybe you want to include meta, meta ads, Facebook, Instagram, and you roll it all up to a social media or you roll it all up to Google, if it's any sort of variation of, you'll see Google, you'll see search, you'll see web search, you'll see internet search, internet research, kind of all these different values that come in. And so I say bonus, best practice dashboard is you also have reports that look at the SRA piece on top of your funnel. Yeah, I love it.
Overthinking and overcomplicating dashboards is like the biggest root to any sort of failure in marketing role and I've experienced that where I just am looking at too much and there's too many data points to try to infer some sort of pattern or qualitative trend and I think just kind of isolating around the core opportunity here is like, each layer of that. Am I driving those demos to your point, right? Sure. Okay.
Then what I'm doing is working on whatever those costs are around that and then like working away, like just simplifying and mapping out like what are the data points to tell your leadership team. I think it's a good starting point. You can know the stuff behind the scenes, but that shouldn't be like executive visibility because that just clogs and gets things a bit more confusing and I love the framework of simplification for that. Great summary.
I should have been a little more succinct. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's great. I'm not going to put on here. And I think it's a, I don't know, stuff, any other questions related to tools to before we kind of jump forward?
No, I mean, I think that's the biggest takeaway for me is making sure that it's not over-complicating what you actually need and what you're actually going to use. And some of that takes time to know what you're going to implement after the fact to backtrack to make sure your tools are streamlined. But it's just an important reminder. It's pretty like easier said than done.
You know, there's some large enterprises where it's like, I say this, but then you also need to do that dashboard for every business unit and also for every Chio and you need to compare those. So you've given your size of your company, it may not be as straightforward, but it's still a good starting point. Yeah. Yeah.
I let it on the side and then once you prove it out to be effective and kind of champion upstream, I think it's the most important thing there. But definitely a journey. I mean, I still it sticks to me that you, your Twitter handle, like being the first creating that first account that's like back in Gmail back in the day of just like, you never know what you're going to land on, but the evolution of your journey. Gmail, we had to request you had to be invited to use.
Do you remember that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Aging myself. We're all old. And just discussions about your journey into marketing and the path that you got here are so different.
But I think there's like a lot of positives to take away from the experience and kind of the evolution and stepping into B2B. But I think it's also we've been remiss if we didn't talk about like what was the lowest point? It was like the shit moment where you were like, I'm done, but I'm going to keep pushing forward. And you sort of like failures or mishaps that you can share with the audience.
I think it's helpful for us to just relate because we all talk about. Yeah, for sure. I think it may be already alluded a little to it. Probably the lowest part of my overall career is like COVID layoff because it was a stressful time and you can be sure who wants to get laid off.
But blessing in disguise in a lot of ways because it did bring me here. And this was like a career changing company for me. I think low point was entering. So low point is layoff.
Low point with this like shifting to the strategy and working here at fine labs and sort of trying to drive this message forward was definitely operating under the assumption that companies were ready, more ready than they are to make this shift and going all in on a strategy that pulled volume from a team of SDRs that was expecting leads every week and we stopped getting these core assets and suddenly they had no leads and these SDRs are coming to the marketing lead coming to me being like, I know I told you that was fine, but actually I mean to roll this back, nobody's ready. And I think that really caused us to just pivot our entire approach with how we are slowly phasing this strategy into companies and assessing the readiness during our beginning of our engagements or for companies that are maybe just listening that are trying to do this internally into your company, bringing in the right stakeholders across leadership, getting sales buy in, getting financed buy in on what metrics you're going to be measuring. If you have the ability to get bored buy in, I know that depends a lot on the size of the company and sort of your marketing relationship to board members, but I think there's a lot of pre-planning to be done up front from the change management standpoint and that took me some time to realize. It's easy to say now, five years in a refined lab, so this is what you should be doing, but my first few companies and shout out if you're listening, we learned a little bit of trial and error as we go and figured out how to showcase is it working or not through what we call split the funnel, just one more vault plug here, but you know really looking at the maybe your previous strategy, your low intent, a more lead gen focused strategy and comparing that to your high intent conversion point and just seeing how they're converting through the funnel and very commonly seen that things convert lower than 2% from lead to closed on revenue from a low intent strategy and that's like a higher closer to 20 to 30% on average with a high intent.
I think that's been a probably the biggest learning threat at all is just how to approach it and how to do it in a bite sized fashion. Every market change, every macro factor, there's been a lot since the steering of 2020 to now, so I appreciate you sharing that. Yeah, it's so important and Megan has talked a lot about that change management piece recently, this year especially, and I think it's so easy, like we were talking about earlier, when you can see the big picture, you are at 10,000 feet seeing all of these patterns and seeing it fail from company to company to company and it's not enough for you to just say, trust me, it works, just trust me, right? That's not enough for an entire organization to change their mindset.
And so even if that's frustrating from your perspective, having those smaller bite size changes or a really strong change management leader is crucial to. Yeah. So let's do the flip side of biggest failure, lowest point. What has this taught you to appreciate about yourself?
What have you learned about yourself as a marketer or as a person through this whole journey? Yeah, I think probably the first thing is just like early on in my career, I didn't trust my instincts a lot. I sort of assumed that I was wrong, that people that had done this for longer than me were at better, they knew what they were doing, I should follow what they'd been doing and did some things that at the time, like, I don't know, this doesn't feel like it's probably the right move, but boy, is it trackable? Let's do this.
And I think the experience of seeing the measuring measurement be done in crack, actually, measuring the wrong things, growing from that made me realize, actually, some of these instincts I had 10 years ago were accurate, but I was in my early 20s and didn't feel like I knew what I was talking about at all. So I think that's been maybe something that just comes with time as you mature into your career, but definitely something that I noticed with my shift, shifting companies and shift in strategy. And I think more so being here, I think this entire journey from a call to measurement journey has really improved my ability to articulate the same thing to different people in different ways. Like, I'm ultimately making the same point, but it may not be received by this individual in the same way that it will be received by this individual.
And that's kind of like the hardest part of client work and the beauty of client work, as well as tailoring your approach to who's on the other end and receiving that message. And that's like, I think invaluable in your career outside of just this and is something that, and outside my career with my family, talking to my husband. All of the communication that you do in your life, I think, is really important to think about how you're tweaking your approach depending on who's receiving that message. Yeah.
Nailed it. I think those team projects in high school, I failed those because I did not know how to communicate when somebody just was like, ah, I'm like, just do it. But now, you know, as you evolve and you're like, okay, I have to learn and it is a skill set. But maybe they were trying to teach something.
I was the person that just like, did the whole project in high school? You guys aren't going to do it the way I want to do it. All right, you two show ups. I'm doing it.
I'm going to have to redo it anyway if you do it wrong. So yeah, I just hope to be grouped with either of you that that was like a dream scenario for me. It's like, oh, let me know how I can help. I mean, I'm a team, either like the best or a disaster.
Right? You both like, oh, Steph's got it. I don't even need to try it. Yeah.
Yeah. I can see that. I'm so sensibly personality. But I also feel like there's something about that personality type and also why we both really like trivia.
I don't know what it is. And I'm terrible at trivia. So just calling myself out here, right and left for the listeners. We're seeing all the connections.
We're starting to come together. I'm learning a lot about myself during this journey. So thank you, Jimmy. Awesome.
Well, let's let's pivot a little bit. I really appreciate you walking us through that. I think that it's just always again, I keep saying this, but fascinated to understand that people's just like the nuances that come with each of those different milestones. So kind of taking a shift to thinking about what's next in marketing.
So it's a big question. It's a loaded question. But what do you really anticipate is coming up and how do you think listeners should prepare for that? Or how do you think maybe marketers entering the field now should start thinking differently or challenging themselves?
Yeah. I had to think about this one for a bit because I'm like, I don't know, there's always these newsletters or post. It's like the newest thing in marketing. The top thing, what's new, what's coming?
And I actually think this is a little bit of a divisive opinion. But I think we're going potentially an over index too much into AI. I think it's already starting in the, like, I don't know, I just updated my iPad and there's a new like AI playground app that came here for generating images, but I could not get the image I wanted of this is for my three year old son. I couldn't get it to be a crocodile, a dinosaur and a raccoon.
It would only give me a crocodile and then a raccoon slash dinosaur like morph together. And I was just like, this robot is not understanding what my three year old son wants. And I think I'm going to see more of that coming out in marketing, especially companies that are not investing into a good talent to harness the AIPs. I think you can see it when somebody copies and pastes from chat GPT the way it's bolded, the way it has its bullet points or its number, the way it's summarized.
I think if you look at it enough, you can hear the tone of voice that chat GPT or other AIs come with. And so I think companies actually, you need to learn AI, no AI, figure out how it can help with the tactical tasks, removing some of the grunt work or the time spent, but actually need to invest more in understanding your ICP, the human touch, kind of connecting back to the community of it because I think it's going to end up potentially robots talking to robots and what's really going to sell is people talking to people. You can go on. Anybody that can put together a dinosaur, raccoon and crocodile, Judy is your number one customer.
So just side in her DMs, sorry, Judy, but I'm going to see this. This will be the art of this episode. Yeah, I think you're spot on the over-reliance. And I think it's such a helpful tool.
So as we think about the future of marketing, AI is the driver for us to decision making and moving quickly. And it should be able to synthesize and help improve how we are executing tasks, especially busy work, right? So I'm the first user to speak into chat GPT when I'm having a brain dump on an idea or trying to think through some things or it's just like more of a task oriented I'm getting myself around. But when people are using it for every newsletter studying the same or everything on their website starting to sound the same, I think you're absolutely mailing that.
And that's one thing that we should all kind of take a step back and reflect on is that it doesn't have to sound perfect and nor should it ever sound perfect. So appreciate that. Yeah, Judy, thank you so much for coming on with us. Thank you for sharing your journey and your insights.
We're really grateful for your time and we hope everyone listening will start to trust your instincts, keep tailoring your message to the audience in front of you and streamline your dashboards. If you like hearing these journeys, make sure to subscribe and share this episode out to your network. And if you want to nominate a marketing hero, come on and chat with us. Feel free to get in touch.
Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you all next time. Thank you. Bye.
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