Yoodli's Betsy McKibbin Built an AI Version of Herself

In this episode of Marketers of Technology, we speak with Betsy McKibbin, Head of Marketing at Yoodli, an AI roleplay and coaching platform that helps revenue teams practice and scale conversations. Betsy explains how she turned Yoodli's own product into her team's internal enablement engine, building an AI version of herself that pushes new releases straight into a practice session instead of a written brief. She also breaks down the guerrilla marketing behind Yoodli's recent growth, the line she draws on what marketing owns as every function generates its own content with AI, and why she treats AI roleplay as a category that has to be sold before the product can be.Topics Discussed:Building an internal AI persona that turns release notes into a live practice sessionWhy agent workflows fail when they just add another summarization layerExpanding AI roleplay from sales enablement into retail, healthcare, legal, and financeScaling training consistency for teams from a handful of reps to 50,000 and upDrawing a hard boundary on what marketing owns as AI content generation spreads org-wideEducating a market on a category with no existing buying playbookLessons For B2B Tech Marketers:Collapse the release-to-practice gap instead of writing another brief: Betsy's team built Betsy AI, a persona inside Yoodli that scans Asana, Slack, and GitHub for what shipped, then delivers it to reps as a live roleplay they can immediately practice. The old cadence was a periodic brief handed to sales. The new cadence has to be constant, since releases ship daily and reps who last practiced last week are already behind. The shift is not the AI summary. It is that the update and the practice happen in one session, with no handoff between them.Kill the agent chain before it multiplies your content problem: Betsy's first version had agents generating a weekly report, which then got fed into other people's agents for further summarizing, adding a layer of content without closing any gap. She got value once she stopped optimizing for more content and used AI to compress the distance between a release shipping and a rep being able to speak to it correctly.Build enablement as an expanding funnel, not a one-time rollout: internal enablement was the first problem Yoodli solved. The next target is extending that instant-update-plus-practice loop to resellers and partners, and eventually customers, treating enablement as a distribution channel rather than a training checkbox.Move faster than your approval chain when news creates a free window: when a national broadcast crew set up two blocks from Yoodli's office, a marketer on the job two weeks grabbed a cardboard sign and got the company name into a live shot with no planning cycle. The lesson is not newsjacking. It is that the marketer had standing authority to act without sign-off, and speed turned a coincidence into a real spike in site visitors.Sell the category before you sell the platform: AI roleplay has no established evaluation process the way HR tech or project management software does, so Yoodli built resources to help buyers navigate the category itself. The bet is that earning trust as the guide to an unfamiliar space converts better long-term than leading with product features.// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co //Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM