With all respect, all due respect, to the co pilots of the world, we're gonna take a slightly different angle when we talk about this topic today, which is how go to market teams are getting real business value out of AI. Real business value in a sustainable, repeatable way. So first and you've heard this from a a few other folks. Ian was up here, and he showed a lot of slides and a lot of data about what's going on inside of b two b at a super high level. It's pretty rough out there. Probably not news to all y'all.

CAC is up. Lifetime value is down. Valuations are down.

Not good. Some data, not as deep as Ian's, but corroborating the same thing. Over the last five years, CAC is up almost seventy percent. Company valuations are down twenty percent against the long term mean, not against the twenty twenty two highs.

Why did this happen? Why is CAC increasing? Why is lifetime value decreasing?

It's not anybody's fault. It's because go to market teams have so much to do, and often they become the most expensive part of the business and one of the least efficient parts of the business. So you have something to do, and then you roll out a new product line or you expand into a new geography or you you have to do something else. And all of a sudden, you have all of these tasks to dos, processes to execute.

So what do you do? You bring on another application. You bring on another person. You hire a bunch of new people in a new geography.

Like, all these different things, and it adds up to the what we have now. And a handful of other speakers today use this phrase, which I thought was pretty interesting, which is that we have this environment of go to market bloat, the accumulation of all the very well intentioned, investments that you make across the go to market engine that are yielding underwhelming, unperforming underperforming results.

This manifests in a handful of ways. I mentioned a couple of them already, probably gonna be pretty familiar to you. Application sprawl, tool bloat. You know, you have a a SaaS platform that crosses the t's on all of your contracts.

Like, what am I looking at? Somebody earlier today said that they're a CEO of a company and they don't they hate looking at the fifteen line items for all the sass they have. I was like, fifteen? That's like an order of magnitude off.

Like, other companies are looking at hundreds of app. We have vendors that help us spend less on SaaS. SaaS vendors that help us spend less on SaaS. And you're like, what is going on here?

Another way that bloat manifests. Hyper specialized full time employees. You hire a person to do one specific thing and then they're very narrowly cast. And that expertise is valuable, but how can we get more breadth in what people are responsible for?

Manual processes that have to be executed painstakingly in a very siloed way that end up creating all of these things end up creating disconnected data. It's It's not talking to each other. There's no real leverage there created from the data. This is a major problem.

In fact, it's the biggest problem that go to market leaders are facing this year. We hear it over and over and over again, and I see a lot of people nodding. Hopefully, you're not just being polite. Maybe you're nodding off because it's the end of the day.

The promise of AI is to experience a pretty significant from to. And, again, with all respect to the copilots out there, you're probably not gonna achieve true go to market velocity with the Copilot experience because it is still a manual process. It is it does still require prompting skills. It's a new thing.

It's another application.

So how can you achieve real go to market velocity? You need to think a little bit differently about AI.

This is what I see from a lot of companies.

They bring on again, well intentioned, and they're thinking about their AI strategy, and they bring on a copilot for this.

And one of their legacy vendors has one little solution for this. Or they have they look at another tool and it solves this one little thing. And they end up in this similar danger zone that many of us are in already with legacy SaaS, where a lot of the tools that you have solve hyper bespoke, very small use cases in a siloed way that does not get infused across the rest of your organization. Don't allow that to happen.

Generative AI is a totally different paradigm for how technology works, and it can break down silos in a way that is actually real unlike some previous generations we've had. And so your go to market AI strategy needs to be in this part of the quadrant. We always wanna be in the top right of the quadrant. It needs to be systematic, and it needs to be a strategic deployment of how you're using AI.

And so I'm using the phrase go to market AI strategy very intentionally. This is not your content marketing AI strategy. This is not your, SDR AI strategy. This is a go to market AI strategy that can and should be interconnected across all the various elements of your go to market team.

Very, very important for you to think this way. Think in systems. That's how you're gonna find leverage in the system. And in fact, largely, this is the role of operations.

Operations exists at a company in order to provide leverage.

And now there's an ability to provide leverage in a totally different way, and that's what business value is. So, I know there's a wide array of folks in here, ops, marketing leaders, sales leaders, etcetera. It is a full go to market team's responsibility to do this, and a lot of it is powered, as it always is, by the fine folks in operations that actually understand how the pipes work, how the plumbing works, and how to deliver information to the people where they are, where they need it.

So the goal of AI and how to get real business value out of it is to do these three things, codify your processes.

I'm gonna I've said that a couple times. I'm gonna keep beating this. You need to codify your processes. Who in your company is the best person at writing an SEO, a piece of SEO, search engine optimized content?

Who is that person? Okay. Sit them down. Say, what is your process for doing that?

I search the keyword. I look at the first three Google results. I look at the headers. I read the content.

I understand that people also ask questions. I look at, all the other things inside that article, and that's my basis to create an SEO content brief. And then I take that brief and I think about the audience all the way. What all of these processes there are hundreds of them.

Open your sales playbook to any page. Open your marketing, finance, ops page to any page, and you'll see a process that can and should be codified inside of AI. Now can every process be codified? Maybe not.

But nine out of ten, maybe more. Definitely can be. So be thoughtful about these human processes that can be codified with AI. Does this remove the human from the loop?

It does not. Human strategy, streamlined AI process, human in the loop at the end. It's kind of this AI sandwich with humans on both sides. Very, very important.

But that middle part is what's causing bloat right now. And if you can get that down to be as streamlined as possible, I hesitate to use the word automated. I think it more as streamlined because it's not full automation here. Human, AI, human, it's not full automation.

But it's streamlining processes to get that cost out of the business and to allow you to achieve that greater velocity.

Velocity is speed and direction. So it's one thing to move fast, and you could fully automate, let's just say, your SDR team right now and say, oh, yeah. We're gonna achieve huge speed, and we're gonna send millions of emails. And then you're gonna wreck your domain.

You're gonna burn through your TAM. You might see a bump in pipeline, but it's gonna plummet. That's what full automation is. So streamline is a bit of a different word.

Velocity is speed and direction. You wanna run fast in the correct direction, that four minute mile that Ian was talking about. Integrating systems is really important. Generative AI has the capability of understanding data in a way that systems just have not been able to before.

Structured data, pretty easy. Salesforce and Marketo can talk to each other. Cool. It's all relational databases.

Unstructured data? No chance. Sales transcripts, PDFs, things that are on your website. All that is data that can be leveraged by generative AI, and you can integrate these systems together in ways you've never been able to before. And finally, that all serves to connect your teams in a way that they've been disconnected.

And now you can connect them by being smart about your processes, being smart about your systems.

This is an uncharitable view of how things break down right now from an operational standpoint. As I mentioned, like, if when data's flowing from one system to another system, we're good. We got pipes for that from HubSpot to Marketo or, you know, whatever. Those systems?

Cool. We got that. But things break down when humans start to get involved. We wanna serve this data from one system to a human.

Well, is it gonna be really enough for them to execute? We need that human to put data into the system. Good luck getting your rep sent or anything in a CRM ever. And we need a human to provide a really good and standardized experience to another human.

How does one of our sellers interact with a buyer, and how do we make sure that's consistent across all of our sellers? It isn't.

But if you are smart about how you think about codifying your processes with AI, you can flip the script on this. You can remove the bloat that exists across a lot of these processes, and you can achieve some pretty impressive results.

So now with that preamble done, how are go to market teams actually getting business value out of AI? I'm gonna do something a little unorthodox here, which I'm gonna put information on the slide and then I'm not gonna talk about what's on the slides. So if you're experiencing a little cognitive dissonance, you're not alone. It's somewhat intentional, but I think it, storytelling is probably a better way of approaching this.

Again, beating just this over the head, codifying processes. This is how you flip the script. This is how you go from bloat to velocity. Alright.

So here we go. Cognitive dissonance engaged.

We were working with a revenue operations team before their fiscal year started on February first.

And for those of you in sales, rev ops, how many of you? Okay. You okay. Got a good amount. You're probably familiar with you get a new territory. You have two hundred new accounts.

Great.

Now what?

And it's hard. Creating territories is very hard. But we were working with a rev ops team, and we had their head of rev ops and their head of SDR. And we said, head of SDR, talk us through your process for building an account plan. What do you do?

I look at, I look at their website for this, this, and this information. I scan their open jobs to see what they're hiring for and why. I run this, this, and this Google search on the company to find CEO interviews and product launches, press releases, funding announcements, all of these things. I research the industry that they're in to know the macro trends inside that industry, on and on and on and on. Sixty minutes of this person just reverse demoing us of their approach to building an account plan.

We codify that process in AI.

We have the generative AI kind of agents now doing the research on job openings, running those Google searches, pulling all of that data together, sourcing it so that you have all the right information where you need it. And then we work with the rev ops team to write all that information back to wherever they wanted it. You wanna create a Google Doc for an account plan? Cool.

We'll have create all your two thousand Google Docs that you're gonna go have. You wanna write it back to your CRM? Awesome. Now all that information is gonna be right back there in your CRM.

And so day one of their fiscal year, all of the reps got two hundred accounts, and all of those accounts had all of this rich information in there. Where are they placing bets for growth? What are their challenges gonna be? How should we position our value prop based on what we know about this company?

We took the process of the best performing SDR who now leads our SDR team of building that account plan and transmitted that across the rest of the company. So now the from to is two things. One, in the world before this process, the first few weeks charitably, maybe months uncharitably of your fiscal year is flushed down the toilet by reps just doing account research.

Number two. Instead of training the team, the sale the sales team, on how to do research, manual, cumbersome, time consuming. You train them on how to take that information and be strategic about it. Be thoughtful about it.

Okay. Now I have all the silver platter information. How am I gonna sell? How's that gonna change my outreach?

How's it gonna change my discovery, my my demos? All of these things that actually create real meaningful conversations, meaningful relationships with your buyers.

That is a codification of process that actually moves the needle. You can see I don't have any, stats on this page. I I have a couple other stats on these ones coming up.

Same sort of deal here for outbound prospecting. Head of SDR. Bring us your best rep. Who was your top performing rep last year? And how do they do their outbound prospecting?

Who are the members that they try and engage of the buying group? Above the line personas, below the line personas. When they're researching a persona, when they're looking at somebody's LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook or some whatever databases you're using for information, what are you looking for and why?

How do you build that kind of mental map of what the org structure is and who's responsible for what and the metrics they care about, all of those things? How do you develop a real point of view on a contact? And then again, use AI to stitch together a series of prompts that create a workflow that codifies this process. And it's not just the contact research in this case.

It's also mister and missus SDR. How do you take that account research? I know where this company is placing bets for growth. I know what their challenges are.

And then take that contact research. I know what they're responsible for, what they care about. And how do you combine that into fifty words of an email? It's really hard.

It's really hard, but AI can do it. Can give you a passable first draft. And so now, day one of the fiscal year, every single rep gets two hundred, like, new accounts that are fully fleshed out with account plans there. They get five, and this was just what they wanted, five key contacts at every single one of those accounts fully researched with everything there with the first draft emails written to the contact record.

Not sent. Human in a loop on the back end.

The rep can go spend thirty seconds editing instead of thirty minutes writing and get all that time back. So So what does the sales rep do instead? Instead of spending all that time researching, writing, flushing time down the toilet, They're doing the video messaging. They're doing the high touch stuff. They're doing the social selling. They're they're doing the things that actually move the needle, and they're doing it in the context of what matters to that company as opposed to what matters to them.

And that is the from to that we're experiencing.

Now the other cool thing that happened and, again, we're thinking in systems here. And I know I only put up the account research and the outbound prospecting. But the other cool thing that happened is we sat down with our account based marketing team. We said, how do you build your landing pages? You have your landing page template.

You use Webflow. Cool. What are the sections?

Header one, hero text, body, all the things, carousel text, all the things. Like, show us how you structure your landing pages. And then we're gonna take that account plan that we built. We're gonna look at the messaging that we created based on the contact research. We're gonna create custom landing pages for all of these people in a snap.

It's wild. It's absolutely wild. Still, ABM strategy is there. So now what does the ABM team get to do? They get to do events like this.

They're not clicking around in the back end of their CMS trying to figure out how to create custom pages. They're letting the technology care of that so they can focus on the human strategy and the human relationships.

Pretty cool.

Deal management is another one. Again, begging your reps to put information into the CRM. Good luck. Good luck.

So now day one of the fiscal year, all of the transcripts that we have had, sales transcripts, if you're using a call recording software, which mostly everybody is, if you're doing virtual sales, which mostly everybody is, you have this unbelievable dataset at your disposal that is often totally under leveraged. So we took all of the calls that had happened within, they said, six month window. If you want a nine month, twelve month, eighteen month, whatever. Whatever window you want, we did for six months.

Looked at all the transcripts, previous conversations that happened for all the accounts that they were gonna assign in the new fiscal year, and tease out all the information that they wanted. If you're a medic shop for qualification, we can have all of that medic information stored on the account record. If you want, the people that were involved in the deal that are no longer at that company so you you can do a champion chaser type play, We can do all that. Take your sales playbook.

Take your marketing playbook, any page, and think about the process that it takes to go do this. And I almost guarantee you can codify that process inside of AI. This is a very different approach than the Copilot experience, which again is useful and you should do, and it'll help you learn how to manipulate the large language models. But the real value comes from your strategy for how to do this kind of stuff, the go to market motions that actually move the needle.

So think if you can think this way and you can stitch these prompts together into workflows, and if you use copy add to do that, it'll be very happy, then you're gonna realize the from to here. You're gonna go from this situation where things probably feel pretty broken. I know at companies I've been in the past, things have felt pretty broken to this universe where you've got greens across the boat. The right information is making its way into the systems and then back to the people.

The codification of best practices happen so you know that the way that buyer or seller one is operating is the same way that sellers two, three, four, five down the line are operating. And that's the peace of mind that you, from a leadership perspective, need to to know that you're always putting your best foot forward. That's what AI can do. That is the business value.

It's not write me a blog post.

That's small potatoes.

It's the bigger systematic stuff that can really impact the entire team.

And this is how you go from bloat to true velocity.

It takes time, just like building any other process takes time, upfront, to codify those processes, to find the people in your company that are the best people at this, and then to actually get them to tell you how they do it. What's their magic? It's hard to do. It takes time.

It is worth the time. For Am people here have built a process before. And, certainly, I I've been in a position where in the early days before the process was documented, I'd be like, I'll just do it myself. It's faster.

Can't do that. Gotta put in the time upfront. Get that process codified.

See what you can, quote, unquote, outsource to AI, and go do it.

And that's the leverage that you're gonna get. That is how you go from this red, red, red CAC skyrocketing, valuation plummeting, to green, green, green.

We're gonna CAC is going down. Why?

In the old world, it's actually it's been five months now since this, company rolled out this new process and these rich accounts and the rich contacts and the all the great outbounding.

And I talked to the head of rev ops in preparation for this last week. And he said, we had, the financial profile that we had or the operating plan that we had was one SDR supporting two AEs. Pretty normal. He's like, now we've got one SDR supporting three AEs across across a global business.

So a fifty percent increase in span of control for an SDR. So instead of needing thirty SDRs to to support their global team, they only need twenty. Doesn't mean they're firing people. It means that they they don't need to hire people in the future.

That is how you change this financial profile. That is how you control customer acquisition cost.

The relationship that you that you build with customers because you understand what matters to them and you have meaningful conversations and relationships with them, that is how you increase lifetime value.

That is the business value of AI.

So I'm not sure if anybody has heard it communicated quite like this before, but it's a bit of a different way of thinking about things. It's much more systematic. It's systematic. And that's the challenge to all of you to really go home and think about is what are those systems that we can codify? The low hanging fruit for most companies, if you need a place to start, typically, is this outbound world, account research, contact research, sequence creation, or cadence creation.

The second is, content creation. So how are we gonna improve our SEO? How are we gonna, create more customer stories? The third is campaign execution.

So given a campaign brief, we need to create all of this landing page and waterfall content. The fourth is account based marketing. As I mentioned, very easy to scale account based marketing. And the fifth is this deal management, AI driven forecasting type thing that's actually taking sales transcripts and making them useful. So those are the kind of the top five places to start. I know that was a bit opaque to me before I started at at Copy dot ai, but I've just seen this now over and over and over again for hundreds of companies. Like, those are the main starting points.

So I know it can be hard. It can be a little bit daunting. It's a new way of thinking. It requires your time, leadership time to codify.

Nobody else can do it. But if you do it, it's well worth it. Pays off pretty quickly. Sixty days within sixty days, ninety days.

And then you start to see the flywheel. And you start to invent your own AI use cases. And you start to codify other processes that other company that are bespoke to your company. Something you're not gonna get out of a cookie cutter, you know, legacy software because you need to customize it for your own process.

That's the value.

That's the value. So if you're interested in seeing how companies are doing this, more than happy to chat with you about it.

It's somewhat self serving for me to just come up here and say, copy it. I can solve all your problems. We can solve a lot of your problems. You can do this in other systems.

You can build your own GPTs. You can do all of that if you want to, or you can go the more purpose built platform route, which is what we're trying to build. So even if you just wanna have a convert like, a philosophical conversation about how to think about this, let me know. It's one of my favorite things to talk about.

So that's all I got for you.