speaker-0: Hey everyone, welcome to Chat B2B, the podcast that gives you a front row seat to AI and B2B marketing. I'm your host, Andrew Rau, co-CEO of Intercept. And on this show, we talk with enterprise marketing leaders who are piloting and scaling AI use cases. Every episode dives into what are they learning and what we can apply in our own organizations. Today's guest is Morali Kandasamy, VP of Growth and Strategy at Path Factory, a content intelligence and customer journey platform. We dig into how AI is reshaping account-based marketing. What are the biggest blockers to ABM success and what happens when the first reader of your content is no longer human? Lots of great stuff to dive into. you like what you hear, don't forget to follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. This is Chat B2B. Let's get into it. ⁓ So Morali, thank you for finding time to join us on the pod. ⁓ I wanted to first dive into a little bit about Path Factory. mean, because it sits at this really interesting intersection between content and data and buyer experience, right? As you think about orchestration, we're to dive more into that specifically around account-based marketing. But for those who are just maybe not as familiar, can you just give us a quick overview? What does Path Factory do? And just just your role there.
speaker-1: No, absolutely. Thank you for that. I'll start with my role. So it gives you context. So I've been with Path Factory for way too long, almost nine years now, 10th year running. And even before that, I was a customer of Path Factory when I was managing the global operations at Western Union. The thing that I realized was we always talk about content and content is such an important thing to educate our prospect in the solution that we are providing. But no one really thought about tracking it, right? The analytical aspect of it and the impact of that content. And that's what drawn me towards Path Factory, where I feel like we sit very beautifully with the content, the data, and the buyer's experience, right? So we are not sitting on siloed on a delivery mechanism of a marketing solution or a technology solution, but we are really focusing on the buyers and how they are consuming content and how this is impacting the marketers. and the sales team. So the orchestration of this journey is important. So we do two things really, really well at Path Factory. One, we remove the friction of content experience, which means the prospect is not going on a scavenger hunt across your website, across your nurture campaigns. And then we recommend the next relevant content for the ⁓ prospect. this way they continue to binge on the content. The second thing we do is we go into the deep engagement analytics. This is beyond the opens, clicks and downloads that traditional marketers relied on. Now we are going into the topic of interest, not just the topic of interest. Are these prospects meeting the threshold on these assets? Are they meeting the threshold on the topic? Where is the buyer in their journey? They're really understanding this and how all of these things can be used for those re-engagement campaign. ultimately empowering sales to move on to the next level. So these are the two important things that we believe in Pathfactory. What I say is it's about content intelligence and activating those intelligence.
speaker-0: Yeah, I love that because I think you're right that a lot of people still or a lot of organizations still pump out a ton of content and they just sort of spray and pray. And so when you ask, hey, how many people have actually downloaded that asset or read that asset or watched that video? Yeah, they don't really know in a lot of cases.
speaker-1: The worst thing is, this is the hypothetical question I ask all the CMOs I engage with and the VPs of marketing I engage with. I tell them, you don't need to answer, but just think about it. Tell me how much time I need to spend on your content to understand the core solution or a product that you're selling me. Don't think there is one person who have given me an answer confidently saying, yes, this is how much time that they need to spend. Because we don't think
speaker-0: Yeah
speaker-1: about content in that way because we hire content marketers, we hire marketers, we hire marketing ops people to just keep cranking out content out there, not really understanding the impact on pipeline.
speaker-0: Yes. And I do also want to double click on when you talked about recommending the next best asset. And I know you've got some interesting stats here around what percentage of people want to consume multiple assets, because we typically are going to push them to a gate, Download this ebook. But what I think is interesting with Path Factory, and as you set up sort of the content libraries, It is providing the next best asset. So you can give people five, six, seven assets, which they want, and you don't have to hit them with five, six, seven gates. That I think is also another unlock that we've seen. Absolutely.
speaker-1: Absolutely. Absolutely. These are the roadblocks or things created by the technology that was given to us 10, 15 years back. There were marketing automation platforms that said, don't have more than one call to action. The best time to send emails at 10 on Tuesday morning and Thursday morning. We are indented with these kind of information that is so old school. But because those marketers are trained on that, they do that. Same thing with landing pages, right? If you really think about it, you want to download a report. Just imagine how many steps you're going through, even if you're a known visitor to that. You've got to fill out a form. Then that form takes you to another page. Or even before that, you click on a call to action. It takes you to a form that says how amazing this thing will be. Then you click on that thing. And sometime they'll say, we'll email you the content. We are creating so much roadblocks for a prospect. All they want to do is educate on your solution. And we do have a lot of data because we've been collecting data on how a known visitor behaving, how a first time visitor behaving with your content versus somebody who has been in your nurture campaign. So definitely that's what the users of Path Factory benefit from. They can really take this and remove that friction for the prospect.
speaker-0: Yeah, we've seen that firsthand for sure. Let's talk a little bit about the ABM for a second. So equal to content intelligence, and I feel like we've got a lack of visibility there. I think there's a big variance when you think about ABM. Like when I talk to, again, we're talking to the same folks, enterprise technology companies, people are in very different places with ABM. I find that some are We're still defining that internally, still building the engine. Some are more advanced. Do you see the same thing? I guess the follow on question is, how is ABM changing? Maybe for the teams that are a little bit more advanced, how has it changed over the past year or two?
speaker-1: This is a very interesting and controversial question, even though it sounds so simple. I see this time in and time out all the time when I'm talking to new prospects specifically, they are still defining and these are like matured companies on the outset. But when you dive deeper into their marketing and their sales strategies, they're still at the very, very infant stage of ABM, which suppresses you. How do you operate?
speaker-0: Yeah
speaker-1: Those marketers are going to come after me for sure, but it is the reality of things. So from the mature ABM marketers and marketing strategists, what I have seen is they have definitely moved away from account targeting to account understanding. Right. For me, that is important. What I mean by account targeting is yes, we always talked about sales and marketing being BFF, but ultimately what ended up happening on the old school ABM is sales will give you a list. marketing is an air cover. This is what I call an account targeting. Because sales never believed in what marketing is doing from an AME site. And this is something that I've heard from one VP of marketing who basically said, Merly, now I can go into those sales meeting and put my chin up and say, this is what we generated. Whereas before, marketing will take, let's say, 10 accounts and go to the sales team. And the head of sales will say, My team has been talking to these guys for the last three years. What are you doing? Right? We know this information. So this is what we moved away in the last two years. would say moved away from account targeting to account understanding. And what that means is it's not about running a campaign against a list that sales is providing. This is about identifying the buying group. It's not just about an account. It is understanding the behavioral aspect of the buying group. What I mean by that is every person in that buying committee, again, we have data on this, what is an enterprise level buying committee looks like versus an SMB versus mid market. So when you're talking about eight to 16, sometimes 24 people in an enterprise buying committee, content need for these people are completely different. We can't be cranking out the same material and say, oh, here's one case study for everybody, right? What is an influencer versus champion versus, you know,
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: technical was as Dershan maker need, right? A lot of time people focus heavily on Dershan maker content, but we all know the Dershan maker is spending like three minutes on content where they're listening to the champions for more than that time. So where should we start educating on that? So this has changed. And what I want to also add, I know we're going to be touching on AI at some point. I know that's always the thing right now.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: That is also getting introduced in understanding the behavior. So the shift for me is moving away from the static segmentation, which is the list, to a dynamic signal driven engagement insight. So for me, this is where the shift has happened really is moving to a dynamic signal driven. And that's what we are focusing on. How do we dynamically change the content for these different personas? A lot of time, if you think about two years back or even like some other service providers, what they're doing is they can change the logo of the company and say, welcome Andrew. What we believe is not that. We believe Andrew needs a specific set of content, and that's what he should see. If Andrew is coming from retail, what we should see was somebody is coming from financial services, what we should see. So that's where the tagging and all that ⁓ back and stuff that Pathfactory is really good, really helps with this change.
speaker-0: And that's where we've seen a lot of success and potential at Path Factory is really, look, we know based on let's say UTM parameters, if there's a specific campaign running, we know what they've engaged on, or if we're sending an email and we know who they are and what industry, how do we use that intelligence and display the content that's gonna make the most sense for them, right? So I think it's a huge unlock. Now, I want to dive a little bit deeper into the AI piece. so you started to get there a little bit. How do you see AI impacting, know, the ADM in terms of a strategy, just in even what Path Factory can do now with some of the AI powered capabilities that we've seen in action? Talk to us a little bit about that.
speaker-1: See, AI is moving so fast, even before we think about recommendation on AI side, which we have been doing even before AI was the buzzword, right? ⁓ We were doing recommendation around content even before all these things have started. So where I feel like AI is playing a big role, even from our deep engagement analytics, is we are not solely focused on these metrics, right? Where it's like our own topic of interest, how deeply we are doing. What AI is really helping us understand is the cluster engagement signals and multiple stakeholders. How do we get to that? And what is also we are seeing is the surface level patterns that humans can't catch from an engagement perspective. And recommended next best content is something that we've been doing long before anything has happened. But for us to understand, you brought this up in the beginning where you were talking about that binging behavior. For me? AI has definitely improved and increased that. Before, our AI, I wouldn't call it AI recommendation, four or five years back when our machine learning was kicking in, it was only looking at few attributes, which means ⁓ topic of interest from a relation perspective. If there is one topic, if there is another asset on that topic that was performing really good, we would recommend that. So that's what I call our recommendation 1.0. But now we are going beyond that topic of interest and performance metrics, right? So now with the deep analytics and tagging and everything, we can really focus on that. And this is where AI for me has become very, very adaptive and predictive. It is not about reactive. It is very adaptive to the user engagement and making it predictive. Those are the two things that I would call, obviously there's generative elements to it. We'll get into that later. But if you ask me where AI is playing a part today, is how quickly we can adapt to both engagement and the follow-up of activation.
speaker-0: I actually want to come back to when you made a comment around sales and marketing and the, you know, the whole traditional working with each other and the human side of it. So, ⁓ you know, we, as you know, have a, AI powered research platform called watch tower. And so this is this particular topic was based on just over 30,000 B2B markers around the world that we're talking about. specifically what is preventing ABM programs from delivering results. 84 % it was sales and marketing alignment was still number one, which is, it's incredible that that's still number one. The next few where there is no clear ABM strategy, unclear sales follow-up, unclear lead handoff processes. And what's interesting to me is that none of these are technology problems. They're all people problems, organizational problems. so how does Path Factory help close that gap between this? mean, this is fundamentally a people problem, right?
speaker-1: see, this is why the stat doesn't surprise me at all. It sounds so big, and you think this should have been solved by now. But you're right. It is not a technology problem. So at Pathfactory, we think that at this, more like a shared visibility problem. Because the data is always siloed. So for me, it's 100 % shared visibility problem. Because think about it. marketing is doing all these work and they're getting to understand the buyer's behavior and all of these things. But the buyer's signal is not passed or interpreted the same way between marketing and sales. Marketing is seeing one data a specific way. Sales are seeing another data another way. Right. So there is no common data layer for the buyer's engagement. Right. So what sales are seeing is, hey, Marketing is sending, if you think traditional marketing, they're saying, hey, somebody opened an email, clicked on an email or downloaded something, go follow up. Sales is like getting hundreds and thousands of these kinds of notifications. Yeah. So what does it mean? Right. And what happens is this is what I call notification fatigue. At one point, the sales is like, ⁓ another notification. Right. They're tired of this thing. So what we are trying to do at Path Factory is we are unifying to make these notifications valuable to the sales team. And they read this the same way as marketing teams wants them to read. We have unified in the last 18 months, we have unified campaign engagement data and web engagement data together. This is very, very important piece because what happens in an ABM, for example, you might have certain champions from a specific account who you're sending emails They're opening, they're reading, they're consuming that content. That is great. Now you can qualify them and send it to sales. That's one way of doing it. But now the minute you start engaging the web analytics data to this scenario, now we are saying there are four people who are known in this account is engaging. At the same time, there are 16 anonymous visitors from the same account is engaging on the website. Now we got 20 people from this account engaging on a specific topic. That is valuable for your sales team. Now add the notification that is meaningful. Rather than saying somebody opened and downloaded, now you're saying, hey, this account is focusing on these topics, and these 20 visitors have spent over, let's say, 40 minutes on your content, specifically around this topic. By the way, your champion and the decision maker have spent 12 minutes on this specific topic, right? Now this changes the game, right? The alignment gets better. The sales is actually seeing value in what you're doing. And then obviously we can do one to one ABM strategies and all that to so-called air cover. I hate that word, but we can still do that where hyper personalization comes in because all of this engagement data feeds into your marketing automation platform. And now it is a very cohesive alignment between market and sales. It is not a volume game. Because if you really think about it before it was a volume game, MQLs, downloads keep sending it to sales, which did translate. And that's where the mistrust and misalignment happened. So I agree with your survey. 84 % seems high, but that's the reality where we are living.
speaker-0: I like the way that you phrase that it is a shared data visibility problem because you're right in that sales and marketing are looking at different metrics, different dashboards, but if we could all be looking at the same data, we can understand the same story and be able to act accordingly. really think that that's a critical piece of this.
speaker-1: So the word I use is the buyer's truth, right? Because there is no internal opinion here anymore. The internal opinion is taken apart and it is the buyer's truth as an account. Right? When 20 people from an account is engaging in your content for 40 minutes, they're definitely not doing that for their health and entertainment. There is a serious problem they want to solve. And how do we support that and how do we improve that education process? Yeah.
speaker-0: And I think that because there's a lot of these lead engine platforms where it's just content syndication, you get these leads, you fire them over to sales. Marketing has got this box of like, how many leads did I generate? How many MQLs? The challenge with this is that it is, your point, has been a volume game, a quantity game. So you throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and then You know, the challenge of sales has to actually go through all of that. And then they lose trust. And then anything that comes from marketing, they think is at low quality. But to your point where you can say you've got it, you've got 20, 30 people engaging, that is a real signal. And we know what topics they're actually surging on. As I mentioned, the, one of the responses ⁓ or topics that was discussed was no clear ABM strategy. And one blocker that came up, which was partly a technology problem. was around how the ABM stack doesn't work well on, let's say, a CRM infrastructure that was very legacy. I think that there was one comment, and because we can actually see actual posts and content, says, you can't run an ABM play when your CRM thinks 100 different buyers are one entity. And it's just like, how does Path Factory help solve that? Because there is this tech debt that we're all kind of sitting with. trying to make a thing work.
speaker-1: See, for me, the problem with, again, I have been a CRM admin in my past life. I've been a marketing automation hands-on user in my past life. So when I'm saying this, this comes purely from heart. This is not something that I've sat and just listened to the stories. The goal of CRM and the goal of the marketing automation platforms are two different things. But sometimes as marketers and as a marketing organization, we try to blend these two together. Because if you really think about what is a CRM, I would say it's more like a record-based thinking, right? It basically records what you're doing, that's it. Where else a marketing solution or a marketing automation platform is what I call behavior-based thinking, right? So how do you blend this thing? Because Salesforce is all about sales CRMs, I shouldn't use the Salesforce word. But CRMs are basically on leads, contacts, and account and opportunities. Where else when you're talking about a marketing automation platform, it's about creating this behavioral aspect. But for me, the way we need to think as marketers trying to impact pipeline and supporting sales is the buying group, the intent, and the progression of the buying group. So if you go back to the basics, What is the role of marketing? Some people will say, ⁓ we need to create awareness. Some people will say, we need to create MQL. But you're all being selfish on your goals. Forget that for a second. Think about the prospect and their challenges. My goal, if I'm a marketer, my goal is to educate my prospect as quickly as possible on the core solution and services I'm providing so they can understand what I'm helping them with. That's it. If you boil this down, that is the goal of marketing. And once somebody understands this, they will buy your solution or they will buy a solution, right? Whoever they feel comfortable with. So for me, taking this behavior-based thinking from the marketing automations and which is powered by Pathfactory itself, you know, ⁓ one there and overlaying that with the engagement intelligence on top of the CRM, this is how I would put it. overlaying that with an engagement intelligence on top of your CRM data is going to be the winning formula for anybody who's talking at. So instead of asking like how many leads do we have, we should ask which account is showing the coordinating buying behavior. Right. That is the shift I think will help ABM work. ABM will not succeed without sales team. I'll tell you right now for ABM to succeed. We talked about alignment before. The only way AMEM will succeed is with sales team. If we don't align that, the minute the sales team start asking this question, are we showing or are we seeing the coordinated buying behavior? If I'm the sales guy, I don't want to talk to one person in the company. I want to talk to like 100 people in the company at the same time, because that is my true ⁓ marketing support that I can get from the marketing team.
speaker-0: Yeah, no, agreed. think we always say to the marketing team, that look, can only, it's particularly a B2B and an ABM specifically, you can only get so far from a marketing standpoint. You must have sales engagement if we want to be successful, right? So back on the whole how AI is impacting this conversation and just ABM at large. You know, we, did have another topic that we were tracking as part of watch tower. And this topic actually had about 180,000 conversations about how AI can potentially improve ABN. And what was interesting is that AI chatbots came in at 83%. Workflow automation was about 14%. The AI chatbot was really high. And I just. I'm curious to get your take on that. Why do you think that is and how do you interpret that?
speaker-1: See, I think that was the easiest front end of AI. For me, that's the baby that everybody was able to have. So I think that's what people think that AI chat bot. But now you can start seeing those companies are dying as quickly as they came. They're dying very quickly. So for me, it is the most visible application that came out first. Everybody thought it's going to be the winner, but now people are really understanding it is not a long-term solution. The long-term solution from my perspective and Pathfactory's perspective, if I can speak for the product team, is around signal processing and workflow automation. Because you really need to understand. Because how do you do a cold start? For me, that's an interesting aspect of AI compared to a chatbot where I have to do a workflow. And then I need to have a mind map of what question to ask this. It's all great for the first three months of implementation. Then you hand it over to this poor soul who has to take care of that. And then they have the miserable life and they leave the company and then that chat is gone. So I don't think that's a long term solution. For me, the long term solution is around automation and intelligence layer for the engine. So that is what I see. We do have a chat. Agent so-called I will not call them a chat bot. It is not a chat bot ⁓ We call them a chat agent. It does a lot of different things without anybody manually managing it but yeah providing information that is needed so for me Interpreting intent is important, but I do understand why almost 80s that 80 seems to be the regular number in your so yeah But for me that that is not surprising. It's an early version of AI For me, it's interpreting intent is important. How do we handle cold start is important. And triggering right actions across the system is important. Not so much from a chatbot perspective, but more from an agent perspective.
speaker-0: Tell us a little bit more on the chat agent and how somebody on the buying committee could potentially use that feature. Talk to us a little bit about that, because I think that's interesting too.
speaker-1: Absolutely. Just I'll use a scenario that our marketing team came up, right? I'm really proud of our team to leverage our solution. They're the number one customer. Typically when we were doing ABM pages, right? Whether it's one too many or one to few or even one to one, it was very one sided, which means I send a specific page to a buying committee. They can read the content. We personalize the content within that, which is good because every persona will see something different. That is great. But now adding the chat agent into that experience, whether you're embedding that within the Path Factory landing pages, or you're putting them as a widget, or you're incorporating that across your website as an embed or ⁓ a thing in your resource center, wherever you're using it. I'll go back to the one-to-one example. So if I'm working with an enterprise company and I have shared this page with the person, rather than if they want beyond what content I've sent, now they can engage with a chat agent right away. Got it. In the back end, I'm sitting there and I'm collecting all of that engagement data within the chat agent. And obviously, our chat agent has a genetic function. So if they said, I'm tired of this chat, let me just speak to an expert or I want a demo, I want to speak to support. whatever it is, our chat agent is smart enough to understand that and trigger those follow up action. So it's not just about question. So for me, this is taking it to the next level. I'm not pushing them to our website. I'm pushing them to our chat agent, which address the additional questions that they might have. So for me, this is again, removing the friction on an ABM account. I don't want my enterprise account to go to my website and search and do a scavenger hunt. Now, within an ABM page, whether it's an embed or a widget inside that page, they have access to extensive content that is beyond that ABM collection that we have put in together.
speaker-0: think it's a really smart innovation that you guys have come up with. think the other one that I think is a of a parallel to that is how you can create these ⁓ custom pages for the buying committee and being able to say, let me take a step back. I think one of the challenges that people have is that, let's say Andrew at a company is very excited about Path Factory. Okay. Why need to now go sell it into the buying committee? And so I've got to make the case and I got to sell it. And I think there's, there's a feature that you're able to look at, click a bunch of different resources and to be able to spin up a page that has that there that I can easily share. To me, that's like, that's, that's very valuable because I have to facilitate that conversation and that I got to sell it internally. So can you just chat a little bit about that? Cause I think that that's a really powerful one too.
speaker-1: Absolutely. And this is what scares me sometimes when you're too ahead of your time, whether it's the right thing or not. Right. Like for me, that that that feature is so cool. Just think about it. Right. I always like to use analogies and storytelling in what whatever we do, because go back five, eight years back. If you have to book a flight ticket, what were you doing? You would either call an agent or you'll email a travel agent and say. Here's all the different flights that I'm interested in, get me in this price, blah, blah. Today, till the last hour, you can change the flight, you can choose the seat, you can do whatever you want. That is what we are trying to do. Typically, even today, marketers, if they have to create a landing page, they submit a Jira ticket or whatever ticket, and then that goes to the web team, whether it's ⁓ whatever complex CMS they have. then that takes two weeks for them to create a static page and you go through it, you get it, and then you try to launch it, right? What we are saying is, marketers, stop building these landing pages. Give the keys to the prospect. When the prospect is doing the research, to your point, they can choose the asset that they're interested in, and then they click off a button, we create a landing page. So this solves the problem. Again, being ahead of time. Will there be a 10 % conversion today? Maybe not. Six months time, one year time, when people understand it, they will. Because I'm using Cloud today, what I'm doing is whenever I run certain table, gives me export the table. using that function. Maybe three months back, four months back, they didn't have that function, so I was manually copy pasting it. I'll copy from Cloud and paste it in my Excel or whatever it is. Today, I can just copy the table and paste it. So it is a matter of helping people. But one other cool feature, I don't know if I've shared this with you, Andrew, actually two that we have come up with, on top of what we are doing, we are also helping marketers. We are not saying, okay, marketers are never gonna create page. What we are telling marketers through our AI page creation is, think about you have a landing page on your website. Or let's say you have an inspiration of a completely different website that you wanna do. Now I can take the URL. put it in Path Factory, click a button, and the system generates the page in your branding. Which means 70 % to 80 % of the work is done. So that's one thing. And then came another challenge for us where our global enterprise customer wanted in different languages. So same thing. Now you create this page in English, you click another button, choose the language you want, it converts all of them into that particular language. Obviously, there's product names and certain things will not translate. but a good 70 % is already done. So for me, these are AI innovation that we are working on, which is removing the friction from a go-to-market team from a speed perspective and also from scale. Today, our customers easily can scale 500 to 700,000 pages with the simple click of buttons.
speaker-0: Yeah, incredible. ⁓ Because I think that we are being asked as marketers to move so much faster, right? And so we need, it's not humanly possible to do that. And so you need the tools to be able to get there and really love the embedded AI capability in that. ⁓ One of the other data points I wanted to get your reaction to, so watch out, this is not an 80 % stat. ⁓ This one was around how marketers think B2B buying will change in 26 because of AI. And the top response, which is around 75%, was actually more content specifically for AI. And so there's this growing conviction that AI is really just becoming the intermediary between the vendor and the buyer. And so how do you think about that one, Morali? And then what is, Path Factory thought about that as well? in terms of how you win the AI buyer or the AI agent potentially. What's your thought on that?
speaker-1: Absolutely. I want to be very clear. We don't create content. That's one thing. But the way we are thinking is how the content that is already created is chunked, tagged, and sequenced. That is important because the content, few months, years, I don't even know how far we are going back in AI, to be honest. We were creating content for humans. That's it. We weren't creating for anybody else. But now we've got to create content for humans and missions. So we are in a very weird place and marketers are still learning, but we are already ahead of that, right? Just like how when the compliance conversation starts in a Senate, we start thinking about it. We also started thinking about like, you know, how we are going to tag these content, how we are going to chunk these content, how we are going to sequence this content, right? Because the engagement signals can be like really helpful for AI driven recommendation. So for us. It is very, very important. The first interaction is not with humans anymore. A lot of people are coming to this through the AI agent's interpretation. So we are definitely already thought about this. The product team is working on this. But I would say it's still work in progress from everybody. But at least everybody is thinking about it. That's the right mindset. That subjective thing. people are ready to park it for a site and saying, hey, this is me, this is, I'm the content writer, I'm gonna write it this way, where people are really thinking about, okay, if I'm gonna write a content no matter what, some mission is gonna go through this, whether it's your own one, or is it the external chats, or sorry, AI engines out there, somebody's gonna read this. So marketers are starting to think about it. I would say we are still at the very, very early stages. That's why you don't have that 80%, I guess.
speaker-0: That's right. One of the things that I can just speak from a content perspective, how we're optimizing for the LLMs. I mean, we've abbreviated this as called beta, partly because it is a beta. It's going to change. The models are going to evolve, right? So best for, which is making sure that your content identifies who your solution is best for. Because if you don't identify that, the model will basically make an inference to say, this is who we think your solution is best for. So really being clear about that. The ease evidence, so it's how do you provide stats and quantitative proof points, which what we find interesting in the models is that if they feel that your statistics sound like BS, they will actually say that. They will say that this stat is too good to be true. I will discount that. So realistic evidence, I should say. The T is for trade-off, and so that is a trade-off with best for. You're best for this? Who are you not best for? And that's a hard discussion that we have with our clients because when we say, well, who do we want to say, declare that we're not the best solution, you should look for alternative, know, our clients will say, no, we're good for everybody. Everybody. Everybody. So this is where... If you don't say where you're not best in class, the model will make it up as well. And then A is just answerability, which is just like the format. How do you chunk it and so forth? All that being said, the rules are being rewritten now. So it's very, very difficult to say, is that the right model that's going to exist in six months? I don't know. Right. That seems to be the model for today.
speaker-1: too, it's changing way too fast.
speaker-0: Yeah, exactly. You know, I want to jump to to one topic around just the overall. I I think what Path Factory is doing is incredible on the content intelligence side. Obviously, we're partners with you guys. We we, you know, we believe in platform. We use the platform. We help our clients use the platform. You know, the one thing is always around, OK, content consumption is one side, but there's the business impact. And so. a buyer might binge on the content hub, end up, you know, the sale might not happen or they might go with a competitor and, so forth. And so ⁓ how do you, how do you think about connecting the content engagement with actual revenue and business outcomes? What's your thought on that? Cause obviously it's like at the end of the day, right? What are you driving in terms of revenue?
speaker-1: See, that is a very, very good question. Ultimately, this is what happens during the renewal process when we have to show the ROI, not just on Pathfactory, but also on the whole of the marketing effort. For me, it's not just about, as we talked about, opens, clicks, and page resets. It is about pipeline velocity. Why does the pipeline velocity is important, and how can Pathfactory show that? Because what were we talking about? rather than waiting every week for an email on your nurture campaign or two weeks on a nurture campaign. Now that process can be done in one day rather than eight week nurture campaign because we are packaging the content in that way. Same thing. When I come to the website, I'm not going on a scavenger hunt. You know, I have to like give this to Nick Path Factory's original, one of the co-founders where he said, Nick Edward, said, the resource center is the graveyard for content. Right. I still use this after almost 10 years because he's absolutely right. When was the last time as a buyer, you went to a resource center of a company and went to page five and found the right resource and engage with that. Never. Right. So exactly. But how much time marketers and web team are spending on that. So this is what I mean. Where else with Path Factory, when you land on a home page or a product page or solution page based on who we are, who you are. we can bring that content to the surface and give you that. So the frictionless journey is a very important part of the education of the prospect. Because think about it. Why am I going to buy your solution? Let's say I'm looking at two solutions. They look exactly the same on the high level. Why am I going to buy your solution? Right. For me, am I understanding your solution faster? Yeah. Right. Once you understand it, Can I articulate that information in front of my colleague and team? Because I want to be the smartest guy in that room when I'm promoting your solution or bringing your solution up. If you don't educate me better, I can't do that. Great. And I am a real life example. There was one time in my career, I got exposed to two marketing automation platform. We will not name names. One gave me a three day training. One gave me on demand training. The three day training one, I bought them in three different companies because of the three day training and the information I got out of it. I don't know if it's a better product or not. I'm not going there. I learned it faster and I was able to use it. So I got comfortable. I looked smarter in that. So I went and did that. To answer your question, if we educate our prospect, the champion, the influencers faster and better, they will vouch for your solution. The two solutions they're looking could be the exact same solution, but who educates them without problem, right? Like then they feel like, the solution will also be designed the same way the marketing is designed. So for me, a pipeline velocity is one important way to look at it from a marketing effort, because there is always question around attribution model and all of that. But if an enterprise deal is closing in six months instead of 10 months, That's a big win for everybody. And if you can expand the buying committee, this is another important metrics nobody measures. How are you growing your buying committee? What is that timeframe? Because from the first call, after you keep the call, follow up call, if you have a hyper personalized one to one landing page as a follow up, that means you're sending it to me, I'm sending to eight of my team members. Now your buying committee has gone to nine in one week. What does that engagement looks like? When you go on the follow-up call, how does it grow? So buying committee coverage is important. Ultimately, the core solution of Pathfactory is the depth of engagement, topic of interest, importance on the asset type. So for me, these three things is our focus. And obviously, AI is definitely ⁓ improving a lot of these things. It's connecting the fragmented signal. We talked about website engagement versus campaign engagement. So that is one thing. predicting the progression is very, important, right? How should the buying committee evolve different stages on the sales cycle, right? So for me, the way I define all of this is first party engagement data. It is true. It is somebody engaging with your content. There is nothing like an intent that says, maybe somebody from this account is looking at something. This is no. Andrew from this account is looking at this topic, right? That's the important.
speaker-0: predictive it's baby
speaker-1: It's validated through first party engagement data. So for me, that pipeline velocity is ultimate. But one data, as I mentioned, nobody's looking at is buying group coverage.
speaker-0: And I ⁓ fully agree. And I think that as Path Factory continues and evolves and new solutions get developed, I wonder if there's this potentially growing blind spot on just the AI traffic. Like if we don't know, for example, where this AI is rep, like what buyer this AI is coming into the page to understand the intent and so forth. I wonder how we unmask that in a way or try and better understand the signal. So if my AI is going out to evaluate solutions, will we be able to see? Like, think, I guess there's a disconnect there that I wonder how we solve that long term. But I don't know. Just a.
speaker-1: Yeah, it to be a whole different conversation by itself.
speaker-0: This will be a, this will be a, an AI factory. This will be a separate business unit from a bad factory. But on this note, if I know you're a busy guy, so I'll just end with a, you know, a forward looking question. You think about in the next 12 months, when you hear modern ABM or best in class, what does that look like? What does best in class ABM look like in 12 months? you think?
speaker-1: See, for me, the number one thing, if you ask me the utopia of ABM, I would say a fully autonomous campaign orchestration. For me, this is important because think about the biggest challenge of ABM. It is not one marketer saying, with the sales guy, I'm going to do it. Then this becomes an air cover. In an ABM, you've touched on this a little bit. Content syndication could be part of it. Paint campaign could be ⁓ paid ads could be part of it. Paid social could be part of it. Email nurture could be part of it. One to one could be part of it. So already we touched on five different teams. Look at the resources that's needed, the content that is needed, the segmentation, the persona, the ICP work that's needed. Imagine a world now where I put my goals and then the system gives me a complete campaign orchestration, choosing the best performing content based on channel, asset type, from your content library, building the whole thing for you, including the landing pages. So for me, that is something that is going to be important, right? For me, that is an emerging one, but it is still important. From you talk about another category, which is essential, right? Otherwise, nobody will touch you. For me, that is real-time personalization. This is going to be so important. And then there are table stakes, right? Marketing, automation, data enrichment, content intelligence. Content intelligence will become a table stake, to be honest. Where, for me, it is going to be AI-driven signal orchestration. For me, that is going to be very, very essential on the fly, like really understanding that. For me, the I always go back to the buying group identification. I think that is important because there was one time one of the customer wanted to create, right? Like where they said, my buying group is these four different personas. I want to build a page that I'm highlighting these things for these four different personas. So for me, that is important and making that dynamic and the marketer doesn't have to think about that. For me, it's important. Ultimately, if you ask for a dream, I will say it'll be like a cross channel. journey orchestration, right? Entirely driven by AI. So for me, that is it. But for me, the biggest shift, if I can like predict the future or how I see, it will become from all of these systems. If you think about it, all the systems we talked about, marketing automation, CRM, CDP, they're all right now is a data storage, right? It is used to store data. For me, the Ethiopia would be, they become What is the word I'm trying to say? Interpret an action in real time. So that's what, for me, will be the true automation slash AI in full potential. Rather than the systems become a data storage place, they will be able to interpret this and act real time based on who is visiting a website, who is doing a campaign. For me, it'll be a point where emails will be empty. It will. the minute somebody clicks on the call to action, that's when the generation will start. Whether it's a copy, the content, the images, I think that will be possible in 12 months.
speaker-0: Well, first of all, the orchestration there, I agree. Because I think this is about how do agentic workflows be able to flow in and out of these different applications and, as you said, data sets to be able to orchestrate and execute. What we're just seeing on the content side is we've now developed a one-of-one content engine that will allow us to ⁓ basically build, customize assets in real time based on the person who's actually submitting for the e-book, let's say. So if it's from, you know, Polly is an example, making conferencing equipment as a technology company, when they download the asset, it will actually be customized to them. It's cross-referencing five, six different databases, but this is the real-time construction of the content. And I think that that gets to, that's what we call it one of one. If we send 20,000 downloads, 20,000 versions actually go out. Exactly. Which is incredible.
speaker-1: And I can't wait for the time where we use a single asset to create so many different variations of it, right? Whether it's an ebook or white paper or a video, imagine having a webinar and creating multiple formats of that. For example, a webinar, a chapterized webinar, a social post webinar, a ⁓ short version of this, right? Then you're taking this one piece of content into multiple different ways, right? So for me, That's what excites me. What waits is not, it will not make marketers lazy. It will actually make marketers really, really efficient. It will make them to test fail when faster and then they can move on, right? Ultimately the goal is to impact pipeline. That's it.
speaker-0: And I think it's the marketers who can really adapt because I think that some are taking this perspective of, you know, and I and I don't fault them for this, but sort of victimizing to say, ⁓ look at this. We're going to be irrelevant when you think about. And again, this was something that was actually mentioned on the All In podcast, but 70 percent of the jobs today didn't exist 40 years ago. It's like jobs will new jobs will get created. So I think if you have that growth mindset. You're going to be able to do a lot of this exciting stuff, but it's really a mindset thing right now.
speaker-1: It's being curious, right? Like if I can give something to a younger marketer, it's about being curious. And I think, you know, I'm not saying this because of, well, I'll say this because I'm proud of my journey. To be honest, I started as a graphic designer, maybe 2D animator before that graphic designer, because that was a progression, right? Drawing from hand to using Photoshop. That was the first tilt there. And then while I'm designing for emails, I said, why don't I go into marketing automation platform? While I was doing a marketing automation platform, I realized that data was going to CRM. I said, why can't I learn CRM? While I was doing CRM, thought, sales sounds interesting. Why can't I do sales? So it is curiosity. think AI can come, but it can't fix the curiosity of a human. So if you are curious, you can always adapt and find a solution within the AI landscape. So for me, the one thing I will say, we talked a lot about system and all this thing, but ultimately we are all humans. One thing from my life lesson is be curious, explore, AI can be your friend, leverage it.
speaker-0: and incredible, incredible note to end on morality. Thank you so much for joining us and it'd be interesting to hear what you guys are up to in the next six months or so, but.
speaker-1: Slowly, Andrew. Can't wait to share all that fun stuff and exciting stuff. Looking forward to the next meeting.
speaker-1: No, absolutely. Thank you for that. I'll start with my role. So it gives you context. So I've been with Path Factory for way too long, almost nine years now, 10th year running. And even before that, I was a customer of Path Factory when I was managing the global operations at Western Union. The thing that I realized was we always talk about content and content is such an important thing to educate our prospect in the solution that we are providing. But no one really thought about tracking it, right? The analytical aspect of it and the impact of that content. And that's what drawn me towards Path Factory, where I feel like we sit very beautifully with the content, the data, and the buyer's experience, right? So we are not sitting on siloed on a delivery mechanism of a marketing solution or a technology solution, but we are really focusing on the buyers and how they are consuming content and how this is impacting the marketers. and the sales team. So the orchestration of this journey is important. So we do two things really, really well at Path Factory. One, we remove the friction of content experience, which means the prospect is not going on a scavenger hunt across your website, across your nurture campaigns. And then we recommend the next relevant content for the ⁓ prospect. this way they continue to binge on the content. The second thing we do is we go into the deep engagement analytics. This is beyond the opens, clicks and downloads that traditional marketers relied on. Now we are going into the topic of interest, not just the topic of interest. Are these prospects meeting the threshold on these assets? Are they meeting the threshold on the topic? Where is the buyer in their journey? They're really understanding this and how all of these things can be used for those re-engagement campaign. ultimately empowering sales to move on to the next level. So these are the two important things that we believe in Pathfactory. What I say is it's about content intelligence and activating those intelligence.
speaker-0: Yeah, I love that because I think you're right that a lot of people still or a lot of organizations still pump out a ton of content and they just sort of spray and pray. And so when you ask, hey, how many people have actually downloaded that asset or read that asset or watched that video? Yeah, they don't really know in a lot of cases.
speaker-1: The worst thing is, this is the hypothetical question I ask all the CMOs I engage with and the VPs of marketing I engage with. I tell them, you don't need to answer, but just think about it. Tell me how much time I need to spend on your content to understand the core solution or a product that you're selling me. Don't think there is one person who have given me an answer confidently saying, yes, this is how much time that they need to spend. Because we don't think
speaker-0: Yeah
speaker-1: about content in that way because we hire content marketers, we hire marketers, we hire marketing ops people to just keep cranking out content out there, not really understanding the impact on pipeline.
speaker-0: Yes. And I do also want to double click on when you talked about recommending the next best asset. And I know you've got some interesting stats here around what percentage of people want to consume multiple assets, because we typically are going to push them to a gate, Download this ebook. But what I think is interesting with Path Factory, and as you set up sort of the content libraries, It is providing the next best asset. So you can give people five, six, seven assets, which they want, and you don't have to hit them with five, six, seven gates. That I think is also another unlock that we've seen. Absolutely.
speaker-1: Absolutely. Absolutely. These are the roadblocks or things created by the technology that was given to us 10, 15 years back. There were marketing automation platforms that said, don't have more than one call to action. The best time to send emails at 10 on Tuesday morning and Thursday morning. We are indented with these kind of information that is so old school. But because those marketers are trained on that, they do that. Same thing with landing pages, right? If you really think about it, you want to download a report. Just imagine how many steps you're going through, even if you're a known visitor to that. You've got to fill out a form. Then that form takes you to another page. Or even before that, you click on a call to action. It takes you to a form that says how amazing this thing will be. Then you click on that thing. And sometime they'll say, we'll email you the content. We are creating so much roadblocks for a prospect. All they want to do is educate on your solution. And we do have a lot of data because we've been collecting data on how a known visitor behaving, how a first time visitor behaving with your content versus somebody who has been in your nurture campaign. So definitely that's what the users of Path Factory benefit from. They can really take this and remove that friction for the prospect.
speaker-0: Yeah, we've seen that firsthand for sure. Let's talk a little bit about the ABM for a second. So equal to content intelligence, and I feel like we've got a lack of visibility there. I think there's a big variance when you think about ABM. Like when I talk to, again, we're talking to the same folks, enterprise technology companies, people are in very different places with ABM. I find that some are We're still defining that internally, still building the engine. Some are more advanced. Do you see the same thing? I guess the follow on question is, how is ABM changing? Maybe for the teams that are a little bit more advanced, how has it changed over the past year or two?
speaker-1: This is a very interesting and controversial question, even though it sounds so simple. I see this time in and time out all the time when I'm talking to new prospects specifically, they are still defining and these are like matured companies on the outset. But when you dive deeper into their marketing and their sales strategies, they're still at the very, very infant stage of ABM, which suppresses you. How do you operate?
speaker-0: Yeah
speaker-1: Those marketers are going to come after me for sure, but it is the reality of things. So from the mature ABM marketers and marketing strategists, what I have seen is they have definitely moved away from account targeting to account understanding. Right. For me, that is important. What I mean by account targeting is yes, we always talked about sales and marketing being BFF, but ultimately what ended up happening on the old school ABM is sales will give you a list. marketing is an air cover. This is what I call an account targeting. Because sales never believed in what marketing is doing from an AME site. And this is something that I've heard from one VP of marketing who basically said, Merly, now I can go into those sales meeting and put my chin up and say, this is what we generated. Whereas before, marketing will take, let's say, 10 accounts and go to the sales team. And the head of sales will say, My team has been talking to these guys for the last three years. What are you doing? Right? We know this information. So this is what we moved away in the last two years. would say moved away from account targeting to account understanding. And what that means is it's not about running a campaign against a list that sales is providing. This is about identifying the buying group. It's not just about an account. It is understanding the behavioral aspect of the buying group. What I mean by that is every person in that buying committee, again, we have data on this, what is an enterprise level buying committee looks like versus an SMB versus mid market. So when you're talking about eight to 16, sometimes 24 people in an enterprise buying committee, content need for these people are completely different. We can't be cranking out the same material and say, oh, here's one case study for everybody, right? What is an influencer versus champion versus, you know,
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: technical was as Dershan maker need, right? A lot of time people focus heavily on Dershan maker content, but we all know the Dershan maker is spending like three minutes on content where they're listening to the champions for more than that time. So where should we start educating on that? So this has changed. And what I want to also add, I know we're going to be touching on AI at some point. I know that's always the thing right now.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: That is also getting introduced in understanding the behavior. So the shift for me is moving away from the static segmentation, which is the list, to a dynamic signal driven engagement insight. So for me, this is where the shift has happened really is moving to a dynamic signal driven. And that's what we are focusing on. How do we dynamically change the content for these different personas? A lot of time, if you think about two years back or even like some other service providers, what they're doing is they can change the logo of the company and say, welcome Andrew. What we believe is not that. We believe Andrew needs a specific set of content, and that's what he should see. If Andrew is coming from retail, what we should see was somebody is coming from financial services, what we should see. So that's where the tagging and all that ⁓ back and stuff that Pathfactory is really good, really helps with this change.
speaker-0: And that's where we've seen a lot of success and potential at Path Factory is really, look, we know based on let's say UTM parameters, if there's a specific campaign running, we know what they've engaged on, or if we're sending an email and we know who they are and what industry, how do we use that intelligence and display the content that's gonna make the most sense for them, right? So I think it's a huge unlock. Now, I want to dive a little bit deeper into the AI piece. so you started to get there a little bit. How do you see AI impacting, know, the ADM in terms of a strategy, just in even what Path Factory can do now with some of the AI powered capabilities that we've seen in action? Talk to us a little bit about that.
speaker-1: See, AI is moving so fast, even before we think about recommendation on AI side, which we have been doing even before AI was the buzzword, right? ⁓ We were doing recommendation around content even before all these things have started. So where I feel like AI is playing a big role, even from our deep engagement analytics, is we are not solely focused on these metrics, right? Where it's like our own topic of interest, how deeply we are doing. What AI is really helping us understand is the cluster engagement signals and multiple stakeholders. How do we get to that? And what is also we are seeing is the surface level patterns that humans can't catch from an engagement perspective. And recommended next best content is something that we've been doing long before anything has happened. But for us to understand, you brought this up in the beginning where you were talking about that binging behavior. For me? AI has definitely improved and increased that. Before, our AI, I wouldn't call it AI recommendation, four or five years back when our machine learning was kicking in, it was only looking at few attributes, which means ⁓ topic of interest from a relation perspective. If there is one topic, if there is another asset on that topic that was performing really good, we would recommend that. So that's what I call our recommendation 1.0. But now we are going beyond that topic of interest and performance metrics, right? So now with the deep analytics and tagging and everything, we can really focus on that. And this is where AI for me has become very, very adaptive and predictive. It is not about reactive. It is very adaptive to the user engagement and making it predictive. Those are the two things that I would call, obviously there's generative elements to it. We'll get into that later. But if you ask me where AI is playing a part today, is how quickly we can adapt to both engagement and the follow-up of activation.
speaker-0: I actually want to come back to when you made a comment around sales and marketing and the, you know, the whole traditional working with each other and the human side of it. So, ⁓ you know, we, as you know, have a, AI powered research platform called watch tower. And so this is this particular topic was based on just over 30,000 B2B markers around the world that we're talking about. specifically what is preventing ABM programs from delivering results. 84 % it was sales and marketing alignment was still number one, which is, it's incredible that that's still number one. The next few where there is no clear ABM strategy, unclear sales follow-up, unclear lead handoff processes. And what's interesting to me is that none of these are technology problems. They're all people problems, organizational problems. so how does Path Factory help close that gap between this? mean, this is fundamentally a people problem, right?
speaker-1: see, this is why the stat doesn't surprise me at all. It sounds so big, and you think this should have been solved by now. But you're right. It is not a technology problem. So at Pathfactory, we think that at this, more like a shared visibility problem. Because the data is always siloed. So for me, it's 100 % shared visibility problem. Because think about it. marketing is doing all these work and they're getting to understand the buyer's behavior and all of these things. But the buyer's signal is not passed or interpreted the same way between marketing and sales. Marketing is seeing one data a specific way. Sales are seeing another data another way. Right. So there is no common data layer for the buyer's engagement. Right. So what sales are seeing is, hey, Marketing is sending, if you think traditional marketing, they're saying, hey, somebody opened an email, clicked on an email or downloaded something, go follow up. Sales is like getting hundreds and thousands of these kinds of notifications. Yeah. So what does it mean? Right. And what happens is this is what I call notification fatigue. At one point, the sales is like, ⁓ another notification. Right. They're tired of this thing. So what we are trying to do at Path Factory is we are unifying to make these notifications valuable to the sales team. And they read this the same way as marketing teams wants them to read. We have unified in the last 18 months, we have unified campaign engagement data and web engagement data together. This is very, very important piece because what happens in an ABM, for example, you might have certain champions from a specific account who you're sending emails They're opening, they're reading, they're consuming that content. That is great. Now you can qualify them and send it to sales. That's one way of doing it. But now the minute you start engaging the web analytics data to this scenario, now we are saying there are four people who are known in this account is engaging. At the same time, there are 16 anonymous visitors from the same account is engaging on the website. Now we got 20 people from this account engaging on a specific topic. That is valuable for your sales team. Now add the notification that is meaningful. Rather than saying somebody opened and downloaded, now you're saying, hey, this account is focusing on these topics, and these 20 visitors have spent over, let's say, 40 minutes on your content, specifically around this topic. By the way, your champion and the decision maker have spent 12 minutes on this specific topic, right? Now this changes the game, right? The alignment gets better. The sales is actually seeing value in what you're doing. And then obviously we can do one to one ABM strategies and all that to so-called air cover. I hate that word, but we can still do that where hyper personalization comes in because all of this engagement data feeds into your marketing automation platform. And now it is a very cohesive alignment between market and sales. It is not a volume game. Because if you really think about it before it was a volume game, MQLs, downloads keep sending it to sales, which did translate. And that's where the mistrust and misalignment happened. So I agree with your survey. 84 % seems high, but that's the reality where we are living.
speaker-0: I like the way that you phrase that it is a shared data visibility problem because you're right in that sales and marketing are looking at different metrics, different dashboards, but if we could all be looking at the same data, we can understand the same story and be able to act accordingly. really think that that's a critical piece of this.
speaker-1: So the word I use is the buyer's truth, right? Because there is no internal opinion here anymore. The internal opinion is taken apart and it is the buyer's truth as an account. Right? When 20 people from an account is engaging in your content for 40 minutes, they're definitely not doing that for their health and entertainment. There is a serious problem they want to solve. And how do we support that and how do we improve that education process? Yeah.
speaker-0: And I think that because there's a lot of these lead engine platforms where it's just content syndication, you get these leads, you fire them over to sales. Marketing has got this box of like, how many leads did I generate? How many MQLs? The challenge with this is that it is, your point, has been a volume game, a quantity game. So you throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and then You know, the challenge of sales has to actually go through all of that. And then they lose trust. And then anything that comes from marketing, they think is at low quality. But to your point where you can say you've got it, you've got 20, 30 people engaging, that is a real signal. And we know what topics they're actually surging on. As I mentioned, the, one of the responses ⁓ or topics that was discussed was no clear ABM strategy. And one blocker that came up, which was partly a technology problem. was around how the ABM stack doesn't work well on, let's say, a CRM infrastructure that was very legacy. I think that there was one comment, and because we can actually see actual posts and content, says, you can't run an ABM play when your CRM thinks 100 different buyers are one entity. And it's just like, how does Path Factory help solve that? Because there is this tech debt that we're all kind of sitting with. trying to make a thing work.
speaker-1: See, for me, the problem with, again, I have been a CRM admin in my past life. I've been a marketing automation hands-on user in my past life. So when I'm saying this, this comes purely from heart. This is not something that I've sat and just listened to the stories. The goal of CRM and the goal of the marketing automation platforms are two different things. But sometimes as marketers and as a marketing organization, we try to blend these two together. Because if you really think about what is a CRM, I would say it's more like a record-based thinking, right? It basically records what you're doing, that's it. Where else a marketing solution or a marketing automation platform is what I call behavior-based thinking, right? So how do you blend this thing? Because Salesforce is all about sales CRMs, I shouldn't use the Salesforce word. But CRMs are basically on leads, contacts, and account and opportunities. Where else when you're talking about a marketing automation platform, it's about creating this behavioral aspect. But for me, the way we need to think as marketers trying to impact pipeline and supporting sales is the buying group, the intent, and the progression of the buying group. So if you go back to the basics, What is the role of marketing? Some people will say, ⁓ we need to create awareness. Some people will say, we need to create MQL. But you're all being selfish on your goals. Forget that for a second. Think about the prospect and their challenges. My goal, if I'm a marketer, my goal is to educate my prospect as quickly as possible on the core solution and services I'm providing so they can understand what I'm helping them with. That's it. If you boil this down, that is the goal of marketing. And once somebody understands this, they will buy your solution or they will buy a solution, right? Whoever they feel comfortable with. So for me, taking this behavior-based thinking from the marketing automations and which is powered by Pathfactory itself, you know, ⁓ one there and overlaying that with the engagement intelligence on top of the CRM, this is how I would put it. overlaying that with an engagement intelligence on top of your CRM data is going to be the winning formula for anybody who's talking at. So instead of asking like how many leads do we have, we should ask which account is showing the coordinating buying behavior. Right. That is the shift I think will help ABM work. ABM will not succeed without sales team. I'll tell you right now for ABM to succeed. We talked about alignment before. The only way AMEM will succeed is with sales team. If we don't align that, the minute the sales team start asking this question, are we showing or are we seeing the coordinated buying behavior? If I'm the sales guy, I don't want to talk to one person in the company. I want to talk to like 100 people in the company at the same time, because that is my true ⁓ marketing support that I can get from the marketing team.
speaker-0: Yeah, no, agreed. think we always say to the marketing team, that look, can only, it's particularly a B2B and an ABM specifically, you can only get so far from a marketing standpoint. You must have sales engagement if we want to be successful, right? So back on the whole how AI is impacting this conversation and just ABM at large. You know, we, did have another topic that we were tracking as part of watch tower. And this topic actually had about 180,000 conversations about how AI can potentially improve ABN. And what was interesting is that AI chatbots came in at 83%. Workflow automation was about 14%. The AI chatbot was really high. And I just. I'm curious to get your take on that. Why do you think that is and how do you interpret that?
speaker-1: See, I think that was the easiest front end of AI. For me, that's the baby that everybody was able to have. So I think that's what people think that AI chat bot. But now you can start seeing those companies are dying as quickly as they came. They're dying very quickly. So for me, it is the most visible application that came out first. Everybody thought it's going to be the winner, but now people are really understanding it is not a long-term solution. The long-term solution from my perspective and Pathfactory's perspective, if I can speak for the product team, is around signal processing and workflow automation. Because you really need to understand. Because how do you do a cold start? For me, that's an interesting aspect of AI compared to a chatbot where I have to do a workflow. And then I need to have a mind map of what question to ask this. It's all great for the first three months of implementation. Then you hand it over to this poor soul who has to take care of that. And then they have the miserable life and they leave the company and then that chat is gone. So I don't think that's a long term solution. For me, the long term solution is around automation and intelligence layer for the engine. So that is what I see. We do have a chat. Agent so-called I will not call them a chat bot. It is not a chat bot ⁓ We call them a chat agent. It does a lot of different things without anybody manually managing it but yeah providing information that is needed so for me Interpreting intent is important, but I do understand why almost 80s that 80 seems to be the regular number in your so yeah But for me that that is not surprising. It's an early version of AI For me, it's interpreting intent is important. How do we handle cold start is important. And triggering right actions across the system is important. Not so much from a chatbot perspective, but more from an agent perspective.
speaker-0: Tell us a little bit more on the chat agent and how somebody on the buying committee could potentially use that feature. Talk to us a little bit about that, because I think that's interesting too.
speaker-1: Absolutely. Just I'll use a scenario that our marketing team came up, right? I'm really proud of our team to leverage our solution. They're the number one customer. Typically when we were doing ABM pages, right? Whether it's one too many or one to few or even one to one, it was very one sided, which means I send a specific page to a buying committee. They can read the content. We personalize the content within that, which is good because every persona will see something different. That is great. But now adding the chat agent into that experience, whether you're embedding that within the Path Factory landing pages, or you're putting them as a widget, or you're incorporating that across your website as an embed or ⁓ a thing in your resource center, wherever you're using it. I'll go back to the one-to-one example. So if I'm working with an enterprise company and I have shared this page with the person, rather than if they want beyond what content I've sent, now they can engage with a chat agent right away. Got it. In the back end, I'm sitting there and I'm collecting all of that engagement data within the chat agent. And obviously, our chat agent has a genetic function. So if they said, I'm tired of this chat, let me just speak to an expert or I want a demo, I want to speak to support. whatever it is, our chat agent is smart enough to understand that and trigger those follow up action. So it's not just about question. So for me, this is taking it to the next level. I'm not pushing them to our website. I'm pushing them to our chat agent, which address the additional questions that they might have. So for me, this is again, removing the friction on an ABM account. I don't want my enterprise account to go to my website and search and do a scavenger hunt. Now, within an ABM page, whether it's an embed or a widget inside that page, they have access to extensive content that is beyond that ABM collection that we have put in together.
speaker-0: think it's a really smart innovation that you guys have come up with. think the other one that I think is a of a parallel to that is how you can create these ⁓ custom pages for the buying committee and being able to say, let me take a step back. I think one of the challenges that people have is that, let's say Andrew at a company is very excited about Path Factory. Okay. Why need to now go sell it into the buying committee? And so I've got to make the case and I got to sell it. And I think there's, there's a feature that you're able to look at, click a bunch of different resources and to be able to spin up a page that has that there that I can easily share. To me, that's like, that's, that's very valuable because I have to facilitate that conversation and that I got to sell it internally. So can you just chat a little bit about that? Cause I think that that's a really powerful one too.
speaker-1: Absolutely. And this is what scares me sometimes when you're too ahead of your time, whether it's the right thing or not. Right. Like for me, that that that feature is so cool. Just think about it. Right. I always like to use analogies and storytelling in what whatever we do, because go back five, eight years back. If you have to book a flight ticket, what were you doing? You would either call an agent or you'll email a travel agent and say. Here's all the different flights that I'm interested in, get me in this price, blah, blah. Today, till the last hour, you can change the flight, you can choose the seat, you can do whatever you want. That is what we are trying to do. Typically, even today, marketers, if they have to create a landing page, they submit a Jira ticket or whatever ticket, and then that goes to the web team, whether it's ⁓ whatever complex CMS they have. then that takes two weeks for them to create a static page and you go through it, you get it, and then you try to launch it, right? What we are saying is, marketers, stop building these landing pages. Give the keys to the prospect. When the prospect is doing the research, to your point, they can choose the asset that they're interested in, and then they click off a button, we create a landing page. So this solves the problem. Again, being ahead of time. Will there be a 10 % conversion today? Maybe not. Six months time, one year time, when people understand it, they will. Because I'm using Cloud today, what I'm doing is whenever I run certain table, gives me export the table. using that function. Maybe three months back, four months back, they didn't have that function, so I was manually copy pasting it. I'll copy from Cloud and paste it in my Excel or whatever it is. Today, I can just copy the table and paste it. So it is a matter of helping people. But one other cool feature, I don't know if I've shared this with you, Andrew, actually two that we have come up with, on top of what we are doing, we are also helping marketers. We are not saying, okay, marketers are never gonna create page. What we are telling marketers through our AI page creation is, think about you have a landing page on your website. Or let's say you have an inspiration of a completely different website that you wanna do. Now I can take the URL. put it in Path Factory, click a button, and the system generates the page in your branding. Which means 70 % to 80 % of the work is done. So that's one thing. And then came another challenge for us where our global enterprise customer wanted in different languages. So same thing. Now you create this page in English, you click another button, choose the language you want, it converts all of them into that particular language. Obviously, there's product names and certain things will not translate. but a good 70 % is already done. So for me, these are AI innovation that we are working on, which is removing the friction from a go-to-market team from a speed perspective and also from scale. Today, our customers easily can scale 500 to 700,000 pages with the simple click of buttons.
speaker-0: Yeah, incredible. ⁓ Because I think that we are being asked as marketers to move so much faster, right? And so we need, it's not humanly possible to do that. And so you need the tools to be able to get there and really love the embedded AI capability in that. ⁓ One of the other data points I wanted to get your reaction to, so watch out, this is not an 80 % stat. ⁓ This one was around how marketers think B2B buying will change in 26 because of AI. And the top response, which is around 75%, was actually more content specifically for AI. And so there's this growing conviction that AI is really just becoming the intermediary between the vendor and the buyer. And so how do you think about that one, Morali? And then what is, Path Factory thought about that as well? in terms of how you win the AI buyer or the AI agent potentially. What's your thought on that?
speaker-1: Absolutely. I want to be very clear. We don't create content. That's one thing. But the way we are thinking is how the content that is already created is chunked, tagged, and sequenced. That is important because the content, few months, years, I don't even know how far we are going back in AI, to be honest. We were creating content for humans. That's it. We weren't creating for anybody else. But now we've got to create content for humans and missions. So we are in a very weird place and marketers are still learning, but we are already ahead of that, right? Just like how when the compliance conversation starts in a Senate, we start thinking about it. We also started thinking about like, you know, how we are going to tag these content, how we are going to chunk these content, how we are going to sequence this content, right? Because the engagement signals can be like really helpful for AI driven recommendation. So for us. It is very, very important. The first interaction is not with humans anymore. A lot of people are coming to this through the AI agent's interpretation. So we are definitely already thought about this. The product team is working on this. But I would say it's still work in progress from everybody. But at least everybody is thinking about it. That's the right mindset. That subjective thing. people are ready to park it for a site and saying, hey, this is me, this is, I'm the content writer, I'm gonna write it this way, where people are really thinking about, okay, if I'm gonna write a content no matter what, some mission is gonna go through this, whether it's your own one, or is it the external chats, or sorry, AI engines out there, somebody's gonna read this. So marketers are starting to think about it. I would say we are still at the very, very early stages. That's why you don't have that 80%, I guess.
speaker-0: That's right. One of the things that I can just speak from a content perspective, how we're optimizing for the LLMs. I mean, we've abbreviated this as called beta, partly because it is a beta. It's going to change. The models are going to evolve, right? So best for, which is making sure that your content identifies who your solution is best for. Because if you don't identify that, the model will basically make an inference to say, this is who we think your solution is best for. So really being clear about that. The ease evidence, so it's how do you provide stats and quantitative proof points, which what we find interesting in the models is that if they feel that your statistics sound like BS, they will actually say that. They will say that this stat is too good to be true. I will discount that. So realistic evidence, I should say. The T is for trade-off, and so that is a trade-off with best for. You're best for this? Who are you not best for? And that's a hard discussion that we have with our clients because when we say, well, who do we want to say, declare that we're not the best solution, you should look for alternative, know, our clients will say, no, we're good for everybody. Everybody. Everybody. So this is where... If you don't say where you're not best in class, the model will make it up as well. And then A is just answerability, which is just like the format. How do you chunk it and so forth? All that being said, the rules are being rewritten now. So it's very, very difficult to say, is that the right model that's going to exist in six months? I don't know. Right. That seems to be the model for today.
speaker-1: too, it's changing way too fast.
speaker-0: Yeah, exactly. You know, I want to jump to to one topic around just the overall. I I think what Path Factory is doing is incredible on the content intelligence side. Obviously, we're partners with you guys. We we, you know, we believe in platform. We use the platform. We help our clients use the platform. You know, the one thing is always around, OK, content consumption is one side, but there's the business impact. And so. a buyer might binge on the content hub, end up, you know, the sale might not happen or they might go with a competitor and, so forth. And so ⁓ how do you, how do you think about connecting the content engagement with actual revenue and business outcomes? What's your thought on that? Cause obviously it's like at the end of the day, right? What are you driving in terms of revenue?
speaker-1: See, that is a very, very good question. Ultimately, this is what happens during the renewal process when we have to show the ROI, not just on Pathfactory, but also on the whole of the marketing effort. For me, it's not just about, as we talked about, opens, clicks, and page resets. It is about pipeline velocity. Why does the pipeline velocity is important, and how can Pathfactory show that? Because what were we talking about? rather than waiting every week for an email on your nurture campaign or two weeks on a nurture campaign. Now that process can be done in one day rather than eight week nurture campaign because we are packaging the content in that way. Same thing. When I come to the website, I'm not going on a scavenger hunt. You know, I have to like give this to Nick Path Factory's original, one of the co-founders where he said, Nick Edward, said, the resource center is the graveyard for content. Right. I still use this after almost 10 years because he's absolutely right. When was the last time as a buyer, you went to a resource center of a company and went to page five and found the right resource and engage with that. Never. Right. So exactly. But how much time marketers and web team are spending on that. So this is what I mean. Where else with Path Factory, when you land on a home page or a product page or solution page based on who we are, who you are. we can bring that content to the surface and give you that. So the frictionless journey is a very important part of the education of the prospect. Because think about it. Why am I going to buy your solution? Let's say I'm looking at two solutions. They look exactly the same on the high level. Why am I going to buy your solution? Right. For me, am I understanding your solution faster? Yeah. Right. Once you understand it, Can I articulate that information in front of my colleague and team? Because I want to be the smartest guy in that room when I'm promoting your solution or bringing your solution up. If you don't educate me better, I can't do that. Great. And I am a real life example. There was one time in my career, I got exposed to two marketing automation platform. We will not name names. One gave me a three day training. One gave me on demand training. The three day training one, I bought them in three different companies because of the three day training and the information I got out of it. I don't know if it's a better product or not. I'm not going there. I learned it faster and I was able to use it. So I got comfortable. I looked smarter in that. So I went and did that. To answer your question, if we educate our prospect, the champion, the influencers faster and better, they will vouch for your solution. The two solutions they're looking could be the exact same solution, but who educates them without problem, right? Like then they feel like, the solution will also be designed the same way the marketing is designed. So for me, a pipeline velocity is one important way to look at it from a marketing effort, because there is always question around attribution model and all of that. But if an enterprise deal is closing in six months instead of 10 months, That's a big win for everybody. And if you can expand the buying committee, this is another important metrics nobody measures. How are you growing your buying committee? What is that timeframe? Because from the first call, after you keep the call, follow up call, if you have a hyper personalized one to one landing page as a follow up, that means you're sending it to me, I'm sending to eight of my team members. Now your buying committee has gone to nine in one week. What does that engagement looks like? When you go on the follow-up call, how does it grow? So buying committee coverage is important. Ultimately, the core solution of Pathfactory is the depth of engagement, topic of interest, importance on the asset type. So for me, these three things is our focus. And obviously, AI is definitely ⁓ improving a lot of these things. It's connecting the fragmented signal. We talked about website engagement versus campaign engagement. So that is one thing. predicting the progression is very, important, right? How should the buying committee evolve different stages on the sales cycle, right? So for me, the way I define all of this is first party engagement data. It is true. It is somebody engaging with your content. There is nothing like an intent that says, maybe somebody from this account is looking at something. This is no. Andrew from this account is looking at this topic, right? That's the important.
speaker-0: predictive it's baby
speaker-1: It's validated through first party engagement data. So for me, that pipeline velocity is ultimate. But one data, as I mentioned, nobody's looking at is buying group coverage.
speaker-0: And I ⁓ fully agree. And I think that as Path Factory continues and evolves and new solutions get developed, I wonder if there's this potentially growing blind spot on just the AI traffic. Like if we don't know, for example, where this AI is rep, like what buyer this AI is coming into the page to understand the intent and so forth. I wonder how we unmask that in a way or try and better understand the signal. So if my AI is going out to evaluate solutions, will we be able to see? Like, think, I guess there's a disconnect there that I wonder how we solve that long term. But I don't know. Just a.
speaker-1: Yeah, it to be a whole different conversation by itself.
speaker-0: This will be a, this will be a, an AI factory. This will be a separate business unit from a bad factory. But on this note, if I know you're a busy guy, so I'll just end with a, you know, a forward looking question. You think about in the next 12 months, when you hear modern ABM or best in class, what does that look like? What does best in class ABM look like in 12 months? you think?
speaker-1: See, for me, the number one thing, if you ask me the utopia of ABM, I would say a fully autonomous campaign orchestration. For me, this is important because think about the biggest challenge of ABM. It is not one marketer saying, with the sales guy, I'm going to do it. Then this becomes an air cover. In an ABM, you've touched on this a little bit. Content syndication could be part of it. Paint campaign could be ⁓ paid ads could be part of it. Paid social could be part of it. Email nurture could be part of it. One to one could be part of it. So already we touched on five different teams. Look at the resources that's needed, the content that is needed, the segmentation, the persona, the ICP work that's needed. Imagine a world now where I put my goals and then the system gives me a complete campaign orchestration, choosing the best performing content based on channel, asset type, from your content library, building the whole thing for you, including the landing pages. So for me, that is something that is going to be important, right? For me, that is an emerging one, but it is still important. From you talk about another category, which is essential, right? Otherwise, nobody will touch you. For me, that is real-time personalization. This is going to be so important. And then there are table stakes, right? Marketing, automation, data enrichment, content intelligence. Content intelligence will become a table stake, to be honest. Where, for me, it is going to be AI-driven signal orchestration. For me, that is going to be very, very essential on the fly, like really understanding that. For me, the I always go back to the buying group identification. I think that is important because there was one time one of the customer wanted to create, right? Like where they said, my buying group is these four different personas. I want to build a page that I'm highlighting these things for these four different personas. So for me, that is important and making that dynamic and the marketer doesn't have to think about that. For me, it's important. Ultimately, if you ask for a dream, I will say it'll be like a cross channel. journey orchestration, right? Entirely driven by AI. So for me, that is it. But for me, the biggest shift, if I can like predict the future or how I see, it will become from all of these systems. If you think about it, all the systems we talked about, marketing automation, CRM, CDP, they're all right now is a data storage, right? It is used to store data. For me, the Ethiopia would be, they become What is the word I'm trying to say? Interpret an action in real time. So that's what, for me, will be the true automation slash AI in full potential. Rather than the systems become a data storage place, they will be able to interpret this and act real time based on who is visiting a website, who is doing a campaign. For me, it'll be a point where emails will be empty. It will. the minute somebody clicks on the call to action, that's when the generation will start. Whether it's a copy, the content, the images, I think that will be possible in 12 months.
speaker-0: Well, first of all, the orchestration there, I agree. Because I think this is about how do agentic workflows be able to flow in and out of these different applications and, as you said, data sets to be able to orchestrate and execute. What we're just seeing on the content side is we've now developed a one-of-one content engine that will allow us to ⁓ basically build, customize assets in real time based on the person who's actually submitting for the e-book, let's say. So if it's from, you know, Polly is an example, making conferencing equipment as a technology company, when they download the asset, it will actually be customized to them. It's cross-referencing five, six different databases, but this is the real-time construction of the content. And I think that that gets to, that's what we call it one of one. If we send 20,000 downloads, 20,000 versions actually go out. Exactly. Which is incredible.
speaker-1: And I can't wait for the time where we use a single asset to create so many different variations of it, right? Whether it's an ebook or white paper or a video, imagine having a webinar and creating multiple formats of that. For example, a webinar, a chapterized webinar, a social post webinar, a ⁓ short version of this, right? Then you're taking this one piece of content into multiple different ways, right? So for me, That's what excites me. What waits is not, it will not make marketers lazy. It will actually make marketers really, really efficient. It will make them to test fail when faster and then they can move on, right? Ultimately the goal is to impact pipeline. That's it.
speaker-0: And I think it's the marketers who can really adapt because I think that some are taking this perspective of, you know, and I and I don't fault them for this, but sort of victimizing to say, ⁓ look at this. We're going to be irrelevant when you think about. And again, this was something that was actually mentioned on the All In podcast, but 70 percent of the jobs today didn't exist 40 years ago. It's like jobs will new jobs will get created. So I think if you have that growth mindset. You're going to be able to do a lot of this exciting stuff, but it's really a mindset thing right now.
speaker-1: It's being curious, right? Like if I can give something to a younger marketer, it's about being curious. And I think, you know, I'm not saying this because of, well, I'll say this because I'm proud of my journey. To be honest, I started as a graphic designer, maybe 2D animator before that graphic designer, because that was a progression, right? Drawing from hand to using Photoshop. That was the first tilt there. And then while I'm designing for emails, I said, why don't I go into marketing automation platform? While I was doing a marketing automation platform, I realized that data was going to CRM. I said, why can't I learn CRM? While I was doing CRM, thought, sales sounds interesting. Why can't I do sales? So it is curiosity. think AI can come, but it can't fix the curiosity of a human. So if you are curious, you can always adapt and find a solution within the AI landscape. So for me, the one thing I will say, we talked a lot about system and all this thing, but ultimately we are all humans. One thing from my life lesson is be curious, explore, AI can be your friend, leverage it.
speaker-0: and incredible, incredible note to end on morality. Thank you so much for joining us and it'd be interesting to hear what you guys are up to in the next six months or so, but.
speaker-1: Slowly, Andrew. Can't wait to share all that fun stuff and exciting stuff. Looking forward to the next meeting.
