The B2B Buying Experience With AI: What Changes?
Timestamps are as accurate as they can be but may be slightly off. We encourage you to listen to the full context.
Podcast Summary
In this episode, Dave Gerhardt hosts a strategic discussion with three B2B marketing leaders about how AI is fundamentally reshaping the buying journey and marketing strategies. (04:07) The conversation reveals that buyers are now doing extensive research before ever contacting companies, using AI tools to compare solutions and make informed decisions independently. (05:30) This shift is forcing marketers to prioritize distribution, unscalable authentic work, and brand taste over traditional funnel metrics. (11:07) The panelists discuss how AI adoption internally is creating smaller, more efficient teams while simultaneously requiring more creative, human-centered approaches to stand out in an increasingly saturated market of AI-generated content.
- Core theme: AI is disrupting traditional B2B buying behavior, requiring marketers to focus on taste, distribution, and authentic brand building over conventional metrics-driven approaches
Speakers
Lindsay O'Brien
Lindsay is Head of Marketing and Operations at Predictive, a bootstrap B2B company that helps marketers activate revenue through their revenue activation framework. She leads a lean team of two full-time employees and a content contractor, overseeing everything from brand and demand generation to enablement, retention, and revenue operations.
Tom Wentworth
Tom serves as CMO at Incident.io, a startup that provides incident management software to help companies resolve outages and technical issues. Previously, he worked at Recorded Future where he managed large marketing teams, and before that had experience at companies in the Optimizely ecosystem. He has transitioned from managing large teams to being hands-on with marketing execution at a smaller company.
Aditya Vempaty
Aditya is VP of Marketing for North America at MoEngage, a customer engagement platform approaching $100 million ARR. The company serves notable clients including Poshmark, Chick-fil-A, and SoundCloud, helping businesses engage their audiences through various customer engagement products and solutions.
Key Takeaways
Shift Focus from Promotional to Informational Content
Lindsay O'Brien emphasized that marketers have "continually lost more and more control over the buyer journey" and that buyers may never visit company websites during their research phase. (08:32) This reality requires a fundamental shift from promotional messaging to clear, informational content that AI tools can easily parse and summarize. Companies must ensure their messaging clearly states who they are, what they do, who they serve, and how they compare to competitors. The goal is to make information easily discoverable and digestible for AI-powered research tools that prospects are increasingly using. This means creating content that focuses on education and comparison rather than traditional sales-oriented messaging.
Prioritize Distribution Over Content Creation
Aditya Vempaty stressed that his team is "completely obsessed with distribution" because "AI literally only gives a shit about where it shows up and how many places it shows up and who's talking about it." (10:29) Every piece of content must begin with a distribution strategy - identifying partners, practitioners for quotes, and people who will share when content goes live. This approach recognizes that authority and reach matter more than perfect content in an AI-driven research environment. Marketers should ask "Who's the partner on it?" and "Who's gonna share it when it goes live?" before creating any content piece.
Invest in Unscalable, High-Taste Marketing
Tom Wentworth introduced a formula: "marketing success is dictated by AI adoption times taste squared." (09:12) While AI tools become commoditized, taste becomes the exponential differentiator. He demonstrated this with an $80,000 billboard investment that can't be directly measured but targets his specific audience effectively. (13:07) Taste is defined as creating work that people passionate about your industry respect and find special. For marketers, this means building teams with great creative judgment and investing in unmeasurable but impactful brand-building activities that stand out from AI-generated content.
Leverage Customer Insights for Strategic Validation
Aditya shared his approach of maintaining relationships with 15 prospects and customers he can text for immediate feedback on campaign ideas. (17:20) Before launching any significant campaign, he asks these contacts whether the concept resonates, aligns with their thinking, and would motivate them to take action. This customer-centric validation helps derisk marketing investments and provides concrete evidence to leadership. The key is having recordings, names, companies, and titles to support strategic decisions with real customer voices rather than internal assumptions.
Abandon Traditional Lead Qualification Theater
The panel agreed that traditional lead scoring and immediate sales follow-up for content downloads has become counterproductive. (24:54) Aditya noted they stopped handing leads to sales until prospects specifically request a demo, eliminating the "countless hours" spent debating lead quality. Lindsay implemented AI-driven scoring models that only assign contacts to sales reps after reaching specific engagement thresholds. This approach recognizes that modern buyers want to research extensively before engaging with sales, making early-stage qualification efforts wasteful and potentially damaging to the buyer experience.
Statistics & Facts
- MoEngage is approaching $100 million in ARR and serves notable clients including Poshmark, Chick-fil-A, and SoundCloud. (07:17) This demonstrates the scale at which customer engagement platforms are operating in the current market.
- Tom Wentworth invested $80,000 in a four-week billboard campaign in San Francisco without traditional ROI measurement capabilities. (13:07) This statistic illustrates the significant budget allocation toward unmeasurable brand-building activities that modern CMOs are embracing.
- Aditya's team spent $80-90k creating a physical book that cost $40 per copy initially, later reduced to $10-11 per copy, with over 2,800 downloads and 800 physical copies shipped, ultimately attributing $4.8 million in pipeline to the initiative. (13:32) This demonstrates the potential ROI of unmeasurable marketing investments when given time to mature.
