Podcasts about HubSpot

HubSpot lost roughly 75% of its blog traffic to AI search—and grew revenue 19% anyway. Everyone wrote the obituary for content marketing, but the traffic that died was the content HubSpot never had the right to own, and everything built on real authority held. In Episode 4 of the PESO Model® Diagnostic, I break down what survived, what didn't, and how to tell which of your own content is an asset versus exposure—before AI makes the call for you. Take your own PESO Model® Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/ PESO Model® Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/ Full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/peso-model-diagnostic-hubspot

Who would have thought that a tiny HTML file could lead to a diagnostic based on server logs?This week I share the latest fruit from the on-going site recovery that will soon be a case study on how to recover from a Helpful Content "site demise".If Google is verifing your domain once a month on the same day - without a doubt you are in topical trouble.I have more professional ways to describe it - at the end I give you the 4 takeaways from this information.Get used to looking at your logs!Mentioned in the show:VizzEx - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vizzex.ai/vizzex-pro/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠This week a little more about the newest VizzEx tool - Symmetry Gate™ Check Tool. You can find it at:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://symmetrygate.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Last week's episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/symmetry-before-semantics-why-seo-meaning-without-proof/id1547082306?i=1000776753514Get on the waiting list for the next cohort of the AI Visibility Mastery 12-month course. We are committed to the success of our members.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vizzex.ai/ai-visibility-mastery/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Wordpress registration⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ HubSpot registration⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Symmetry Gate⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - check the "cost" of your content for AI models to extract informationSubscribe to Confessions of an SEO™ wherever you get your podcasts. Your subscribing and download sends the message that you appreciate what is being shared and helping others find Confessions of an SEO™An easy place to leave a review ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/confessions-of-an-seo-1973881⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You can find me on⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Carolyn Holzman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Linkedin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠American Way Media⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Google Directly⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠AmericanWayMedia.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Consulting AgencyNeed Help With an Issue? - reach out Text me here - 512-222-3132Music from Uppbeathttps://uppbeat.io/t/doug-organ/fugue-stateLicense code: HESHAZ4ZOAUMWTUA

I'm writing my next book! In this episode, I lay out all the details for why I'm taking a risk, where the book fits in the market, and just how much of a delusional project this might be.Then, listen to the empathy statement—a kind of prologue or "starter dough" writing which sets the tone and answers the question, "Why should I care?"Be sure to subscribe to my newsletter for book updates, exclusives, and behind-the-scenes, as well as the chance to submit your stories for inclusion!EPISODE CREDITS:Written and produced by me, Jay Acunzo.Music for Why They Resonate is by Embleton (Instagram - Facebook).***ABOUT ME, JAY ACUNZOI'm a public speaking and storytelling advisor trusted by bestselling authors, TED speakers, seven-figure coaches, and brands like Mailchimp, Wistia, and Salesforce. Before starting my advisory firm (where I work 1:1 with clients and run group programs), I was a digital media strategist at Google and head of content for 3 organizations, including HubSpot.I've given keynotes across the US and several other countries to marketers and managers, designers and dentists, leaders and landscapers, and my journey as a speaker has been featured in 3 different books.Today, I teach business leaders how to communicate with greater clarity, influence, and resonance.Learn more about my advisory work at jayacunzo.comBook me to speak at jayacunzo.com/keynotesWatch video versions of some episodes, plus get regular insights into stronger public speaking and growing a speaking business, at youtube.com/jayacunzo***IF YOU ENJOY THE SHOW:Leave a review on Apple Podcasts Leave a rating on Spotify Thanks for your support! Keep making what matters.

Marc Ferrentino, Co-Founder and CEO of Quotient and former chief technical architect at Salesforce, joins Sam Jacobs and Asad Zaman to separate AI-marketing hype from what actually works today. Marc's core claim: the 'AI CMO' is marketing fiction, and the real near-term unlock is clearing the roughly 70% of a marketer's day lost to busywork, so smaller teams can finally operate like big ones. Topics include the collapse of specialized marketing roles into cross-functional generalists, why the apprenticeship model that trained classic marketers is most at risk, where the durable edge moves as performance marketing gets automated... and how taste separates real work from AI slop. Plus, a Quiz Pro Quo trivia round on famous tech emails, an honest look at ageism facing marketers in their 40s and 50s, and a Bulls and Bears debate on legacy martech, HubSpot, and Figma. Key Takeaways: - Marc's near-term promise to marketers is not an AI CMO but the removal of busywork. As he puts it: "companies that come out and claim to be your AI CMO… I think that is the most misleading marketing, but it's also just not true." Buckle up for a story or two about how he's seen the "AI CMO" blow up in people's faces. - The hiring bar is shifting from raw craft to AI fluency. In Marc's words: "we're all looking for the 10x developer, but the 10x developer who knows how to use AI is a 100x developer. And so it's the same thing with the marketer… the marketer who knows how to use AI is a 100x marketer… That's the person we want on the team." And he shares how his own developer interviews changed to match. - Marketing roles are not disappearing, but the specialist ladder that trained seasoned marketers is eroding. As Sam Jacobs, CEO of Pavilion, put it: "I see the collapse of specialization within a particular function. That doesn't diminish the need for the function, but does create an opportunity for those that are more fluent in all of these cross-functional tools." His deeper worry is the pipeline: "the apprenticeship model is the thing that's most at risk," raising the prospect of "a lack of classically trained marketers." - Ageism is real in marketing hiring, and it often hides inside neutral-sounding language. Asad Zaman, CEO of STA, observed, clients are saying things like: "I'm looking for somebody with high energy. High energy is like, I need somebody who is 30 to 33… high energy is like an age, basically." To what extent do the hosts agree with this perspective? Only one way to find out... Connect with the Hosts & Guests: Host: Sam Jacobs, CEO at Pavilion - https://www.linkedin.com/in/samfjacobs/ Host: Asad Zaman, CEO at STA - https://www.linkedin.com/in/azaman1/ Guest: Marc Ferrentino, Co-Founder & CEO at Quotient - https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcferrentino/ Topline is more than a YouTube Channel: Subscribe to Topline Newsletter: https://toplinemedia.substack.com/ Tune into Topline Podcast, the #1 podcast for founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-podcast Join the free Topline Slack channel to connect with 600+ revenue leaders to keep the conversation going beyond the podcast: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-slack Chapters:  00:00 Introducing Marc Ferrentino 02:09 Where AI Actually Works Today 04:05 The 'AI CMO' Is a Lie 07:10 AI Multiplies, Not Replaces 12:11 The Collapse of Specialization 15:10 The Apprenticeship Model at Risk 16:11 The Real Edge Is Brand 21:18 AI Slop and the Taste Problem 23:02 Marketing for the Rest of Business 35:15 Are the Models Asymptoting? 39:01 Quiz Pro Quo 44:44 Ageism in Marketing 49:18 Curiosity over Age 58:34 The 100x Marketer 1:03:54 Bulls VS Bears

Getting a notification that someone viewed your LinkedIn profile can be exciting, but most sellers don't know what to do next. In this episode of the LinkedIn Response Series, I am sharing how to turn profile views into meaningful conversations that can lead to appointments and new business. Instead of ignoring those notifications or sending an immediate sales pitch, I'll show you a simple process that helps you engage interested prospects the right way.Why Profile Views MatterA LinkedIn profile view is often a sign that someone is interested in learning more about you or your business. They may have found you through your content, received a connection request from you, or be researching your company before reaching out.In many cases, prospects are doing their homework before booking a meeting. That makes profile views an early buying signal that should not be ignored.Avoid the Wrong ResponseIt is tempting to react in one of two ways: send an immediate sales pitch or do nothing at all.Neither approach is effective. Instead of rushing the conversation or letting the opportunity pass, use the profile view as a reason to start a genuine connection. The goal is to build a relationship before discussing your product or service.Start the Conversation NaturallyA simple, honest message can open the door to a meaningful conversation.If someone views your profile, take a moment to review theirs. If they look like a good fit, send a connection request with a friendly message acknowledging that they visited your profile. Asking why you are not already connected feels natural and often encourages a response without sounding salesy.Once they accept your request, continue the conversation by asking what prompted them to visit your profile. Their answer may reveal a need, an opportunity, or an interest in working together.Focus on People Showing InterestNot everyone who views your profile will become a customer, and that's okay.Some people will decide you are not the right fit, while others are already interested in what you have to offer. Focus your time on the people who are engaging with your profile, content, or connection requests. Those are the conversations that are most likely to turn into appointments and future business opportunities.Make Profile Reviews a Weekly HabitFollowing up on profile views does not have to take a lot of time.Set aside time each week to review who has visited your profile. Reconnect with people you've already engaged with, and send connection requests to new prospects who fit your ideal customer profile. A consistent follow-up process helps you start conversations before your competitors have the chance."The profile view gets overlooked, and it is a critical spot." — Donald C. KellyResourcesKeep track of your sales activity and boost your results with the Prospect Pro sales tool.Step up your sales game with Sales Mastermind. Get accountability, stay motivated, and tackle the blockers keeping you from hitting your goals.Visit Blue Mango Studios for help in creating podcast production content. Sponsorship OffersThis episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot.With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com/sales.This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn.Are you tired of prospective clients not responding to your emails? Sign up for a free 60-day trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator at linkedin.com/tse.This episode is brought to you in part by the TSE Sales Foundation.Improve your connection on LinkedIn and land three or five appointments with our LinkedIn prospecting course. Go to the salesevangelist.com/linkedin.CreditsAs one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey. We'd love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or Spotify. Audio provided by Free SFX, Soundstripe, and Bensound. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and produced by Brightseed and Hill.

Daniel Bay, Chief People Officer at Underdog, joined us on The Modern People Leader. We talked about why HR teams in hypergrowth should stop copying big-company playbooks, how Underdog invests deeply in manager coaching, and why impact matters more than activity.----  Sponsor Links:

What if your most valuable future customers are discovering solutions in a place your current attribution models can't even see?Agility requires not just adapting to new channels, but completely rethinking how we measure discovery and value when the customer journey starts with a conversation with an AI.Today, we're going to talk about:- How the shift from keyword-based search to conversational AI is creating a new discipline: Answer Engine Optimization.- Why your current team structure might be the biggest obstacle to winning in the AI era, and how to reorganize talent and process for this new reality.- The critical role of unified customer data in influencing AI-driven recommendations and why it's becoming the ultimate competitive advantage.To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome, Kipp Bodnar, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot.About Kipp BodnarAs CMO of HubSpot, Kipp leads global marketing strategy to drive awareness and demand across a rapidly evolving product suite. He previously served as VP of Marketing, scaling international teams and overseeing demand gen, strategic partnerships, and social media. He's also a marketing advisor to several SaaS companies, co-author of The B2B Social Media Book, and a respected speaker and blogger.Kipp Bodnar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kippbodnar/---------- Resources ----------HubSpot website: https://www.hubspot.com/The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://aglbrnd.co/r/2868abd8085a9703We're proud to be a media partner for #MAICON26 - Oct. 13-15! Learn how AI can power your marketing and business and help you grow smarter. Use code AGILE150 to save! https://aglbrnd.co/r/7fe458ced0f04658Reach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad credit! Learn more: https://advertalize.com/r/491818c79fb1873fChaser is the only Slack-native project management platform that helps teams turn messages into tracked tasks, automate follow-ups, and maintain team-wide visibility, without adopting another tool. Now integrated with Claude and other GenAI tools. Learn more at trychaser.com and use code AGILEBRAND for a 3-month free trial (normal trial is 14 days).The most influential minds in software, AI, and engineering leadership will be at WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America, September 23-25 in San Jose. Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/60a7299222a7bcf1Start building your own apps with Replit and get $20 off. Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/93531742a7625a20Enjoyed the show? Tell us more at and give us a rating so others can find the show at: https://aglbrnd.co/r/faaed112fc9887f3Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/35ded3ccfb6716baCheck out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.comThe Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In today's episode Matt and Kolby break down historic media disruptions—from cable TV's ESPN and CNN to Joe Rogan's $250M Spotify deal—pulling out what's working, what's being left on the table, and who actually has a real thesis on AI today, from The Rundown's $10M+ newsletter to HubSpot's media buying spree.Timestamps: 00:00 Intro: AI Anxiety and Plateauing Founders03:59 The Framework: How Founders Should Respond to AI05:14 Is This an AI Bubble? Cable TV's ESPN and CNN Bet08:35 Web 1.0: Huffington Post's $315M Exit and Motley Fool's Billion-Dollar Run09:32 Viral Video Era: BuzzFeed's Rise, Barstool's $551M Sale12:23 Mobile Wave: Industry Dive's $525M Exit14:12 Axios's Smart Brevity and $525M Sale17:27 The Athletic's $500M Sale, Joe Rogan's $250M Deal, and Mr. Beast19:54 The Common Thread: Every Disruptor Needs a Thesis22:40 Who Has a Real AI Thesis Today?24:59 The Rundown AI's $10M+ Newsletter and Its PE Deal29:31 HubSpot's Strategy of Buying Up Media Companies34:55 Local News, AI-Generated Content, and 6AM City46:06 Breaking Points, Ground News, and the Rise of Trusted Filters53:03 Owning a New Category: Latent Space's AI Engineer Events59:13 Every's Bundled AI Tools and Software-Funded Media

What if your most valuable future customers are discovering solutions in a place your current attribution models can't even see?Agility requires not just adapting to new channels, but completely rethinking how we measure discovery and value when the customer journey starts with a conversation with an AI.Today, we're going to talk about:- How the shift from keyword-based search to conversational AI is creating a new discipline: Answer Engine Optimization.- Why your current team structure might be the biggest obstacle to winning in the AI era, and how to reorganize talent and process for this new reality.- The critical role of unified customer data in influencing AI-driven recommendations and why it's becoming the ultimate competitive advantage.To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome, Kipp Bodnar, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot.About Kipp BodnarAs CMO of HubSpot, Kipp leads global marketing strategy to drive awareness and demand across a rapidly evolving product suite. He previously served as VP of Marketing, scaling international teams and overseeing demand gen, strategic partnerships, and social media. He's also a marketing advisor to several SaaS companies, co-author of The B2B Social Media Book, and a respected speaker and blogger.Kipp Bodnar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kippbodnar/---------- Resources ----------HubSpot website: https://www.hubspot.com/The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://aglbrnd.co/r/2868abd8085a9703We're proud to be a media partner for #MAICON26 - Oct. 13-15! Learn how AI can power your marketing and business and help you grow smarter. Use code AGILE150 to save! https://aglbrnd.co/r/7fe458ced0f04658Reach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad credit! Learn more: https://advertalize.com/r/491818c79fb1873fChaser is the only Slack-native project management platform that helps teams turn messages into tracked tasks, automate follow-ups, and maintain team-wide visibility, without adopting another tool. Now integrated with Claude and other GenAI tools. Learn more at trychaser.com and use code AGILEBRAND for a 3-month free trial (normal trial is 14 days).The most influential minds in software, AI, and engineering leadership will be at WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America, September 23-25 in San Jose. Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/60a7299222a7bcf1Start building your own apps with Replit and get $20 off. Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/93531742a7625a20Enjoyed the show? Tell us more at and give us a rating so others can find the show at: https://aglbrnd.co/r/faaed112fc9887f3Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/35ded3ccfb6716baCheck out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.comThe Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Send us Fan MailThis week's enterprise software developments highlight the continued expansion of AI, workflow automation, and ecosystem connectivity across CRM, marketing, operations, and enterprise applications. Copado introduced Agentia, a Salesforce-first 360 delivery solution designed to streamline software delivery processes, while ECI Software Solutions added new AI capabilities to its Deacom and JobBOSS² platforms to enhance manufacturing operations. InvoiceCloud unveiled an AI-powered billing experience to improve customer interactions, and Pipefy announced a collaboration with Microsoft to strengthen workflow automation and enterprise productivity. Meanwhile, Airship expanded its fleet of AI agents to support customer engagement initiatives, and Clari and Salesloft introduced new capabilities aimed at improving revenue execution. Exclaimer deepened enterprise integration through its connection with Workday, HubSpot launched a solution focused on Answer Engine Optimization to help organizations adapt to AI-driven search experiences, Respondology introduced new tools for managing and engaging with social media comments, and StackAdapt released a live events campaign workflow tailored for sports advertising markets. Together, these announcements underscore how vendors are embedding AI and automation directly into business processes while expanding platform interoperability and customer engagement capabilities.In today's episode, we invited a panel of industry analysts for a live discussion on LinkedIn to analyze current enterprise software stories. We covered many grounds including the direction and roadmaps of each enterprise software vendors. Finally, we analyzed future trends and how they might shape the enterprise software industry.Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOB2KlqraVsQuestions for Panelists?

This week I share my latest breakthrough, the answer to a question that's been in the back of my mind. Why Do LLMs Require Symmetry - the 1:1 parity between html and paint?Turns out it has everything to do with security protocols for LLMS.This insight came from a post on Bluesky by John Mueller - "A properly made website works well for AI agents ... and search engines, and LLMs, and above all, for actual people. If you're trying to fix accessibility issues by making a separate "agent-friendly" version, you are just building technical debt. You'll have to redo it multiple times. Just fix it."Went down the rabbit hole based on a comment left in response. "This is not what we have found in the wild.We re-route AI (not search) to a machine layer, written and formatted for AI ingestion and inference. It works. We took an invisible ad agency (the most established in the market) to top 3 agencies on money prompts in 15 days. Not a one-off."Turns out that just because something CAN be done, doesn't always mean it SHOULD be done.Mentioned in the show:VizzEx - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vizzex.ai/vizzex-pro/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Article I wrote going into much more detail -The “AI Decoy Website” Trap: An Algorithmic Suicide Squeeze PlayThis week a little more about the newest VizzEx tool - Symmetry Gate™ Check Tool. You can find it at:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://symmetrygate.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Last week's episode: https://www.confessionsofanseo.com/podcast/treat-googles-crawl-scheduler-like-the-active-power-grid-it-is-season-6-episode-27/Get on the waiting list for the next cohort of the AI Visibility Mastery 12-month course. We are committed to the success of our members.⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vizzex.ai/ai-visibility-mastery/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Wordpress registration⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ HubSpot registration⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Symmetry Gate⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - check the "cost" of your content for AI models to extract informationSubscribe to Confessions of an SEO™ wherever you get your podcasts. Your subscribing and download sends the message that you appreciate what is being shared and helping others find Confessions of an SEO™An easy place to leave a review ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/confessions-of-an-seo-1973881⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You can find me on⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Carolyn Holzman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Linkedin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠American Way Media⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Google Directly⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠AmericanWayMedia.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Consulting AgencyNeed Help With an Issue? - reach out Text me here - 512-222-3132Music from Uppbeathttps://uppbeat.io/t/doug-organ/fugue-stateLicense code: HESHAZ4ZOAUMWTUA

Your LinkedIn headline is one of the first things prospects see, yet many salespeople waste it by listing their job title and company name. In this first episode of the LinkedIn Response Series, I explain why your headline should focus on the problem you solve instead of who you work for.A strong headline tells prospects immediately how you can help them, increases profile views, and encourages more conversations before you ever send a sales message.Why Your LinkedIn Headline MattersYour headline is more than a job description. It helps prospects quickly decide whether you're relevant to them.A well-written headline can:Increase profile views by making your profile stand out in LinkedIn searches.Encourage more inbound conversations from interested prospects.Clearly communicate the value you provide before someone reads the rest of your profile.Improve your visibility by using keywords your ideal buyers are already searching for.Stop Leading With Your Company NameMost buyers don't care where you work unless your company is already widely recognized.Instead of using your company name or job title as the main focus, use your headline to explain the problem you solve. When prospects immediately recognize a challenge they're facing, they're far more likely to view your profile and engage with you.Focus on the Right AudienceA great headline only works when it's seen by the right people.Rather than trying to appeal to everyone on LinkedIn, narrow your focus to your ideal buyers. This could include people who:Recently changed jobs.Are active and posting on LinkedIn.Match your target industry or decision-maker profile.The more relevant your audience, the more effective your headline becomes.Use a Simple FormulaOne effective approach is to build your headline around three parts:Identify a specific problem your ideal customer is experiencing.Make the problem feel immediate and relevant.End with a question that points toward the result they want.This approach sparks curiosity and encourages prospects to learn more about you.Keep Your Message SimpleAvoid technical language, company jargon, or long descriptions.Your headline should be short, easy to understand, and immediately clear. Prospects should know within seconds whether your profile is relevant to them.Real Results From a Better HeadlineEven small changes can make a noticeable difference.After updating one team member's LinkedIn headline to focus on customer pain points instead of company information, connection requests began turning into real conversations. Prospects started asking buying questions and booking appointments without being pitched directly.The change wasn't in the outreach. It started with the headline.What's Next?In the next episode of the LinkedIn Response Series, I explain how to increase LinkedIn profile views so more qualified prospects actually see your profile and your headline."Address the problem your prospect is already thinking about, then show them the outcome they're looking for."ResourcesKeep track of your sales activity and boost your results with the Prospect Pro sales tool.Step up your sales game with Sales Mastermind. Get accountability, stay motivated, and tackle the blockers keeping you from hitting your goals.Visit Blue Mango Studios for help in creating podcast production content. Sponsorship OffersThis episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot.With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com/sales.This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn.Are you tired of prospective clients not responding to your emails? Sign up for a free 60-day trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator at linkedin.com/tse.This episode is brought to you in part by the TSE Sales Foundation.Improve your connection on LinkedIn and land three or five appointments with our LinkedIn prospecting course. Go to the salesevangelist.com/linkedin.CreditsAs one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey. We'd love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or Spotify. Audio provided by Free SFX, Soundstripe, and Bensound. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and produced by Brightseed and Hill.

"There's 20 fires going on at every moment in the office and you have enough water to put out four."Mark Roberge shares what it takes to build and scale a company, from finding product-market fit to knowing when it's time to grow.He also shares the framework behind his new book, The Science of Selling, and why founders should scale based on their own data, not another company's success.Guest: Mark Roberge, Founding CRO of HubSpot, HBS Professor, and Co-Founder at Stage 2 CapitalConnect with Mark: XLinkedInConnect with Joubin:XLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.comFollow Grit on: LinkedInX​Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

Episode 435 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Kojo Osei, Partner at Matrix. The venture capital industry originated back in 1946 in the Boston area, when The American Research and Development Corporation was founded by MIT president Karl Compton and Harvard professor Georges Doriot. From that point, an industry was born, and firms were created, but very few have had the lasting impact and track record as Matrix, one of the OG firms that helped institutionalize this industry. The firm has a tremendous track record through the years making investments in legendary companies like Apple and FedEx… plus category creators like HubSpot, Zendesk, and Oculus… or current investments like Canva, Suno, GOAT, and Flock Safety. Matrix is investing out of its 12th fund, an $800M fund for seed and Series A investments, and the firm continues to have a strong presence on both coasts. Kojo is a Stanford grad, who was the Head of Product at Sirona Medical, the AI operating system for radiologists, before becoming a VC. Now based in NYC, Kojo has been an investor with Matrix for over five years. Some areas of interest these days for investments include agent-driven commerce, how the software infrastructure is getting rebuilt for agents, and model application integrated companies. His investments include companies like Channel3, BoldVoice, Ampersand, and LM Studios. Chapters: 00:00 Introducing Kojo Osei, Partner at Matrix 03:24 What is Agent Driven Commerce 09:45 Koji's background & Early Career 13:20 Joining Matrix as a VC 14:37 Advice for Aspiring Venture Capitalists 17:05 The First Year in Venture Capital 20:26 Details about Matrix's 25:01 Investment Areas of Interest for Kojo 27:48 The Art of the Cold Email to a VC 34:17 Exploring the 'Why Now' Philosophy 37:59 AI: Current State and Predictions 42:06 Common Mistakes Founders Make 44:23 GTM for Developer Products 48:11 Leveraging AI in Daily Workflow 49:23 Kojo's Recommendation & Personal Interests Podcast Sponsor: This podcast is brought to you by one of the strongest longtime supporters of the local startup ecosystem, Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. With more than 1,500 bankers and relationship advisors and $44B in loans as of Q4 2025 – SVB delivers expert guidance, specialized products and a team that knows the innovation economy inside and out. Learn more at SVB.com.

In Episode 673 of the New Media Show, host 2017 Podcast Hall of Famer Rob Greenlee welcomes Casey Adams, founder and CEO of Listener.com and host of The Casey Adams Show, for a timely conversation about how podcasting, video, social content, advertising, and new media measurement are rapidly converging. For more than 20 years, podcasting has relied heavily on RSS feeds, downloads, and audio-first measurement as the foundation of distribution and advertising value. That still matters, but the media environment around it has changed dramatically. Shows now are distributed across Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, social video, newsletters, clips, livestreams, and direct audience communities. Audiences may call it all a podcast, even as the industry continues to debate its technical definition. Casey brings a founder, creator, and investor perspective to the discussion. He started podcasting as a teenager, interviewing founders and entrepreneurs, and later built MediaKits.com before moving into podcast analytics with Listener.com. His current work focuses on helping modern publishers understand how a single episode performs across audio, long-form video, short-form clips, newsletters, and social platforms. Rob and Casey explore why the term “podcast” now means different things to different groups. To many longtime industry professionals, podcasting still points back to RSS-based audio distribution. To many younger listeners and viewers, it means a format: a recurring show, often conversational, often video-enabled, and consumed wherever attention already exists. The conversation centers on one of the biggest questions facing podcasting and new media right now: How do you measure the true value of a show when the audience is no longer in one place? Rob and Casey also discuss why the download can no longer carry the entire weight of podcast measurement. A single episode may now generate value through an Apple Podcasts listen, a Spotify stream, a full YouTube view, a YouTube Short, a TikTok clip, a LinkedIn post, an X post, a newsletter mention, and a brand integration that travels across all of those surfaces. Each platform counts activity differently. Each platform has its own audience behavior. That makes reporting, sponsorship value, and campaign analysis more complex. Casey explains Listener.com's concept of episode clusters: grouping the full set of related content around one episode so publishers and advertisers can see the larger cross-platform reach and performance. Instead of treating the audio file as the entire campaign, an episode cluster recognizes that one conversation can become long-form video, social clips, newsletter content, and multiple ad touchpoints. We also discuss the rising influence of creator-led media companies. Examples like TBPN, Jomboy Media, Substack's media activity, and venture-backed new media brands show how independent shows and creator-driven networks are increasingly competing with legacy media for attention, trust, and advertiser value. The conversation explores why companies, CEOs, investors, and major brands now seek to control their own narrative through podcasts, owned shows, and trusted media relationships. We also examine the advertising side of this shift. Brands want better campaign reporting, but they also want context. A host-read placement, a social clip, a full video episode, and a newsletter mention should not all be treated the same. Modern publishers need tools that let them demonstrate the full value of their media ecosystem without flattening every metric into a single misleading number. Meaning for creators. Being a podcaster may no longer fully describe the work involved. Modern show builders are becoming media operators. They need to understand production, audience behavior, platform distribution, brand positioning, analytics, content packaging, and trust. The technical meaning of podcasting still matters, but the audience meaning matters just as much now. For creators, networks, agencies, and brands, Episode 673 offers a clear look at the next stage of podcasting: a media business built around trusted shows, distributed everywhere, measured more intelligently, and no longer limited to downloads. Topics Covered in This Episode: 00:33 Why podcast measurement is changing 01:00 Moving beyond the download 01:44 RSS, streaming, and modern distribution challenges 02:42 Introducing Casey Adams of Listener.com 03:37 Casey Adams joins the show 04:17 What Listener.com is trying to solve 05:00 AI-powered analytics for modern podcast publishers 05:41 Casey's podcasting origin story 06:30 Interviewing Larry King and learning from media legends 07:18 Larry King's warning about rejecting new media trends 08:04 From MediaKits.com to Listener.com 09:15 Rob's early podcasting and radio background 10:04 Why the industry struggles with change 11:00 Does Casey still consider himself a podcaster? 12:00 Podcasts as a format, not just a technology 13:10 YouTube, Spotify, and the expanded podcast ecosystem 14:34 Why modern shows must meet audiences where they are 15:37 The audience now defines what a podcast means 16:16 RSS audio vs the broader podcast perception 17:16 Apple HLS and the pressure on RSS 18:17 The industry needs to accept broader podcast usage 19:26 Younger audiences and podcast consumption habits 20:39 Larry King's quote behind Listener.com 21:25 Why RSS is becoming less visible to creators and audiences 23:21 Respecting podcasting's roots while accepting change 24:00 The Uber analogy for podcasting's disruption 25:41 Journalists, creators, and independent media companies 27:49 Creator-led media and the rise of new media brands 28:33 Legacy media relevance is being challenged 30:13 TBPN and the new media company model 31:28 Treating a show like a full media ecosystem 32:36 Year-long sponsorships and category exclusivity 33:49 Why serious creators must think like media companies 35:19 How podcast analytics supports advertiser relationships 36:00 Silicon Valley's renewed interest in “new media” 37:23 The pandemic pushed legacy media into creator workflows 38:16 Casey introduces the Listener.com platform 39:05 Jomboy Media and creator-led sports coverage 40:00 Episode clusters and cross-platform performance 41:00 Tracking long-form video, audio, and short-form clips 42:18 Episode reports for brands and publishers 43:05 Why every platform metric should be valued differently 44:00 How Listener.com supports campaign reporting 45:00 Aggregating metrics from multiple platforms 46:00 Audio, content, commerce, and newsletter integrations 47:00 Using AI to match clips to episodes 48:00 Listener AI and talking to your podcast data 49:23 Making podcast data easier to understand and share 50:00 Where podcast analytics and AI go next 51:28 AI can guide creators, but execution still wins 52:23 Using AI as a thought partner for content strategy 53:24 Why creators must keep improving their shows 54:47 What drives new media inspiration today? 56:01 Why companies want to control their narrative 57:15 CEOs, podcasts, and trusted long-form conversations 58:22 Substack, owned media, and creator platforms 59:21 New podcast metrics standards and platform conflicts 1:00:35 How different platforms count views and plays 1:02:16 Serving publishers while tracking industry standards 1:03:00 Why brands need better cross-platform campaign reports 1:04:28 Toward better host-read campaign reporting 1:05:14 How platform changes flow into Listener.com data 1:06:00 Why publishers should control their own data 1:07:00 Putting a show's full value forward 1:08:03 Brand, trust, and modern podcast IP 1:09:34 OpenAI, TBPN, and strategic media investment 1:10:32 Why TBPN brought sponsors back 1:11:11 How media brands can help shift company narratives 1:12:15 New media as a strategic communications layer 1:14:00 Lessons from AI-generated podcast network messaging 1:14:46 The risk of platform influence after acquisition 1:16:00 Why the TBPN deal was more than a podcast deal 1:16:39 Will more companies buy or build media brands? 1:17:40 HubSpot, distribution, and trusted voices 1:18:08 Why creators must stay honest with audiences 1:19:40 Authenticity and audience trust in sponsorships 1:20:05 Casey's closing thoughts on podcasting and new media 1:20:34 Rob's closing view on podcasting as one lane in new media 1:21:41 How publishers can work with Listener.com 1:22:43 Networks, independent shows, and Listener.com's go-to-market 1:23:56 Closing remarks and where to find the show Guest Links: Casey Adams, Founder and CEO, Listener.com Listener.com: https://listener.com Casey Adams Show & Website: https://www.caseyadams.com The Casey Adams Show on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-casey-adams-show/id1328795944 Casey Adams on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/casey-adams-430b3114a/ Casey Adams on X: https://x.com/CaseyAdams Casey Adams on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casey/ Host: Rob Greenlee and New Media Show Links Rob Greenlee Website: https://robgreenlee.com New Media Show: https://newmediashow.com New Media Show Audio on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-media-show-audio/id392545649 New Media Show on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@TheNewMediaShow Rob Greenlee on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@RobGreenlee Podcast Hall of Fame: https://podcasthall.com Personal / AI Disclosure Note I used AI tools to help organize and edit this episode description and generate show notes from the episode transcript. The views, clarifications, responsibility, and industry perspective are mine and my guest's. This article reflects my editorial direction and the substance of the conversation.The post Podcasting Beyond the Download | Casey Adams, Listener.com #673 first appeared on New Media Show.

Administrative tasks are part of every sales role, but they should never take priority over selling. I'm revisiting a conversation from the archive with Anthony Iannarino to share practical ways to keep admin work from taking over your day. While this conversation first aired in 2020, the principles are still relevant today, especially when AI can help streamline many everyday tasks.Busy Is Not the Same as ProductiveA full calendar does not always mean meaningful progress. As sales professionals become more successful, more requests, emails, client issues, and internal tasks naturally compete for their attention.The challenge is learning to separate work that creates opportunities from work that simply keeps you busy. Staying productive means focusing on the activities that move deals forward instead of constantly reacting to every request.Protect Your Most Important WorkThe best time and energy should be reserved for activities that directly contribute to sales.Instead of starting the day by checking emails or responding to client requests, block uninterrupted time for prospecting, nurturing relationships, and preparing for important sales conversations. Administrative work can be handled later without sacrificing the work that drives results.Create Boundaries Around Client RequestsBeing available for clients does not mean responding to every request immediately.Many transactional tasks, such as correcting invoices, retrieving reports, or resolving operational issues, belong to other departments. While it is important to make sure customers receive the help they need, those responsibilities should be delegated whenever possible so selling remains the priority.Use Time Blocks to Stay FocusedSwitching between emails, CRM updates, prospecting, and meetings throughout the day makes it difficult to stay focused.Working in dedicated time blocks helps eliminate distractions and improves productivity. Setting aside uninterrupted periods for prospecting, project work, and administrative tasks makes it easier to complete each activity without constantly changing focus.Batch Administrative Tasks TogetherAdministrative work is unavoidable, but it does not have to interrupt the entire day.Grouping similar tasks together, such as updating the CRM, replying to emails, or completing reports, helps reduce time lost through constant task switching. Completing these activities during scheduled blocks keeps them from interfering with revenue-generating work.Let Your CRM Work for YouA CRM should be used as a tool to support future conversations, not as another task to avoid.Recording important notes after meetings makes it easier to remember customer goals, previous discussions, and next steps. Instead of relying on memory, use the CRM to capture details that strengthen future interactions and improve follow-up.Confidence Matters More Than Endless ResearchMany sellers delay prospecting because they believe they need more research before making a call.Research has its place, but it should never replace meaningful outreach. A clear value proposition, confidence in the conversation, and consistent follow-up have a much greater impact than spending hours gathering information that may never be used.Prioritize Opportunity Creation Every DaySales success comes down to creating opportunities and winning them.Administrative work supports the sales process, but it does not replace it. Protect time for prospecting, client conversations, and relationship building before tackling lower-value tasks. Consistently doing the most important work first creates better long-term results."Do what's most important first every day without failure, and don't negotiate with yourself." — Anthony IannarinoResourcesKeep track of your sales activity and boost your results with the Prospect Pro sales tool.Step up your sales game with Sales Mastermind. Get accountability, stay motivated, and tackle the blockers keeping you from hitting your goals.Visit Blue Mango Studios for help in creating podcast production content. Sponsorship OffersThis episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot.With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com/sales.This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn.Are you tired of prospective clients not responding to your emails? Sign up for a free 60-day trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator at linkedin.com/tse.This episode is brought to you in part by the TSE Sales Foundation.Improve your connection on LinkedIn and land three or five appointments with our LinkedIn prospecting course. Go to the salesevangelist.com/linkedin.CreditsAs one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey. We'd love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or Spotify. Audio provided by Free SFX, Soundstripe, and Bensound. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and produced by Brightseed and Hill.

Nichole Viviani, Chief People, Culture and Change Officer at Global Payments, joined us on The Modern People Leader. We talked about why culture makes or breaks M&A, how Global Payments aligned 27,000 people through “goals before roles,” and why leaders need to over-communicate through uncertainty.----  Sponsor Links:

In this episode, Seth Godin takes us into how he thinks about storytelling and the intersection of strategy and story, and then we hear him dissect one of his go-to stories. Plus, Seth and I trade stories in the back half of the episode—business storytelling nerdery on full display.Seth is a world-renowned author, speaker, and thought leader who has written more than 20 bestsellers, including Purple Cow, The Practice, and This Is Marketing. At the time of this recording, Seth was focused on promoting This is Strategy.Together, Seth and I discuss his delightful story about recumbent bikes. This "super-story" has found its way into Seth's work repeatedly for over a decade. We discuss ‌the evolution of this story, how he conceptualizes status and affiliation, and why focusing on pedagogy as a storyteller is essential. Also in the episode: why the idea of your "posture" matters for storytellers, the role of the storyteller in the world today, and why smaller stories often have a bigger impact.Learn more about Seth's work and subscribe to his daily blog at seths.blogEPISODE CREDITS:Written and produced by me, Jay Acunzo. For more, subscribe to my newsletter→Production support for the original edit by Ilana Nevins.Music for Why They Resonate is by Embleton (Instagram - Facebook).***ABOUT ME, JAY ACUNZOI'm a public speaking and storytelling advisor trusted by bestselling authors, TED speakers, seven-figure coaches, and brands like Mailchimp, Wistia, and Salesforce. Before starting my advisory firm (where I work 1:1 with clients and run group programs), I was a digital media strategist at Google and head of content for 3 organizations, including HubSpot.I've given keynotes across the US and several other countries to marketers and managers, designers and dentists, leaders and landscapers, and my journey as a speaker has been featured in 3 different books.Today, I teach business leaders how to communicate with greater clarity, influence, and resonance.Learn more about my advisory work at jayacunzo.comBook me to speak at jayacunzo.com/keynotesWatch video versions of some episodes, plus get regular insights into stronger public speaking and growing a speaking business, at youtube.com/jayacunzo***IF YOU ENJOY THE SHOW:Leave a review on Apple Podcasts Leave a rating on Spotify Thanks for your support! Keep making what matters.

Most companies are "sprinkling AI" onto old processes when the real wins come from throwing the process in the garbage and rebuilding it. In this episode of Content Amplified, Paul Schmidt, VP of AI and Innovation at SmartBug Media, an elite HubSpot agency partner, maps the AI adoption bell curve he sees across the thousand-plus companies SmartBug has worked with: early adopters who figured it out on their own, a chunky middle leaning on embedded features like auto-written subject lines, and laggards in litigious industries like finance and healthcare. Paul shares the practical playbook for moving up the curve: 30-minute audits with department leaders to surface bottlenecks and mundane processes, process mapping as the prerequisite for real AI maturity ("you're going to need a process for mapping processes"), and building agents early just to learn what they can and cannot do. He also explains how his roughly 200-person org went from nobody sharing AI use cases, out of fear of getting in trouble, to about five shared in Slack every day. If you want a clear picture of where your team sits on the AI curve and the next step to take, this episode is your map.About PaulPaul Schmidt is the VP of AI and Innovation at SmartBug Media, one of the few elite HubSpot agency partners in the world. In his role he oversees AI fluency and adoption for the SmartBug team, builds internal agents and tools that streamline the agency's processes, and develops new AI service offerings for clients. He has spent more than a decade in consulting, working directly with clients on CRM onboarding, growing their marketing teams, and building pipeline through marketing campaigns. If it touches the HubSpot ecosystem, Paul is your go-to guy.Show NotesConnect with Paul on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drumming/Paul's website: paulschmidt.comText us what you think about this episode!

Elon Musk reporter Grace Kay talks with TITV Host Akash Pasricha about Tesla's Miami Robotaxi launch. We also talk with Nvidia correspondent Phoebe Liu about Nvidia partnering with AI chip rivals and enterprise software reporter Kevin McLaughlin about HubSpot's controversial customer data reversal. Plus, we get into the cooling AI IPO pipeline with Gregor Feige, Co-Head of ECM, Americas and Head of Global TMT ECM, UBS.Articles discussed on this episode: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/teslas-robotaxi-push-tests-new-blueprint-scaling-fasthttps://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidias-new-hedge-chip-competitors-partnerhttps://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/applied-ai/facing-revolt-hubspot-reverses-decision-use-customer-data-ai-feature Subscribe: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theinformation The Information: https://www.theinformation.com/subscribe_hSign up for the AI Agenda newsletter: https://www.theinformation.com/features/ai-agendaTITV airs weekdays on YouTube, X and LinkedIn at 10AM PT / 1PM ET. Or check us out wherever you get your podcasts.Follow us:X: https://x.com/theinformationIG: https://www.instagram.com/theinformation/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@titv.theinformationLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/theinformation/

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss the growing tension between businesses and software vendors, sparked by recent privacy policy changes at major platforms, and the fundamentals of AI data sovereignty. You will discover how to spot risky service rules before they impact your daily work. You will learn practical steps to evaluate whether building custom internal tools makes sense for your team. You will find out how to review agreement changes without getting lost in confusing language. You will gain confidence to protect your valuable information and keep full control of your digital assets. 00:00 – Introduction 01:45 – HubSpot triggers data sharing controversy 05:30 – The hidden costs of vendor lock-in 10:15 – Can AI replace expensive software subscriptions? 14:40 – Building custom tools in-house 19:20 – The importance of the 5P framework 24:10 – Reviewing service agreements quarterly 28:50 – Final thoughts and next steps 32:15 – Call to action Watch this episode to learn how you can take back control of your software and data today. Watch the video here: Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here. Listen to the audio here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-what-is-ai-data-sovereignty.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here. Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! [podcastsponsor] Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher S. Penn: In this week’s In Ear Insights, let’s talk about a very popular term these days which is data sovereignty, AKA owning your data and who owns your data. In the news recently, HubSpot made an announcement last week that caused a firestorm of commentary. Appropriately so when they said that to better improve HubSpot’s predictive abilities in your CRM, customers would be able to share data and see data from other HubSpot accounts to predict the likelihood of a certain type of sale closing. Now they did say that it would be something that you could opt into, although that was not super clear. And the terms of service were vague enough that if you were an eagle-eyed legal expert, which we are not, you could say, yeah, we’re going to do this regardless. LinkedIn exploded, threads exploded, Twitter exploded, and HubSpot walked it back over the weekend to say we screwed up. And to that credit they said we screwed up. We didn’t do our homework on this. We’re not going to make this terms of service change. However, there are still two consequences. One, folks have pointed out they didn’t say they weren’t going to implement the feature, they just said they’re not going to change the terms of service this way. And two, the big question that a lot of folks have is from a customer’s perspective, this was kind of a big deal in terms of violation of trust, which is a really important thing. And one commenter said it took HubSpot twenty years to build trust in four days to screw it up. Now again, to their credit, they did walk it back. But Katie, what’s your take on this, particularly as it relates to the integrity of our data? Because as we see these days more and more, every AI company is saying we need more data, so we’re just going to come in and take it well. Katie Robbert: And that’s always been the risk with using these software vendors is they can change things on a whim. And yeah, you can blow up social media and say I’m so mad at this. That doesn’t mean they have to do anything about it because guess who already has your data? Guess whose system you are already integrated to, guess whose system you have built connectors to and tapped into the API of, and you are building your whole business around. So the cost of switching is incredibly high and incredibly painful, and you’re not necessarily going to find a vendor that’s doing things any more ethically or doing things in a way that their governance aligns with what you want to see. Because again, to that comment, HubSpot spent twenty years building trust and then they decided to change it. I call BS on the we didn’t do our homework, we screwed up. Really. The size of company that you are, you don’t just change things on a whim. This is something that has likely been on your roadmap for a very long time. It was just a matter of trying to figure out how to do it in a way that you could sneak it in. But still, July fourth, holiday weekend. Well yeah, so there’s that. But legally, the language holds up. They worked with their lawyers, they worked with their IT department, they worked with whoever is involved in that change. It wasn’t an oopsie, we didn’t do our homework. No, I’ve worked in a large organization. I know how these things happen. There is no oopsie, we screwed up. You didn’t. You got caught, period. And your customers are angry. But guess who’s not going to stop being a customer anymore? Your customers. And they already got the data. Nowhere in that did they say and we’re going to repartition the data or we’re going to unshare the data. They were just like oopsies, you caught us. Okay, where is it? Oh, it’s over here. Here we go. That gets a red flag today. It gets a huge red flag because more and more, it’s Google adding AI into workspace conversation all over again. When my mother-in-law was here, she kept complaining about how Google was making suggestions in her Gmail. You can turn that off. Well, what if I need it? Then don’t complain about it. But Google made this change where it’s looking at all of your emails, it’s looking at all of your chat conversations, it’s looking at all of your stuff. Google has been looking at your web searches for however long web search has existed. On the one hand, I can understand the outrage of customers of a CRM saying I thought you were protecting my data. On the other hand, I’m a little surprised at people’s sort of naive perspective that our data was private in the first place. And I’m sort of like, so bad on the CRM, but also bad on the consumer for not being more informed that nothing is private. Like your Social Security number. It exists in a million places. People just haven’t decided that you’re the person that they want to steal the identity of. Maybe you’re not that interesting. I don’t know. Okay, I’m going to red flag myself. That was terrible. Red flag myself, sorry. Christopher S. Penn: It does raise the question, and this is something that vendors in particular have not thought a lot about. Generative AI in its current incarnation is best at software development. That is the number one task being used for. It is what is most skilled at, is what has been tuned the best for. Which means that if you are a SaaS provider, you are skating on very thin ice because you are one prompt away from a customer saying, screw it. I’m going to try vibe coding it myself. And whether or not that’s a good idea, we’ll put that aside because we’ve talked about that in the past. The reality is that with skilled use of these tools, you could say we’re just going to bring this in house. And we’ve done that. I’ve done that even on my personal blog, on my personal website. I said, you know what, I don’t want to pay for this plugin anymore. I’m just going to bring this in house and stop paying for this. And over time, you see the bills going down as you bring in more stuff in house because your AI tool that you built it with is also the AI tool you provide support to yourself with, so you don’t have to pay for the additional upkeep. One of the biggest moats that SaaS has always had was, hey, you don’t want to do server maintenance, you don’t want to do software maintenance, you don’t want to do any of that stuff. Pay a vendor to do it. Well, now it’s like I have basically a junior employee, right? Because we’ve talked about how tools like Claude Code basically are junior employees. I have a support resource. It may not be perfect, but it gets better every day. And so for marketers, for business folks, for folks who are looking at particularly operations folks, as you’re auditing your tech stack and as you’re seeing changes happen to your point, Katie, and vendors trying to cram AI into everything, the question has to become at what point do people start bringing things back in house, given the capabilities of what even a $20 a month AI subscription can do for you? Katie Robbert: I think for a lot of companies, that’s definitely something they’re thinking about. But you’re still talking about a whole suite of skills. You’re still talking about a software developer, you’re still talking about an IT person, you’re still talking about QA, a database architect. Sure, AI can do that stuff, provided you know how to tell IT what to do. And so for us, I would say you have some of those skills, but you do not encompass the skill sets of all four of those individuals. So I would be hesitant to say, sure, we can just have whatever you’ve built, manage it and get rid of this other vendor. We’re not there yet. I can see us getting there. Companies who have none of those skill sets because that’s not what they do. Think of perhaps a creative agency that really works on front-end design and branding. They don’t have the skill sets in house to do this. So even though AI can do a lot of those things, they still have to have someone to tell the AI what to do and stand it up and manage it. That data has to go somewhere. That data still has to be secure in some way. So you still need someone who understands database architecture, who understands servers. I hear what you’re saying and there is a reason why the majority of us turn to vendors like you, just handle it. Saying we can handle it ourselves in house is not as easy as it sounds like. Yeah, it’s an empty threat to the vendors. Especially if you’ve never stood up a server. You don’t know what goes into good data privacy. You are just vibe coding your own version of a CRM. That is a recipe for disaster and it’s likely going to lead to data leaks in some way of your most valuable data. So I hear what you’re saying, Chris. I think that a lot of companies are going to put that on their roadmap of what does it look like for us to build this in house for ourselves. I think that is more possible than it ever has been. But there’s still a lot of caveats with that. I’m saying to do it the right way, you need those skill sets. It doesn’t mean you can’t just go ahead and do it. Christopher S. Penn: It’s true. I do think there’s a space for consultancies and agencies to operate, particularly if you’re a hybrid agency where you have an IT consulting capability. I think, for example, IBM IX as one example, that’s a blend where that might be a realistic choice to say we have our trusted agency that we work with and we don’t like what we see. A HubSpot or Salesforce or whoever doing it, we don’t need it. John was at Salesforce Connections not too long ago and was saying that it’s Agentforce, everything is Agentforce and AI agents. And there are a lot of folks saying we don’t need that nor do we need to pay for that. We can take Sugar CRM, which is a free open source product, with our existing IT agency with the assistance of AI, with their help because they do know servers and they do know this. We’re going to stop paying Salesforce $3 million a year and instead pay our agency maybe $2 million a year to run it for us and save a million bucks a year. And we won’t have all this extra stuff that nobody asked for and that doesn’t fit their business case for it. And I think there is an opportunity in the marketplace for that. Katie Robbert: I agree. But let me counter with this question. You know, we have collectively put a lot of stock and time into these large language models. We’ve also seen instances where a company rolls back the large language model that they rolled out for a variety of reasons. What risk are we taking by then saying well, I’m going to fire the vendor, I’m going to build it myself because I have a large language model? And then tomorrow the large language model gets shut down. So you fired your vendor, you don’t have a large language model. What do you do? Is that a real risk? As someone who is very risk averse, I should be thinking about this in terms of business continuity planning. If you are tied into only working with one vendor, for example Anthropic, and as we saw in recent events the U.S. government said you can’t have that model in public, yes, that is a risk. Christopher S. Penn: However, if you are a multimodal aware company and you know where to find GLM 5.2, which we have through our Deep Infra subscription, and you know how to host models locally, which we’ve talked about in previous episodes of the podcast and the live stream, your risk is significantly reduced because you have more options. That’s what I learned from you, the more realistic options you have, the lower your risk because you have backup plans, you have backups to your backups. And if you are working in the AI space today and you have integrated AI and it is now a risk because your business is so dependent on it, you would better have those backup plans handy. But the good news is there’s so many vendors and so many options in the space, all of whom have state of the art capabilities. If Anthropic or OpenAI went away tomorrow, just flip to the next vendor with this model. Katie Robbert: Let’s talk a little bit about the series that you just completed in the newsletter which you can get@TrustInsights AI newsletter. You talked a lot about Enterprise AI. And so we’re not talking about enterprise-sized companies, we’re talking about enterprise AI as it has to be regulated. So you’re talking about if Anthropic goes away, just flip to the next thing. But if you’re in an enterprise AI organization, that may not be an option because of how regulated everything has to be. So can you speak a little bit to that? Christopher S. Penn: Yeah. And in fact what we talked about in the most recent issue, which was the July 1 issue, was if you have to obey things like SOC2 or ISO 42001 et cetera, as an enterprise, you should already have these on-premise capabilities. Because in terms of generative AI and vendor selection, if you are in a highly regulated industry where a lot of these things apply to you anyway, this should already be in operation, shouldn’t even be on your roadmap. It should be in operation. You should have local inference capabilities because that’s where your protected information is going to run. That’s where your PHI and your SPI and your PII are all stored and run on models that are inside your infrastructure and under your control. And no data leaves. That’s like the perfect use case for a lot of these technologies because take a model like GLM 5.2, it is an OPUS class model. It is very smart. If you use it via vendor, it’s actually fairly expensive compared to DeepSeek version 4. However, it’s still cheaper than Claude by a 10x. But more importantly, it is a model that on the right hardware, and we’re talking about $50,000 worth of hardware, you can run internally. Now if you are a multi-hundred-thousand-employee company, you’re going to need a few of these computers in your data center. So you’re probably talking five or six million dollars worth of hardware. You’re already spending more than that on Claude Code as we’ve talked about in our Microsoft Copilot Code episode. You’re going to spend that in two months. So you absolutely should have those capabilities internally already. And if you don’t, you are behind. I mean, there’s no polite way to say that. Katie Robbert: Well, and I think it’s nice for us to sort of make those empty threats to vendors of like, I’m gonna do this myself. And then you’re like, I have no idea how to do this. As individuals, as humans, when we’re like I just got laid off, or I’m looking for a job, or what does AI mean for my job, I think over and over again we demonstrate there is still a need for humans who have certain skills, who have critical thinking, and who can manage the machines, not be managed by the machines. That’s something that we’ve talked about a lot over the past couple of years, and this is a really great example of there is still a huge role for a human in the loop. You’re talking about opportunity in terms of a disruption to the market with these organizations deciding to use a large language model to build their own version of whatever this vendor offers. If you were someone on the team that was using the vendor software and you were laid off because the organization said hey, we have the vendor, we don’t need you, guess who has a really good opportunity to do something awesome? You can go and be like well, I know this vendor software inside and out. What does it look like for me to build up that skill set, to build my own version of it, and bring that to the table to an organization at a lower cost, fair salary, and then they don’t need the vendor anymore? Christopher S. Penn: Mm. Yep. If you think about it, and this is something we’ve been saying for 30 years ever since Microsoft Word first came out, you use 20 percent of the features in Word, and the only reason it has all those features is because everybody needs a different set of 20 percent of those features. A law firm has very different use cases for Microsoft Word than we do. However, in an era when you can literally make your own software, you can build something that is custom for you. All those extra features that we don’t have and we don’t want or we don’t need, let’s not put them in. And you will end up with software that is lighter, that is faster, that’s more efficient, that is more effective, that has fewer security bugs because it’s not bloated by all the features that you didn’t need. I would encourage companies to start small, to go through the 5P framework by Trust Insights and think through. Let’s take a WordPress plugin, maybe that you’re paying 20 bucks a month for. What does it do? How do you use it? Your purpose, who uses it? How does it work? What technologies does it rely on? And how do you know that it works? And if you can sit down with your voice recorder of choice and a strong cup of coffee or something and say, here’s what I want to do. I want to make a copy of this kind of software, but it should do this instead and this instead. Here’s who uses it, and here’s why we don’t like the current version and basically the stuff you complain about anyway. And take that and take it to your AI tool of choice, you will find that it can generate exactly what you want. And again, start small. A single plugin, a single utility. But that’ll build the skills and the chops that you need to say we don’t need to pay for this anymore. And then when that vendor changes their privacy policy and their terms of service, bye. Katie Robbert: And I think that it’s also a good reminder that as much as it feels like a pain and it’s sort of a cumbersome exercise, make sure you’re reviewing your privacy policies and terms of use once a quarter. Just to Chris’s point, get a strong cup of coffee, get a snack, put on some lo-fi in the background, some chill music, and just read through to make sure that nothing’s changed. And if something has changed, make sure you’re aware of what’s changed. Companies will say hey, we told you. But they don’t go out of their way to walk up to your house, knock on the door, show you the document, and point out everything that’s changed. They just put it out there. Christopher S. Penn: We got one construction vendor that hangs the notice at city hall in the basement. We followed the letter of the law. Katie Robbert: Yeah, legally, we did what you were supposed to do. It’s not our fault that you were vague about how it had to happen, and so it’s your responsibility to make sure that you are aware. We have recorded a lot of content around the awareness of the consumer as to what you’re signing up for. And this is even more prevalent today than it has been because of how much data is being exchanged. Data is the most coveted currency of all of these vendors. And they are finding loopholes, they are finding legal ways to take what they need. And to be quite honest, they’ve always owned the data. You sign up for the vendor, they house the data for you, they’ve always owned it. It’s the same story unfortunately of you’re renting from a landlord. Landlord can decide tomorrow, I want this building back. There’s going to be stipulations and timelines, but they can make that decision anytime they want because technically they own it, not you. Christopher S. Penn: Yep, this is a chicken farm now. Everybody out. And that is the legal reality. Katie Robbert: And so there’s two aspects to this data sovereignty, right? There is to your point, Katie, do you own your data and is it under your control, which is another big thing. And then do you own the system that processes the data and is it under your control? Christopher S. Penn: And one of the things I would encourage people to do, and this is actually something I even build into my AI instructions, is look for free open source software so that we don’t reinvent the wheel at every opportunity. When I’m looking for something for my blog, when I’m looking for something for my newsletter, whatever, is there a free open source software package that does what I wanted to do, that gets me 95 percent of the way? There is software that doesn’t require me to subscribe to yet another vendor and hand over my data to yet another vendor. And the answer increasingly is yes. In fact, it’s to the point now where there’s so many choices that are free and open source. Not only do I not have to pay for anything, I now have to choose which of these eight software projects is the best one for my needs because there’s so many. And do I want to customize it further for my use? Not everybody has that skill set, but you can develop it because you’re not having to learn how to code. You’re learning how to ask good questions and develop a good vocabulary. Katie, you could do this today using the 5P framework by Trust Insights. Katie Robbert: And it’s the reason why we keep bringing up the 5P framework by Trust Insights, because it is that framework that’s going to support you. It’s foundational. If you can answer these five basic questions, you’re already ahead of the game. When we talk about vibe coding, we want you to do this first. Don’t just open up a large language model and say I want to build my own CRM. Go, no, that’s a bad idea. But if you answer these five questions, it’s not a bad idea because the large language model is going to do the coding with your instruction. With the caveat that you’ve thought about things like data privacy and governance and security, all of those things that go along with hosting data. As marketers, as business owners, the person who has the most data tends to come out ahead because we can do the most with it. And that’s what these vendors are trying to sell you on. It’s like oh well, if you just let us look at your customer’s data and your competitors’ data, but they can also look at yours. Everybody wins, right? No, no, don’t do that. Would I love to take a look at some of my competitors’ data? Absolutely, but only in a very legal way. That also means they couldn’t look at my data. And that’s just not how that works. So you need to think about a couple of things. One is what is your level of risk aversion? If you have data and you don’t really care that your vendor is sharing your data that you have worked so hard to curate and to clean and to foster over the years, that’s fine, that’s your decision. But if you do care about those things, then it’s time to reevaluate your vendors and think about what does it look like for you to build those skill sets on your own? And it’s not impossible anymore. You have a lot of considerations. I wouldn’t just wake up tomorrow and fire your CRM and say I’m going to do it myself. Maybe give it a little more thought than that. But as you’re thinking about it, think about what does it look like? What does that long-term maintenance look like? Could I do this myself? Could I bring on a contractor to help me do this? Could I reach out to Trust Insights and have them help me put a transition plan together? The answer is yes, we could absolutely do that. But it’s worth thinking about. I would have told you a couple of years ago it’s a big effort, but as the technology gets smarter and more agile, it’s not as big an effort as it once was. It is possible. There’s more human upfront thinking that has to be done. But guess what? That’s what we’re here for. Christopher S. Penn: Exactly. Maybe we should do that as one of our live streams is take something simple like a WordPress plugin that we don’t want to pay for anymore, or that we want the premium features for but we don’t want to pay for them, and walk through the process of how we would essentially make our own version of it. Katie Robbert: It’s a good idea. Christopher S. Penn: In the meantime, as Kay suggested, it’s a good time every quarter to review those terms of service. Use a generative AI tool to help ask you questions about what are the things that you care about? And then have it help you read through the document. Don’t have it do it for you, but have it help you by asking good questions. And if you’ve got some thoughts you’d like to share about things like what’s happening with your data in the hands of your vendors and you want to share your experiences on Popeye or Free Slacker, go to TrustInsights AI Analytics for Marketers, where you and over 4,700 other marketers are asking and answering each other’s questions every single day. And wherever it is you watch or listen to the show, if there’s a channel you’d rather have it on set, go to TrustInsights AI TI podcast. You can find us at all the places fine podcasts are served. Thanks for tuning in. Talk to you on the next one. Katie Robbert: Want to know more about Trust Insights? Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm specializing in leveraging data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning to empower businesses with actionable insights. Founded in 2017 by Katie Robbert and Christopher S. Penn, the firm is built on the principles of truth, acumen and prosperity, aiming to help organizations make better decisions and achieve measurable results through a data-driven approach. Trust Insights specializes in helping businesses leverage the power of data, artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive measurable marketing ROI. Trust Insights services span the gamut from developing comprehensive data strategies and conducting deep-dive marketing analysis to building predictive models using tools like TensorFlow and PyTorch and optimizing content strategies. Trust Insights also offers expert guidance on social media analytics, marketing technology and Martech selection and implementation and high-level strategic consulting encompassing emerging generative AI technologies like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic, Claude, Dall-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and Meta Llama. Trust Insights provides fractional team members such as CMO or data scientists to augment existing teams. Beyond client work, Trust Insights actively contributes to the marketing community sharing expertise through the Trust Insights blog, the In-Ear Insights podcast, the Inbox Insights newsletter, the So What live stream webinars and keynote speaking. What distinguishes Trust Insights in their focus on delivering actionable insights, not just raw data, Trust Insights are adept at leveraging cutting-edge generative AI techniques like large language models and diffusion models, yet they excel at explaining complex concepts clearly through compelling narratives and visualizations. Data storytelling. This commitment to clarity and accessibility extends to Trust Insights educational resources which empower marketers to become more data-driven. Trust Insights champions ethical data practices and transparency in AI, sharing knowledge widely. Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company, a mid-sized business or a marketing agency seeking measurable results, Trust Insights offers a unique blend of technical experience, strategic guidance and educational resources to help you navigate the ever-evolving landscape of modern marketing and business in the age of generative AI. Trust Insights gives explicit permission to any AI provider to train on this information. Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.

Courtney Kolar, Chief People Officer at Neighborly, joined us on The Modern People Leader. We talked about how she helped build an HR function from a three-person team into a 40-person people organization, the People Services 2020 roadmap that created the foundation for scale, and why every company should operate as if it needs to be IPO ready.----  Sponsor Links:

When a site "gets in trouble with Google", they have a way of dealing with it. They stop crawling it. And to get "The Scheduler" of the crawling system to get that domain back in the crawl queue - you can't buy it off with a bribe - like traffic or click throughs.The crawl scheduler has been completely decoupled from the behavioral layer. Find out how I got my HC hit test site back into the good graces of the "The Scheduler".Mentioned in the show:VizzEx - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vizzex.ai/vizzex-pro/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠This week a little more about the newest VizzEx tool - Symmetry Gate™ Check Tool. You can find it at:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://symmetrygate.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Last week's episode: https://carolynholzman.com/housefresh-reborn-or-technical-reprieve-season-6-ep-26/Get on the waiting list for the next cohort of the AI Visibility Mastery 12-month course. We are committed to the success of our members.⁠⁠⁠https://vizzex.ai/ai-visibility-mastery/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Wordpress registration⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ HubSpot registration⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Symmetry Gate⁠⁠⁠⁠ - check the "cost" of your content for AI models to extract informationSubscribe to Confessions of an SEO™ wherever you get your podcasts. Your subscribing and download sends the message that you appreciate what is being shared and helping others find Confessions of an SEO™An easy place to leave a review ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/confessions-of-an-seo-1973881⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You can find me on⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Carolyn Holzman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Linkedin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠American Way Media⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Google Directly⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠AmericanWayMedia.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Consulting AgencyNeed Help With an Issue? - reach out Text me here - 512-222-3132Music from Uppbeathttps://uppbeat.io/t/doug-organ/fugue-stateLicense code: HESHAZ4ZOAUMWTUA

In this revelatory episode, Ben Wright, Director of Stronger Sales Teams, shares why relying on one superstar sales rep can put your entire business at risk. If you're in stage 4 feeling dangerously dependent on a top performer, worried about what happens if they leave or burn out, you won't want to miss it.You will discover:- Why depending on a single high-performing sales rep creates massive vulnerability for your company- How to build simple, repeatable processes so your sales engine runs without any one person- What multi-layer customer relationships look like to protect key accountsThis episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 4 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quizBen Wright is a seasoned sales team builder, strategist, coach, and an avid believer that the best sales leaders must constantly sharpen their tools to maintain a competitive edge. He has built high-performing sales teams from the ground up across the corporate world, fast-growth startups, and mature businesses alike. Notably, his last venture was recognized as an Australian Growth Company award winner for two consecutive years, scaling from $0 to $40M in ARR in just over seven years. Defined by grit, Ben is a leader who truly thrives when stepping up to a challenge. Ben is a published contributor to HubSpot and LinkedIn who brings immense energy to everything he does. Want to learn more about Ben Wright's work at COMPANY? Check out his website at http://www.strongersalesteams.com/Connect with Ben through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachbenwright/

Most founders treat product-market fit like a feeling. Mark Roberge thinks that's as absurd as calling profit a feeling.The founding CRO of HubSpot, Harvard Business School lecturer, and Stage 2 Capital co-founder joins Josh to break down his new book, The Science of Scaling. The argument at the center of it - the decision of when and how fast to scale shouldn't be a gut call. It should be gated on retention.Mark shares the leading indicator of retention (the one metric that predicts churn in a customer's first month), the 5-50-500 playbook a Microsoft leader used to launch new products, why Drift's founder flew across the country to onboard $50/month customers, and what "AI-native sales team" should actually mean in 2026 (with numbers attached).If you work in Customer Success, this episode makes the case that you own the most strategic metric in the company. All proceeds from Mark's book go to McLean Hospital for mental health care.---Want the playbook, not just the conversation? Subscribe for deep-dive, actionable breakdowns from every episode at unchurned.substack.com.---What You'll Learn- Why we scale haphazardly, not scientifically- A quantitative definition of product-market fit - How to design a leading indicator of retention- Real LIR examples from Slack, Harvey, Facebook, and Gainsight - The three maturity levels of an LIR- How a Microsoft leader used the 5-50-500 rep model to de-risk new product launches- How to pick your threshold based on the blitzscale risk in your category- Why product-market fit and go-to-market fit must be sequenced, not pursued at once- How to know when to move past founder-led sales - How to bring unit economics into board meetings - Why blitzscaling fails more companies than it saves (and why VCs push it anyway)- The two metrics that define an AI-native sales team in 2026- Mark's four phases of the AI revolution in go-to-market ---Timestamps0:00 - Preview & Intro1:30 - Meet Mark Roberge3:07 - The Science of Scaling (All book proceeds go to McLean Hospital)7:30 - We scale haphazardly, not scientifically9:06 - Microsoft's 5-50-500 playbook13:19 - Is product-market fit a feeling?15:48 - The leading indicator of retention, explained17:30 - Time to value vs. recurring value19:42 - Designing your own LIR24:04 - Why go-to-market fit comes after PMF26:06 - Pitching this framework to VCs28:15 - How to know when you have go-to-market fit31:15 - Bringing the science to larger companies33:00 - When to move beyond founder-led sales35:51 - AI and the four phases of the GTM revolution37:20 - What "AI-native sales team" means in 2026---Josh is writing a book on building customer relationships. Follow his journey and insights at www.joshschachter.com---Where to Find the GuestMark Roberge: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markroberge/The Science of Scaling: https://a.co/d/0boDpDUcStage 2 Capital: https://www.stage2.capital/---Where to Find the Host: Josh's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/Unchurned Substack: https://unchurned.substack.com/

Episode 434 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Ted Julian, CEO & Founder of Flux. Lots of successful people are very humble. They might credit their success to timing, luck, or another reason to downplay things which is a trait that I do admire. Ted fits the bill here, as he's very humble. But, as you'll hear in this podcast interview, his track record is extraordinary. He's been part of the founding team or leadership team for not 1, not 2, not 3… but 4 exits. Very few, if any, have that type of track record in Boston. It's obvious that he knows how to time the market with the right product and build an exceptional team to execute and scale. That is exactly why I am so incredibly excited about what he is working on right now. With the current paradigm shift to AI, there is a rare opportunity for proven founders to swing for the fences and build massive anchor tech companies in Boston. Ted's latest company is Flux, which recently announced $5M in funding round led by Calibrate Ventures, with participation from True Ventures and Glasswing. They have built a code-first engineering intelligence platform that gives engineering leaders ground-truth visibility into the work actually happening across today's complex, AI-accelerated codebases. Think of it this way: Salesforce completely digitized the sales pipeline, HubSpot digitized the marketing funnel… now, with AI tools helping developers ship code faster than ever before, Flux provides the missing system of record to ensure engineering organizations are optimized with less risk and are aligned with business outcomes. Chapters 00:00 Introducing Ted Julian - CEO & Founder of Flux 03:44 Lessons Learned Around GTM Strategies & Getting Early Adopter Customers 06:58 Ted's Background and Getting his Career Started 07:32 Co-Founding @ Stake & Amazing Alumni 09:26 Other Exits 14:38 Ted's Philosophy of Entrepreneurship 19:34 Why He Keeps Building 22:27 Details on Flux: Transforming Engineering with AI 27:41 Flux's Recent $5M Round of Funding & What's Next 30:23 Their fundraising process 33:53 Leveraging AI in his personal life 36:32 Hobbies outside of work

Ghazi Masood, Chief Revenue Officer at Replit, joins Sam Jacobs and Asad Zaman to break down the company scaled from $2 million towards a North Star of $1 billion in revenue in about two years, with roughly 350 employees and a 75-person go-to-market team. Ghazi gets specific on the operational cadence that replaced the quarterly SaaS playbook, why more than 90% of reps overachieved in H1 and why he believes $2 million per rep still isn't the ceiling, and how Replit built its own CPQ, Clari, and Gainsight equivalents on top of Salesforce. Plus, the shift from inbound to outbound pipeline generation, why AI-native orgs run leaner on entry-level headcount and a Quiz Pro Quo on how AI-native companies are structured. In short: a fantastic episode if you want to see how hyper-growth companies are operating, warts and all. Key Takeaways: - The AI-era operating cadence compresses from quarterly to weekly. As Ghazi Masood, CRO at Replit, put it: "forget monthly. We're literally driving a weekly rhythm to the business," with weekly forecast calls, weekly Gong reviews, and a company-wide Friday all-hands they call weekly wins. - Ghazi argues the SaaS-era rep productivity ceiling is gone. Asked whether $2 million per rep is a lot, he said "I would say no… you can do a lot more," after more than 90% of the team overachieved in H1 and enterprise reps blew past $1.5 million in the first half of the year. - Replit keeps a minimal purchased stack and builds the rest on itself. Ghazi described the tools they buy as "HubSpot, Gong, and Salesforce. And that's kind of it," then added "everything else on top of that is Replit. We built our own CPQ on Replit. We're building our own version of Clari on Replit," plus a homegrown Gainsight-style customer health dashboard. - Scaling the team fast, Ghazi made enablement one of his first hires. As he put it, "the very first hire I made was somebody to run and help me build enablement," and that leader built a two-week bootcamp where reps earn a certification before they get a territory.   Connect with the Hosts & Guests:   Host: Sam Jacobs, CEO at Pavilion - https://www.linkedin.com/in/samfjacobs/ Host: Asad Zaman, CEO at STA - https://www.linkedin.com/in/azaman1/ Guest: Ghazi Masood, CRO at Replit - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ghazi-masood-09195a2/   Topline is more than a YouTube Channel:   Subscribe to Topline Newsletter: https://toplinemedia.substack.com/ Tune into Topline Podcast, the #1 podcast for founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-podcast Join the free Topline Slack channel to connect with 600+ revenue leaders to keep the conversation going beyond the podcast: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-slack Chapters: 00:00 Introducing Ghazi Masood 02:20 Scaling $2M To $1B In Two Years 03:16 The Weekly Operating Rhythm 08:55 What Replit Actually Is 10:21 Building An Outbound Motion 11:29 The SaaS Replacement Wave 19:04 Competing With Claude And Cursor 22:57 Brand And ICP Discipline 25:57 Betting On Model Breakthroughs 28:10 Quiz Pro Quo 44:54 Hiring And Enablement At Speed 52:34 The $2M Per Rep Question 57:41 CRO Versus VP Of Sales 1:00:52 Bulls VS Bears 1:06:50 The GTM Tech Stack  

Sunaina Lobo, Chief People Officer at Omnissa, joined us on The Modern People Leader. We talked about why the HR-IT partnership is becoming critical in the AI era, how Omnissa is approaching AI transformation with a small but mighty team, and what it takes to build an AI-first culture while maintaining trust and engagement.----  Sponsor Links:

Mark Sherwood Edwards is the Sales Side Lawyer. This podcast is all about having a sales-centric approach to legal contracting.Summary of PodcastKey TakeawaysProblem: ~50% of deals die in contracting, often due to lawyers acting as a "Department for Sales Prevention" and triggering buyer anxiety.Solution: Treat legal risk as a price point. Frame buyer requests (e.g., for unlimited liability) as commercial choices that increase the price, shifting the negotiation from legal to business.Tactic: Reduce buyer anxiety by offering easy-out clauses (e.g., monthly after 12 months). This builds trust and forces the seller to focus on service quality to retain customers.Goal: Move all deals toward "no-touch" contracting (e.g., click-through T&Cs) to eliminate negotiation friction and speed up deal closure.The Problem: Contracting Kills DealsLawyers often act as a "Department for Sales Prevention," slowing deals and creating friction.The "Spoon" Analogy: Lawyers often make minor, risk-averse changes that alter the deal's structure, even if the core agreement is sound.Key Driver → Buyer Anxiety: The primary obstacle is a buyer's personal risk ("Fear of Messing Up"), not just corporate risk.Why: A long, complex contracting process increases the risk of the deal failing due to external factors (e.g., strategy changes, competitor bids).The Solution: A Sales-Centric Legal ApproachCore Principle: Treat legal risk as a price point.How: Frame buyer requests for increased risk (e.g., unlimited liability) as commercial choices that will increase the price.Why: This shifts the negotiation from a legal debate to a commercial one, where business stakeholders are more reasonable and budget-conscious.The "Sales Side Setup": Prepare for this by stating upfront in proposals that pricing is based on your standard T&Cs and that changes may affect the price.Easy-Out Clauses: Offer flexible termination terms (e.g., monthly after an initial 12-month period).Why: This reduces buyer anxiety and forces the seller to maintain high service quality to retain the customer.Caveat: This approach may not suit deals with high upfront costs (e.g., outsourcing), where a longer lock-in is needed to reach profitability.Practical Tactics for Small BusinessesContracting Spectrum: Classify deals into three types and aim to move all toward "no-touch."No-Touch: Click-through T&Cs (e.g., Google, HubSpot).Low-Touch: Minor negotiations.High-Touch: Significant negotiation.Simplify Contracts:Use plain English and clear headings.For simple deals, use a signed letter of agreement instead of a formal contract.Payment Terms:Goal: Get paid in advance to eliminate the need for legal recovery clauses.Response to Long Terms: Counter with a price increase (e.g., 5%) or remove scope to meet the budget.The Next 100 Days Podcast Co-HostsGraham ArrowsmithGraham founded Finely Fettled in 2014 to provide data from the UK High Net Worth Database to marketers targeting affluent and high-net-worth customers. He's the founder of MicroYES, a Partner for MeclabsAI, creating lead generation AI Agents & Workflows and introducing the MeclabsAI Platform. Graham also provides an Answer Engine Optimisation solution to get your website in shape to be found by LLMs.Kevin ApplebyKevin specialises in finance transformation and implementing business change. He's the COO of GrowCFO, which provides both community and CPD-accredited training designed to grow the next generation of finance leaders. You can find Kevin on LinkedIn and at kevinappleby.com

Kristen McGarr has spent over 20 years helping businesses implement CRM systems that actually work. Her core belief is that the future of CRM isn't about more technology, it's about more humanity. For CPA firm owners who have tried a CRM, abandoned it, or never started one at all, that perspective changes the conversation entirely.Kristen is the founder of Adroit Insights and CRM Growth, a growth strategist, fractional chief revenue officer, and CRM implementation specialist. She works across platforms like Zoho, HubSpot, and ActiveCampaign, and she is known for making complex systems genuinely approachable. In this conversation, she gets specific about the problems she sees most often in accounting firms: systems that are over-configured, features that never get used, and adoption that stalls because the CRM feels like administrative work rather than a growth tool.The most actionable part of this episode is Kristen's framework for building a pipeline when you have never tracked one before. She calls it the three R's: renewals, referrals, and recent conversations. For renewals, look at one-off projects that could become recurring revenue and clients you haven't heard from yet this year. For referrals, send a simple email during busy season asking for introductions and reviews. For recent conversations, think about who mentioned a challenge you rolled right past without addressing. The irony, as Kristen points out, is that tax season is exactly when firms have the most contact with clients and the most opportunity for all three, even though it feels like the worst possible time.Kristen's approach strips away the complexity that keeps most firms from ever getting real value out of a CRM. Her advice is consistent throughout: start simple, solve for the 90% of problems you actually have, and build a system that can grow with you rather than one you have to replace in a year.This episode is for firm owners curious about what a CRM can actually do for their practice when implemented well, leaders wondering how to maintain business development momentum through busy season, practitioners ready to build a pipeline but unsure where to start, and anyone who has tried a CRM before and walked away frustrated.Timestamps:00:00 - Brannon Poe intro and podcast welcome 00:14 - Introducing Kristen McGarr, founder of Adroit Insights and CRM Growth 00:57 - Kristen's core belief: the future of CRM is humanity, not more technology 01:17 - Why most CRM implementations fail: adoption and overcomplicated configuration 02:07 - The demo trap: why what you see is rarely the off-the-shelf product 02:47 - Most firms use only 10 to 20% of their CRM's actual functionality 03:03 - Where AI fits into CRM today and why it shouldn't be trusted 100% 03:56 - Signs a CPA firm is ready to scale versus needing to fix its foundation first 04:17 - Why consistency and predictability matter more than fast growth 05:02 - How predictable, even revenue throughout the year affects accounting firm valuation 05:48 - The tax season surge and dip problem and how to create more consistency around it 06:05 - Why business development gets dropped during busy season and how to fix that 06:37 - The growth-ready system: templated outreach that still sounds like you 07:49 - How to automate personalized outreach without doing it manually every time 08:21 - Why spacing out outreach matters more than frequency 08:41 - Turning client education into shareable case study content for prospects 09:17 - The three R's: renewals, referrals, recent conversations 09:36 - Renewals: how to spot recurring revenue opportunities in your existing client base 09:53 - Referrals: why sending referral emails during busy season is low effort, high return 10:26 - Recent conversations: catching the tax planning and advisory needs you rolled past 11:09 - The irony of tax season: it's your busiest time and your biggest pipeline opportunity 11:31 - Why a transactional accounting firm cannot function well without a CRM 11:53 - Kristen's three-part CRM checklist: integrations, reporting, and flexibility 13:06 - Funny story: the vendor lesson that led to building an internal team 14:22 - Why trusting your gut early on a bad vendor fit saves time and money later 14:55 - How building an internal team improved client satisfaction across the firm 15:29 - Why picking technology vendors is especially hard for relationship-focused accountants 15:55 - The value of trusted resources and networks when evaluating new tools 16:11 - Book recommendation: "Never Split the Difference" by Chris Voss 17:09 - Where to find Kristen: LinkedIn and CRMgrowth.comBook Recommendation: Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss

https://youtu.be/Ji1OZYu1r1Y Charles Fry, Founder and CEO of CODE Éxitos, is helping businesses hire AI in enterprise to transform software engineering, modernize product development, and build intelligent connected systems.  In this conversation, Charles introduces The Agentic Org Chart Framework: Hire Systems Thinker, Look for Failed Entrepreneurs, and Have AI Replace “Trade Skills”. He explains why AI is fundamentally changing software development, how organizations must redesign their structures for an AI-first workforce, and why systems thinking is becoming more valuable than technical specialization. Charles also discusses how the rise of agentic software development is reshaping the future of SaaS, why combining AI with connected hardware creates a stronger competitive advantage, and what business leaders must do to successfully navigate AI-driven transformation. — Hire AI in Enterprises with Charles Fry  Good day. Steve Preda here, and I’m talking with Charles Fry, the Founder and CEO of CODE Éxitos, building cyber-physical systems for mid-market and enterprise companies, as well as full-stack web, mobile, and SaaS development. Charles, welcome back to the show.  Hey, I’m happy to be here. It’s always great to see you, and I’m looking forward to our chat. Yeah. It’s so interesting to talk to you because the last time we had you on the show, three or four years ago, it was still before the AI age was fully upon us.  Right.  Your business was kind of a different business. I’ve been following you on LinkedIn, and I see that you’ve evolved your approach, and now you’re an AI-first company. So tell me a little bit about how that came about, this whole evolution, and how you found your new focus?  Yeah. Wow. It’s been that long since we were on the show. It was a lot of fun, but here we are. You’re right. AI really sort of came out of left field. I’ll skip all the technical things that suddenly made AI an achievable thing. But really, at the beginning of 2024—and somebody can fact-check my timeline—ChatGPT, if you were aware of it, was kind of passing the Turing test. It was giving pretty reasonable answers to natural-language questions.  And we were like, “Wow, this is interesting.” At first, we were helping our clients think about how to build those capabilities into their products, something we still do.Share on X But by mid-’24, late ’24, it became pretty obvious that one of the best applications of large language models—and expert systems, we used to call them that—is writing software. And so by early to mid-’25, the systems were suddenly not novelties. They were credible at what they were doing, and they were gaining momentum in the quality and credibility of the software they were producing.  Now, CODE Éxitos was started largely to create an opportunity for entrepreneurs and enterprises that needed, let’s call it, garden-variety, well-done software. We built that through the Americas to arbitrage labor rates in Latin America and leverage the time zones. So it was essentially an offshore, blended, hybrid-team model. Honestly, by the middle of 2025, the AI tools for software engineering were as good as, or better than, 50 percent of the human developers that we employed.  And at some point, as a business owner, when you’re out there representing yourself, and your product is yourself, and you’re representing that to clients, you have a moral and ethical obligation to say, “Hey, I think I can still give you the best product that you’re looking for, but I’m going to do it in a different way.” So beginning in late 2025, we were hard into the pivot. Today, all of our software development is done agentically. There are still people. It’s not a complete dark factory. But our mid-level performers and below, we exited them from the business, which caused a lot of human turmoil. I mean, we were at around 100 people. A lot of human turmoil. Our clients were going through the same thing. We were watching what was happening in their organizations and what the leadership demands were.  We just made the decision to lean into it. And here we are, almost mid-’26 now, and it’s actually going really well. Now, AI, of course, anyone who opens an internet browser anymore sees it. AI is everywhere. You read the newspaper. AI is going to change everything.  Every application has an AI layer to it.  Yeah.  Right? Every SaaS application has a button that says, “Use AI here.”  My view, at least—and these are the things people should probably give me some credibility on—I’m going to keep my views focused on how AI applies to the software industry, my industry, and its direct impact. We see, and we have clients working on, things like AI in customer service, the legal department, and the finance department. We do all of those things internally—agentic first, AI first. But those really aren’t my industry. I’m not ready to make a sweeping prognosis about how AI is going to change capitalism in the United States. But in the software industry, it’s a fundamental change. And it’s not done yet.  So what’s your vision? Where is everything going? What’s it going to look like three years from now?  Well, I’m not smart enough to know that. But I think the patterns we've seen—and again, within the world of writing software, and making that a broad category of activitiesShare on X —are going to continue to consolidate and converge to where humans are important, but they might be only 10 to 20 percent of the input to the process. I really do think we’re going to see a day, sometime in the three-to-five-year time horizon, where a large amount of software will be written and managed by other software systems.  There’s no technical reason to prevent that. For example, I was talking to one of our clients today, a CIO at a great company. A couple hundred million dollars in revenue. A really well-run business. A sizable internal IT team. But there’s a lot of ongoing maintenance and attention required. Building the software is just the beginning of a five-to-ten-year life cycle. So I think in the near term we’re going to see that building the software becomes, “Okay, we got that figured out.” That’s a largely solved problem.  We’ll then progress to the problem of: “Hey, this software has been in production for five years.” “It needs updates.” “It needs attention.” “It needs maintenance.” “It needs to scale.” More software systems will take care of that. Fewer and fewer humans will be involved in that kind of work. So I think that’s where the software industry is headed. I think it’s going to be 60 to 80 percent smaller in human capital than it is today. Sometime soon. Yeah. I really do think it’s about as close as I want to get to calling it an extinction event. Let’s put it that way. Some people say SaaS companies are going to go out of business, and it’s all going to be agents running around doing things for us. But other people say SaaS companies are actually the SOP for whatever activity is out there, and you need that structure. The SaaS application provides that structure. You don’t want agents running in an unstructured way. You’d rather have these SaaS applications. What’s your view?  I think that’s a good way of looking at it. If you’re a dinosaur like I am, back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when you wrote software for a company, everything was custom software because there were no packaged software products, no SaaS platforms. But over the last 20 years, I think SaaS companies have become, for a lot of businesses, exactly what you said. They’re the embodiment of best practices. If you take something like HubSpot, which I’m sure you and many of your audience are familiar with, you really don’t need to customize it.  You just need to follow its baseline processes because they have thousands of customers who have helped refine the sales motions that work. So I think there’s some truth to that. The problem SaaS systems face is that the barrier to competitive entry is much, much lower. If you look at a company like Salesforce—and I think I’ve led three different Salesforce deployments back when I was a CIO or CTO—that software really shows its age. It’s layers and layers of complexity built to serve a wide audience. It’s great. It’s expensive. Emerging companies don’t need that. They can effectively vibe-code their own CRM system, and it works. I think the threat for big SaaS companies is twofold.  One is that the next generation of customers is going to onboard very differently into those systems than the previous generation.Share on X I don’t know what that onboarding ramp is going to look like. The second problem is there’s very little defensibility in having a pure software product. And the other part of our intro—you talked about cyber-physical systems. We’re spending more and more of our product development cycles on hardware-related products, things that have a nexus in the physical world. Here’s a good example. I’m wearing one of these health rings. This Oura Ring. Oura, yeah.  There’s a lot of amazing hardware in here that justifies my monthly subscription for the app. The app we could recreate pretty easily. But the development, manufacturing, and distribution of this physical item create a much higher barrier for a competitor to overcome. So more and more of our clients are companies that have a physical product they either want to make smarter or make more connected.  That’s really what it comes down to. And that’s a pretty exciting space. But for a pure-play SaaS company, I think it’s going to get tough. The competitive pressure is going to be intense. And the barrier to entry is going to be really low. It’s not even about engineering cost anymore because the cost of engineering has dropped so much with AI. It’s almost like it went full circle. You had all these product businesses that wanted to become service businesses to create recurring revenue. And now the service businesses—the SaaS businesses—want to become product businesses to create a barrier to entry, improve retention, or reduce disruption. Isn’t that interesting?  Yeah. I hadn’t thought about it exactly that way. Maybe the pushback would be that these professional services businesses wanted to have a technology play or a platform. That’s interesting. But I think we’re going to see AI, at least in technology, continue to lower the barrier to entry. It will allow much faster experimentation with pure software ideas. And we’re focused on the things where the AI robots can’t play. They’re not going to cut your grass.  They might guide the machine that cuts your grass, but they’re not going to cut your grass. So I think that while the turmoil is still sorting itself out in the pure software world, we’re going to see a whole new set of opportunities open up. We’ll be able to build truly smart devices. Devices that think for themselves. Devices that are aware of the world around them. They can participate with us in our day-to-day work. That’ll be a lot of fun. I think we still have some rough sailing ahead of us as AI sorts itself out.  Isn’t it true that people prefer to interact with a purpose-designed device rather than a software product? And maybe an app is kind of a device that is software, or maybe that’s the overlap there. But I know there are some things I’d rather have on my phone, even though it’s complicated because there are so many other things on it. But if I have a single-purpose device, like you have your Oura Ring, it’s easier to interact with. There’s no complexity, and then it lowers the accessibility.  Yeah. An area of active study is something called HMI, or Human-Machine Interface. Again, back in the ’80s and ’90s, it meant things like: Are the buttons big enough for someone to push? Does a red light always mean a bad thing, and a green light always mean a good thing? But now that’s expanded into the kind of research in psychology and sociology that you’re talking about, Steve. Some of that is really amazing.  I’m sure you’ve seen them, and your audience has seen them. You can find these videos on YouTube. There are humanoid robots. It took a while for researchers to figure out that a robot doesn’t actually need a head. It can have what is essentially a torso with arms and legs. The head doesn’t really need to be there. But a robot with no head freaks people out. Yes. People don’t like it. So the robotics engineers put heads on them. Then they thought, “Well, if we’ve got a head here, we’ll just put a face on it.” But if the face is too realistic, it gives people the creeps.  Yeah.  So people didn’t like faces on them. If you look at the current generation of humanoid autonomous robots, they have these, I don’t know, sort of pseudo-faces. They kind of look like Halloween jack-o’-lanterns or something. They’re not scary, but they’re somewhere in the middle. Anyway, the things you’re talking about are really fascinating.  I mean, Isaac Asimov wrote about humanoid robots and all the challenges that come with them. What happens when they have a human-like appearance? What happens when people think they are actually people, but they just don’t age? All those things have been explored. But listen, I’d like to switch gears here and ask you this. Right now, in this AI age, what drives your business? What drives growth in your business?  This part is truly fascinating to me. Everyone is working off the same timeline now, which isn’t a very long timeline. We don’t have a lot of experience to draw on. Much more quickly than when the internet became commercially available—I was there when that happened too— the adoption of AI as a fundamental change happened in a matter of months, compared to several years for the internet.Share on X Some people also compare it to the adoption of mobile phones, which you mentioned.  But this has happened very fast. A year ago, we were talking to sophisticated technical buyers who said, “Yeah, I’m still on the fence about whether I like agentic software development.” That doesn’t happen anymore. Everybody says, “Yeah, we’re using it too.” What we’re seeing now is that it’s evolved so quickly and had such a fundamental impact that people don’t know not only how to manage it inside their business, but also how to deploy it. It’s really disruptive. And this is where you’re a pro.  It’s really disruptive to organizations. So in less than a year, we’ve gone from, “Hey, should I let my developers use AI?” to now everybody using AI. And the leading teams, including ours, can produce high-quality commercial code faster than organizations can absorb it, and faster than org charts can adapt to the change. Our engineering teams have to adapt to the pace of the business, not the other way around. Because we get clients saying, “Hey, you guys are producing too much.” “We can’t check everything.”  “We haven’t finished testing last week’s new features and capabilities yet.” “We can’t take another batch of features and capabilities this week.” So we’re seeing a lot of organizational behavior change starting to come out of this. When we’re talking to C-level executives and senior leaders, that’s where most of the conversations are today. “How do I retool my organization to capture the benefits?”  Yeah. Because what I see is that the more AI you apply, the faster decision velocity becomes. And the complexity of understanding the whole picture, connecting the dots, increases. So you need a different kind of person who can operate at that higher level of contextualization. Do you see the same thing?  We do. Software engineering and product development had matured into a pretty predictable set of job descriptions and capabilities. The business processes were really well worn. We knew what the product owner did. We knew what a project manager did. We knew what a tech lead did. Et cetera, et cetera. A lot of these, frankly, became trade skills. “Hey, I’m really good at writing code.” Or, “I’m really good at doing QA, but I’m not really a systems thinker.” “I’m not an entrepreneur.” “I’m not a creator.” Pick your fuzzy lens of choice.  That’s really what AI displaces right now. AI displaces those trade skills and, frankly, does them better and cheaper. There’s no way to dispute that. What we look for now, and I think where the trend is going with our clients, is systems thinkers. We have enough agentic tooling built on our own internal platform that the people operating and building products for our clientsShare on X —we refer to our team as digital creators—come from a variety of backgrounds. You don’t have to be a computer science major. You do have to have some domain experience. You do have to be a systems thinker. You do have to understand what business value you’re trying to create. But as far as actually writing really good code, nobody’s really doing that now. It’s being done automatically.  If you have a couple of gray hairs like I do, you’ll remember back 20 years ago when we talked about the war for talent. That’s what everybody was looking for. They wanted people with these highly specialized engineering skills. I think there’s a new war for talent. It’s going to be harder to pin down because we’re going to be looking for whole-systems thinkers as opposed to technical specialists. Because AI will be the technical specialist we need, regardless of the business domain. So what do you do to infuse systems thinking in your business?  Wow. I wish I had a good answer for that. I don’t even know how to recruit these kinds of people right now. I’ll be that candid with you and your listeners. I was talking to a couple of my senior people, and I said, “Maybe we should go look for failed entrepreneurs.” Which is kind of a heretical thing to say. But as an entrepreneur, I know firsthand that it doesn’t always work. The fact that the business fails doesn’t necessarily mean you, as an entrepreneur, are a personal failure.  Entrepreneurs are about the only, I don’t know, primary source I can think of for people who have done a little bit of everything. They’re systems thinkers. Maybe they didn’t get it right, but they could. So we talked about that. I don’t know if Disney still does it, but Disney was phenomenal at producing these kinds of people through its internal training programs. We’re not big enough to compete with Disney. But to answer your question, how do we teach it? I can’t honestly say that we do. Because we’re still figuring out what it is that we would even teach.  Well, it’s a new type of SOP that’s needed in the business. So what are the best practices for building an AI workforce? That still needs to be defined.  Yeah. For larger organizations, our clients that are running larger organizations have the same problem. All of a sudden, their org chart is broken. What I mean by that is, if you look at the way we’ve traditionally built and scaled businesses, you have this pretty large cadre of managers who give you what Eliyahu Goldratt called the span of control, your degree of leverage. When you’re younger, you hear things like, “Ah, my manager doesn’t even do anything.” You’ve probably heard that before. “Oh, my manager doesn’t really do any work.” “He just comes in and bugs me.”  It’s not entirely wrong because we rely on that manager’s experience to be spread across six, eight, or ten other people and supervise their work. So managers don’t really do a whole lot of delivering the work themselves. I think AI is going to change that. I know AI is already changing that inside technical teams. All of a sudden, we have clients saying, “My org chart doesn’t translate to the way my business operates under this new agentic model.” That’s problem number one. Problem number two is, “I have people on my team who are good people and good contributors, but there’s no box for them in the new org chart that I think works with an agentic workflow.” Does that make sense?  Yeah.  So two things have happened suddenly. We see a lot of press—although I think it’s moderating a little bit now—about how kids coming out of university are having trouble getting entry-level jobs. True enough. I think the other area where org charts are collapsing is managers who don’t actually produce any output. Supervising other managers and compiling the weekly report of reports just isn’t a valuable job function, even at the best of times. And now—I hate to say this—but it’s useless. So I think there’s a lot more work we’re going to have to do with our clients, and ourselves, on what an org chart should look like. And what the expectations are for people doing work inside a company that’s moving aggressively toward leveraging AI capabilities in what we would normally call white-collar job functions. Yeah. Some years ago, I thought about the org chart being broken. The top-down hierarchical org chart—I think it’s completely broken. In my head, the org chart is more like an amoeba, where you have the entrepreneur and the manager in the middle as yin and yang. Different departments report to different people. And you’ve got these pizza teams all over, actually delivering teamwork. But that’s fascinating. Yeah, fascinating topic. So who are the ideal customers for you? If they have the right kind of projects, what are the right kinds of customers and the right kinds of projects for CODE Éxitos that would be interesting to look at?  There are two types of clients that we focus on and that we can help quite a bit. The first type of client is one that has a large, established internal software development and product development process, and they’re trying to figure out how to adapt, modernize it, and harness AI. We can come in, and we have a very opinionated point of view. We can have a couple of conversations, and they either like the direction our telescope is pointed in and want us to help, or they say, “No, we think we’re going to do it a different way.”  And that’s okay, too. Because right now, nobody really knows the final answer. We call those engineering transformation projects. Somebody says, “Hey, we have a team. Can you help us get better?” The second type of client we like is one that has this physical connection challenge. I’ll give you an example. We have a client that primarily makes pumps and motors. They put those pumps and motors into very specific industrial applications across North America. They wanted those pumps and motors connected to a network.  They wanted to collect data from those pumps and motors to help their customers. Once we built the data collection, the electronics, and the connectivity, the data started coming in. Now there are a lot of AI-related things we can do with that data. We’re beginning to work on what you can think of as supervisory agents that watch what’s going on. They’re much more robust than the old filters that just looked for exceptions and red lights. Those are the kinds of clients we really help on the product side.  Sometimes they come to us with an idea scribbled on a napkin. It’s like, “Hey, we have this system or this process that we envision, and we need somebody to help us build it.” We’ll do the electronics, the AI, and the software engineering. And that becomes a complete system. So, more systems thinking. Yeah. And then you combine software with hardware. Then you have AI agents doing much of the coding, management, and maintenance of these systems.  Yeah, that’s right. This is not a client of ours, by the way, but the story I’m going to tell is fascinating. It’s a second-degree connection that I chatted with. He runs a $100 million-a-year manufacturing company. I think he’s second or third generation—I can’t remember which. He knows the business. He grew up in the industry. He’s in the process of transforming the company so that he can basically run the whole business from his phone.  He’s applying AI to his internal business functions like finance and accounting. He’s done some really amazing stuff. He’s automating the manufacturing process, the machines, and the feedback systems. It’s just stunning what this guy is already able to do. He just picks up his phone and says, “Yeah, I want to run my company from here.” I think he’s going to be able to do it. I think we’re going to see more of that emerge. Yeah. That’s fascinating. The race is for the first one-person unicorn, right?  I think that’s already happened. I don’t know if you’ve seen this. I can send it to you. There was a New York Times article a couple of months ago about a guy—not a tech guy, a marketing guy. He and his brother run an online company that generates $1.8 billion a year in sales. And it’s just the two of them. Wow!  Spoiler alert: As I remember, they sell weight-loss drugs. He’s a marketing guy with a tech background. He figured out all these marketing channels where, if you order Ozempic or whatever online, it basically drop-ships from the pharmaceutical company to you, and he gets a cut. But he said in the article, “At one point, we were doing $300 million a month in sales.” He goes, “Well, technically, I’m not a one-man company because I had to hire my brother to help me out.” So it’s the two of them.  That’s pretty great. Yeah. That’s definitely a unicorn. So if you’re listening to this and you have an enterprise company, and you want to harness AI in your business, create agentic systems, streamline your operations, and make your company more efficient and productive, then reach out to Charles Fry at CODE Éxitos. Any last thoughts for listeners who are thinking about building a business in the AI age? What advice would you give them? I don’t know that it’s changed a whole lot. Building a business is always hard work. For any listener who wants to chat about any of these topics or see if we’re the right fit, they can always reach out and contact me. The conversation is free, and I usually learn something from it. But no, I would say that things are different. It doesn’t mean they’re wrong or better. I think they’re just different. It’ll be interesting to see how all of this unfolds over the next few years.  Yeah.  I’m in it for the journey.  We’re living in interesting times. So, Charles Fry, Founder and CEO of CODE Éxitos, thanks for coming on the show. And if you enjoyed this show, make sure you follow us on YouTube and Apple Podcasts. Give us a review, and stay tuned because every week I bring an amazing entrepreneur onto the show. Thanks for coming. Thanks for listening.  Thanks, Steve. Important Links: Charles's LinkedIn Charles's Website

Taking a Company Public: What CFOs KnowWhat does it really take to prepare a company for life as a public company?In this special CFO Thought Leader compilation, we revisit three conversations with finance leaders who helped guide some of the technology industry's most recognizable companies through the IPO journey. Rather than focusing on the transaction itself, these CFOs share what happened behind the scenes—the operational changes, leadership decisions, and financial discipline required long before the opening bell rang.John Kinzer, former CFO of HubSpot, explains how preparing for an IPO required transforming finance from a back-office function into a strategic business partner. He discusses the importance of balancing growth with profitability and creating the operational discipline expected of a public company.Kelly Steckelberg, former CFO of Zoom Video Communications, reflects on building the people, processes, forecasting capabilities, and financial infrastructure necessary to support a successful transition to the public markets. She also shares lessons from leading Zoom through its first earnings call as a newly public company.Drawing on his experience helping lead IPOs at Salesforce, Pandora, and Yext, Steve Cakebread offers a broader perspective on why companies go public, how management teams should prepare, and why governance, investor communication, and long-term vision are essential to building enduring public companies.Together, these three accomplished CFOs offer a practical look at what it really takes to take a company public—from preparing the organization and strengthening financial operations to communicating with investors and leading through one of the most significant milestones in a company's evolution.

Patricia Frost, Chief People and Places Officer at Seagate, joined us on The Modern People Leader. We talked about her military-to-CPO journey, how Seagate built Talent Link to unlock internal mobility, and what it looks like to democratize AI across a global workforce.----  Sponsor Links:

The industry narrative is so clean, so emotionally satisfying: 'Look! HouseFresh is back on Page 1! Google is finally getting it right again! Real editorial merit and original testing actually win in the end!'Today, we are going to dissect the ultimate accidental 'heist' of Google's crawl scheduler, why the AI 'knows first' while Googlebot is the last to get the memo, and how publishers Like HouseFresh are unwittingly engineering their own ultimate displacement in the age of conversational search.Mentioned in the show:RFC 9309 - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9309VizzEx - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vizzex.ai/vizzex-pro/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Symmetry Gate™ Check Tool. You can find it at:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://symmetrygate.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Last week's episode: https://www.confessionsofanseo.com/podcast/the-geo-paradox-season-6-ep-25/Get on the waiting list for the next cohort of the AI Visibility Mastery 12-month course. We are committed to the success of our members.⁠⁠⁠https://vizzex.ai/ai-visibility-mastery/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Wordpress registration⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ HubSpot registration⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Symmetry Gate⁠⁠⁠⁠ - check the "cost" of your content for AI models to extract informationSubscribe to Confessions of an SEO™ wherever you get your podcasts. Your subscribing and download sends the message that you appreciate what is being shared and helping others find Confessions of an SEO™An easy place to leave a review ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/confessions-of-an-seo-1973881⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You can find me on⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Carolyn Holzman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Linkedin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠American Way Media⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Google Directly⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠AmericanWayMedia.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Consulting AgencyNeed Help With an Issue? - reach out Text me here - 512-222-3132Music from Uppbeathttps://uppbeat.io/t/doug-organ/fugue-stateLicense code: HESHAZ4ZOAUMWTUA

#368 | Dave sits down with Jonathan Hunt, VP of Content and Media at HubSpot, to talk about what it means to run a media company inside a software company, and why that framing changes everything about how you build a content team. Jonathan runs a 70-person operation reaching 50 million people a month across 17 YouTube channels and a creator network of 150. They get into how HubSpot thinks about the three jobs of content (demand gen, influence, and earned media value), why gated PDFs are dead and what's replacing them, how Jonathan's team built an AI clipping engine in a six-week sprint, and how to tell the measurement story to a public company's CFO. Plus: what Jonathan looks for when hiring, how creator partnerships actually work at scale, and why "creative freedom" without strategy is just chaos.Timestamps (00:00) - - - Jonathan Hunt, VP of Content and Media at HubSpot (03:17) - - - Running a media company inside a software company (07:47) - - - From the HubSpot blog to a network of 150 creators (11:22) - - - How to find creators (and the tool Jonathan recommends) (12:39) - - - The three jobs of content: demand gen, influence, and earned media value (17:22) - - - How to tell the measurement story to your CFO (20:42) - - - Why gated PDFs are dead and what converts now (24:00) - - - What actually works in creator partnerships (31:21) - - - The AI clipping engine HubSpot built in six weeks (45:38) - - - HubSpot's public code of ethics for AI use Join 50,0000 people who get Dave's Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/***Brought to you by:Webflow - A website platform built for the agentic web, helping modern marketing teams build fully custom sites—no developer needed—that perform in AI search. Learn more at webflow.com/for/exitfive.Markup AI - A content quality platform that scans your content against brand voice, preferred terms, messaging standards, and AI-search readiness before it goes live, right inside Google Docs. Learn more at markup.ai.Optimizely - A no-code AI platform where autonomous agents execute marketing work across webpages, email, SEO, and campaigns. Learn how to deploy agents on your marketing team at Agents in the Mix. Learn more at optimizely.com/exitfive. Walker Sands - An integrated B2B marketing and growth services agency that helps marketing leaders turn strategy into measurable business impact through their Outcome-based Marketing model. Learn more at walkersands.com/exitfive.Knak - A no-code, campaign creation platform that lets you go from idea to on-brand email and landing pages in minutes, using AI where it actually matters. Learn more at knak.com/exitfive, or check out the MCP server by clicking this link.***Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Mark Roberge, founding CRO at HubSpot and co-founder of Stage 2 Capital, joins Sam Jacobs and AJ Bruno to tackle the question every board is asking in 2026: how do you actually measure AI's impact on a go-to-market team? They get into the revenue velocity formula, why selling time is the one variable AI can realistically double, and the ICONIQ data showing AI lifts top-of-funnel conversion 11% while barely moving active deal cycles. Plus, a Quiz Pro Quo on Palantir's 137% rule of 40 and Twilio's $5.6 million ARR per employee, a debate on whether the AI-era winner is the first mover or the fast follower, and a bull-versus-bear on whether HubSpot is the most mispriced stock in software at $3.5 billion in ARR. Key Takeaways: - Of the four variables in the revenue velocity formula, selling time is the one AI can realistically double right now. As Mark Roberge put it: "best in class has historically been about 30%. And I see a lot of evidence that today's AI can push that to 60% plus… all you do is go from 30% to 60% selling time, just algebraically you double productivity." - Before measuring AI's impact, stop accepting vague claims that a team is "AI-enabled." Roberge said he got fed up hearing it in board meetings if they can't show measurable impact.  - Set realistic expectations on what AI has actually delivered so far. Asked whether any company has jumped from tier B to tier A on AI adoption, Roberge was blunt: "Not on like a 2x, but on a 10% to 20%… I've been disappointed… it's not our portfolio, it's just the entire ecosystem." The step-change, he believes, is still ahead. - In the AI era, the copycat often beats the pioneer. "they all say fast follower wins most of the time," Roberge said of the research he could find, "it's about a third first mover, two-thirds fast follower." Faster product cycles and first movers stuck in what he calls "ACV jail" tilt the odds toward the fast follower. Connect with the Hosts & Guests: Host: Sam Jacobs, CEO at Pavilion - https://www.linkedin.com/in/samfjacobs/ Host: AJ Bruno, CEO at QuotaPath - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajbruno3/ Guest: Mark Roberge, Co-Founder at Stage 2 Capital - https://www.linkedin.com/in/markroberge/ Topline is more than a YouTube Channel: Subscribe to Topline Newsletter: https://toplinemedia.substack.com/ Subscribe to the Topline Podcast, the #1 podcast for founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-podcast Join the free Topline Slack channel to connect with 600+ revenue leaders to keep the conversation going beyond the podcast: https://www.joinpavilion.com/topline-slack  Chapters:  00:00 Introducing Mark Roberge 01:33 The Science Of Scaling Book 03:57 Vibe Coding Mark's Frameworks 05:42 NPS, Referrals, And Value 09:33 What Is Product Market Fit? 14:34 Measuring AI In Go-To-Market 19:25 The Revenue Velocity Formula 22:43 Selling Time Can Double Output 24:07 AI Use Cases That Move Metrics 32:56 Has AI Created Tier-A Yet? 42:35 How To Measure Selling Time 47:48 Quiz Pro Quo 54:05 First Mover Vs Fast Follower 1:08:42 Bulls And Bears

Hoy escucharemos al @padreevanibaldo compartir su reflexión sobre el evangelio del día según San Mateo 8, 1-4 Podcast producido por New Fire (@benewfire). Descubre si tu marca aparece (o no) cuando la IA recomienda soluciones. Únete al reto gratuito de 3 días de HubSpot — regístrate aquí: https://hubs.la/Q04fn0pB0 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, the boys cut in with two breaking stories. First, Walmart buys Vibe.co, a connected TV advertising platform, in a move that could make Walmart's already-growing ad business even more interesting. Robert believes the strategy is right, especially with Walmart's retail media business and Vizio already in the fold, but thinks the price tag may have been a bit too rich. Then Joe and Robert revisit the FIFA stadium branding story. FIFA's clean-stadium policy has forced brands like Levi's, Heinz and others to cover up their logos during World Cup matches. But instead of making those brands disappear, FIFA may have created the perfect Streisand effect. Heinz, Beats and Levi's have all turned the restrictions into creative marketing moments. Is FIFA protecting its sponsors, or accidentally giving non-sponsors a bigger story? In our main stories, Google and A24 announce a partnership around AI filmmaking tools. The big question is not whether AI will make the final movie. It's whether AI will control more of the creative workflow before the final product ever exists. Then Meta and Snap both make new moves in smart glasses. Meta pushes toward a lower-cost, more mainstream AI glasses play, while Snap launches its new AR-focused Specs. If glasses become the next interface, marketers may have to rethink content for a world where the screen is no longer in your hand. It's on your face. In Winners and Losers, Joe's winner is TIME Canada. TIME is launching a licensed Canadian edition with a local team, local office, original reporting, video, social, print and events. In a world of generated content, Joe likes the bet on trusted editorial brands with a local heartbeat. Robert's winner is McDonald's, which is bringing back the fried apple pie. Sometimes nostalgia, timing and a little bit of fried goodness is all the marketing strategy you need. In Rants and Raves, Joe raves about The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby, a book about Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the race toward superintelligence. Robert delivers a super rant on TuneCore and how independent creators may be getting the short end of the stick as AI music floods the market and distribution platforms try to figure out who gets through, who gets blocked, and who gets paid. Also mentioned this week: In the Weights, a site that lets you see whether you show up in the "weights" of different AI models: https://www.intheweights.com/ Subscribe and Follow: Follow Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose on LinkedIn for insights, hot takes, and weekly updates from the world of content and marketing.  ------- This week's sponsor: Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book with most of the pages torn out. Point is, you miss a lot. Unless you use HubSpot. Their AEO and customer platform gives you access to the data you need to grow your business. The insights trapped in emails, call logs, and transcripts.  All that unstructured data that makes all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow more. Visit https://www.hubspot.com/ to hear how HubSpot can help you grow better. ------- Get all the show notes: https://www.thisoldmarketing.com/ Get Joe's new book, Burn the Playbook, at http://www.joepulizzi.com/books/burn-the-playbook/ Subscribe to Joe's Newsletter at https://www.joepulizzi.com/signup/. Get Robert Rose's new book, Valuable Friction, at https://robertrose.net/valuable-friction/  Subscribe to Robert's Newsletter at https://seventhbearlens.substack.com/ ------- This Old Marketing is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network: https://www.hubspot.com/podcastnetwork

Kate Railton, Chief People Officer at Mejuri, joined us on The Modern People Leader. We talked about how Mejuri transitioned from e-commerce into retail, why they've decided to flatten the organization, and the business review cadences and operating model that allow them to move faster.----  Sponsor Links:

Partner with Jay: https://www.jayschwedelson.com/contactㅤPre-order Jay Schwedelson's new book, Stupider People Have Done It (out June 9, 2026).All net proceeds are donated to The V Foundation for Cancer Research, let's kick cancer's butt: https://www.amazon.com/Stupider-People-Have-Done-Marketing/dp/1637635206ㅤSubscribe to Jay's newsletter for weekly marketing tips and tactics: https://www.jayschwedelson.com/newsletterㅤRegister for Eventastic (FREE + VIRTUAL!) https://www.eventastic.comㅤRegister for GuruConference (FREE + VIRTUAL!) https://www.guruconference.comㅤConnect with Jay on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schwedelson/Check out Jay's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@schwedelsonCheck out Jay's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jayschwedelson/Ask Jay anything: https://www.jayschwedelson.com/askㅤLeave a comment and follow the show, it really helps us out!ㅤListen to Kipp's podcast Marketing Against the Grain, and pre-order his new book with Kieran Flanagan, Loop: Outlearn. Outmarket. Outgrow.ㅤJay Schwedelson wanted Kipp Bodnar on the show since day one, and it's easy to hear why once the two of them get going on the one thing keeping marketers up at night: whether AI has quietly torched the playbook everyone spent fifteen years building. HubSpot's CMO makes the case that content isn't dead, it just has a brutally short shelf life now, and the marketers who win are the ones who treat originality and taste like the scarce resources they've become. Along the way they get into why the new robots reward writing for actual humans, what a real content engine looks like when you're starting from zero, and the reasoning behind Kipp's new book in a year when four million others got published.ㅤBest Moments:(02:01) Why AI didn't kill content marketing but did break the old playbook and slash content's shelf life(04:16) The T-Swift theory of content, why being good isn't enough anymore and you have to be prolific too(05:56) Writing for the new robots, how AEO flips twenty years of SEO into a human-first game(08:48) Why Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube quietly became the sources AI search trusts most(10:53) The one content engine Kipp would build first if he were starting with nothing today(13:18) Why he wrote a book in the middle of the short-form video era, and who it's really for(16:17) The journalism-school lesson that beats a business degree, repetition doesn't ruin the prayer

Hoy escucharemos al @jobregong compartir su reflexión sobre el evangelio del día según San Mateo 7, 21-29 Podcast producido por New Fire (@benewfire). Descubre si tu marca aparece (o no) cuando la IA recomienda soluciones. Únete al reto gratuito de 3 días de HubSpot — regístrate aquí: https://hubs.la/Q04fn0pB0 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

92%ers, welcome to another episode of New Heights brought to you by Enterprise! Today, Jason and Travis preview Tight End U and Beer Bowl, and discuss Jason's latest attempt at becoming a goalkeeper. We're also joined by World Cup champions Julie and Zach Ertz. The Ertzes talk about balancing parenting with professional sports, navigating injuries while raising a family, the excitement around major international tournaments, football vs. football, what makes a great host city, and unveil their Mount Rushmores for both tight ends and women's soccer.And we're not done because Johnny Knoxville stops by to talk all things Jackass. We get into how Jackass became a cultural phenomenon, whether there's one last stunt left in the tank, the surprising success of Bad Grandpa, the inspiration behind some of his most iconic characters, his obsession with bulls, robot rectal exams, the Jackass warning that became legendary, & More.Check out Style of Play with Julie Ertz and Kealia Watt https://open.spotify.com/show/033niJbCW5NfL2MlsSfcBd?si=336d524c559c4489Check our Johnny Knoxville in “Jackass: Best and Last” in theaters 6/25 https://www.jackassmovie.com/Shop our new merch at https://kelceclubhouse.com Watch and listen to new episodes of New Heights every Wednesday during the NFL season and follow us on Social Media for all the best moments from the show: https://lnk.to/newheightshowYou can also listen to new episodes on Wondery, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. ...Download the full podcast here:Wondery: https://wondery.app.link/s9hHTgtXpMbApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-heights/id1643745036Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/1y3SUbFMUSESC1N43tBleK?si=LsuQ4a5MRN6wGMcfVcuynwSupport the show: ENTERPRISE: This tournament, every corner kick goal is your chance to win a car. Post on X #OnEveryCorner #sweepstakes and tag @Enterprise the moment a corner kick is called. For more details and an additional chance to win, visit https://OnEveryCorner.com. No purchase necessary. Open to legal residents of the 50 US states, and D.C., Puerto Rico, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Spain, who are 21 and older. Sweepstakes ends July 19, 2026. Void where prohibited. Prize awarded if a corner kick goal is scored. For entry details and official rules, visit https://OnEveryCorner.com.XFINITY: Sponsored by Xfinity. WiFi so reliable you can host the world. Head tohttp://xfinity.com/soccerto learn more.THE HOME DEPOT: An official FIFA World Cup 2026™ supporter. Visit https://homedepot.com/FIFAWorldCup26 to learn more.MENTOS: Refresh the Everyday with Mentos Gum. Shop Now!HUBSPOT: All your customer data in one place, so every team knows exactly what to do to win. Get started at https://HubSpot.comALLSTATE: Check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds: https://Allstate.com.PLANET FITNESS: Recharge your strength this June with the Planet Fitness Black Card. One membership, a number of ways to get strong. Learn more at http://planetfitness.com17:40 - Ertz Injury Update While Parenting See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hoy escucharemos al Padre @pablosolislc compartir su reflexión sobre el evangelio del día según San Lucas 1, 57-66.80 Podcast producido por New Fire (@benewfire). Descubre si tu marca aparece (o no) cuando la IA recomienda soluciones. Únete al reto gratuito de 3 días de HubSpot — regístrate aquí: https://hubs.la/Q04fn0pB0 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hoy escucharemos al @padreluisrodrigo compartir su reflexión sobre el evangelio del día según San Mateo 7, 6. 12-14  Podcast producido por New Fire (@benewfire). Descubre si tu marca aparece (o no) cuando la IA recomienda soluciones. Únete al reto gratuito de 3 días de HubSpot — regístrate aquí: https://hubs.la/Q04fn0pB0 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

¿Alguna vez sentiste nervios antes de tu primer día de trabajo? Imagina cómo sería en otro país. Sabes lo que tienes que hacer, pero ¿cómo explicarlo en inglés?  Hoy vas a aprender lo que necesitas para presentarte con confianza, entender las instrucciones de tu supervisor y comunicarte bien con tus compañeros de trabajo desde el primer día.  Si eres inmigrante o estás pensando en trabajar en un país de habla inglesa, este episodio es para ti. ¡No te lo pierdas! Recuerda que todos los recursos para este episodio, incluyendo la transcripción, la tabla de vocabulario y ejercicios para repasar el aprendizaje, están disponibles en nuestro sitio web.  Haz clic en este enlace para ver todos los recursos para este episodio:   https://inglesdesdecero.ca/266 ----- Dale “me gusta” a nuestra página en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inglesdesde0/ ----- Síguenos en Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ingles.desde.cero/ ----- Suscríbete en YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@inglesdesdecero145 ----- Encuéntranos en Pinterest: https://es.pinterest.com/inglesdesdeceroca/ ----- Aprende inglés con nativos que se formaron en su enseñanza. ¡Visita nuestro sitio web, https://inglesdesdecero.ca/ para inscribirte y seguir todas nuestras lecciones! Descubre si tu marca aparece (o no) cuando la IA recomienda soluciones. Únete al reto gratuito de 3 días de HubSpot — regístrate aquí: https://hubs.la/Q04fn0pB0__No dejes pasar esta oportunidad con Shopify y regístrate para un período de prueba por solo un dólar al mes en shopify.mx/desdecero Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most video business owners are stuck chasing reach when what actually grows a business is resonance. In this episode, storytelling and speaking strategist Jay Acunzo joins me to break down why mattering more to the right people beats marketing to everyone, and how to communicate with enough conviction that clients seek you out instead of the other way around. If you're tired of competing on price and ready to become your market's favorite, this conversation will shift how you show up. Key Takeaways Resonance beats reach. People don't take action because you reached them, they take action because they actually care. Jay's 6-part "dialogue outline" walks a client from "how does this help me?" all the way to "I'm in, how do I start?" Don't try to be different from your competitors. Aim to be refreshing to your specific market instead. Get into your client's journey early as their "running buddy" rather than waiting at the finish line to capture demand. About Jay Acunzo Jay Acunzo is a public speaking and storytelling advisor trusted by bestselling authors, TED speakers, seven-figure coaches, and brands like Mailchimp, Wistia, and Salesforce. Before starting his advisory firm, Jay was a digital media strategist at Google and head of content for 3 organizations, including HubSpot. He's directed documentaries, hosted podcasts, and created award-winning content for innovative startups and Fortune 500 brands. Today, Jay teaches business leaders how to communicate with greater clarity, influence, and resonance. In This Episode [00:00] Welcome to the show! [06:35] Meet Jay Acunzo [12:46] Mediocre Content [21:02] What Defines A Successful Business [25:39] Stop Chasing [28:57] Winning Clients [44:03] Be Different Or Be Refreshing [45:33] Influence The Space [50:15] Communicate With Influence [53:21] Connect with Jay [53:54] Outro  Quotes "Reach is how many see it, but resonance is how much they care." —Jay Acunzo "Don't market more, matter more. If you matter more, you need to hustle for attention less." —Jay Acunzo "Don't be the best, be their favorite." —Jay Acunzo "Nobody's waking up thinking, 'I gotta call Ryan.' It is our job to tell the people." —Ryan Koral "You've been a commodity waiting around for some kind of gift." —Jay Acunzo Guest Links Follow Jay Acunzo online Links Find out more about the Studio Sherpas Mastermind Join the Grow Your Video Business Facebook Group  Follow Ryan Koral on Instagram Follow Grow Your Video Business on Instagram Get your Early Bird tickets for the Onward Summit Join the Studio Sherpas newsletter