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Nina: I see that prompts are becoming the new templates. And by that, I mean, for the past 10 years, 15 years, ever since Outreach, Salesloft, Apollo these sales engagement platforms hit the market, junk in is junk out, right?
And so the quality of these sophisticated systems are incredibly reliant on the quality of the content that goes into them. And so for the past 15 or 10 years, folks have been developing these high performing templates to make sure that they could reach the amount of people they need to reach to with minimal intervention or edits along the way, right?
So you're trying to balance the personalization and the reach scales.
Connor: Hello and welcome to Go To Market with AI, a podcast for sales, marketing and customer success leaders using AI to scale their growth operations. I'm your host, Connor Jeffers and in today's episode, we are talking to Nina Butler, head of marketing at Regie.ai, a generative AI platform for enterprise sales teams that personalizes content using data unique to your business and prospects.
Nina, welcome to the show.
Nina: Thank you so much, Connor, for having me. Happy to be here.
Connor: Likewise, I have, okay so in your bio at the outset, no one knows this, but we had originally from Martha's Vineyard in it, and then you were like, no, I have this big bio, but it's not in there and like we'll pull it out. What is the, give us the big bio. What's, what's the big bio. How does that get in there?
Nina: The big bio! The big bio. Yes, I'll expand on it. So I actually was born and raised on the island of Martha's Vineyard, a little island off the coast of Massachusetts. A lot of people don't think folks are actually like from there.
Connor: Yeah. Yeah, we don't know that Martha's Vineyard is like a real place. They're like, it's like just..
Nina: Or they're like, you don't just take a day trip?
Like you have grocery stores and electricity? These are real questions, these are real questions that I've gotten and yes, we have both of those. But the point being is I grew up in a very small, very tight knit and hyper dependent on each other community. And I actually think that that's shaped a lot of my personal and professional track that I've taken because I am
an incredibly relationship motivated person, and I'll get to it a little bit like, how did I end up at Regie? But I feel like it's all kind of culminated.
Connor: We have start back at your birthplace to like truly understand the journey.
Nina: That's exactly right. That's exact from the Oak Bluffs Hospital, we will go all the way back in time, but I do think it's had a profound impact in terms of how I move through life and how I think about creating connections with people,
cause I think I had a bit of a unique upbringing.
Connor: Amazing. Well, you can start as far back as you want. We can then start with like, we went to high school. We, we made connections with people, but
how did you find yourself leading marketing at an AI business now of all times?
Nina: Yeah. So a bit unconventional. I, I actually do a lot of mentorship in my free time. And I particularly like to seek out people seeking, you know, tech and marketing and SaaS careers because I'm like, come one, come all. You do not need a, you know, a linear journey because I certainly didn't have one. But growing up in the vineyard, I, I spent actually the first about 12 years of my career in food and beverage and hospitality, event design, production, wedding planning, you name it,
I've had almost every single job you can have when it comes to the broader world of hospitality. And I think doing that is one, I really got to cut my teeth on on customer obsession. Like the customer is always right in that world, and I think that that now motivates me and a lot of what I do is, how do I do right by the customer and furthermore, how do I put all my effort in to create a memorable experience for them?
So whether it's their wedding day, whether it's an anniversary dinner whether it's a family reunion, you name it, right? Like, these might be the most important moments in somebody's life, and I love to be a part of that. And so when I, when I kind of left that world a mentor of mine you know was like, you, I love the highs and the lows,
call me masochistic, I love the highs and the lows of the hospitality world. And a mentor of mine was like, you might get that same level of satisfaction in the startup world, and I was like
Connor: Or stress, let's say it's the level of raised cortisol levels at all times.
Nina: That's right. And I was like, I watched Silicon Valley, but I really had no idea what like a tech startup was
right, but I had the opportunity to join an early stage tech company back in 2014 in Boston, and and I've been in tech and SaaS ever since. But it actually It was on the B2C side. So that's where I really started to get introduced to, like, the formal marketing discipline. Meanwhile, a lot of what I had been doing in the hospitality world was marketing just with a different title.
So I felt like it wasn't too far of a stretch in terms of my experiences and what I like to do. But eventually Connor it was interesting. I felt like I got farther and farther away from the customer. Like I was mass marketing to millions of people in a database and we were optimizing for our cart value.
We were, we were like a, a B2C company that, you know, sold, it was a two sided marketplace that had both business users and then customers at the end of the day. And I felt like to my earlier point, I was getting far away from like the neighborly connection and actually getting to know my business and my neighbors one to one and the same mentor was like, well, maybe B2B is going to be more exciting and more interesting to you because instead of marketing to millions of people,
you actually only market maybe to 2,000 accounts, right, at best case scenario? And therefore the care and attention you have to put into those experiences is a whole heck of a lot more important. And so I moved into the B2B world about six years ago, I've been here ever since, and I've kind of directly chosen
marketing, sales, rev technology that one, I see value in, but two, I think continues to perpetuate this overall hypothesis of mine, which is like we are better together, right? Like, how do we bring people closer together? How do you create more meaningful business relationships? How do you like break the convention?
I think a lot of the bad habits and bad experiences that have been perpetuated by technology and so that's how I ended up at an AI company. I actually chose to join before the chat GPT craze. So I like to say I was an
early
trend
setter I like,
Connor: I like the AI OGs that are like, I
was here before this was cool.
I've been here for over a year which is like so funny,
that makes you an OG, but you know, the the company I'm now at Regie.ai, we've, we've been working on this problem for about four years. So we didn't wake up nine months ago and decide to hop on the bandwagon, but you know, the co founders have really committed their recent life work to, to solving some big problems with AI.
So that's how I got here today.
Amazing. I love people with hospitality backgrounds in general. I think that anyone who has a hospitality background is just like extremely tough, super empathetic, you have to understand those customers and like you just have to get, you have to be so gritty because you just get kicked in the teeth everyday all the time.
Nina: And that's actually interesting, I mean, this could be a whole other topic.
A
Connor: whole other topic sometime.
Topics on
Nina: I feel like there's so much parallel too between hospitality, you know, let's say a restaurant for instance, and the friction between marketing and sales. Like I often think of marketing as the front of the house in a restaurant,
sales is back at the house. You only win if you're both, you know, hyper compatible and team oriented at the end of the day, but there's like so much built in friction between those two worlds. And so I actually feel like I excel now in these areas because I've like had a predisposition to figuring out like how to make sure the chef likes you.
Connor: We use so many with Aptitude8 in the services business, we use so many service, and I don't even think anybody has like a deep hospitality background, everyone's kind of done some of it. You'd outpace all of us in terms of breadth. But I think we use it really often of like, okay, you're an SA you're taking orders at the table.
But like the kitchen doesn't need to know everything, they just need to know like burger medium rare. But like if you give them things that aren't on the menu, they don't know what to cook and it's not because they're stupid. Like you have all these things and we do them all the time.
Nina: That's exactly right. So anyways, I digress,
Connor: Tell me, tell me about Regie. What, what is Regie What, how should people think about it? Where does it fit in the thing? What are you excited about? And then we'll kind of dovetail from there.
Nina: Yeah, absolutely. So, we are in the ever topical AI space and I'll give folks just a bit of a background in terms of our journey because I help, I think it helps give some credibility in terms of the problem we solve today. Actually was an early Regie customer many, many years ago, and we first got known for a sequence generation.
So when content generation was just becoming accessible to the pre ChatGPT worlds you could actually start to use it to think about, well, how do we take some preset value props and messaging for your website, read some of your sales engagement data and stitch it all together to create a really performant piece of outbound content.
And that was like hyper novel when it first hit the market. I don't know about you, but, I never want to write another sales sequence again. Like it is the bane of my marketing existence. Sales never likes it, so then they go rogue and then it like, you know, just pains me as a brand marketer that people are writing their own things and, you know, targeting whoever they want so we solved a big problem.
But interestingly enough, there's not a lot of sustained value in the middle, right?
Even the best of organizations, maybe write sequences once a quarter, once, twice a year, right? And so what happens in the middle?
Connor: New head of marketing starts. Oh my God, all of this is terrible. We need to rewrite all it.
Nina: But then it goes stale really quick, and you just don't have the capacity to keep up with optimizations, most organizations. And so the next iteration of the product was actually helping to unlock personalization for frontline sales reps, right? So any given sales rep, maybe 60% of those sequences are templatized, they click the button or it automatically sends.
But the other 40% requires actual human to human connection and personalization and you got to do your research and your homework and you got to think about, well, how do you catch them with the perfect subject line and opening line? And so we were able to take the same type of operating principles of our platform, but apply it to one email instead of multiple emails.
And, and customers love that because it, you know, you take what's maybe a 15 minute process to write a great cold email down to less than a minute. But the interesting thing
Connor: Is that like, is my experience, am I, is it mad libsy? Am I like writing something and you're fixing it? Like if I'm the end user, I'm a sales rep. What, what do I experience if I'm doing that?
Nina: So there is a decent amount of set up on the backend to then have minimal set up on the output, right? And so what I mean by that is you know, I see that prompts are becoming the new templates. And by that, I mean, for the past 10 years, 15 years, ever since Outreach, Salesloft Apollo, these sales engagement platforms hit the market, junk in is junk out, right?
And so the quality of these sophisticated systems are incredibly reliant on the quality of the content that goes into them. And so for the past 15 or 10 years, folks have been developing these high performing templates to make sure that they could reach the amount of people they need to reach to with minimal intervention or edits along the way, right?
So you're trying to balance the personalization and the reach scales. But people are getting hammered right now on deliverability, especially with the changes from, from Yahoo and Google and others. As of Feb 1, if you're sending templated messages, you are ruining your domain reputation. You're probably not even reaching your buyer's inbox, let alone creating compelling enough content for them to open, you know, reply and engage.
Connor: Yeah, that used to be the primary struggle. Now it's like 3 struggles down.
Nina: That's exactly right. And so prompts are, are similar in that you give direction for how you want these AI models to create content and it's, and it's mad lib in that it will understand the rules of the game that you're giving it, but it has enough flexibility and enough freedom to actually generate a unique message that fits those confines every single time.
So you can start to now use AI to create the same volume if not more, of messaging but every single one is going to be unique and relative to the buyer. But it's again, only as good as the data sources you feed it and the prompts that you coach it around. And so there's similar styles set up on the backend, but then as a rep at the end of the day, all they do is click 'Yes send' because all that work's been done for them
right? And they give it a quick read and they make sure that it's, you know, good to go.
But the point that was really interesting, I mean, not that I've held you know, held a bag on a sales team, but I've worked with a lot of sales reps. And
10 years ago, people would have tripped over themselves for this level of accessibility and ease of use, right?
But now, you can't get reps to click the button, which is really interesting. I don't know how many sales leaders I've talked to. There's actually an interesting stat from Gartner that 77% of sales reps say that they're falling behind on their tasks. Like, they just can't keep up with the work required,
they can't get through all the clicking of the buttons, and it's bottlenecking their ability to reach their buyers. And so now when we think about the real implications that has for people, we needed a new solution that actually blows past the human bottleneck and allows AI to start owning more of the work outright.
So the product today of Regie, this is a long winded way of painting a picture, is think about it almost as if it's an autonomous or a virtual SDR. When you think about all the repetition that plagues sales processes, you have to find your ICP, looking at data in your CRM. You then have to go out to some sort of third party data provider and build a lead list.
You then got to get your leads back into your system of record. You then have to think about, well, shoot, what do I say to a head of RevOps, which is probably different than a head of marketing, which is probably different to my third persona. And then I have to create a sequence for them, and then I have to put all the people in the sequence, and then I have to actually click the buttons now to send all the emails and make the calls and connect with them on social media.
And so when you think about all these failure points and like what I like to think of as the outbound assembly line, it's no wonder that folks are finding it incredibly challenging and incredibly expensive to operationalize an outbound motion today. And so we automate that fully, and it gives capacity back to your talented human sales reps and SDRs
to hit the phone on people that are highly engaged or to spend the effort on social media to make InMail's and connections happen where they're going to see the highest reward and payoff on engagement. So we're now playing in the in the AI space when it comes to autonomous SDRs. It is amazing to see how quick this this transformation has happened in terms of how quick the tech's evolved and the real life problems that we're solving for, for many enterprise sales organizations.
Connor: Is the autonomous SDR, a fake LinkedIn profile, fake name person? Is it, is it an impersonating sounds like a very bad word, but like, is it impersonating my real rep or like, what is the experience for how that actually manifests?
Maybe the people that I'm I'm prospecting to.
Nina: That's a great question. There are solutions on the market that are fake by nature, right? It's like, here's my virtual SDR, Susie Q, right? And everybody knows Susie Q is not real, but, and maybe people care, maybe they don't right. And maybe it all comes out in the wash. We instead are the workhorses that are doing all the work on behalf of a real life human that is on your team.
And so think about it you know Connor, if you're an SDR and you know you need to make a hundred personalized emails a day, you know, a thousand phone calls a week and connect with 50 people on social media you can now tell your agent, you can give your agent these parameters, the agent will do all this work on Connor's behalf.
And now you, Connor, as an SDR, wake up every day and you open your task list. And now you're only humanly calling into the accounts that have high levels of intent as warmed up by these agents. You're only going to LinkedIn and making these connections on high levels of intent that have been warmed up by the agents and all the email that was happening
from your domain, from your name, and that way when you start to bubble up interest and intrigue, those replies go right to you and now you, human Connor, can hop in and say, "Yeah, Tuesday at noon is great. Here's my Calendly you can book time here". So we pull you into the loop when it matters most, and we keep you out of the loop when it doesn't matter, and it's, and it's actually a low expenditure of reward from, from your, your capacity standpoint.
Connor: Do you have customers, and I'm curious how intentional of a design decision this is right of like, are there customers like, well, I don't want you to be Nina Butler, I want you to just be like like give me a thousand SDRs, like I want an infinite number and just replace all of it. And is that something that you're like, we don't do that because the technology isn't there.
We don't do that because we think that that doesn't make sense. Like where do you sort of land on that scale?
Nina: That's another great question. You know, and I often get asked, like, what are best practices? What are pitfalls? Like, this is this is like flying cars, like give me the roadmap. And one of the questions I get asked is something along these lines. And our directive back is, it's actually hurtful to overproduce for your organization if you can't keep up with the demand,
right? So you give this instance, well, I want a thousand of these virtual SDRs, you know, going hog wild on the weekend and working overnight. But it actually does you no good to burn through those lead lists and potentially, you know, overfish your pond if you don't have the SDRs or the reps that are able to make the phone calls and do the social work at the end of the day, which is why we help you with that sales math is what I call it.
Like what's the minimum level of volume you actually need to put through this to make a noticeable difference. And then what's the maximum volume you don't want to exceed because you actually don't have the human capacity today to accommodate it.
Connor: Cool. So the end rep experience is I get plugged into Regie, the people that I talk to are folks that we've, I have already been prospecting into with his account on LinkedIn doing some of these different pieces, and now I'm reaching out to them being like, Hey, I've been trying to reach whoever here's what we're doing,
here's what's going on. And I sort of have those conversations at that point but it is pre warmed and, and serves to me, it makes it sound like an airline meal or something.
Nina: More delicious, I promise.
Connor: Higher end, higher end.
cold.
Something you said that really resonated with me previously it was sort of like prompts of the new templates.
And what's really interesting we just did this acquisition, we were going to wait on the announcement staff. Our director of marketing is on vacation this week and I was like, Hey, by the way, we might actually do it next week. And what he gave everybody and I don't know, I didn't think that much of it
and then what you just said really, I don't know, made me kind of think about it more, which was that instead of giving everybody, here's the social posts that everyone should use, it was, "Hey, I made these prompts for you and you can put them into GPT and tell it this, and everyone will get their own response
and everyone gets a unique, organic post that you can write." And I was like, oh, that's cool but what you just said sort of thing takes that of anywhere you're using a template for anything, being able to provide somebody with here's how you should interact with the AI and then it'll give you something that's different for you than anybody else.
And I think in some situations, the AI that's cited as a bug, right? Like anybody interacts with it gets something completely different so you have no consistency, but that lack of consistency actually becomes a huge value prop when you're trying to. Cool. create kind of unique, not unique, but unique enough at scale.
Nina: That's exactly right. And, you know, to, to have your cake and eat it too, the way that we've developed at least our own product, and I've seen similar efforts in the market is like, what are the non negotiables, right? When you think about compelling outreach that's on brand, reflective of your value prop, you know, relevant for your buyer, chances are, if you have a very strong value proposition and a very strong pain point on how you solve that problem, and it's laddered up to the appropriate persona in terms of the different people that are part of your buying committee at the end of the day.
That is enough to feed an AI for the rest of its life, right? Its belly is full, it knows how to mix and match and reword and rephrase, but never lose the intention of what your message is. And that's how you actually get to have that personalization at scale, which I think many pieces of tech have promised for multiple decades, but you've never actually been able to deliver on it
until recently with the advent of AI. And so that's how you kind of preserve and protect the brand, but still allow for flexibility and customization on the output.
Connor: I talked to a lot of founders and CEOs and people doing kind of these arenas on, on the show, and I think they're all very excited about it. And they're like, Oh, everyone loves it it's amazing. What do you find when you're thinking about whether you're talking to buyers or thinking about messaging, like as people are looking at
Regie or maybe AI solutions generally, what is their hesitation, objection? Like where are you focusing your marketing efforts that I think then translates to people in market for these solutions? What are they afraid of, thinking about, skeptical of that you guys are sort of trying to overcome?
Nina: It's great. And, you know, the, I will say, I think for the better, some of the fear mongering and the and the paranoia and hysteria has calmed down a little bit because I think a lot more people have actually got to touch, feel, manipulate, massage a lot of these AI solutions, whereas 12 months ago, it was like, Oh my God, it's coming for our jobs.
know, we're have we're gonna have to
move to the moon.
Connor: I saw,
I saw a clip of Sam Altman like a day ago that was hysterical, where he was just like, he's like, "When we release these things, everyone's like, oh my god, it's the end of jobs, and they're gonna take everything, and everyone's gonna be employed, and he's like, and now, everyone complains it's too slow".
And he's like, that happened really fast. And I think that that's like, a really beautiful observation on technology generally of how people sort of experience that curve.
Nina: It's
exact. Well, actually, interestingly enough, so when I kind of broke down the three chapters, if you will, of Regie, we had the sequence engine, we had like the personalization at point and now we have these agents. We thought about and knew that the capability was possible with agents back in the sequence days,
but we thought that the market wouldn't be ready. We were like no way will people trust this, relinquish the process, take the human out of the loop to that degree. And then when we got to the middle stage, they were like, can't you just press the button for us? Right? They
Yeah.
Connor: Like why, why do I have to do
it?
Nina: Let's
go literally.
And so you're like, okay, right? So hypothesis disproven, and I think that that is Sam Altman's point, which is, you know, once once thingss start to get socialized, people have very high expectations for performance. And actually, that's one of the, whether you call it a challenge a curiosity, you know, one of the best practices that I try to coach anybody is demonstrating patience with the tech, right?
For some reason humans expect far more accuracy, even if it's a really nascent piece of AI tech than they do a human standard. And so what I have to coach people around is like, if you don't take the time to really massage those prompts in a way that you love the output 99% of the time, which granted is higher than how much I'm sure you love your human output, right?
But
Connor: It's like self driving. It's like, oh, it crashed once.
You
You know people crash like all the time?
Nina: That's exactly, a perfect example, right? And then you have one you know, moment in time and you're like, Oh my God, we're pulling it back right. And so people have these incredibly high standards so I really encourage people, if not for their own education, to get really familiar with prompt development and engineering,
and what if you move that up here? How does that impact that output every time? And so that's one area that I get lots of curiosities around. I think the second thing that I hear most often is there's uncertainty in terms of where to, to apply these solutions to first you know. Their content's a dime a dozen now in terms of you can use it for top of funnel, mid funnel, customer engagement, everything in between, and I think some folks are kind of paralyzed by the opportunity.
And I often think back to my B2C days, right? You make a bad purchase in B2C, you just return your pants to Amazon or whatever, right? Like, no harm, no foul, maybe you lose out on a shipping cost. You make a bad purchase in B2B and people lose their jobs. So the stakes are a lot higher and therefore it's a lot more of an emotional sale.
And so people don't want to bet on the wrong horse because then their role could be in jeopardy. And so what I like to tell people is think about the different areas or opportunities in your business that have the lowest risk but the highest reward potential, right? And that's actually why we started in prospecting. When you think about most B2B organizations have hundreds of thousands of leads in their CRM, their marketing automation platform.
Marketing has spent good money to acquire those folks, and maybe only a sliver is ever engaged with by sales. Sales cherry picks off the folks they think they're gonna get the quickest wins with, and everybody else is kind of in this graveyard. And so if you think about deploying,
Connor: MTLs are trash. I hate them.
Nina: That's right, if you think about deploying these agents against you know greenfield, untouched, never engaged or worse, just like spam cannon parts of your database, there's very little risk that something will go terribly wrong and a tremendous upside when you think about all the engagement and pipeline you can actually start to build when you start to shake the gold pan a little bit.
So, so that's kind of my recommendation when people are like I don't know where to start. Go to the place that's lowest risk, potentially highest reward in your business and, and test and iterate often.
Connor: That resonates with me so much cause I think we we're like a big HubSpot co-seller, so we talked to all these people in CRM decisions and everybody's like, do you have the AI stuff? And they're like, Yeah we have the AI stuff. And they're like, Oh, that's really good. We were told that the AI stuff is really important.
And I get asked by analysts and all these people all the time, like, of like, Oh, is the AI functionality like moving the needle? Is it doing it? I'm like, look. It comes up in every conversation, but no one knows what they want to do with it, and no one knows where to start. And then when you give them the ability to execute on some of that, they're totally paralyzed and have no idea what they should do with it
so they're like, ah, this really freaks me out, I'll do nothing. And I really like the framework of there are lots of areas in your business, in your strategy that are low risk and potentially high yield. And you might as well throw something at that and see what comes out the other side versus putting it into some existing function
and you know, there's a lot of downside if, if it goes awry.
Nina: That's totally right. And you know maybe you have all these website visitors and you don't have any way to, to engage that audience on web, you know, like, think about all these different pockets of where you're like, man, we either do nothing today, or we potentially provide a very bad experience today that we'd love to improve.
And like, those are the natural places in which you should, you should test and test often with AI.
Connor: What, what is something that your team is doing? So let's pivot out of, and it could be, Hey, here's what we're doing with Regie, it could be here are other tools we're really excited about. But what are you doing or embracing as a GTM leader in an AI organization, theoretically on the bleeding edge of, of using AI in your own GTM efforts that you're really excited about or, or is, is working?
Nina: Yeah, it's I feel like it's, it's a bit of a cop out, but we drink our own champagne. We are the most aspirational customer in our portfolio. Our entire go to market strategy is built around the efficacy of these agents or, or lack thereof and we're the first to figure that out. And so I've been with the organization for about 15 months now,
and we've been utilizing these agents for, let's call it you know, 7 or 8 of the past 15 and it's completely transformed every element, every element and I'll kind of go through those in detail. One, validating our ideal customer profile. It's actually fascinating how many organizations I speak to that are just like
we sell to enterprise SaaS companies. And it's like, okay, let's get a little more scientific, right? Like, where's the data? Where do you have the highest quality of revenue? You know, what is your NRR look like in different segments? Like, let's get really scientific with it. And even with that level of inspection there's still biases that infiltrate your determination of who makes a great fit customer and who maybe doesn't.
And so using something like an agent that can actually go into your CRM and start to verify some of these assumptions to say, like, Hey, Nina, call me crazy, but you're booking a lot of meetings with RevOps personas. And meanwhile, that's not a persona that was ever in our line of sight. It can actually start to help keep you honest in terms of where you're going to have the highest rewards.
So it's, it's helped us rethink the definition of our ICP. Two, it's completely changed our dependency on contractual, excuse me, contractor resources. So, you know, we're early stage, we don't have full time rev ops, sales ops, any of that fun, great stuff. We used to have to rely on people to help us build lead lists,
we used to
Connor: Yeah. There's ton of orchestration
Nina: Really pay for pricey data providers that maybe we get like 10% of, of functionality because we just don't need everything else right. And now it's completely eliminated that for us. So one, it tells us who to go after and two, it just goes out and finds those folks for us.
And then the third biggest thing is completely consolidating that content creation workflow. You know, again, in my career, I've spent it's actually embarrassing, but I have spent months trying to get just a new sequence and market by the time everybody has an opinion and preference and an edit and you go in and it's just like
it's just a nightmare, right? And now these things happen completely human free. The AI is smart enough to understand not just what content to put out there, but actually what the next best action for the buyer is, right? When you think about some of the the plagues of of legacy prospecting and sequencing It's arbitrary.
You just decide that email, email, social, phone call is like the new hot touch pattern.
Connor: Put it on a slide and it seemed really compelling.
Nina: Or you like, go to one webinar once and you're like, I don't know, that's what they're doing, like, we're just gonna take that framework. Whereas now you completely challenge the convention of static sequencing.
And now the AI agents can listen for actual engagement and actual intent and say, Hey, listen, Connor hasn't opened your past two emails, why keep hammering him now with a phone call and a LinkedIn message and another email? Let's instead cool off Connor and go back to Connor in 30 days. Maybe he'll be in a different headspace,
maybe he'll have a different level of interest in our offering. Conversely, maybe Connor's opening every email and is on our website and is downloading our content. You best believe we should be calling right into that person, right? So it'll, it'll fluctuate up or down based on the real behaviors and habits of your buyers, which again, I think is just a beautiful challenge to how many of us have had to market and sell for the past two decades, which is through this idea of static sequencing.
Connor: if you guys are doing a lot of these different Regie agents, what is your level of, I don't know, how has it changed the way you think about where you're applying effort at which point in that sort of production stack and then how you're thinking about the not necessarily staffing, just how many SDRs do we need? But what sorts of folks do you need in your GTM team to execute on that play?
Nina: So when I think, so when it kind of changes, like my my particular role, like when do I come in and maybe what type of mental bandwidth do I now get back? I can actually now start thinking about experimenting with new verticals and new personas and new territories at a speed in which I've always had a, had a hindrance because it was like, okay great
now I have to go get the data, now we have to write all the content, now we have to like AB test, which like is always never accurate, right? Whereas now I can literally today Conner be like, Hmm maybe we should start selling into sales enablement. And I could just put my agent and start to work that persona with some specific content.
And literally by tomorrow morning, I'm going to have instant results in terms of how this, how this content is performing with that persona, which is a marketer's dream, right? Marketers have never been able to know what's actually driving engagement outside of like vanity metrics of opens and clicks on your, on your your sales engagement, right?
When I think about now, well, what does this mean for how we continue to grow as a high growth company? We can now think about not necessarily a reduction in our head count, but a redeploying of that human capital. And so, you know, if we have four SDRs today, where our agents are actually now driving 42% of their meeting contribution,
well, that's pretty tremendous. The SDRs are still working a 40 hour work week, but now we're getting to our goals a lot more quickly. And when you get your goals a lot more quickly, doors start to open for you. Maybe you have more funding opportunities, maybe you have the ability to get higher profiled marketing opportunities, right?
Like it propels your, your entire business forward at a speed in which you may be predicted that wouldn't happen for a couple of quarters or a couple of years. So it's less a job replacer and it's more a job augmenter or a goal augmenter, so now you can start to get to the goods quicker as a, as a go to market team.
Connor: Do you have, like, how do you respond to somebody who looks at this and says, wow, we're just scaling up outbound spam of, of volume and everything else here. And people are going to be all tuned out to it, those channels are going to go away or, or that sort of shifting. If everybody sort of says, oh, wow, and eventually this becomes somewhat prolific, right?
In terms of the volume and the cost to access it, that people just tune out to those, those layers of messaging entirely.
Nina: Here's what, here's what I would say and observe for that. One, I actually think that automation has proliferated this spam inundation, right? Like more does not equal more in most instances. And because it's actually interesting, our co founder, Matt Millen, he was the original CRO at Outreach. So he had a front row seat in the very early days of that business.
It's like the real challenge that content was becoming to sales professionals. But with great power comes great responsibility. Just because now you can contact 10, 000 people in a week does not mean you should contact 10, 000 people in a week, right? But because there's, it's hard to permission those systems and it's hard to prevent the human from going rogue in the experience, that is now why people have just cranked up the volume on their outbound channels and have not course corrected the quality of said volume.
Now you have something like an agent that actually normalizes those trend lines. One, you're only going to be able to pump the volume through the agent that is respective of your, you know, your, your domain limits, right? You can't just email a million people or else you're going to get shut down like we, we don't change that, right?
Like that is a limitation of your provider. But two, if you do crank up the volume, or at least you maintain the volume, you now are guaranteeing that every single interaction is actually going to be relevant to the buyer. You know, whether they bite on the message or not, you're not just pumping people with, you know, self fulfilling or me centric content because you're now training these agents to not do that type of behavior.
And the second thing I would say is, I've been on actually the recipient of some, you know, what is soon to be found out AI generated content. But I didn't care, because they met me where I was. They led with relevancy in terms of, you know, who I am in the business and the problems I may be facing and therefore the solutions I would certainly be interested in exploring.
And the crazy thing is it got me to a human faster, which is all I want at the end of the day, right? Like, I don't, I don't want to be sold to by a robot. So if your robot can get me to the human quicker, I'm going to take that experience as a consumer every single day of the week.
Mm
Connor: I think that's really compelling. It honestly, it resonates with me with something like really well targeted, like TikTok, Instagram, any of these ads where it's just, I know who you are, I know what you're interested in, here's something that really applies to that. And as a result, you as that end user, you're not sitting through the infomercial that you have no interest in on whatever mass market thing you're, you're sort of interacting with something you're like, okay, I'm curious and I'm interested and the speed with which you can connect that interest to someone who can facilitate it
is, is that core sort of a value provider.
Nina: That's spot on. I mean, it's the perfect analogy, like, B2B buying should work just like advertising does, right? It should be able to go as a business. You should be able to discover new audiences or lookalike audiences, right? You should be able to have something that can put the right content in front of the right person on the right channel
and if it doesn't, it stops doing it, it doesn't spend your money anymore, right? Like it should function exactly the same and yet it's like, we've been such laggards because of the limitation of the tech in the market to be able to actually, you know provide the buying experience. You know, buyers today, Connor, like we've all been conditioned by the Netflix is by the TikTok's
like we, we want our cake and we want it now right? Like we actually have come to abhor the sales processes today because they're, they're ineffective, they're wasteful, they're spammy. Like it's just wild how broken it's become comparatively to how we like to buy from a consumer standpoint. So it's like, let's try to do more of that and less of like this legacy,
ick factor sales outreach that I think like sales has gotten a bad rap for recently.
Connor: I, Hey, any AI that can say sales, we can get you a better rap instead of we'll just spam people faster sounds, sounds good to me.
Well, Nina, this has been lovely. Thank you so, so much for coming on and checking us out. Best place for people to connect with you. Best place for people to learn about Regie.
Where would you send them?
Nina: Awesome. Well, you can find me on LinkedIn, Nina Butler, I lead marketing at Regie. ai. And if you want to check us out online, we're just www.Regie.Ai. Very easy.
Connor: Thank you so much, Nina I'll talk to you soon.
Nina: Thanks so much, Connor. Take care.