Pipeline Visionaries

This episode features an interview with Gaurav Misra, CEO, Captions, an AI video-generation company that allows you to create and edit talking videos with AI.  Gaurav dives into the practical applications and future implications of AI in video, and how these tools can enhance marketing efforts for businesses of all sizes.Key Takeaways:Video capabilities are improving rapidly, and are now at the point where spinning up an AI-generated version of you speaking, is likely better quality than anything you could deliver to camera. These capabilities allow marketers to spin-up and test content very quickly with far less expense than in the past. How people will react to content moving forward, when it will become less and less clear what is real, remains to be seen. Quote: “ Spun up a video and it's like me wearing like a suit… I'm delivering this emotional message, but I'm delivering it so fluently with all these words that I would probably never use actually… and I'm looking at this like, shit, I couldn't be like this on camera. This is such a good delivery, such a good presentation..  It just isn't actually physically possible. And I think we are at that point where I can look at that and be like, wow, I just couldn't do this. It's better than what I could do.”Episode Timestamps: *(03:13) Challenges and Opportunities in Video Content*(08:01) The Future of AI Tools in Creative Work*(24:11) Innovations in Video Generation*(28:28) Real-World Applications and Feedback*(35:27) The Future of Deep Fakes and Content AuthenticitySponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Gaurav on LinkedInLearn more about CaptionsLearn more about Caspian Studios Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode features an interview with Casey Hill, CMO at DoWhatWorks, a company that removes the guesswork from website optimization, tracking millions of websites daily to find winning A/B tests from major brands.Casey provides actionable advice on effective thought leadership, influencer marketing, and various ways to optimize your website. Key Takeaways:Promoting customer’s posts about your company can be a great way to spread an outside vantage point, and customers are typically happy to have you pay to promote their pages. Test all your assumptions and learn what makes sense for your business. Try to test components of your website that you may not have initially thought to look into. Be cautious when it comes to social proof and unintended signalling with third party reviews. A lot of marketers do this poorly. Quote:   Most people do social proof really poorly. The way now, and this is across the board, so we talked about logos, but it also applies to G2 reviews or third party reviews. I think people don't pay attention enough to unintended signaling. Like someone puts 4.4 stars with 300 plus reviews and someone sees that, and that might actually might be a negative signal, right? And so like they look at that, they're like, 'oh, I thought you were much bigger. You only have 300 reviews.' Or in our world today is 4.4 good or bad, right? Like some people might see 4.4, like if I see it on a restaurant or I'm like, eh it's okay. Like it's kind of a neutral one to me, right? So I think you wanna be really careful about unintended signaling.Episode Timestamps: *(07:32) The Trust Tree: Create content that will be shared by other outlets*(20:30) The Playbook: Convert faster, talk about your capabilities instead of benefits*(49:53) Quick Hits: Casey’s quick hitsSponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Casey on LinkedIn Learn more about DoWhatWorksLearn more about Caspian Studios Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode features an interview with Brenton Williamson, VP of Marketing at Bamboo HR, a company that empowers HR pros, employees, and organizations everywhere to simplify complicated processes and streamline time-consuming tasks.Brenton discusses how he thinks about creating distinction in the market, the diversification of marketing channels, and the value of digital engagement. Key Takeaways:Distinction is different from differentiation. Differentiation is product focused, while distinction has more to do with brand identity and feel. You need both. As organic search continues to take a hit, in-person events become an increasingly important tactic to get in front of customers. We’re coming out of the inbound era and sales may need to get used to interacting with people who aren’t actively in a buying motion, and building relationships over time. Episode Timestamps: *(04:29) The Trust Tree: Distinction, differentiation, diversification *(09:04) The Playbook: The end of the inbound era*(36:24) Quick Hits: Brenton’s quick hitsSponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Brenton on LinkedInLearn more about BambooHRLearn more about Caspian Studios Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode features an interview with Andrew Thomas, VP of Marketing at Archer Meat Snacks, a company that makes jerky, sticks and sausages, from real ingredients. Andrew has over 15 years of experience in the CPG food and beverage industry, with brands like Chicken of the Sea, Wilde Chips, and PepsiCo. He discusses Archer’s recent rebrand, their go-to-market strategies, and the importance of social and influencer marketing. Key Takeaways:Awareness and creating memory structures for customers helps build a moat around your brand. Don’t underestimate the power of a strong PR flywheel. Once it gets going, it has an outsized impact. Long-term partnerships are the way to go with influencers. Fewer, bigger, better is a more strategic and authentic approach. Quote:   We're the fourth largest meat snack brand in the nation. Our awareness is not the fourth largest. It's lagging quite a bit behind. And so what I'm trying to do is really build that mental availability, build a big ownable, distinctive brand that creates those memory structures in our consumer's mind so that when they go to the store, when they go to Costco, they go to Sam's, they go to Target, they go to Walmart, they recognize and see us because we have a pretty successful business today, but people are buying the grass fed beef mini sticks. They haven't necessarily been buying the Country Archer or the Archer grass fed beef mini sticks. And we want to create a moat around our brand. We want to generate a lot of that stickiness. Episode Timestamps: *(05:46) The Trust Tree: Being scrappy with social and influencer*(23:09) The Playbook: Leading a strategic rebrand*(45:43) Quick Hits: Andrew’s quick hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Andrew on LinkedInLearn more about Archer Meat SnacksLearn more about Caspian Studios Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode features an interview with Robin Emiliani, Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Catalyst Marketing, an AI-enhanced growth marketing company that leverages AI to build smarter growth marketing strategies, faster.Ian and Robin cover the fears marketers face with AI and how becoming an expert in tech tools can make marketing leaders indispensable.Key Takeaways:Expectations around websites are changing. People want answers at their fingertips, not to search for them on secondary and tertiary pages. Marketers will need to rethink inbound. Surround sound and reaching your prospects through many different channels, is especially critical right now. Quote:  How are websites going to change over time when the expectation is, I don't wanna go to a secondary page, I don't wanna go to a tertiary page anymore. I just wanna be able to type in my question, get my answer. Like that I think is on the new forefront of how this is gonna help evolve things. But how do we restructure our websites completely? Because the expectation is I'm going to be able to get my answer at my fingertips.Episode Timestamps: *(04:38) The Trust Tree: How AI is changing websites *(19:50) The Playbook: It’s a race to create strong content at scale *(29:47) The Dust Up: Messaging needs to be clear and concise*(32:15) Quick Hits: Robin’s quick hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Robin on LinkedInLearn more about Catalyst MarketingLearn more about Caspian Studios Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode features an interview with Kevin Cochrane, an experienced CMO who is currently CMO at Vultr, a company on a mission to make high-performance cloud computing easy to use, affordable, and locally accessible.Kevin dives into the art of being discoverable, the monetary value of brand equity and the importance of using all data available to build a real model of your marketing efforts. He also discusses headcount, and how he is thinking about investing in it. Key Takeaways:Avoid focusing too much on tactics to get customer attention, like tweaking the subject line or the format of the email. Focus on the art of being discoverable, on making it easy for customers to find and fall in love with you. Don’t be simplistic about data analysis. Simple metrics can you lead you astray, you need to leverage all the data available to you to build a holistic model. Brand equity directly impacts the value of a business, take a company like Nvidia or Apple. Marketers who investing in their brand well, will see the productivity of their demand gen dollars skyrocket. Quote: “ I would not invest heavily in headcount. I have seen too many marketing organizations rapidly scale headcount. And you can have a company that's 200 million in revenue and there'll be 80 people in marketing, right? You can have an organization that's 50 million in revenue and they'll have 40 people in marketing and they'll hire field marketers in this region and that region. They'll build out their whole PR team. They'll build the whole AR team. We operate super, super lean here at Vultr. Number one is we empower everyone with a lot of, you know, AI tools and a lot of ability to make decisions, and they all have access to a massive treasure trove of data in our data warehouse, right? We just drive employee productivity as much as possible. Secondly, we leverage as much as possible external third parties that have specific expertise.”Episode Timestamps: *(06:59) The Trust Tree: Fostering an open ecosystem, the antithesis to a walled garden *(25:22) The Playbook: Brand experience drives demand gen productivity*(43:42) The Dust Up: Tension over events *(46:05) Quick Hits: Kevin’s quick hitsSponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Kevin on LinkedInLearn more about VultrLearn more about Caspian Studios Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode features an interview with Rebecca Stone, SVP of Revenue Marketing at Cisco, the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era.Rebecca shares how she stays agile inside a Fortune 500 giant and why she approaches AI with thoughtful skepticism. She also reveals her evolving take on content strategy – arguing that soon how you present your content could matter more than the content itself.Key Takeaways:You can prioritize agility to drastically reduce time to market, even at a large Fortune 500. Always think critically about answers from AI, and ask the models where they pulled their data from. Otherwise, risk sharing misinformation. The way your content is distributed and presented is just as important as the content itself. Quote:  I think it's a matter of meeting the market and meeting the moment, as well as just the sheer breadth of things that we have to do from an internal perspective. As with most organizations, there's not an unlimited amount of headcount and budget to go around. And so when you start to think about how do I approach things in a way that allows us to make progress. In a way that we were super slow, to your point, historically, that agile methodology is really helping us. And I think as an example of that, if you look over the course of the last six months, as we've moved more and more into the team operating fully agilely, we've cut down time to market for some of our most successful tactics from months, even potentially a quarter or more, to weeks.Episode Timestamps: *(03:42) The Trust Tree: Serving mom-and-pops up to the world’s largest governments *(10:22) The Playbook: Agile operations in very large marketing team *(37:50) The Dust Up: Marketing and sales, and marketing and product *(40:27) Quick Hits: Rebecca’s quick hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Rebecca on LinkedInLearn more about CiscoLearn more about Caspian Studios Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode features an interview with Suzanne Behrens, CMO at Granicus, a software company that helps better engage governments and the people they serve.Suzanne discusses how Granicus is transforming engagement through AI-driven marketing, investing in digital channels over booths, and ensuring tight sales alignment. Key Takeaways:While procurement processes differ, public sector buyers still seek personalized, digital-first experiences. Meeting them with the right message at the right time is just as critical as in traditional B2B marketing.New tools allow a new level of precision, and marketers needs to stop with mass marketing effort and focus on higher prospects.While events are crucial for many CMOs we speak to, they can also be high cost and it may make more sense to overinvest in digital channels to meet customers where they are.Quote: “  We've got a tech stack with some tools that are AI-enabled, that we've adopted and hosted, that have really helped us more effectively understand buyer's behavior and intent to help us target opportunities more effectively, versus in the past, it used to be mass marketing. You'd sort of throw it out there and hope someone will, you know, call you. It's really now about looking at their behavior and intent to help us target more effectively and personalize the experience and customize from a super ABM perspective of reaching prospects and customers. So, leveraging different tools to help us do that. We're reaching them when they're ready. They're much higher prospect than just sort of casting a wide net.”Episode Timestamps: *(02:36) The Trust Tree: Selling globally to many personas *(05:04) The Playbook: Overinvesting in digital and web*(21:37) The Dust Up: Meeting in the middle*(22:47) Quick Hits: Suzanne’s quick hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Suzanne on LinkedInLearn more about GranicusLearn more about Caspian Studios Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode features an interview with Putney Cloos, CMO at Bombora, a B2B data pioneer that connects the B2B ecosystem in a one-of-a-kind Data Co-op of leading publishers, brand websites, and premium data providers.Putney dives into the criticality of intent data in building your go-to-market motions, the importance of measuring ROI across a long sales cycles and playing the long game in PR.  Key Takeaways:While we all need to be rethinking search and paying attention to how the world is changing, we shouldn’t abandon traditional search entirely, or too quickly. It still has a significant role.While some see PR as an old-school tactic, it’s a very high return tactic. Marketers should leverage the fact that journalists are under pressure to find stories and should be reaching out before there is a deadline to they are top of mind.An AI thought-partner doesn’t care when you throw out the entire brainstorm or trash an hour of work, making AI a great thought partner.Quote:“One thing that we're all struggling with, or thinking about at least, is traditional search. I think we all need to learn and think about, how does the world change? But the reality is in aggregate, traditional search still plays a pretty significant role. We're not going to throw the baby out with the bath water. We have to think about how we position ourselves as the world changes, but continue to do sort of old school investment and test and learn in the traditional search channels.”Episode Timestamps: *(04:16) The Trust Tree: Selling to publishers *(19:43) The Playbook: Invest in high quality intent data *(41:36) The Dust Up: Conflict during the interview process*(45:06) Quick Hits: Putney’s quick hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links: Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Putney on LinkedInLearn more about BomboraLearn more about Caspian Studios Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Discover the future of B2B content in 2025 with insights on five consumption methods: shorts for quick bites, shows for subscribers, limited series for binge-watching, live events for interaction, and fiction for edutainment. Learn how marketers are like gardeners navigating platform ecosystems like YouTube and LinkedIn. Ian emphasizes the importance of tailored content for specific formats and the shift toward creator-centric strategies. Quality trumps quantity, with AI as a tool for enhancing creative output and reaching diverse audiences effectively.