With AI now baked into nearly every software solution, how can you get the most out of it to grow your SaaS company?
Used wisely, smaller teams can achieve much more with less effort.
However, AI isn't a magic solution for SaaS marketing. Used unwisely, it creates generic content, adds inaccuracies, and provides a negative impact on your brand in the mind of your ideal customer.
In Episode 67 of the B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks Podcast, Brian and Stijn share both the benefits and the critical limitations you need to keep in mind to make AI a powerful tool without compromising your brand’s authenticity.
Topics discussed include:
If you're a marketer, SaaS founder, or executive wondering how to use AI effectively in your strategy, this discussion is full of practical insights whether you use ChatGPT, Perplexity or any other tool.
B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks is one of the most respected voices in the SaaS industry. It is hosted by two leading marketing and revenue growth experts for software:
B2B SaaS companies move through predictable stages of marketing focus, cost and size (as described in the popular T2D3 book). With people cost being a majority of the cost involved, every hire needs to be well worth the investment!
The best founders, CFOs and COOs in B2B SaaS work at getting the best balance of marketing leadership, strategy and execution to produce the customer and revenue growth they require. Staying flexible and nimble is a key asset in a hard-charging B2B world.
Resources shared in this episode:
Brian Graf: Hi there, and welcome to episode 67 of B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks. I'm Brian Graf, I'm the CEO of Kalungi, and I'm here again with Kalungi’s co-founder, Stijn Hendrikse, who's a serial SaaS marketing executive and an ex Microsoft product marketing leader. Today we are hopping on the AI bandwagon. It seems to be taking over almost every software solution out there and has also made us unimaginably more efficient, allowing B2B SaaS marketing teams to do so much more than they ever could have with so much less.
But AI isn't a silver bullet. It, like every other technology, has limitations and if it isn't used the right way, it can lead to vanilla, generic, or outright inaccurate responses that could stagnate your marketing performance or even hurt your brand. Hopefully this discussion helps you to use AI the right way.
And let's you get the most out of AI for your marketing team. Let's get into it. Okay. Stijn today's topic is AI's impact on marketing. And I'm sure that there are plenty of other sources talking about the same thing. It's a big topic nowadays, but I wanted to make sure that we could weigh in where.
Everything is important. And I think that as we'll come about in the conversation, there's a ton of really beneficial things that AI has brought and it has disrupted marketing much more than honestly, I thought that it would when I, when it first came out, but I still think that there are some pretty significant limitations that are worth considering as you as a listener, as a marketer, as a, B2B SaaS founder executive consider utilizing it in, in your marketing efforts.
I don't think it's a silver bullet by any means, but I think that it can add a ton of scalability to your team if used correctly. So let's see if you agree and we can dig into it. So let's start with, you know your use of AI, maybe describe what you've used it for and what are some of the main benefits that you have seen from it?
Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, it's funny, I have been working, I think, most of my career with a lot of, well at some point I was very young too, but let's say the last 10 15 years of my career with people that are much younger than I, but in marketing you end up working with a lot of people in their early 20s that are interns, they're junior people on your team.
And I had expected, when ChatGPT arrived at the scene, that the Gen Z generation would be mostly going to embrace it, and the millennials. It would be far more, I guess, higher friction for Gen X, my generation and the Boomer generation to adopt this new way of utilizing this amazing productivity hack.
And toolset. And what I've been surprised to Brian is that I think I use it more than most of the 25, 26 year olds that I work with in marketing and. And it's actually puzzling to me. Honestly. I use ChatGPT for almost everything I do when I am preparing a meeting, whether I'm doing notes from a meeting, whether I'm preparing a plan, whether I'm reviewing something, I'm giving someone feedback.
I have to come up with a presentation. I'm writing a book again, which of course is very useful to do research, to structure my thoughts, to, to get some ideas on the, the, the sequence of talking about certain topics. To make sure we don't forget anything. When I do content creation in general, There's nothing more powerful for someone for whom English is not the first language to make sure I don't have to worry about the spelling and the grammar and things like that.
And I can talk, I can really think about what it is that my audience could really benefit from. I could do research again, using AI and what's already out there and challenge myself to make sure that I publish something that is increasingly better. That is not what's already out there. In all of these examples I just gave, I cannot fathom why an average marketing leader or marketer doesn't do the same.
And the amount of markers that I see out there that are still, especially younger ones, that are still doing a lot of these things that I just described without starting with ChatGPT first. It's amazing, Brian, and I'm sure you have a perspective on this running a relatively sizable marketing agency. So when I coach people, I constantly, when I used to ask, Hey, did you Google it?
When someone asked me a question that I felt was not necessarily a good use of our time. And now I say, Hey, did you check GPT? Did you use it to either prepare a conversation, to get an answer to your question, to help you structure your thoughts or to make sure you couldn't make it any better.
So all those things for me are, so when we talk about this topic, the impact on AI. Of AI and marketing, the first thing that comes to mind is that there are a lot of marketers, especially in their 20s and in their early 30s, who I think are really at risk of getting disintermediated faster than anybody else if they don't really, really embrace this.
Brian Graf: I think you're right. It's not that, what's the saying? AI won't take your job, but somebody who knows AI will. That is very much at play, especially in the realm that you're talking about. What's interesting, especially with you, is that even before AI, you have been one of the better people that I've ever seen at AI.
Productizing yourself and all of the efficiency hacks and templates and everything that you use to make yourself as effective as possible should be followed by many other marketers, but often isn't. And I think this is an extension of that almost. Like you have, Jumped on and the AI bandwagon and use it as you said with for almost everything right to make yourself more efficient to make yourself smarter But you may are probably on the left side of the audience maturity curve, right versus, you know Many others who are a little bit more laggard I feel like a lot of the people that that you're describing are they've gotten to where they they are Because they've been able to brute force their way through a little bit You You know, they've pre ChatGPT and pre AI.
The way to learn something was to just go into the trenches and get your hands dirty and do it, basically. Aside from courses and Googling and all that stuff. But that was really the way that you got deep knowledge. And so I feel like there still is a lagging sentiment among that group where this is the way that it's worked and so I'm going to keep doing that, but the risk, to your point, is that they, if they don't harness this capability the right way, they're going to miss the boat in terms of what they can do. And they will quickly be in danger, I guess, of, of being replaced or, or, or something like that. If they can't get on board and utilize it to their advantage.
Stijn Hendrikse: I think it's like tools were, of course, One of the most important things that sets humans apart from the animal kingdom.
Whether it's iron tools in the stone age or things like the wheelbarrow. Or now, of course, the software and computers and AI. The last thing you want is to consider these things a threat. And then because they may not have embraced them. Yeah, it's magical. I use it probably at least an hour per day and sometimes more, like throughout every meeting, throughout every call.
And we can go through a couple of examples Brian, but like, let's think about a writer. In the marketing team, writing should not be anybody's job anymore. Copywriting. It is a complete waste of someone's brain. Become a creative director, do the creative part, do the organizational part.
Challenge the writing that the AI does for you, because it can, it is so good at also understanding what has already been written. And then you can use that to help it create something new. That we don't focus on the actual structure of the writing, but you can. You focus on the ideas, you focus on the questions that are out there that have not been answered yet.
And now it needs you to help answer those questions. Synthesizing. Synthesizing things that are multidisciplinary. If you think of topics that cross certain areas of expertise, there's nobody better than a human brain to connect what an AI can do really well, like figuring out, hey, what is really good from an automation perspective in this specific area?
But what is very good from a content perspective in this area? What is very good from a strategic perspective in this area? And then a human is really good at combining those in the way that is most useful for whatever you're trying to do. So, so I think understanding how to use these tools, I recommend everybody who's and not just in a certain age group, but everybody who's in marketing to spend multiple hours a day actually to play around with these things and use it to every question that you could ask to a human being who's working with you or for you.
Assume this is free labor, labor that you have at your disposal, ask it to the AI. And especially these newer algorithms. I don't know if you've played around with the new algorithm that came after 4.0, it's better at reasoning, et cetera. It is really amazing. Like I have a tendency to ask my ChatGPT bots.
I have a bunch of custom chats that I've built. I ask them certain questions over and over and it knows now. So it doesn't even ask me anymore. It knows that I like to put things into spreadsheets that are in Excel format. Whenever I have questions that need to be structured as a table, it will immediately create the Excel for me.
It knows that I like that. Spending 30, 40 bucks a month for this to be one of your tools that you use, it's so worth it for every marketer, Brian.
Brian Graf: You bring up an interesting category, which is content creation. And I think for somebody like you, who is an expert in marketing. This is such an efficiency hack. I look at AI, especially for marketing, as I used to say, as an intern, and maybe it's leveled up to an assistant now.
But basically it can go do your bidding. But you just can't expect it to be a thought leader in the industry. It'll give you what's out there. It's really good at doing research. It's really good at synthesizing and summarizing, and there's huge amounts of efficiency that can be unlocked because of that.
But one of the mistakes that I've seen more junior people use who are using AI is that they'll just use, Put the prompt in, they'll take the results out and that's what they're going to use. Which is not the way to do it. It doesn't actually add value to the conversation. It doesn't take into account the perspectives of their customers or anything like that.
And it ends up just putting really vanilla generic content out. And that I think is the biggest mistake that can be made while using AI. But I guess from your perspective, I'd be really interested to hear what, as either a junior marketer or an executive who doesn't know as much about marketing.
How would you recommend taking, utilizing ChatGPT to point you in the right direction to where you can add value to the conversation. Or you can research the right things so that you can put together something, a piece of content that's really good, instead of just vanilla, generic things that won't move the needle.
Stijn Hendrikse: What I found very useful, and of course here it helps when you have some experience managing other people Brian? To almost treat ChatGPT like a team member who works with me or for me. The easy thing is you don't have to be nice to it. You don't have to use like, Oh, please do this.
You can be relatively transactional in your feedback and what you need. But other than that, it's very similar. If I think the answer is vanilla. I can say so. Hey, this is pretty vanilla. You know, can you explore a little bit more of this? Have you thought about that?
Can you challenge yourself a little bit and think a little bit more out of the box? Can you get creative here? Or if I think it's too creative, I can tell it, hey, this, this feels a little bit off. You're off your rocker here… is this factual? Did you do some checking here? And it can actually do some of that for you.
So I would learn how to have these conversations with it as if you're talking with a team member.
Brian Graf: The amount of time that you can spend with it upfront to refine your prompting. Learn how to give feedback and refine its output as much as possible.
It'll pay dividends in the future. Just taking the first output as the best that it will do? You'll just end up wasting so much time having to rewrite it yourself versus being able to play with the prompts and, and go back and forth with the model to put out the best outcome.
What do you think are the biggest limitations to AI so far in your experience? I mean, we talked about vanilla content, but is there anything else that you think is just worth knowing for people who haven't dove in as much as you have?
Stijn Hendrikse: You know, you have to realize that the only thing the AI knows is what it can find online or what you've told it.
And that's also when things are vanilla, you're looking at what the AI can find online. And sometimes that's a good thing because now you know where to add value. Now you know exactly how you can make it less vanilla. And so that's where the magic can happen. And it is really powerful when you push it a little bit, for sure.
That maybe there's nothing else out there that has already been written, so you're, because the first job you have is to be relevant. To do something that hasn't been done before, ideally, or do it better, or do it with more focus on a certain audience, with a new perspective, with a new, a new opinion.
So using it to challenge yourself in that sense as well, I think it's really powerful. And then make sure that when you get the output the formatting of these answers is usually pretty, pretty similar, you know? So one, the thing about how I make this really my own. Don't just copy paste things.
And that again, it's really about, do you want to be relevant yourself or are you okay with whoever is talking to you? The consumer of your work thinks of somebody that they don't need you anymore. So if you don't want that to happen, then you have to make sure you make whatever you get from the AI a little bit better, ideally much better.
Brian Graf: I think what's interesting about AI is that it will add a ton of noise to the market. If we're thinking about marketing in terms of the amount of content produced. It's going to skyrocket and we've already seen that, but the value of that content will not necessarily. And so what's interesting to me is that AI is: if you want to be successful with it, it almost forces you to become very active. Educated in your segment. To know your industry better than anyone, to be really well read, really well researched, Know the trends, know the history. If you can do that and you can apply it to AI, there's no ceiling. But if you don't want to be proactive as somebody who isn't already an expert in the field to make yourself an expert in the field, it will just be really hard to make yourself stand out.
It will be really hard to add value to the conversation. And it will be really easy to get stuck and to be going back to the job quote. Somebody else who knows the industry better and knows how to use AI better will come along.
Stijn Hendrikse: I'm going to challenge you a little bit, Brian.
You did a great job writing two prompts for us today for this podcast recording session. How much did you use AI for that?
Brian Graf: Learn all my secrets now. Especially for podcasts, I like to use AI as a thought partner or somebody to bounce ideas off of. I think my prompts for this one were… give me 20 thought provoking questions to ask in a podcast about the impact of marketing on AI.
And I looked through those and they, what was interesting actually to use it to be more specific. The questions were really good, but they were very specific. ChatGPT wanted to go into every single discipline of marketing. And so what about SEO and what about automation? That's not exactly where I wanted to take the conversation.
So I ended up going back and forth with it a little bit and bringing it back up a level or two to get some of these. And then I handpicked the questions that I've been asking you. And then usually from there, I will take over and start to add in my own thoughts in terms of what I think, what I think the best answers are, and then go from there.
I think I'm okay at using it, but I'm still not to the level that I probably could be in terms of. Refining and multiple iterations with the bot to make it the outcome is as great as possible at a certain point. I say, okay, this is close enough. I'm just going to take it from there.
And I probably could be more efficient if I were a little bit more patient.
Stijn Hendrikse: The one thing I would add; you could even use the AI to figure out any of these questions. Like, if you would answer this AI yourself based on what you know online, what would the answer be?
And that was interesting, Brian, you can sense what is already being answered online. And our listeners can go find other podcasts to hear about that. And there are areas where it's not a great amount of thought on that. Where we can really lean in.
Brian Graf: That's a great point.
Going back to your thoughts on the gap analysis of the conversation that makes a lot of sense.
Do you have any predictions on where AI will go? We've seen it in the past. I don't know what two years almost disrupted the status quo quite a bit. But I think it's only really getting started. How do you see it progressing and its impact? And your ability to use it to better your outputs.
Or the way that it could disrupt a marketing team and be utilized.
Stijn Hendrikse: I think there's an area of human work that is really hard for it to do, like coaching people. There is an emotional piece of labor to be done and collaboration between team members and all those things. But when it comes to more transaction-like campaign planning and automation and repetitive work and writing and all of those things, AI will do so much better.
So if you're in marketing, you better figure out how you get good at the strategic stuff. Like how do you do packaging and pricing really well? How do you do positioning really well? How do you talk to customers and turn that into new insights really well? How do you use the AI to do the writing for you.
And the campaign planning, et cetera. Marketing automation. Copywriting, even PR management, those types of jobs, I think are hard to sustain.
Brian Graf: I agree. Getting yourself as close to strategy as possible is the way to go right for your security and just your impact on, on marketing.
I think that granted, I didn't see AI moving into content and strategy as fast as it has. And so maybe I will be surprised in the future, very possible. But I do think that, especially as a marketer, knowing your customer better than anybody else will be very difficult for something like AI or generic outputs of AI to replace.
No matter what's on the internet. Going out and actually talking to customers and prospects. It's understanding what their pains are, what they want. And understanding how to solve those pains with differentiation and your product. That is how, that's how you put yourself in a strategic place.
And that's how you utilize AI to, at that point, you basically become a VP of marketing with AI underneath you. Like you can do just about anything as long as the right strategy to implement it with. So again, along with. My soapbox speech on research and, and getting to know the industry.
Getting to know your customers more than anybody else is going to give you that lasting edge.
Last question that may or may not be relevant. Do you see, there's been a ton of movement. I feel like AI is the, the big buzzword of the last two or three years and will be for the next, I don't know, five, but, but I also see a bit of a boom in terms of, The amount of companies that are coming out and the amount of investments that that's being thrown around with anything that has, dot I behind it.
Do you see that trend sustaining over time? Do you see it going? Back down to, you know, the internet boom and bust. How do you see this playing out?
Stijn Hendrikse: I think with a lot of technologies that came like in the computer era, they then the computer itself, software doing all kinds of things, internet, of course, not on the phone, the mobile devices, those were relatively still not easy to predict, but better, easier to predict than what AI will do.
Brian, I think we've only scratched the surface. There probably will be some bubble effect. There's always things that are inflated in expectations and we'll find out what is real and what's not. But I think the potential here is so much bigger than when many people realized that the bubble could easily break.
Even if some of these get deflated, then there's other bubbles to replace them because there's so much potential here that it's going to be mind blowing what happens in the next four or five years.
Brian Graf: I agree. It's hard to imagine that we go back to a world where we don't really use AI.
And even with some of those bubbles and consolidations. I think it will be here to stay. The other interesting thing is just OpenAI's dominance in the market. The amount of capital that they've acquired and the amount of market share that they've acquired is just staggering really.
And so it does make me wonder, if, and what other competitors will actually be able to survive in the long term against it. But I guess that remains to be seen.
Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, the real thing for marketing is going to be hard to predict, but it really is meaningful if you can figure this out. The way people consume information is still very diverse because People have their own preferences.
Some people like to watch videos. Others like to listen to audio. Some people still love to just read. And be able to scroll up and down and scan information instead of having to listen to it and not being able to fast forward how AI, because it's so much better at predicting what someone is looking for and surfacing that up.
And we'll also start determining what those channels are. Maybe audio is actually a much better channel than written content. If AI is able to summarize it correctly in an audio format. Maybe I don't want to listen to a three hour podcast recording because I just don't have the time.
AI does a really good job summarizing the audio in a way that's relevant for me because it knows me. That could completely change, then I never read a blog again.
So I think what happens to the channels and the way we consume information and the way the information gets filtered by the AI on a person's behalf because the AI knows what they like will really change what we as marketers are able to control in where do people hear about us, about what we want to say, about what we want people to believe.
The job of a marketer comes really down to changing someone's behavior, changing someone's beliefs. If AI is now becoming one of those tools that are also on the receiving end of the marketing information, people can take much more command of how they want to receive, how they want to learn, how they want to listen.
What does that mean for the marketer? Is it just now even more than what's already happened in the last 10, 15 years? It's all about relevance, relevance, relevance. Just create content that's really relevant. The AI filters will make sure people find it and make sure that people consume it correctly and now you as a marketer don't have to worry about whether it's written content or audio.
The AI will figure it out. Is that going to be important for marketers to know? I don't know. That would be one of the things for me that's super interesting to track.
Brian Graf: It does seem like a lot of people are moving towards just searching through ChatGPT. Because it has the most specific answers and can surface exactly the answer to the question that you're looking for.
Aside from Google, which we all know the issues with SEO, but whether it's because people are searching more through ChatGPT or because the efficiency hacks that have worked for things like SEO and pay per click will almost become table stakes that AI can just do for you.
It'll be really interesting to see what happens with the channels that everyone has used to date to, to market to the audience. But I think just going back to again, how to make yourself the most effective marketer possible. It is relevance. How can you add value to the conversation?
How can you provide the best answer to the questions that are being asked? And if you can then your material gets surfaced. And if you can't write, then life becomes very hard for you. So it will be really interesting to see how. How this all plays out and maybe, in a couple of years, we start to get some sort of a bigger window into how AI works and how it selects its materials.
But as of now, it's just, how can you provide the best answer?
Thanks as always, Stijn. We'll catch you on the next one. Thank you, Brian. Thank you to Adriano Valerio for producing this episode and the Kalungi team for helping us make this whole thing work. And of course, you for choosing to spend your time with us.
As a reminder, all the links we mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes. And if you want to submit or vote on a question you'd like us to answer, you can do that at Kalungi.com/podcast. Every time we record, we take one of the top three topics and jam on it.
Thanks again.