AI will eat B2B buying... (Dave’s Newsletter)

AI Changed B2B Buying. So What’s Marketing’s Role Now?

Editor's Note: We're all getting our information from AI today. And if I can talk to ChatGPT and figure out your pricing, the competitive landscape, and compare your product to 2–3 other vendors, why would I ever fill out a lead form on your website? Or "contact sales" before I'm ready to give you my credit card? I hosted a conversation with three marketing leaders recently from early stage to enterprise – Lindsay O'Brien (Head of Marketing at Predictiv), Tom Wentworth (CMO at incident.io), and Aditya Vempaty (VP of Marketing at MoEngage). They each shared what's working for them right now, what's not working anymore, and what changes they are making because of AI.

Buyers are doing their homework before you even know they exist (90% of B2B buyers use AI tools in their research, according to Forrester).

By the time they reach out, they've already done all the work. They know who you are, what you do, and how you stack up.

They're not going to waste an hour talking to someone just because that's your process.

You don't control the buyer journey anymore. So what do you do?

Here's what smart marketers are doing to ride the wave and embrace this change.

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WHAT WE'RE HEARING

Four Things That Are Working Today in B2B Buying

While everyone else is running the same plays, a few things are breaking through:

1. Unscalable Bets No One Else Will Spend The Time On

One CMO just spent $80,000 on a billboard in San Francisco. After four weeks, there will be no way to measure it. Some anecdotes. Some data points. But nothing he can take to the CFO and say "we got $1.3M in pipeline."

He doesn't care. His audience lives in San Francisco. They commute into the office every day. They're going to see it.

Another marketing leader created a 120-page book. It cost $80-90k to make. They shipped 800 physical copies and got 2,800 digital downloads.

The result? $4.8M in pipeline.

One CMO is spending $22k/month working with an agency to find influencers who talk to developers and engineers. These engineers create content across multiple channels.

At Exit Five, we're hosting an event in March. We hand-selected 100 people to invite and hand-wrote notes to all of them.

Not scalable, but that's the point. That's how you break through when everyone else is using the same AI tools to blast the same emails.

2. AI Workflows With Rich Context

Context is what makes AI powerful. The prompt is what makes it precise.

The Gong Call Transcript Workflow

AI makes call transcripts more actionable than ever. We used to talk about listening to a couple Gong calls a week. Now AI can listen to every single one and pull out insights and trends.

One company runs about 10 AI agents every time a Gong call happens:

• An agent reads the call transcript and pulls out key deal information (budget, decision makers, timeline, pain points) and dumps it into Salesforce
• Every time there's a mention of a competitor, it summarizes the learnings and pushes them to a database that updates battle cards every few weeks
• Call transcripts trigger Slack notifications to the right people

Multiply 20 sellers × 10 minutes of work per discovery call. So much time is saved every single week.

The Clay + Qualified Outbound Workflow

Here's how one CMO is doing AI outbound that he's proud of:

• Clay does all the research: summary of the person's LinkedIn profile, summary of the company, what they were doing on the site, all the contextual stuff about the product
• Feeds all of that to Qualified
• Qualified writes the emails

The context is what makes it work. It's not just writing emails off random stuff.

Real use case: They go to a big event. Meet 800 people. Only 40 really want to talk.

Ten years ago? Email nurture stream in HubSpot. "Thanks for coming to the booth."

Now? Qualified handles all the follow-up.

The Knowledge Base System

One team created a knowledge base covering everything: brand voice, positioning and messaging, competitors, personas, existing content.

Anytime they need to give AI context, they download it as a PDF and upload it to whichever platform they’re using.

It's tool agnostic, it gives rich context, and it keeps the AI on brand.

3. Obsess Over Distribution

AI only cares about where your content shows up, how many places it shows up, and who's talking about it.

Your traditional SEO authority? Gone.

One marketing team is completely obsessed with distribution. So anything they publish has to start with distribution.

Before creating anything, they answer these questions:

• Who's the partner on it?
• Who's going to give a quote?
• Who's going to share it when it goes live?
• What forms will this content take? (Blog, video, social, email, podcast)
• What engagement will it drive across all those channels?

Nothing else matters until they know how the content is getting distributed.

Make Sharing Simple

You interview a customer. Turn it into a case study, social snippets, quotes for their LinkedIn. Hand them everything they need to share it. Do the heavy lifting for them. Now it reaches their network too.

Everyone does their research before they come to you, you need to be everywhere they're looking.

4. Start By Talking To Your Customers

How can you get leadership on board with spending $80k on a billboard or $90k on a book?

Go straight to the source. Ask your customers. Get the names, the companies, the titles, what they said. Record it with AI. Summarize it and present it.

If you talk to customers first and come back with proof, you make it a lot easier to get that buy-in.

One VP of Marketing even built a base of 15 people he can text to run ideas by. They’re not customers but people he trusts. And when he has an idea, he can ask, “What do you think about this?"

But at the end of the day, you need a CEO willing to break through the noise. Without that alignment, it’s going to be really hard to stand out.

What’s Not Working Right Now?

A few things came up that aren't worth the effort anymore. What else would you add to this list?

1. Website A/B Testing

Remember when everyone was obsessing over testing button colors?

Here's the problem: most of the time you don't have enough conversions to learn anything meaningful.

Say you get 20 demo requests a day. It’s just not enough volume for it to make sense to spend a ton of time optimizing.

One of the CMOs used to work at the company that pioneered website optimization. His take now? It's of zero consequence. Hasn't thought about it in 10 years.

2. Gating Content

Look, we gate everything at Exit Five. BUT we run a different business. The real issue isn't gating content. It's thinking that gated content should automatically get a phone call from your sales team and some good outcome is going to happen.

For most B2B businesses, giving information as freely as possible is the way to go.

The exception? Only if you absolutely have to.

3. Building Massive Teams

A recent Proctor & Gamble study compared human-only teams to people using AI.

The finding? One person using AI performed as well as human-only teams. But two people using AI outperformed everyone.

Team size is shrinking. Everyone is under pressure. To ask for one headcount right now, you better explain to the CEO and board why you can't do this with technology.

4. AI Avatars

I asked all three marketing leaders: Would you use AI avatars in your marketing?

All three said no immediately. One tried it for customer win announcements. Too cringe.

One company just launched a product and filmed a TV commercial with real actors. Paid them. Had catering. Filmed for a full day. Had set design.

Expensive. But their launch video was 10x better than what it would've been with Sora.

People can tell when it's AI. And they don't trust it. To be fair, this one probably just isn't ready yet.

So, Is The Funnel Dead?

Here's the best way to think about it: the funnel is a planning tool.

You still need it as a guardrail. You still have to figure out which marketing plays to run.

Maybe not enough people in your market know you exist. That's an awareness issue. Go spend money on billboards.

Maybe you have a ton of interest. Meetings are full. But you're struggling to close deals. That's a conversion issue – a completely different problem.

The funnel helps you plan. It helps you communicate internally because most people know about those stages and understand them.

The funnel isn't dead. It's just not how buyers move anymore.

– Dave

P.S. What used to be a staple of your marketing playbook that doesn’t work anymore? Reply back and let me know. We really do read them all.

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