From Demand Gen to AI: Navigating the New Marketing Landscape

0:00I am very, very excited to, lately I've been getting to nerd out on AI. pretty much the last several conversations I've had, epic leaders talking about epic things, but the conversations kind of veer towards AI, admittedly. Today, we've got another really epic human being who's been deep in that world. I already know this because I know what he's been up to at least a high level. And so I'm very stoked to introduce Brian Urioste, the Chief Marketing Officer at Redwood Software. Brian, welcome to Marketing Trends. Well, thank you for having me. I'm super excited to talk about what's going on in the world of marketing.

0:38And if we head down the path of AI, that's fun too. Okay, cool. So I know we talked a little bit about some of the things that you dig and like to nerd out on. One of the things I want to put a pin in and maybe open up now is demand gen, right? You come from a demand gen world. You're big in that space. We think about specifically B2B Demandian a lot in our world of how we are leveraging our network and how we work with some of the partners. And like, we just love to talk Demandian and we love to hear from thought leaders like yourself who come from that space, who very much still do a lot in the space of Demandian.

1:17Give us your kind of, you know, state of the industry in terms of Demandian in your world. What are you seeing? What's changed? Like what's table stakes? What's different? You know, I'd love to hear your perspective there. I'm not a big gotta be innovating every day kind of guy. I believe in innovation, but there's so much that works. At the end of the day, I care about yield. If it's not something that's gonna present well on a stage at some conference, I honestly don't care. The reason I'm hired is to help grow a company and you grow a company by generating new bookings, retaining customers and expanding those customers.

1:55And so I feel like the science and the innovation comes in finding the things that work best. And so when I think about the world of demand gen, a lot of the core principles, the four Ps still matter. That hasn't changed. I learned that a long time ago. And it still comes up. You know, I think the notion of segmentation is still one of the most powerful, you know, before we start talking about cool tech and automation and AI and triggers and whatnot, like, man, if you don't know who you're talking to and what they care about and what is an event that is going to trigger them to make a change, then it kind of doesn't matter.

2:48right um so you know when i when i think about the world of demand gen there there are today there are obviously um you know many of the tools that have been around for a long time but there are more tools to to do segmentation better to get in front of folks in a different and a more segmented way um and so for me it all you know demand gen all starts with you know kind of that notion of finding the right buyer getting the right message to them when it matters uh the most You'll probably hear me say this too many times. It's about yield. So you think about the work that you're doing. This is how we hold marketers accountable.

3:28Leading indicators matter, for sure. But at the end of the day, it's, did you generate pipeline that turned into a bookings dollar? It's not that you're not responsible. Your responsibility does not end so far up funnel that it hasn't created impact for the business. It doesn't mean you control everything, of course. Right. But I very much think as a full funnel marketer, as a CMO, my value to the company comes in generating bookings. Right. And so we as marketers have to care about all those things and deploy all the tech, all the tools, all the latest ideas, as well as the old ones to get there.

4:05Okay. And you're also, you know, Redwood is also not just serving one segment, right? You have multiple industries, massive scale. So that tells me there's like buckets of, you know, problems and things that you're solving for these different segments. Take us kind of a layer into now, one, talk about the industries that you're serving to give our audience some context. But then like, what are the, are the problems vastly different in each segment? Are you like, actually, no. What John in logistics experience is the same as, you know, Susie and telecom or whatever it is. What are you seeing across the different audience voices that you have to cater to and you get to cater to?

4:43Yeah. So first, without being a shameless plug, let me give like the super fast. What is Redwood software? What do we do? We're an automation company at the end of the day. That is what we do. We automate mission critical, complex business process, business and IT processes to deliver, you know, outcomes that companies are seeking. And so one of the challenges as a marketer of a company like Redwood is we have a very horizontal platform. One of the things we say out in the market is anything that can be automated should be automated. Right. OK. So that leaves a lot of stuff. Right. And so the platform itself and think more back office automation than like replicating a user clicking on a mouse.

5:27This is thousands of applications talking to each other millions of times a day in order to complete something like closing the books or enabling an order to cash process at a$20 billion company. Humanity is sort of not able to do that anymore because we've become so productive and created all this technology that you need technology to orchestrate it all. There's sort of this horizontal concept of how do you add value with an automation platform. But I think where it starts getting really interesting is when you start solving very, you know, however you want to think about it, more specific business problems.

6:06And the business problem could be what I was just mentioning, your utilities company, a big utilities company, and you have all this tech in place that collects data from a meter on the street and processes through all these applications. And ultimately, somebody, you know, the business wants to get paid. And so strings this all together. And so as a segment, there's a very unique audience there. And their outcome, they're not solving for automation. Honestly, they don't care. They're solving for efficiently collecting that data and delivering along the way so that ultimately they get paid. And when they get paid faster and more accurately, and they're not pissing off their customers because they're sending double bills or inaccurate bills or late bills or whatever it may be, their business is better off.

6:56And we've seen with many of our customers, it enables them actually to do some things differently. It just provides, not to mention just differentiation in the market. And so as a marketer, that is a much more unique message to the SIT team that is probably at the end of the day responsible for that chain of automation. But at the same time, there's a business user there that cares about that meter to cash process completing. And so I could talk automation all day long and dynamic scheduling to the business user and they're going to glaze over pretty quickly. But if I tell them, you know, we're going to shorten the cycle of a financial close or we're going to, you know, whatever, something that they can relate to, then I'm going to get them on the hook.

7:43And they're going to want to talk to us because it's a pain that a lot of them already have. And it's something they can resonate with. And so then my job is just getting that message in front of them as efficiently as possible. I guess, considering all of the different industries that you're serving, is it like in terms of the pulse of automate of the world of automation that you're serving now? Is it are you finding that your prospects, customers are already down the road with automation that that Redwoods actually coming and just improving what they have already in place? Or is it, hey, look, you're still missing a ton of opportunity because these things aren't talking.

8:20And so is it still more of that, like coming in and connecting layers and synchronizing things like you described? Or is it, no, actually, they've got other tools in place. It's just Redwood does it better. Well, I mean, I'd be hard-pressed not to say Redwood does it better. But it is all of the above. And actually, one of the assets that we recently created was an automation maturity assessment. Because it's a very real thing. And it's interesting because we interact with enterprises large and small that have no core enterprise automation solution in place. And so they have just a dearth of scripting that a bunch of people have to keep up to date is really hard to manage.

9:06God forbid somebody leaves, then it's like, oh my God, how did that work? Right. And so, but, but there's absolute reality there. At the same time, you know, we certainly come into environments where most many large enterprises already have something in place, but it's not serving their need. You know, there are oftentimes they, they will be going through some sort of transformation. And so like, this is a great trigger for us to, to think about as marketers. They're going through a cloud transformation. Well, you know, our, our automate our enterprise automation platform was the first one to go to SaaS.

9:39And so we have a lot of credibility there. In other cases, some of the other products on the markets actually do not have a SaaS solution. So they are looking like there is an event there, not driven by automation, but potentially driven by something at the corporate level, an initiative to get to the cloud. And so, again, we see all varieties of those scenarios where there's, in some cases, we're helping them to move off something messy and expensive. and unserviced. In other cases, it's a little bit more greenfield and very quickly, it's just a better day for those customers. Give me an example, one example of a project that Redwood has either worked on or working on now of the scale of the impact that it's having inside of the organization.

10:29You gave a couple of examples earlier, but is there something that you're just most proud of when you think about the power of Redwood software and maybe it's a use case or something that's been really compelling and the impact that it's making at maybe a global scale? They can be very specific to the use case, for example. So we did a project with a large, without naming customer names, a large commercial products company. And this is a process where we helped them to significantly, I sort of referenced this before, significantly reduce the time for them. It was basically a supply chain process that they were running.

11:13And I can't quote off the top of my head what the improvement was, but to a point where it literally enabled them to make an offer to their customers, to shorten the cycle for them to ship to their customers. It was basically like, at the end of the day, it was automation. It improved the process, but it gave them a new capability that they could offer to their customers because they could deliver more quickly than they could before. And they had the confidence that they would actually be able to back it up because they had data and the process to support behind it. In other cases, it's really like the cloud transformation one is a very common one.

11:52It's their inability to get to the cloud kind of holistically across their company. In some cases, it's very ERP driven as well. They've got an initiative to take SAP, for example. SAP has the RISE initiative, which is to get their customers essentially into the cloud, onto the latest instance, get the latest and greatest. Meanwhile, while eliminating all kinds of technical debt that many ERP customers create over time and customize in their solution. And there are countless customers that we have helped make that transition, which again, And part of a broader mandate for the company to get to the cloud.

12:30I think another one, just an obvious one is like, you know, we have a solution specifically tailored to not so much industry focus, but more of a use case around the close process. And you can imagine the business implications of reducing the financial close, specifically where we where we support this is in the record to report process and reducing the financial close from 20 days to 10 days or to five days. You can imagine just the visibility just makes a tremendous difference in your ability to deploy capital. Wow. Another side of this that I'm curious about, if you're seeing any of this at all, is just kind of the democratization of automation.

13:11I mean, you've got a lot of low-code, no-code tools out there. You've got a lot of businesses just choosing to kind of, do we build? Do we buy? Why, you know, are you seeing, are you having a challenge, you know, in that way where some businesses are just doing this on their own and building their own kind of automation solutions based on kind of how fast things seem to be moving? Or do you still see the TAM is just so massive that that's not even a concern? The TAM is massive and just kind of continuously expanding. But I would say less of that, especially in the enterprise, because there's so much complexity.

13:48But I mean, the trend though is absolutely real. Look, 20 years ago, we had very technical people. This is back in the batch scheduling days of automation. You had to have a pretty technical capability to deploy that. Over time, especially as we're serving more of a business need, you really want business users in there, right? And so this, I think, also is where even more so AI will play a role. So, for example, a business user could come in and say, yeah, I want the automation to do this. And then instead of them having to script, use custom scripting, or do very complex configuration of a job flow of all these different systems, the AI has the intelligence essentially to build it for them.

14:46Another way where that's coming to life is not so much from a building perspective, but a business user's ability to understand what's going on. Again, many of the automation tooling that's been around a while, it's pretty cumbersome. It's not the prettiest thing that you'll see. And so if you want to answer a question, I'm running a financial close. I want to know where it's going to break because stuff happens. There's always stuff going on. You can ask the question to the AI and it's going to tell you. You can start by saying, hey, over the last 36 days, what part of this job flow aired out the most?

15:26It'll let you know. And then you can course correct if the AI actually hadn't already found a way around that issue to begin with. but it just makes the information so much more accessible and actionable. So I think that's a big part of sort of the democratization. The low-code, no-code, I think it's part of it. Make it more drag and drop and all that kind of stuff. But what if you didn't even have to click and drag and drop and you just had to ask the question? Yeah, yeah, Nick, wow. Are AI agents already kind of being enabled on RedWords platform? I hear so much about it now. They seem to be everywhere already.

16:05Yeah. Let's just say we have a lot of work underway, but we are taking a cautious approach with it because it needs to add value. I mean, I'll tell you, for the most part, customers aren't... It is not a key reason that they are looking... It is not like the number one reason that they're looking to buy an automation solution today. They're first trying to solve the problem. Can we make the experience better, easier, more transparent, all that kind of stuff? is really very much where we're heading. And I think for Redwood in particular, you'll see some announcements in the next... During 2025 in particular, around how we're stepping our way through it.

16:46We're getting a lot of customer feedback right now on is this valuable? Take, for example, one of the things that we're testing with clients is around documentation. We have massive amounts of documentation. Very simple thing. Help me find the answers. It's, you know, think about how you find stuff on Google these days. You know, you can provide the information in a much more consumable, less searching around. You can aggregate information into something that is very concise and punchy and really answer the question without having to assemble six different documentation articles and then, you know, understand what they mean together.

17:22I mean, where do you see the puck heading here? Like in terms of, you know, automation specifically in your space? Like bring us into the future a little bit from what you've seen. Where does this get to go for businesses and solving their complex challenges? I mean, I think the first thing I'd say is I'm a marketer. I'm not the product guy, the product visionary. But what I would say is if there was a word, maybe it would be augmentation. And look, I think the same thing in my world as a marketer. There's a role for humans to play. but how do you make that role more impactful? And I think that's sort of like, kind of a principle that you can think about.

18:02And I think a little bit where the puck is headed. How much value is there in somebody writing, scripting for an automation workflow? Obviously it's got to get done. If there's an easier way to do it, then great. And so it's empowering the people that you have to be super powered, right? AI can become that enabler of one person feeling like they can leap a tall building because they've got way more information. They can do 10 times as much in a day because they've got a tool that helps them to do that. And then over time, there's sort of the notion of agentic AI where it becomes more than just the chat GPT stuff that most people are familiar with.

18:51hey, answer this question or draw me a picture of something because I can't draw or something cool. It becomes more decision-making oriented. Humanity plays a role in that, for sure. And there's some things that the data will be more inclined to enable AI, I think, to make those sorts of decisions. but things that have massive amounts of data that you can take off somebody's plate and flag an error when something comes up that you need a human to put the human eye on it, that's somewhere down the road. Probably not that far down the road. Are you seeing your team leveraging AI, using it in their roles?

19:34What's the impact of that? Like I, you know, I cross, I guess, many functions. I imagine a tool like GPT or Claude or Perplexity or one of them could probably be a really cool, you know, a cool thing to add to their tool belt. What are you seeing from just, yeah, like team and dynamics and how they're using AI specifically? Is it like blowing your mind? Like, I mean, is it blowing their minds? Like, what's the, what's it look like? Yeah. So I'll tell you a couple of things. I think we're testing it like everyone else. We're both understanding the implications of how we can use it, as well as what are the impacts to us.

20:14Obviously, the world of search engine optimization is a little different these days. Your experience is a little different. So what does that mean? The trend is not always going to flip things on its head. At the end of the day, Google is looking for the best content, the most relevant, the most recent, those sorts of things. And whatever the front end is may not really matter if they're optimizing still for the same thing. Maybe they've got a better way to find the best thing. And so you need to be even better. But within the team, we certainly went through what felt like the gold rush of I now have ChatGPT or whatever platform.

20:48And content creation is I think where a lot of people started. right um okay and you know we went through the iterations of and uh you know running things through it and looking at it and saying is that good does that sound right and you know we've sort of made our way down the path to um it's a tool everything with that every piece of content uh that we that we run through it gets human reviewed um there's a process for that and and also you know kind of checked for factual accuracy and um you know copywriting and that sort of thing some content naturally lends itself, I think, more to the medium.

21:26And the approach we're taking is more fact-based informational type content fits that well. Whereas stuff that's more point of view, not so much. We've created some bad content that was intended to be more like a blog with a perspective through some sort of AI tooling. And we said, so in that case, use it more as an enabler. I've got an idea for this sentence or paragraph. Help me to craft it in a way, get my seed thought into something more concrete, and then maybe copy edit it as well. But I think we're scratching the surface there. As we're entering 2025, one of the things we're doing is we're identifying AI champions in the company and specifically in marketing.

22:12So people that just dig it, naturally want to learn about it, have passion for it, are reading stuff out there. And we're coming up with ideas, whether they're feasible or not. What are the different places where we think there's a play? Salesforce has their agent force concept. Okay. Is there a play for AI with an SDRBR role in some capacity? That's interesting. There's a role I think it probably is not ready to play, but there's a volume component to it. There's some repetitive things in there. We're already using tools like outreach to sequence communications. And so we're coming up with a long list and we're going to prioritize them.

22:57And we're going to experiment like crazy in 2025, based on what we think will have the most impact and go from there. Let's talk a little bit about team dynamics. I know you mentioned that earlier in the prep, and I want to kind of click into that about, you know, Just how you think about team dynamics, how you go about building high-performing teams. Let's touch on that and get your opinion and experience around that stuff. It's pretty important in my role as a CMO. And one of the things I tell people that I mentor or anybody that asks, I suppose, and since you sort of asked, I'll tell you, is as you develop as a marketer and into more and more leadership roles.

23:38I mean, I think a lot about the fact that I need to, over time, become a better leader than I ever was a marketer. Now, I have to remind my team, hey, I'm still a marketer. So I have opinions and a little bit of experience I can probably still weigh in. The skills are still there. They're not all quite as sharp. We're all latest and greatest, but there's still something there. But yeah, I think that part is essential. I think You have to be curious as a leader and develop that skill set. And it's a skill to develop over time. I spend a lot of time thinking about team dynamics. And that all starts with hiring.

24:20Hiring is pretty much... My team has all heard me say this. It's the most important thing that you have to do as a manager. So I'm sure you feel the pressure of this campaign or that campaign and its performance. And I get it. I'm probably the one asking you about it. Right. But when you tell people to pause and think about the impact of having a rock star on your team, man, it's like, okay, now I totally get it. And so if you've got an open rec and you're not in LinkedIn, bugging your network, sourcing every day, like we've got amazing recruiters at Redwood. But look, they're hiring other jobs.

25:05We're not the only ones. And so while we get plenty of their time, at the end of the day, it's on you. So just having a... A, caring about it. B, using your network. And C, having a process for it, like something programmatic. And you'll hear... This is another thing that we could spend some time on. Having a playbook matters. It matters across everything that certainly that we do at Redwood, across the business. But certainly in marketing and hiring is absolutely part of that. from who's like, how do you think about your interview team? What does that look like? What do you want each one of them to talk about?

25:42Do they know that? How are you going to step your way through the process so that you can give real clarity to every candidate as to what they're in for? And then, you know, what's going to get you to the answer about whether there's right fit or not at the end of the day, who gets to have a say and, you know, stop the bus if they think it's the wrong candidate and who doesn't, you just all those kinds of things. There's probably many different ways to get there. But having a playbook so that when you make 15 hires, and we're going to do a bunch of hiring and marketing over the next 12 months.

26:15Amazing. Yeah. It makes a big difference. And that applies again. That concept applies to how we think about search engine marketing. Or our SDR playbook is like, I think it's like 28 pages long or something like that. Wow. Speaking of the SDR sales marketing alignment, I know you talked about that before. just how much you value the alignment of sales and marketing. It's obviously a big one. It's actually come up a few times this week. I was chatting with Alison Wagenfeld earlier this week. She's the CMO over at Google Cloud and was talking about sales and marketing alignment as well. And I know you have experience in aligning these two worlds.

26:54Speaking of playbooks, what's in your playbook when it comes to aligning these two really important functions of the business? The word I would use is funnels. And so when we... I spoke earlier about, I have to care about bookings. Bookings are ultimately a big part of how I evaluate my own success and the team's success. And so at Redwood, we think of the world as a bunch of funnels. There are people from sales. There are people from marketing. But at the end of the day, success is when we get to that, we drop to the bottom of the funnel and something spits out the bottom. So we have a cadence of a weekly pipeline review meeting.