Inside Webflow’s Bet on an AI-Native Web and What That Means For CMOs

0:02I'm Eric Fulweiler and this is Scratch bringing you marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains, rewriting the rulebook from scratch for the world of today. Hey everyone, my guest today is Adrian Rosencrantz. He is the chief revenue officer at Webflow, also responsible for marketing over there. Really interesting conversation. Adrian's background at Salesforce for a really long time, really being at the front of the curve of industry disruption within the tech web 1.0 web 2.0 space is really fascinating we actually go on a detour before we even get into the brief because what he said right before we press record about all these conversations that he's having with cmos you know they have hundreds of thousands of customers at webflow now about the state of ai and what cmos are looking for what they're doing his perspective on what he talks about is kind of a css and how to differentiate with ai both internally, but also externally for your brand is a real highlight for me.

1:07It's always interesting to speak to someone who oversees both sales and marketing. And I know a lot of you can relate to that question of how do you integrate sales and marketing? I'm not going to give away Adrian's answers, but I will say he gets very specific with methods and meetings that he uses to make sure that that happens. So make sure that you check that out. And I also found it really interesting, you know, he recently hired a CMO at Webflow, kind of what he was looking for, not just in general, but actually specifically to kind of the next five to 10 years of what the role of the CMO is going to need to be able to do differently.

1:40Really great conversation. I know you're going to enjoy it. So without further ado, I'll let you get straight to my conversation with Adrian of Webflow. Adrian, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for making the time. How are things in San Francisco. They're great. We've had a couple days of sunny weather. September's an amazing month. Love it. Well, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Obviously, we've been doing some work together. Our teams have been doing some work together. I mean, you know, in terms of challenger brands in categories that are being disrupted, you know, can't think of one maybe bigger and better to have on the show than Webflow.

2:19But before we get into that, the icebreaker question that we ask every guest is, of course, what is one challenger brand that you're particularly passionate about right now and why? Great question. One of the brands that I really like right now, especially in software, is Ramp. And it's not just because my sister works there. It's because they're really thinking about how turning finance onto autopilot. And what I love about what they're doing is they're really focused on something that has been around as long as businesses have been around, which is expenses and spend. And they're really reorienting the conversation around selling time.

2:59They sell the time and the savings, not the software. And I think that really is fascinating, just given that it's such an existing workflow for so long that to have a fresh take and help reorient the conversation, something that I really think they're doing a phenomenal job at. yeah i'll give a plus one to that we actually work with one of their competitors um and and one of the things i love about what ramp is doing is also the brand is so distinctive for that space like it really stands out and from a media and go-to-market perspective you know they're certainly taking the like go big own the category narrative type of approach like they are everywhere in terms of their advertising they do a lot out of home to really establish that kind of credibility and trust.

3:44But it's funny, we have this first of what will be an annual list of the top 50 Challenger brands from our vantage point in the industry. And actually, I submitted Ramp as one of them, as one of the ones that I think should be considered. So on the same page with that. All right. So I would imagine that most people listening to this have heard of Webflow, but obviously the business and the category around it is changing very quickly. So can you give us an overview of what Webflow does for people that might not know and also kind of where it is right now and where you're taking it for those who might know it but might not know you know what it is today.

4:22Absolutely let me start with what Webflow is. Webflow is an AI native web experience platform that helps teams build and manage optimize and learn how to ship faster more effectively their website and web apps. And I think what's interesting about this space is if you go back, this space was really created actually when the web was created. I think the most prevalent company is WordPress. Most of the web is actually built on WordPress. It's pretty remarkable. And I think as time has gone on, CMS became a category within it to be able to manage your content. and now we're in a new era and in this new era things have to evolve to meet the moment because the way that the web is being consumed is changing so fast with the introduction of LLMs and how AI is disrupting and really disintermediating the experience and so that's it's a really interesting space because it's been around as long as digital has been around and it's very unique in that there's one one specific company WordPress that really kicked it off.

5:31and we've actually done work in that space not just with you all but also with wp engine on the creative front so very familiar with how much is going on and and kind of where it's going which is what i think we're and i know you are really excited about and to see a lot see a lot of opportunity within so we have the whole brief that of course we aligned on ahead of time but as we before we pressed record you know you started talking about what you're seeing and some of the conversations that you're having with cmos around the state and future of ai and marketing. And I was like, you know what, we got to start there.

6:02So before we actually get into the brief that we prepared, can we get a bit from you on what you're seeing, what you're hearing, what you're talking about with and for CMOs on the state of marketing right now in AI? Absolutely. It is such a fascinating time because I've never seen something change so quickly in over a decade, really. So the web, it was always about competing for clicks. It was about competing to get the click to become the destination to your website. You could craft the story there, and it started to evolve. The landscape started to get a little bit fragmented as social media arose.

6:44But what's changing now is what used to be we're just competing for clicks with LLMs and how they're crawling the web. Now you're competing to be the answer. and that's a fundamental shift. One part of it is actually quite similar, which is you're still trying to be discovered. But the part that's actually changing fundamentally in a way that we're starting to see seismic shifts across our customer base and what I'm hearing from CMOs is your website and your digital experience is now having to solve for two things, not just discovery, but the second is to create an experience that delights humans in a way that it never has before, at the same time as you have to actually give context to bots and LLMs to be able to answer questions about you.

7:34Because what's happening is that you're getting a wedge in your funnel and you're being disintermediated. Because before, the click would lead to you. You could explain who you are. Now there's judgment. There's context-aware judgment when a user is asking questions. And one of the recommendations I suggest everyone to do is go take your About Me page on your website, drop it into an LLM, and just give it the prompt of, give me the top five products based off of this About Me and see where you stand. because it's fascinating to see that simple action and to learn about where LMs see you. And just to share some data with that, one of the things we've seen is 125 % increase, a surge in LM bots crawling over our 300 ,000 customers.

8:22And so you're really starting to see that disruption. Translating that to what I'm hearing CMOs say and like how to meet that moment, I'm really hearing two flavors of it. one is how do we go show up in that traffic to try to grab that traffic to turn it into revenue how do we show up with you know some call it aio some call it aio with answer engine optimization ai optimization how do you show up there and then the second conversation is well we believe that traffic is going to erode either way but what we also believe is that when we get the traffic they're going to be so much more qualified that we have to have a highly relevant personalized experience that can just convert someone with right away because we know who they are.

9:06We know what they need and we can give them something really quickly. And so that's the two flavors is really surging on conversion and also surgeon to be seen. It's interesting hearing you talk about the human and the bot side of it, because actually that's a lot of how Jenna, my co-founder and our chief media officer, you know, is thinking about kind of the challenger approach to the next generation of media planning and buying is it really is these two worlds that you need to strategize for and plan for and win if you know for her it's paid media it's distribution it's acquisition it's performance um but i just wanted to kind of connect that dots because that's the second you know you're the second person that i've heard talking about that i think it's definitely spot on one of the other things that you mentioned was that you're seeing the i think you said the rate of adaption or the pace of adaption accelerate.

10:00And I'd love to hear more context on what you're seeing because I feel like, but I'm not having the conversations that you are, that I'm hearing from a lot of people that they are piloting things, that they're testing things. But, you know, I was talking to a big global CPG business and they said they spent a year trying to get a hundred people trained on, you know, a big AI platform. Not exactly what Webflow is, but something around like the operations of the internal marketing function. So I guess I'm hearing a lot of people starting to move, but the adoption at scale within enterprise being slow still.

10:38Are you seeing something different? It's a great question of how do you get AI adoption? I think there's a couple pieces that are critical for it. There's your leadership team. Are they leaning in? It's your culture. It's your governance. Normally, governance actually is the thing that slows you down the most. And then there's the tools, which I don't really hear people have an issue with buying tools because there's so many. Maybe which ones? From our point of view, and I think my biggest piece of advice of where I've seen it go faster versus slower. So when you tie it to a specific KPI and you're really trying to figure out how to move the needle on that KPI and enabling teams to use AI to do that.

11:17So given we just talked about how traffic is eroding and how you're going to meet this moment, a good example is there's a whole set of capabilities to be able to show up in LLMs or convert more effectively. And as you think about what AI workflows you may need to meet that moment, you can start to identify ones that maybe would make sense to invest in. A good example is we know that content freshness shows up much more effectively in SEO and AEO. And so what are your workflows to use AI to really drive refresh of your content so that you can get to more content, refresh it, keep it, be able to have it be seen more effectively.

11:56And that's just an example. But what I found is as we've identified existing workflows, but also really tie it to an outcome. And in our case, responsible for sales and marketing. And I really care about the customer. So I'm really trying to say, like, how do we drive a customer outcome and how do we use AI to make that more effective? Last question on this. I just find it so fascinating that I promise I'll get to the brief. This kind of big event that I mentioned, we're working towards this live stream where I actually didn't tell this part to you, but my co-founder and I are going to walk a marathon on a treadmill while we interview folks like hopefully yourself on kind of what they're seeing and what they're doing.

12:34in the state of AI and marketing right now. And the reason for that is that we see a lot of similarities in terms of the cycle of adoption and disruption of AI to past technological shifts that have come, Web 2.0, certainly Web 1.0. And so, to be honest, I think there's a little bit of a bubble. However, the technology is absolutely going to be as disruptive and transformative as the Internet was. And businesses need to be thinking about the long-term, not just the short-term. So AI native, you know, that's how we think about what we're trying to do with our business and where things are going.

13:08Do you, does that factor in for you at all? Would you, you know, also knowing the next part of this conversation that we're going to go to you, you know, spending a long time at Salesforce, one of the winners and success stories of, of course, the web 1.0 paradigm shift. So I'd love to hear you talk about or just respond to kind of that, I guess, provocation or perspective. yeah it's a great question well first of all i may not be running on on a treadmill while you do but maybe i should i know my sister's running a london marathon so maybe i should get on that too it's it's really interesting i think becoming ai native understanding how it factors into the next wave and then the cycle of adoption as we try to disintegrate all these those pieces i think what's probably hardest right now is that it's changing so quickly and with each like which each you know chappy gpt or gemini iteration or clod iteration the technology is fundamentally changing and you're having to learn so fast i think it's putting a real premium on curiosity and understanding and really understand really being able to adapt with it that's really hard and as you get to a even not even a large organization even a small organization it's really hard especially if it's creating or you're manufacturing a new workflow that's never existed before something you never could do now you can especially with unstructured data so you know i think where where i kind of uh land on this is i think that the fastest path short term is going to be around taking things that really we never should have been doing and we had to because there's no choice and figuring out how to disrupt that workflow and then shifting into like how do we innovate new things.

15:02In my case, I actually went as far as to hire AI engineers in go-to-market to really, their job is to wake up and figure out how to blow up how we work. um and uh and so that's how i kind of went to the extreme is we're going to hire people and we're going to we're going to basically have them come and say pick off workflows and like invent new ones we're actually doing something similar we had our chief product officer join a couple weeks ago who's looking at exactly that um okay so a few different directions to go here let's go back to the salesforce thing i was excited to ask you this question and hear your answers.

15:40So you spent a long time at Salesforce. You probably also already mentioned a few of the learnings that you've taken from those chapters of your career. But what did you learn in your time at Salesforce that you're taking to your role at Webflow? It was one of the best opportunities that I stumbled into going, ending up at Salesforce for over a decade. It was incredible to see how we evolved and grew from an SMB tool that was disrupting the market with cloud all the way up into the enterprise and solving for both. I think where what really clicked for me is Salesforce is incredible at translating this, turning a narrative into an operating cadence.

16:27That is the piece that was just remarkable. We, you know, when in the time I was at Salesforce, a lot evolved. When I first started, people were still using SugarCRM and we were positioning cloud mostly and having to explain what cloud was and why you should move to the cloud. Something that is no longer as much of a discussion. And the thing is that it really was a fundamental shift. But what I realized the most in that was that Salesforce ethos and culture was never afraid of repositioning itself over and over and over again. And I think if I were going to say the one thing that was most important, besides turn the narrative into an operating cadence, it's probably that you need to sell and move go to market and market at the speed of relevance.

17:24And as the world changes, you have to meet the relevance every single time. And that has to be your beacon. The thing that I think was most powerful about that actually is that the relevance comes from your customers hear what they're talking about meet that moment adjust adapt and i think being able to have a narrative that has a scaffolding that lets you flex there but also not being afraid to challenge yourself was one of the things that i was most impressed by especially as you go multi-product go to different market segments go to different cultures in the world you have to be able to adapt your and be as relevant as possible and be part of the conversation at all times.

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18:44And now back to the episode. Yeah, well, as you know that you're preaching to the choir here and our entire approach for how we think about brands and go-to-market strategy is based on what we see challenger brands do really successfully. and a big part around the positioning is that we call it plasticity right but the brand operating system something that is built to update and upgrade with the business within it the needs of the customer but also the category and the culture within the category that sits around it so i love that and and that's probably a good segue into kind of the next question around how are you kind of applying that perspective and that approach to setting web flow up to not just keep pace and stay relevant, but actually take advantage of the disruption that's happening in the category?

19:32Great question. I think it ties really nicely to the conversation about relevance. Right now, with the web changing as quickly as it is, and also with AI mandates coming from every single board, we're in a unique position to help in multiple ways. I think where we started before this new technology arose was that because we allow you to build visually, you don't have any bottlenecks in your workflow. So it's not just the developer, but it's also the designer, the agency, the marketer that all can contribute to building for your digital experience and building your website and building campaigns.

20:12And as that has evolved, we're now in a place where we've seen a size, that was already a seismic shift. Everyone should be able to do it. But now with these new technologies, we're actually able to open up a whole new wave of capabilities. But the relevance piece is that everyone's traffic is fundamentally shifting. If you've been around for a long time, maybe you've been hyper-focused on really crafting your entire top of funnel. You've crafted your SEO strategy. You've crafted how you are going to go in media and out of home and how it comes all together to come to you. That whole piece is getting disintermediated.

20:51and that's where our opportunity in my mind is. And so as I connected to what I've learned at Salesforce, this is about us moving at a speed and velocity from a product perspective to be able to give the people the tools to do that and that not only meet the traffic disruption, but also meet the fact that, I think we talked a little bit about this, the fact that AI is hard to use sometimes and most of the time, if you really unpack it, what's hard about it is every single tool has AI. and it's a bunch of bolt-ons. And the problem with a bunch of bolt-ons is that what it typically results in, and I'm seeing it in other software tools we use beyond our webflow for other workflows.

21:32The problem is it introduces new silos because only maybe one person knows how to use it or one group knows how to use it and you're reliant on others. And so I think one of the things that I'm really excited about right now is just because the world's changing so fast, that is our opportunity to help people move with that speed. it's funny i'm actually thinking about how i'm actually seeing that within our organization granted 40 people nothing at the scale that you are at but as we figure out and work towards what does it mean to be we want to be a top one percent consultancy when it comes to being ai native in our operations and also our output and my it's just the way that i am is like all right let's get started getting started you know i want everybody to kind of like start getting their hands dirty you know using the tools that are most relevant to the job that you do and so we kind of have this organic growth but in a way it does mean that you know the strategy team is using it in one way and the media team is using it in a different way and at some point we're going to have to kind of bring that back together but that's um again you know partially maybe just who i am but always my push to people around this topic i know i'm going back to the ai thing but you just got to get started getting started you know it's changing so quickly and um i think you just need to make sure that you are on the pitch for the game and not sitting on the sidelines you know absolutely it's really interesting i'll give you a a stat that i think really shows this because i think this is not in the control of any one of our internal teams or uh unless you're in a model building company when the models shift a lot shifts not just how to use the the llm but also even how it might interact with your brand.

23:13So for example, when ChatGPT 4 went to ChatGPT 5, ChatGPT 4, when you asked it questions, it would actually give you a little link at the end of the question with a source and you could click it and you'd be referred to that site. When it moved to ChatGPT 5, you actually had at the bottom, it would aggregate all the links and say sources. You have to click into that to see another pop-up window to click into the website. What the shift causes, we saw like a pretty material drop overnight in referral traffic because people were staying in an LLM longer. And I think there's just that to your point, you just have to get started because things are just going to change and it could just happen overnight and you have to adapt.

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24:29Okay, so let's talk about one of the favorite topics for every B2B marketer out there, the integration of sales and marketing. So you are the chief revenue officer. You own sales, marketing, customer success, everything that's customer facing. How do you align sales and marketing to make sure that everybody's in the same boat, rowing in the same direction? It's a great question that I think we all have asked ourselves our entire careers. How do you do it? What's the best way? and what I think the easy answer is but I'll give you uh the the hard answer but the easy answer is make sure you have the same metrics I think that's the easiest way to get into different spots is if you have marketing teams with different metrics or goals or metrics that really are untranslatable to a sales organization it the collaboration and how they work is just really hard um the The hard answer is I call it the rows and columns.

25:29My team actually makes fun of me since my last name is Rosenkranz and they call it the rows and Kranzes. But I call it the rows and columns, which is if you imagine your team and everyone on the team is in a row or a column for the responsibility. The question is, if you were to create that for sales and marketers, is there clear accountability where someone owns each row and each column so there's a sell overlap? And I'll give you a specific example. You have a sales leader who's selling. They have one number. Maybe they have multiple products to sell. The row might be the sales leader. The columns might be all the products they sell.

26:04The PMMs who own those products should be the columns. And when you do a review, it should be, hey, row, sales leader, hey, column, product, PMM, what's happening with this product? And that review process creates a joint accountability on both sides. If you only have a row and not a column, this person is going to end up blaming marketing instead of actually working the problem. And so that is something I try to implement is I actually map it out all the different pieces so that my sales teams, my sales dev teams, my marketers all connect in a way that makes sense. And I think the way that it really comes together forcibly is with one tactic, which is having the marketing team build the narrative that the sales team then uses and having that sharpen.

26:56That experience typically brings everyone together because is this a story we're going to market with? Is this story resonating? And then how do we translate that into business reviews with those rows and columns? I want to ask a follow-up question to that. I'm thinking of at a call with a CMO of a fintech B2B business earlier today. And he was talking about how many people, because it's a heavily sales-led organization, think of marketing as the coloring end department. How do you ensure that that is not the case unless you disagree and think that marketing should be the coloring end department, but knowing a little bit about you and how you're building Webflow, I don't think that's the case.

27:34and ensure that your CMO and the marketing team has the proper remit to not just be sales enablement, but do the job of building long-term demand by building the brand and connecting the value of the product to the needs that exist in the market and all that? It's a great question. The way that I think about the coloring in is, is the marketing team just an in-house agency that's providing services, or are they a strategic lover to figure out how to go win market share? And my answer is that I think there probably needs to be a little bit of both. Most likely, actually, there's a way organizationally to set it up properly so that it doesn't bleed.

28:17Because what I find is if you don't, quarantine is probably the wrong word, but if you don't create a clear operating model of how the services piece works, then there's always going to be more service asks. Oh, I need this image for this email template I need. And you're just going to spiral out of control. And I'd say there's two ways that we approach it. The first is we're blessed in that we have both a product-led growth business and a sales-led growth business. So two sales motions that we go to market with. In the product-led, it's really the growth marketing team that's helping drive that revenue.

28:54And so there's a revenue number attached to it that's meaningful. And so I view them as an extension of the sales team, even though they're marketers. The second piece is as I ladder up into the brand, this is where my philosophy is to intentionally create almost a studio internally that doesn't have to be big, can be a couple people, that basically can clearly have big bets that as a business and as a brand, we're trying to go move in the market. And then second place to that comes all the services requests. I think when it gets out of whack, it's tough to really help them drive the strategy.

29:37The thing that I would say is probably most important, though, is me telling everyone that I need them to be strategic. Because I think if the sales leader, or in my case, because I own multiple of these functions, if I start to say, no, you need to, you know, I need that deck. that is not a strategic ask saying i need you to help me shape the next narrative that every single salesperson is going to be trained on and bring to market that is more strategic so you recently hired a cmo dave who we love what were you looking for when you went to market to recruit for this role there's you know the opportunity of the business there's the disruption in the category, there's everything AI.

30:23There must have been, you know, what was on your kind of scorecard as you were looking for a candidate to come in? This is a time where I was looking for signals over slides, repeatable growth systems that he could deploy. But more importantly, I needed to understand that in today's world, with the way the market's changing, he had to have the ability, even though the team is large, to go deep and roll up his sleeves and be in it, be working the tactics. I think, you know, it's kind of like when a brand decides to do a relaunch of positioning or a relaunch of their website that normally comes with the positioning, normally comes with media.