Why More AI Won't Grow Your Revenue (and What Will) | with Loreal Lynch (CMO, Nooks)

0:00If you have an agent that is able to make a rep 10x more productive, why would you get rid of reps?

0:05Loreal Lynch: Loreal Lynch just announced as the chief marketing officer at Nook. There's this misconception in the market that agents are about automation. And when you talk about automation, it scares people a little bit because they think job replacement. And our strong perspective is that it's not about labor replacement. It's really about labor augmentation. You're not going to cut back on hiring engineers. You're just going to hire more and be able to build and ship faster. And I think with sales, that's closing faster. It's a hard job. And a lot of the manual work that was being done is just a grind.

0:36This enables them to work in a much more beautiful and fun way with AI at the center of that. And the agents that we're building at Nooks are learning to persuade. They're kind of getting this feedback loop. So it'll get to the point where it's no longer that the sales rep is prompting the AI, but it's going to get to the point where the AI is actually prompting the rep.

1:14Loreal Lynch: L 'Oreal, welcome to GTM Now. Thank you. It's awesome to have you here. I'm so excited to talk because you kind of had this really cool front row seat to AI almost in the first AI wave. You were the CMO of Jasper, Chief Marketing Officer. And now you recently joined as the chief marketing officer of Nooks. Huge congrats. Take us back to that decision. Like, why did you join Nooks? Yes, thank you. I'm really excited to be at Nooks. And I'm happy to talk to you about my decision-making process. So what was interesting, and you kind of alluded to this at Jasper, when you think about the surface area that AI was able to sort of transform first, in a lot of enterprises, that started with content.

1:51And Jasper had a front row seat to that. Like you said, Jasper was one of the first players in the space, is still a market leader when it comes to AI for marketing. I think then you saw the way products get built and developed really get transformed with the likes of Cursor. You've got Cloud Code. When you think about sales and the opportunity that exists with AI being able to be applied to sales processes and transforming the way sales gets done, we're really barely scratching the surface. We're getting incremental gains here and there from agents and automation. but I think when I talked to Dan, the founder of Nooks, and heard the vision for the ways I think over the next two years, sales is really going to be completely transformed with AI, got me excited.

2:37And so that was the start of my considering going to Nooks. I think a couple of the other things that I found once I started getting deeper into the process was just the incredible momentum that the company is seeing. You love as a marketer to see low-hanging fruit, like a really powerful customer community that loves the product. As a marketer, when you have customers coming to you saying, can I do a case study? That's a dream. Never happens. And it's happening at Nook. So that's another cool thing. And then I think also the rigor around the product velocity. The founders of Nook's are three Stanford engineers.

3:12And so they care very deeply about the technical ambition, the technical team. We have a world-class engineering team. So overall, I had a lot of trust, not only in the vision, but in the ability for the company to be able to execute. And that's the kind of company that I wanted to be a part of.

3:27Loreal Lynch: That completely makes sense. And I mean, we're big fans. Nooks has been pretty transformative portfolio companies at GTM Fund and our broader network. I was actually talking to a Series B, like very hot AI company this morning, and they just became Nooks customers and said wonderful things. So it's this funny thing where like, usually you hear kind of mixed feedback from people and you only hear good things. Yeah. So I can see that advocacy and how that makes sense. Yeah, definitely. That was a part of my process is like talking to customers. I was a customer myself at Jasper. I actually oversaw the SDR team and we had onboarded Nooks about a year before I left and we're seeing tremendous results with the platform.

4:03And also just the love that the team had for Nooks internally was also good, just a testament for the kind of company that you want to join. Again, as a marketer, we want to be able to go amplify and tell that story.

4:12Loreal Lynch: That's super cool. So you've seen it from multiple sides now. For sure. Yeah. I actually interviewed Dan, the CEO of Nets. Oh, okay. He came on GTM Now earlier this year. It's phenomenal. But he said a really interesting analogy. It was kind of, picture that classic iceberg analogy, where part of it's above the water, part of it's below the water. And he's referring to AI and humans and the composition of work around them. So above the iceberg, above the water, it's human work. And then below is all the agent work. But that threshold of where the water sits is constantly changing as we have transformed AI transformations and further developments.

4:48Loreal Lynch: You've always kind of been a couple steps ahead of everyone with AI, with your background and just being immersed in the space. What do you think of that kind of analogy and where we fall? Like if you take a revenue organization now and you look at the human agent composition and then you look at 2028, let's say, what's going to change? Like where are we now and what do you see for that composition mix between humans and agents? I like that analogy a lot. I hadn't heard it, but I think that that makes a lot of sense. Humans are really good at some things and agents are really good at some things.

5:21And so I do think a hybrid organization in which you have humans and agents working alongside each other is very powerful. For example, humans are very good at reading the room. And that's really important in sales, maybe even more important than people realize. I sat in on a meeting the other day, a sales meeting as I'm onboarding with an enterprise AE, and it was with a head of RevOps at an enterprise company. And you can just tell right when we got on the call, this guy was not, he was busy. He was like, I'm on the call, I'll take the call. But like, this is not what I, you know, I have lots of things to be doing.

5:51So he was like, maybe a little grumpy. And this enterprise AE could just tell right off the bat and started asking a little bit of small talk, like, I see you're in Florida. I used to live in Florida. Do you surf? I surf. And immediately you could see them make that connection. And the guy on the other end totally softened and his tone changed. That's something that an agent could never do. On the other hand, agents are really good at reasoning. They're very good at processing information, distributing information, scaling that information. And so again, when you apply the ability of a salesperson to read the room, to build those connections, really to persuade, and then you combine that with an agent that's very good at reasoning and information processing, it's kind of a beautiful combination.

6:33I think back to your question on where is this going in the future, I think where we're headed and what, again, what I'm excited about with the technical ambition of Nooks is that agents can learn more and more from the humans that they're working alongside. And the agents that we're building at Nooks are learning to persuade. They're kind of getting this feedback loop. So it'll get to the point where it's no longer that the sales rep is prompting the AI, but it's going to get to the point where the AI is actually prompting the rep. do this, go call this person. We recommend that you do this after the meeting in order for you to help accelerate this deal.

7:10And I think that's very powerful. And we're going to see the scales start to tip here in the next year or two.

7:14Loreal Lynch: Oh, that's super interesting. Because when I first asked that, I was almost thinking about a volume equation of how many agents, how many humans, and that is so much more powerful of that equation of who's actually doing the prompting. Yes. And that kind of skews. So that's fascinating. Yeah, I do think volume is a big piece of it too. And I think there's this sort of misconception in the market that agents are about automation. And when you talk about automation, it scares people a little bit because they think job replacement. And our strong perspective is that it's not about labor replacement.

7:48It's really about labor augmentation. Because if you have an agent that is able to make a rep 10x more productive, why would you get rid of reps? Why would you not just double the amount or triple the amount of reps, you know, and then they're all you can grow that much faster. And I think, again, to go back to what we're seeing in product development, what we've seen over the last several years as AI has taken hold in the world of code and writing code, that's what you see with these 10x engineers is that you're not going to cut back on hiring engineers. You're just going to hire more and be able to build and ship faster.

8:18And I think with sales, it's closing faster, closing more.

8:22Loreal Lynch: Yeah. And I mean, the impact of AI on coding specifically in engineers' workflows has just been absolutely night and day. And now we see the 10x engineer. where do you think we are with sales? Like, are we at a 10x sales? Will we get there? We see it with some customers. Yeah. We do. Yeah, we absolutely do. And I think kind of where we started at Nooks was we made the specific strategic decision to start with outbound. And so we really started with SDRs. And we started with, you know, our dialer was our first product. And so call outreach, but then we extended into multi-channel with our sales engagement platform, which launched earlier this year.

8:59And we are absolutely seeing that, you know, I think among our customers, the metric that we see is like 3x meetings booked, 2x pipeline, and that's with the existing headcount. That's without scaling additional reps. And so we absolutely are seeing some of the impact of that. I think we're barely scratching the surface, though, when it comes to sort of what I mentioned on autopilot, autonomous agents that are really prompting the reps. And that's what I'm excited about. That's going to come next.

9:25Loreal Lynch: Oh, that's super, super exciting. And the reality is, I mean, a lot of this world, our world in general, but our revenue world too, was built pre-AI. And it wasn't really built for this composition of having humans and agents working together. So it kind of calls for a lot of shifts, a lot of foundational shifts, like revenue operating system shifts and so forth. Give us a little like inside scoop on why that is. Like why can't we use the same rails we once built? Yeah. And then what is the rails that we need? What's the revenue operating system now? I've talked a lot about this from the marketing perspective, but I think it's actually the same sort of concept holds true for revenue, which is if you think of a lot of the tools that exist today in the stack and the overall GTM stack, including, you know, take, for example, marketing automation system, these tools were built for humans to be the users of them.

10:15And so they are basically SaaS tools with interfaces that are made for humans to go and use them to, in the case of marketing automation, build a journey or in go-to-market like in sequencing, for example. It's for human reps to go and build sequences. When you think about agents using this software and doing the actual execution, which is what we have in Nooks, you no longer need that same interface because the agents aren't going to use it in the same way. It's much more intuitive the way an agent works. And so what that means is not only do the tools need to change, but I think the more important and actually more challenging thing for enterprises is that the processes themselves need to change.

10:59Because you can't just take a new AI native tool and apply it to your old process. You've got to rethink your process from the ground up. And I do think, you know, to go back to where we started, which is SDRs, even now we've kind of extended into the full revenue lifecycle. with SDRs, the powerful thing. And I think the reason SDRs love Nook so much is that we've really transformed the way that they work. And they needed it to be transformed because it wasn't great. You know, it's like, it's a hard job. And a lot of the manual work that was being done is just a grind. And so this enables them to work in a much more beautiful and fun way with AI at the center of that.

11:39And so kind of re-architecting their process around AI now at the center has been fun to watch and powerful just to see how that's just one surface area. But again, it just points to the broader opportunity.

11:51Loreal Lynch: Definitely. Yeah. I mean, we talked about this SDR, the sales rep. If you look at sales as a whole, is there any kind of beliefs right now that you aren't in alignment with? What do you think people believe about AI sales that isn't necessarily true? Well, it's a good question. I think one of the things that people believe right now is that agents are easy to build. I think there's a lot of tools out there that make it, you know, self-serve tooling that make it easy to be able to build an agent. And I saw this, you know, in my last company too, like, it's very intuitive, I think, with a lot of the self-serve tooling to be able to go in and build an agent.

12:31And you think like you build a prompt, you save it, you have a new agent. This agent can now do account research for me. I think the challenging thing is it might be easy to build an individual agent, but scaling that across an entire go-to-market organization is much more challenging. And especially when you think about the fact that these agents need to have shared infrastructure in order to, so it's not just the data, which is an important foundation and the context, and of course the governance of that, but also this execution system underneath. For example, if we're building agents that are calling on your behalf, that are sending emails on your behalf, that are reaching out on LinkedIn on your behalf, that underlying infrastructure, the email deliverability, calling infrastructure and dialing infrastructure, that's really hard to build.

13:15And so I do think that's one of the common misconceptions today is like, oh, I can just build my own agents. And once we start talking to customers, particularly RevOps leaders, they understand that it's much more complex than that.

13:27Loreal Lynch: Yes, they appreciate the pain of it. Yes, Yes, exactly. Yeah, certainly, certainly. And when we think about actually operationalizing it in an organization, because that's really when you get the uplift. I mean, people can vibe code their own solutions, and that's great for individual productivity. But to actually see meaningful gains in an organization really does take making adjustments to the underlying infrastructure of the organization. How are you doing that at Nooks yourself? What are you doing to actually enable the team to go fully AI native? In our marketing organization? Yeah. Yeah.

14:00Yeah. I think it's something that starts with, you know, like if I take, for example, launching a campaign, I think there's a historical way that campaigns have always been launched where, you know, you create the brief, then you come up with all of the different channel strategy and assets, and then you create all of the different pieces of content. And I do think, and this was something that we encountered at Jasper and that we also talked to people about when I was at Jasper, is that if you think about that in an AI native way, it might be like, okay, the first thing I need to do is go write a blog post.

14:36But when you have AI, it might be that you just kick off this work stream where that's all automated. Agents can kind of automate the whole thing. And so it is something that we are thinking about, you know, as we scale our marketing team and we're still small but mighty, how can we leverage AI? And instead of going straight to headcount, I need to build this empire. I do think there are a lot of areas that we can think about where to apply AI first for certain things. And then where do we need to hire?

15:05Loreal Lynch: Do you have a decision-making framework or anything when you're assessing? Does this go to headcount? Does this go to agents? I do. I think that there are some skills. And I do think this speaks to the nature of, we talked about the collapse of the stack. And I do think the org chart is collapsing a little bit too. not in terms of shrinking, but just I think there are certain roles, particularly like in marketing, it's always been comprised of a lot of specialist roles. You've had someone who is a specialist specifically on paid search or on paid LinkedIn only. And now that agents can sort of automate away a lot of that execution, what are the skills that you need in a human to actually do those jobs?

15:44And so I think it comes down to judgment is one that we talk about a lot. I also think in marketing in particular, and this probably applies to sales too, I think narrative and storytelling is really important. And that is still something that AI has not nailed. AI can go and take a narrative architecture and flesh out content and a bill of materials. Even on the sales side, it can help you build a deck. It can help you build a brief, anything that you need in the deal cycle. But coming up with that story, that specific narrative is something that I think still needs to come from a human that has those skills.

16:19Loreal Lynch: 100%. That makes me think of a situation where we were brainstorming a new naming convention for a specific kind of tier of our investors, our LPs. And we ran through so many different cloud prompts and different AI ideas, and they were all of a similar vein. And then we sat together and brainstormed for probably four minutes as a team. and the human brain connection came up with just such a brilliant idea and comparison that AI could have never. Exactly. Because it didn't make those connections. Like the creativity is just. Yeah, it doesn't make those connections. And it just doesn't completely have the context that you have, you know, and kind of going back to like, what do humans have?

17:01Like that judgment, the creativity. Yeah, exactly.

17:04Loreal Lynch: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we've been talking about marketing for a little bit here, but we actually started off talking about the revenue organization as a whole and sales before that. You have the title, Chief Marketing Officer. But we started off with that topic. Now, this new era here with humans and agents and the AI era in general, what does it really require alignment-wise between a Chief Marketing Officer and a Chief Revenue Officer? Like Hannah, for example, in your organization. So it is interesting because I talked about, you know, on the technology side, the collapse of the stack. And it's converging into these agentic systems that can execute across all of go-to-market.

17:41And all of go-to-market is everything from marketing, from lead gen to inbound leads coming in, figuring out how to market to those leads to bring them into the system and then pass them along to sales and ultimately get them across the line to become a closed one deal. And then even after that, expansion and customer success. So the entire revenue lifecycle historically has been managed across multiple different teams. And we still do have different teams, but I do think that as the stack gets more converged into one, it's super critical that the teams also have these shared operating models and really shared success metrics.

18:22And so for me, as I think about the future of the go-to-market organization overall, it was very important when I was evaluating my next move, who my CRO partner was going to be. And that's where I had a lot of great conversations with Hannah. Hannah was hired, I think, about a year before me. She runs a tight ship. She's built a really strong sales team. Sales execution is phenomenal. They're all meeting and exceeding their quota. They're beating and raising every quarter. It's one of the things that got me excited about joining as a marketing leader is thinking about how I would partner with Hannah.

18:56And one of the things that you don't want, and I think we've all seen this, is where you battle back and forth on who gets the credit for the lead. You're not meeting your number. Well, you're not closing. I'm sending you all these leads and you're not following up on them. And that I think is just so counterproductive. And so thinking about this new organization that's being built where rather than having separate targets, you have this shared target, you have shared systems, you have shared agents that are executing across the life cycle. And it makes that partnership, I think, all the more important.

19:26Loreal Lynch: Very cool. And so how, you mentioned shared systems. I'm curious, like there's the systems side, almost the technology side, if you will. And then there's probably the non-technology side, which is your meetings and how you foster that alignment. Like what are some tangible ways that you and Hannah do that together? Yeah. So for example, we have, I mean, I think some of the same calls, but it's more of like how they're run. Like everybody, I think probably every company has a forecast call. And so we are, I'm part of that forecast call. And then we have a pipeline call as well once a week. And so we have a pipeline call, but one of the interesting things with the way that we come up with our pipeline target is rather than having targets on sourced, we have this conversation where we're like, it might actually be counterproductive to have if someone comes in via a certain source, but you know, the cycles are long.

20:15And it might be that then they go to a dinner, and then maybe one of our executives engages with them or becomes friendly with their executive, and they connect on LinkedIn. And then it leads to eventually a deal. And then along the way, someone's looked at a case study, it doesn't really matter who sourced it. And so rather than having sourced targets for our enterprise business, we just have a shared pipeline goal that we're both held accountable to. And so when we run those pipeline meetings, we look at the top line number of like, where, what is our number? How are we tracking to this number?

20:46How is it across different segments and regions? Are there certain industries or verticals that are doing better than others? And then as a collective group, what can we be doing to close that gap? And sometimes it might be there's nothing marketing can do. It's like sales right now needs to, you know, it's like deep into the cycle and they need to engage a certain executive. But sometimes it can be like, oh, well, this can require some marketing programs or some marketing love. So let's think about standing up this new campaign or standing up this new outreach program or something like that. So that's a little bit about the way tactically that we've kind of employed this philosophy internally.

21:19Loreal Lynch: Very cool. Very exciting. And now putting you back in kind of the crystal ball holding seat that you were in previously or earlier in this conversation, if you look at marketing as a whole, it's transformed tremendously around what works over time. Now we're seeing a ton of shifts with the AI era. What do you think is going to work here moving forward in general? What type of marketing? Yeah, I think there are some things that I think have changed with the way the work gets done. I think in terms of what works in marketing, kind of the same tried and true things that have always worked. I talk about how in the old days, like the days of Mad Men, if you ever watch that, like the old ad industry, brands, well, companies used to win or lose based on the strength of their brand.

22:04So you think like Pepsi Coke, you know, there could be some great ad campaign. And that's why you would swing one way or the other if you're looking at a competitor. So it was really about great marketing and great brand building. I think over the last decade, even 20 years, we've moved in a direction where it's all based on performance. It's clicks, it's the cost per acquisition and a lot of digital marketing. And I think now with AI, AI can automate away a lot of that. And so it comes back to not can you win based on the strength of your digital program or your demand or how much you know, leads or pipeline you're generating.

22:41I think the pendulum has swung back to building a strong brand, one that creates trust, one that resonates with your audience and a brand that you can remember. And it's interesting because even in the tech space, that is critically important. I mean, Nooks is playing in a very competitive space. Revenue agents, there's a lot of go-to-market software out there today. And even if there aren't direct competitors for a decision maker, like a CRO or a RevOps leader, they're getting pitched so many different tools. And all of them are saying the same thing. We have agents that can automate your processes, you know.

23:13So how do you cut through the noise? And I think that's, for me, the job to be done and what I'm excited to crack at Nooks and to start to work on.

23:21Loreal Lynch: Very, very exciting. And it's so funny how the pendulum always swings. It's like everything is cyclical. Once we got you. What's old is new. Always, always. Like, we'll see what we swing to next. But it's like, once we got attribution at our fingertips, everything went into that. And now we're kind of coming back to fundamentally, how do you build a great brand and serve your customers, which is great. Brilliant. And now you are leading marketing at Nooks. Very exciting. What are you excited to particularly build out at Nooks on the marketing front? Yeah, well, I do. I like to build. And I think the opportunity to build is great at Nooks in particular because the category doesn't really even exist yet.

24:00It's still very nascent in terms of being formed. And I think the category that we see evolving is in revenue agents. And so the opportunity to not just lead the category, but really shape and define what the category looks like is an exciting opportunity. And that, I think, can be done through a lot of thought leadership, working with our customers, translating this into what we're seeing in the market. I have been lucky to work at companies that did the same. I spent many years at Salesforce, which was obviously the category leader at first in CRM, but actually we acquired Tableau. And once we acquired Tableau, I went to go lead a global product marketing at Tableau.

24:38Tableau was also the category leader in BI and analytics. And so being able to see firsthand how they, Tableau created the category of modern BI, Salesforce created this new CRM category. And then I got to go to Stripe and Stripe also, sort of built and led this modern payments category. And so I think the opportunity at Nooks is to get in and really do the same, is kind of build and lead this new revenue agents category. And I made a bet that Nooks is the one that's going to be able to do it.

25:05Loreal Lynch: I love it. Well, you've done it many times before. So very, very exciting. Yes. Thank you. So what are the types of companies, organizations that are seeing success with Nooks? Yeah. So our customer base really is a lot of forward-looking, almost early adopters of AI tech. So we have a lot of technology companies, the likes of Cursor, Replit, Deal, HubSpot is a big customer. And so these are customers that are ahead of the curve when it comes to adopting AI and driving successful outcomes. And again, I think that's because it goes back to transforming your processes. And so it's not surprising that an AI native company would be first to adopt something like a Nooks in order to transform their own sales organizations.

25:50I think we also see a lot of growth that's starting to happen among more traditional larger enterprises, so financial services and companies like those. But certainly right now, it's a lot of these high tech, high growth companies, which I think is cool because it's a lot of like the fastest growing sales organizations in the world that are running on Nooks.

26:08Loreal Lynch: Yeah, that is super cool. I think one of the coolest parts that makes Nook's just so well positioned is how you started with the wedge of the dialer. Because that gives you so much rich data. Conversational data is one of the most rich things that you can then build sequencing and other products and revenue agents on top of. Whereas if you go the other way, you don't have that rich history. And so it's like more of an uphill battle where I think you guys have a huge advantage because of that data. I think so. And even just strategically from a go-to-market perspective, it's easier to have a wedge like that than sometimes to go in and sell this broad platform for transformation where sometimes you just have to meet customers where they are and they might not be ready for that yet.

26:51And I think especially with AI, a lot of customers start with pilots. And so it's easy to pilot something for a specific use case that's very confined, that's ring-fenced. And I think the dialer, and again, outbound, was a good opportunity for us to do that. And now we're kind of ready to take it to the next level.

27:06Loreal Lynch: All right, L 'Oreal. And we've got a couple rapid-fire, just finish the sentence questions for you here. Okay. You ready? Yep. Okay. The thing nobody tells you about leadership is… Be yourself. Love that. the most underrated piece of go-to-market advice is don't over-index on activity it's about impact i love it i love it i love it and i mean you already spoke to that too just in terms of how you measure pipeline meetings and create that alignment too not sourced opportunities brilliant and then overall after those kind of quick rapid fire questions curious if you extend this it could be any part it could be life it could be revenue organizations it could be anything but what's just overall the best advice that you've gotten and who gave it to you?

27:49That's a good question. I think where I would take this is, and it sounds silly, but I actually apply this to a lot of different areas of my life. There's no time for bad wine. And the reason that I like that is because I think it extends beyond obviously wine, but it's more of like, there's no time to drink bad wine, take the trip, do the fun thing. And And you've got to be able to do that in your life to have the balance and to really get fulfillment. And so it just speaks to kind of priorities. And I like that a lot.

28:22Loreal Lynch: I like that too. I wish we had a wine glass. I know. I would cheers you. Yeah. We talked about the marketing organization at Nooks. Are you hiring at all? A hundred percent. We are hiring a lot. And very quickly, we need to get butts in seats. So check out our job board. Right now we are hiring for a head of comms because it's important for us, again, to be able to go tell this story. We are hiring for a head of growth marketing to get us in front of the right audiences. So really building out the leadership team. We're also hiring for marketing operations and building solid foundations and data foundations for us.

28:56Great creative director that can come in and help really build a distinctive brand that helps cut through the noise and stand out.

29:02Loreal Lynch: Well, the job board will be in the show notes for anyone interested. Awesome. And for anyone looking to follow along with you and your journey, where can they find you? Definitely on LinkedIn. I'm active on LinkedIn. I love to participate in communities on LinkedIn. And so find me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to connect. Awesome. Wonderful. Great. L 'Oreal, thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure. It's been great. Thank you.