SaaStr 819: Swapping Notes on the AI Revolution in Marketing with G2's CMO Sydney Sloan

0:00Welcome to the official SASTR podcast where you can hear some of the best SASTR speakers. This is where the cloud meets. Up today on the Sastra Podcast. The fastest people to switch are enterprises. Usually enterprises aren't the ones that adopt it first, but that is what the data showed us, is that enterprise were first movers here. And they were doing it because of the productivity gains. You absolutely have to be able to add AI and AI capabilities to existing platforms. And then there's the part that is that the use of AI is part of the buying process and that people are going to LLMs first, which is then changing the marketer's world of how we have to think about marketing in the age of LLM, the new LLM buying process.

0:52Hey, everybody. It's Saster. Finn is the number one AI agent for resolving complex queries like refunds, transaction disputes, and technical troubleshooting, all with speed and reliability. See how FIN can deliver the highest resolution rates and highest quality customer experience at fin.ai.saster. That's fin.ai.saster. The biggest B2B and AI event of the year is back. It's the Saster AI Summit in the SF Bay Area, aka the Saster Annual. It'll be back in May 2026. With 36 % of everyone coming CEOs, it's an incredible AI-first professional event. The very, very best S tier folks will be there talking about sharing and learning how to scale AI and B2B in this new world.

1:39But here's the reality. The longer you wait, the higher ticket prices go up. They're really cheap at the beginning. And then, you know, just a few days before they get kind of expensive. But you've been warned. Early bird tickets are available now. And I want to see you there. Once they're gone, you'll pay hundreds more. So book your spot today by going to podcast.sasterannual.com. That's podcast.sasterannual.com. get you exclusive discounts for Sastra AI SF 2026. We will see you there. Hey, everybody, it's Sastra. I'm Anil LaRoude, the Chief AI Officer here. And together with my co-host, Guillaume Devon, we're launching a new podcast series in Sastra called Swapping Notes, where in every episode, we'll sit down with the top AI leaders in SaaS and B2B, and we'll swap notes on what's actually working and what's not moving the needle in AI.

2:26So whether you're a founder trying to navigate your AI strategy or go to market leader, implementing AI features and frameworks yourselves, this is the show for you. So without further ado, let's swap some notes. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Saster. We're here on a new series we're doing. I will introduce my co-host first. This is Guillaume Caban. For those who don't know you as G, G, tell folks a little bit about yourself. Yeah. Hello, everyone. I'm super excited for this new series that I'm joining with Saster. so i've built a couple growth teams in a number of like successful companies segment and drift and gorgeous and more recently i led all of marketing at ramp a great fintech company out of new york and i advise companies in btb i've been doing that for the past 10 plus years and i've been lucky enough that has worked and i've built a little entity around it and so So at Happy Growth Partners, we advise about 20 of the best companies per year.

3:29And we help them grow faster. Amazing. And G knows a lot about AI and marketing and just disaster. And so we thought we'd bring him in for another perspective of boots on the ground. And our inaugural guest needs no introduction, but we'll do one anyway. The incomparable Sydney Sloan, she's the CMO of G2. Sydney, you've got such a great career already. other companies as sales law Adobe right so give the folks who maybe don't know you I'm currently the CMO at G2 which was another company that G advised for and so I've been here just a little bit over a year same thing like I love advising companies and founders I'm part of stage two capital as an LP I'm part of the scale adventures network and stay involved in that.

4:20So blending time between my daytime operating role, but also enjoy just helping founders and helping teams figure out how to crack the nut of growth. And today it's everybody's at the starting line, right? Like we get to hit a reset button and so it's like exciting times. It's exciting times. One of the things we recently covered on Zaster that will help us kick off here as a good transition is in your guys' latest G2 Buyer's Behavioral Report, you put it out right before Sastre Annual, I think in May. We covered it on Sastre. We released an AdSastre Annual. AdSastre. Okay. That's our release party.

5:01Yes. Unplanned. It's a great release party. It's just in front of a live studio audience in person and live streaming, but I'll get there. Yep. You guys talked about one of the most interesting learnings was AI. We all talk about it now. AI for you guys at G2 now means always included. I agree. We saw that a lot at SaaS for two. You said 88 % of people won't even buy or think about using software if it doesn't have AI. Let's start there. From your perspective, like where you've been at G2 for over a year, but you've bought software for a long time now. Like how have you seen that pattern change of how people buy software with the advent of AI?

5:41I think there's three questions in there so we can unpack them. So the first of the always included is that is people are looking for AI capabilities in the platforms they're buying. And surprisingly, in that same report, the fastest people to switch are enterprises. Usually enterprises aren't the ones that adopt it first, but that is what the data showed us is that enterprise were first movers here. And they were doing it because of the productivity gains. You absolutely have to be able to add AI and AI capabilities to existing platforms. The second is that people are now at the point of setting their agentic strategy and then trying to determine which platforms they want to use to build out their agents.

6:31So you've got this really interesting time of, you know, we're AI-izing added to platforms. You can build now with AI. And so we're going back to like bespoke workflows. And what can I augment with AI? What still needs to stay? people-based and what's your strategy there? Do you want it to go hybrid? Do you want to go co-pilot? So I think everybody's in the process of figuring that out right now. And so that's why I said it's like super exciting times. And then there's the third part is that the use of AI as part of the buying process and that people are going to LLMs first, which is then changing the marketer's world of how we have to think about marketing in the age of LLM, the new LLM buying process.

7:19And PPC is no longer the way that we can buy our way. We have to figure out a new way. So I think there's like, we can go deeper in each one of those things, but it's impacting all of it. Yeah, I think I'm really curious about the last one here because obviously the buying process is changing, which means you, I, and all of us marketers, we sit on the other side of that. like it is the selling processes if the buying process is changing the selling process has changed right but you uniquely seen you see both sides of it right because you can see because of g2 in the platform like you see the buying and the selling and so i'm curious what are you seeing that's changing in the buying process and how are marketers addressing and how are they adapting their selling process they're going to llms first so that that has been a significant shift.

8:12What they do is they first they go to the LLMs for their research process, their discovery process. And what we're seeing is that they really do trust it. And so when they cite the sources, the second place they go is the source. And lucky enough, we allow our information to be indexed by the LLMs. And LLMs love user-generated content. So sites like G2 and Reddit, Wikipedia, like you're seeing these as the main drivers of the source of content. And the next place they come is the peer review sites to do that, like fact checking. And then once they've done that and they get down to a smaller list, then they'll end up potentially at those companies' websites or third-party marketplaces.

8:57Gee, you mentioned Ramp, right? So Ramp is trying to transact in their own marketplace. So like our G2 reviews are also in the marketplaces. And so all of these, the process that buyers are going through, they start with the LLMs, then they go shortlisting in the LLM. They might even build their RFP template in the LLMs and ask for sources. And so now we as marketers have to figure out what's the best way to influence the LLMs. gee you and i had a conversation about this so how do we think about influencing the llms where seo was looking for for clicks and links that was our whole strategy what we're calling geo generative engine optimization is looking for answers so we have to reorient our content strategy around what are the prompts and what are the answers that people are looking for in the way that we're thinking about our content.

10:00So I learned this from G, is think about your personas and their jobs to be done and start writing your content around the jobs to be done. And then thinking about what types of content are the LLMs indexing on? They love listicles. They love user-generated content. And so how do you start to build that content? Yeah. There's something that you said you want to trust. You say people trust LLMs. And I think that is a very important thing. I agree with that. It is very obvious. It's clear that the trust is moving towards LLM. And I think that is a core challenge for us marketers because us marketers, from the consumer's perspective, have never been worthy of trust.

10:45Why wouldn't we? We've been trying to hear the perception. There's some soft lying that hasn't been happening forever. And so now, all of that. So we're getting disconnected. We've lost some of that trust, and that trust has, we're de-intimidated. And so that presents a unique challenge for us. And the other thing that you said, you said people like the AI, our agents, they like the UGC, very much like humans, because that's what they model after. And so I think the way that I think about it these days, for marketers, I love to hear how, like you had this result on how you reinvent yourself right but the way that i've been thinking about it and i've been training people on is there's really two broad categories things that are ai proof right the ai resilient so that's going to be like social proof and influencers is going to be like some of the ugc stuff i a lot of that the webinars in person the events the dinners all that that is going to work for a while like people like being in like in social connections if Sydney sends me a mail about something that she cares about I know that it is important I'm going to read it or I'm going to trust it so I have trust there okay but then the rest is influencing the AI agent it's influencing chat GPT all right if I can't have that trust relationship then I can influence so it's AI proof versus like full AI and there's realistically nothing in between realistically the other channels that in between like going away but i'm not sure how you hit that reset button yeah i think the things in in in that question when trust is starts with brand and so it's like people need to be starting to go back to think about the fundamentals of brand building and how do you build a trusted brand using your voice of the customer, using those influencers, thinking about those, the other influence sites are like, what are the trusted sites that the LLMs are using that then you need to build your brand and influence on.

13:02And I think that even though we're talking about the buying process, when you go back and you talk about the personas and the jobs to be done, you can still be delivering great content for things that are not related to your product if i'm let's say i'm a salesperson and we're selling let's say contact data for sales people maybe they that's a challenge they have to go research have to go off all these things but if you think about their entire jobs to be done they also want to know negotiation skills or they might want to know other things you can still build content for that. You can still add value to every single question that they're going to go for the LLM.

13:45And as you're seeing as that sourced reference, that's going to still build your brand. So you can't stop thinking about brand building and building relationships with your audience. I think people are going to still leverage LinkedIn. We know our buyers are there. They're still going to get influenced from within that. And that's part of brand building. and so trust i think and brand are equal the other thing is that it's giving you the answers and accelerating your productivity the llms and and that's also what we saw if it can give you a better answer than when you know you how maybe you searched before or it gives you insights that you never thought i used you i gpt 100 times a day right i'm like Like, oh, yeah, that's an, oh, I didn't even think about that.

14:38And so that extra insight is also adding incremental value to the end user. And that's why they're going there. You're getting better answers. You're getting more than you asked for. That's crazy. So I think that is why we're seeing the LLMs take off so fast. That is why people are trusting it. and I don't see it ever going back. Yeah. And I think what's interesting, some of the things you said that I don't double-click on is that I think it's coming from the consumer that the B2C of us are consumers. In a way, we buy stuff online. We're people. So we buy stuff. In this day and age, we buy stuff online a lot, especially to buy more.

15:26Also, there are purchases on which I was agonizing over for months because I couldn't spend the time to figure out which of the products I wanted. And now that friction, that effort is going away. And so I can buy arguably a product that's a benefit. Right. And every time I do that, I'm saying that it works well. The outcome is good. Right. And so I'm learning my brain. I'm training my brain to recognize, hey, like this cycle of like purchase is the better one. Right. I start trusting him, and everyone that I know is doing that. And so that brings us to something interesting, which is, do you think that not only the research process is moving more and more towards GPT?

16:16Do you think that the web itself is moving to GPT? Is the purchases starting from the consumer? there's something that i brought up and we discussed a bit about it but don't you think that e-commerce for example purchases will be done entirely in the chat window without opening a tab and going through a cart and just say hey opt-in b of this carousel this is what i need go for it you have my credit card details you got my address deliver it in palm springs all right yeah done you brought up this notion g of basically sell by chat right like why can't an LLM, just tell me, okay, I'm already asking it for reviews for its opinion on what I'm going to buy at a much faster rate.

17:02You trust the LLM. We've seen this a bit in how we're using AI for sales. And somebody actually coined this phrase as we were using it that said, oh, I love being sold by chat. Like our AI is basically selling tickets to future Saster events, all via email, all automated. There is a human in the loop, right? We are orchestrating it. We put in the right data. We make sure the links are right. We make sure it doesn't hallucinate what speakers are going to speak at Zaster. But it's such an interesting thing where it's totally changed how people buy from us. Like they used to just come to the website, buy a ticket to Zaster, and many people still do that.

17:40But we're literally seeing it 50-50 now. Some people prefer to buy this via chat, we call it, sell by chat. And I think it's interesting, G, you bring it up from a LLM perspective, chat perspective. Sydney, you have the buyer marketplace perspective on it. But I think we are not so far away from seeing it in both of these instances, right? Like, I think we're not far away from seeing it in something like a chat GPT, where you ask it for something and it can sell it to you at a lower price point, right? I think we're not far away from sites like G2 turning into chat agents. I know you already have a chat agent on the site now, Sydney, but I think you're probably even just a few months away or maybe closer on that agent being like, you were looking for ramp, let me hook you up to the ramp team.

18:29Or, hey, actually, I know how much ramp would be for you. Let me just sell it to you. There's something valuable in what you're saying here, Amelia, which is the value of the conversation, the perception of the value here from the recipient's standpoint is more important than the medium. Yeah. And so it doesn't matter that the web is going away and we might not use browsers and tabs because why would we? It's only a format, right? It's very weird to have to open so many tabs, go through the entire page of all the things to figure out what you want. And if you haven't tried, audience, if you haven't tried one of the newer AI browsers, d our comment to try it out it's not ready yet but it is like interesting window to the future right but like in the end what matters matter yeah it doesn't matter what matters can the recipient get the answer that is the most valuable and can get to the end point and i think you're right what's shifting is that and then melia's example is great what's shifting is that people used to and I worked at Drift a while back.

19:34The perception of chat was bad. Because the experience was bad, arguably. Right? And just when you were trying to call a United Airlines or whatever because you had issues like the phone tree was terrible. Okay? Now the experience, arguably, and we're seeing that in some of the phone AI agents, it's better than when you're calling an outsourced conversation. Or waiting, right? or they're closed at certain times. Now the AI is always there. You can call whenever. It works. And it just works. It just works. And the email exchanges just work and we get there. Right? And so that I think is what matters.

20:13The value is there. You're delivering the value. Right? So here's the conundrum. So I 100 % believe in what we were talking about it today. Like we're definitely in need of a website refresh for sell.g2 which is where our buyers come. We just launched g2.ai in June if you come, it's more of an AI-based experience for buyers to be able to do their research. But the point is that if everybody is starting in an LLM, they don't want context switching, right? They're going to want that same kind of experience when they hit the next site to be able to continue the conversation. We'll see if they can be able to do it with context, like where the LLMs decide to go if they allow for context to be there, where they can get like a better experience.

21:02So that's where I'm pushing my team is we need to change the entire thought process of our web experience and putting web and content to be able to be that same answer engine. So somebody should be able to land there and ask a question. And so therefore it's like, what is the future of websites? And we were a customer of Qualified. You could just ask the qualified agent a question and she'll deliver the right content to you she'll book the meeting for you we can continue on that transaction you have to think about agent handoffs and we talk a lot about that in my kind of cmo circles but i see us being at that point in the next eight months like people are going to re re-imagine the experience and build for that here's the conundrum then where do you put the content that the lms get trained on you're still going to have to have it somewhere right yeah so two things on that i don't know if i'm right all right but i what i'm seeing one i'm seeing more and more companies build hidden websites completely hidden to the humans it's an entire other index an entire other like web tree right for the purpose uh for ai agents to scrape that was not allowed in a google-centric world because Google wanted to see exactly what the humans were going to see and you were penalized if you were doing that.

22:27You're not being penalized. You actually have positive incentives to do that and have a completely different set of content for the purpose of answering questions and training the models on. And some of the companies I work with have done it and it has worked. So the content goes there on the right thing. The second thing is MCP coming around. Okay. MCP coming around. And so a lot of the values, if you go back to this example that you had of Venn is selling contact data and doing transactions, you can expose in the MCP all the products, the descriptions about the products, and maybe there's a transactional layer or not.

23:05It is not hard to imagine that the front end of the web disappears. The idea of having a database of the content and a website and then rendering that PHP into HTML and then having a browser interpret the HTML and then having a human read this visual version. And then it's nonsense. You can just have the LLM just connect to the databases. Like, hey, what do you sell? What's the font description? Oh, good. Yeah. Much easier. 100 % agree with you on that, G, as to where things are going. I know. Exciting times, right? Where we're going to be a year from now is... and it's just getting faster and faster.

23:45What's the same is going to do if the first project they used to do, which is redo the website, what's it going to be now? Make the, you continue to make the experience, build the brand, continue to make the experience great. Think about delighting your users. So, you know, like you just kind of lean into users and audience building trust with those users, right? Yeah. That's bringing it all through circles. Yeah. And users, it's not accounts. And so that is like what role does marketing then extend into the product experience or extend into user experience to continue to build that trust in those brands.

24:25Okay. I'm going to move us to the end rapid fire question because I know we're running out of time here. It's gone by very quickly. Okay. Rapid fire questions. first one so i know you use a lot of tools she's we all use a lot of tools that are ai focused are there specific tools or for you categories of tools and ai right now that you couldn't live without even two months ago for work i would say there's two things i we have really started to build up like our personas and content and i think that's transformed the way that we test messaging, we help write messages. It's just like significantly improved it.

25:10The other area that we're diving deeper into is the conversion rate. So once we have a signal and the time it takes to like book a meeting, like I'm just trying to tackle that one to the ground. And so, yes, that does have an impact on certain types of leads and who follows up on those leads and I'm pushing those more and more to agents. Be that like a Sixth Sense intelligent workflow now, they call it, the qualified agent. We're definitely getting lots of incremental value there. We haven't gone all the way like you have, Amelia, but those two areas can't live without, won't turn back. I agree.

25:55I think personally, voice, AI, has transformed how I work. like on a very personal level like i use a whisper flow on my phone on my computer i didn't think i would get there in like in my life but like i'm much faster like speaking to like my device than typing on my device and i don't think my kids who are like seven and nine i don't think they're going to be proficient at keyboard right hitting their hands on a slab of plastic will be like a weird relic of the past so i think that's a shift of the past few weeks and months really all right That was going to be my personal one. I just have, I'll say you're an expert.

26:35It's helped me get strategic thought down on paper so much faster. And so I'll give it the persona it needs to be. You're a product manager trained in this model. I'm picking up a new product idea prompt for the interview. And we just go back and forth. And it takes an hour. What would have taken me, I don't know, maybe eight or 10 hours to produce in the past. and so that's my like personal hack the other one is a product called granola i don't know that one yet oh my god like i no longer take notes it's on my phone like it's in personal it's everything everything is written and summarized and i'm just like yeah and so going down that path quickly one of the tools that i recommend these days and the changes i'm seeing is around content right because like we say small things we try to do small things and like many different settings is we have a lot of like prompts.

27:28All right. And the things that we say, I've moved a lot of my content from having rewriting sessions to like having a AI workflow on a Gore-Tex Lab or an Aerox, for example, that takes that recording snippet and turns it into a fully fledged article. All right. And so that has changed my approach to content. And I'm now encouraging CMOs to like have much leaner content teams and just a few people that can run content workflows at scale because the output is just as good if not better. Yeah, the rise of AI orchestration as a job role is going to skyrocket. I think it's already taken the place of AI GTM ops.

28:15Like we already need one at Zaster. We're hiring for one. I just thought like Jasper Artisan's hiring for one. Like this role is blowing up and it's because as we use more or more of these tools that we've all been mentioning and use day to day, they all take time. They all take time. They all take tuning. They all take training. They all do take oversight to build that trust that we've been talking about. It requires humans to build that unironically. Last question for both of you. Sydney, we can start with you. What's one parting piece of advice you'd want to give to founders and CMOs on this AI journey right now?

28:50Just force yourself to use it every single second of every single day. I changed it in my browser, so I just, everything starts with GPT, and it's really just taken me further into the rabbit hole faster. And so, just force yourself. Good advice, though. It's true. Yes. Yeah. I would say humans are extremely bad at estimating log changes, lographic changes, right? And this is exactly what we're seeing right now. and so as a founder as a cmo you got to look at the trend and say where are we going to be six months 12 months from now and how do i change my investments right now and i've been in multiple like cmo rooms and settings lately we've asked who is spending 25 of the budget and headcount on like lm appearance no one raised their hand and that doesn't make sense because that's where we're heading 12 months from now there is no question and the sooner you get there the more influence you'll have it's going to be outsized yeah so you gotta shoot for like intersection point of six months from now 12 months from now right you're gonna put out your own beliefs i write like my own beliefs at the top of my docs i believe we're going to a webless world i believe gpt is going to be like a quarter to a third of the traffic and nine months from now And thus, my actions, all of what I do, my predictions, my projects are in light of that.

30:23You might disagree, put out your own predictions. But we have to. If you're not transparent and clear about your predictions of the impact, you can't run a good process.

30:35Lots to unpack here, guys. We'll do a follow-up very soon just to see where all of us are at with all of our tools, all of our LLMs. But thank you both for joining. And we'll see you guys again. It's Astor. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, everybody. If you're serious about B2B and AI, if you want to know how to deploy AISDRs, how to get AI to qualify leads to your site, how to use AI to manage your rev ops, how to use AI and GDM, you have to be in London this December 2nd and 3rd with us. Saster AI London is bringing together more than 2 ,000 leaders and founders for two days of practical advice on scaling with AI into the new year.

31:14That's all we're doing this year. how to use AI to grow faster and how to make this stuff actually work at your startup and your company. We'll have speakers flying in from around the world from OpenAI, Wiz, Clay, Intercom, all your favorite B2B companies, including yours truly and Harry Stebbings for a live 20BC and Sastra podcast. It'll be fun all right in the heart of Sastra London with me and the entire Sastra team. You've got to be there. So get your tickets with my exclusive discount by going to podcast.sastralondon.com. And that's podcast.sasterlondon.com. See you there.