Episode #242:

Kari Hanson, Chief Marketing Officer at Robin, explains why traditional ideas of predictability are breaking under the pressure of AI-driven change. She describes how shifting buyer behavior makes historic performance less reliable as a guide. Kari shows how brand and voice of the customer can restore clarity in this chaos and outlines a path to rebuild more predictable revenue systems grounded in genuine customer insight.

“The brand and really understanding the voice of the customer are the pieces that feed the predictability in a very unpredictable way.” – Kari Hanson

This episode explores why classic ideas of predictability are breaking in an AI-driven world and what CMOs can do about it. Kari unpacks shifting buyer behavior, lazy AI use, and noisy markets, then shows how brand and customer voice give leaders the context they need to design more reliable, scalable revenue systems.

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[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we have a really interesting conversation with Kari Hanson. Now Kari, you are a chief marketing officer. You actually are one of the very few that actually went to school to be a marketer.

[00:00:22] Steve MacDonald: I’ve talked to so many people that are like engineers that turn marketers, all kinds of background. But you’ve done this your whole life. B2B marketing. You’ve gone from seed rounds companies all the way through IPO and you actually created a new category that then took that company and went through IPO.

[00:00:42] Steve MacDonald: So that’s a fantastic achievement, so congratulations. We’re gonna take all of that and we’re gonna talk about how do we make more predictable revenue systems, and I called it a contrarian point of view you had, because we know that we are being asked more and more and more and more to be more pipeline focused driving revenues, right.

[00:01:07] Steve MacDonald: You know, far more than we ever have before. So we have to, and we also know that there’s massive trends that are going against us in terms of the B2B buyer waiting longer and longer to even want to talk to us. And the sales department, which makes marketing’s role actually more important than ever.

[00:01:24] Steve MacDonald: Because they’re consuming more and more content to make their decisions before they talk to us. So we’re at an interesting juncture in time. But we’re gonna talk from chaos to clarity, creating predictable revenue systems. But before we get into that, I would love to turn it over to you and maybe just explain a little bit more about your background

[00:01:43] Kari Hanson: Yeah. Well, thanks for that introduction. I feel like my mother could have written that. It’s quite glowing. Yeah. So, I’ve been in B2B marketing my entire career. I did go to school. I actually started out as a computer science major way back when before it was the cool thing. And I will never forget my first program that we wrote. I was on Turbo Pascal, which I think is a dead language now, so don’t ask me to program anything.

[00:02:04] Kari Hanson: But everybody came up with these really complex, it was a business school, all these complex programs, and mine was two people walking and champagne popping. And like, it was really cool, but it was before there was visual. It was all the letters of the program turned into this champagne thing, and my computer science professor pulled me aside and was like, I want to introduce you to the marketing professors because you are clearly on the wrong track.

[00:02:27] Kari Hanson: I realized that perhaps they were right. So, you know, I went into marketing. I started out at a PR agency working with a bunch of startups who all ended up wanting to be acquired, moving on. So I got to see a whole bunch of perspective, which gave me a nice bootcamp. And then I went into the other side of the desk as they would say.
[00:02:46] Kari Hanson: Again, I slowly over my career, I’ve done every piece of marketing at every size of a company. And the only thing that is still true is that what worked yesterday probably is not gonna work tomorrow. And so I think that’s the state of the state for marketers right now, but it’s also what makes it so fun.

[00:03:03] Steve MacDonald: It does make it fun. Along the way, that fun, we run into our VC firms and PE firms that want predictability, boards that want predictability. The rest of the C-suite, our CEOs, our CFOs that want predictability. We want predictability, right? But your point of view is that predictability is more elusive than it ever has been in modern B2B.
[00:03:26] Steve MacDonald: Right. But what was interesting is you contrasted that to the fact that we have more tools today. We have more data. We have supposedly more insights into the market and what’s going on and what’s working and what’s not. So why is predictability in B2B growth more elusive than ever before, despite having that much more view into the market and what we could be doing?

[00:03:54] Kari Hanson: I feel like there is sort of the disclaimer of yesterday’s returns do not predict tomorrow’s futures. But I think AI has brought us many things. I believe in the potential of AI. I think it is a game changer on many fronts, but it eliminated predictability.

[00:04:09] Kari Hanson: Like it took it away from us in many ways and for many reasons. And I perhaps over time it will come back. But I think it is changing how people are consuming on a regular basis. And so we can no longer predict, and frankly, we can’t even say how the large LLMs, there’s no way to even say, here’s how people are gonna use them in the next quarter.

[00:04:28] Kari Hanson: I don’t buy it because that predictability is completely gone. Because we’re remaking, and this is sort of what happens when you go through such a seismic shift, that everything is changing, how people are consuming, creating everything, there by definition is no more predictability because we’re completely remaking it.

[00:04:45] Kari Hanson: And so, not that I’m old enough to be pre-internet. But I am old enough in my marketing career to remember there was a time before when everyone I came out of school just as everyone was getting a website, and there was a time before this mass email marketing was a platform. And there was a time before search engines were a thing.

[00:05:04] Kari Hanson: And if you remember when Google came out, they were proud that they had no ads and then suddenly they had ads, and there was a time before LinkedIn. And so every shift, and even mobile, every shift changes how people do things. And I think AI blew everything else up. And so,

[00:05:22] Kari Hanson: For as much as I have more visibility than I’ve ever had, it has eliminated any predictability. I don’t think anybody could say what’s gonna happen over the next couple of quarters. And the challenge, frankly, is everybody wants predictability. Because you can’t scale without it, right? Like you can’t say, give me a dollar, I’m gonna give you ten dollars and I’m gonna do it this way.

[00:05:42] Kari Hanson: Like, there is no scale, which is sort of the reliable growth. You can have viral moments in here and there, but you can’t scale at the pace that you want without having that predictability. And so, you know, it’s this yin and yang that we’re struggling with right now. 

[00:05:57] Steve MacDonald: That’s a dire outlook and we’re not gonna stay on that.

[00:06:01] Steve MacDonald: ‘Cause you have some really great suggestions here. But before we move on, how do we define AI and its role in our growth? Because, I mean, we’re everybody, from the board on down, everybody’s looking at us and saying, what’s your take on AI? What are you doing with AI, right? And a lot of it is on how do you become more efficient, right?

[00:06:23] Steve MacDonald: How do you do more or less? But your point of view is that’s not always the case, right? That AI has an opportunity to do a lot more in our growth, and I’d love to just explore that for a moment.

[00:06:36] Kari Hanson: Yeah, well, so there’s two threads there. One, I think AI presents this huge opportunity for go to market, especially for marketers, but it also is presenting the biggest challenge that we’ve ever faced.

[00:06:48] Kari Hanson: So, on the one hand, AI automates a lot of things, and we have a lot of people who are taking the easy path and they don’t know what they’re doing, and they’re automating bad behaviors. And this is why email spam is out of control. The robocalls are out of control, the personalization, but it’s completely odd and in some ways creepy, of, you know, I know where you went to high school. Like really weird use cases, but then also when it can be wrong.

[00:07:12] Kari Hanson: And so you just have this onslaught of the AI slop, as it’s called, and it’s coming at a crazy pace. And then you also have the easy button for content. And AI can just make all of this content, but it’s the same thing and it’s based on pre-published work, so there’s nothing new, but it’s just spam on spam on spam.

[00:07:30] Kari Hanson: And so it’s making it really hard to stand out. And it’s also taking, you know, everyone says outbound is dead, email is dead, but when you do it right, it can work really well. And so I think AI is creating that really big challenge of just automating. And you know, people call it the easy button.

[00:07:48] Kari Hanson: I call it the lazy button because some things should not be automated. Like some things should actually be eliminated and we shouldn’t do it. And AI is just doing it all. And it doesn’t cost very much, you know? So it’s easy to just try it, spray and pray, and then move on. And so I think as a marketer, that’s really challenging for us.

[00:08:05] Kari Hanson: And then, you know, it does do a lot of things. Like we can move faster, we can do things better. We can be a lot more efficient. But I do think this, you know, the AI hype is, we’ll just do more with less. And it’s, you know, from a marketing perspective, we went into COVID, we did a lot more with a lot less because we had to.

[00:08:22] Kari Hanson: And then coming out of it, there was like this big boom. And then coming out of that, everyone was like, oh, budgets are overstretched, you know, maybe we need to scale back. I think every marketer I know reined in their budget but still had the same expectations. So we were doing more with less.

[00:08:37] Kari Hanson: And then we saw, well, you know, maybe we’re not gonna hire at the pace we’re going to. Let’s just sort of slow that down a little bit. But you still have to, in terms of growing, you have to deliver more results. So we’re still doing more with less. And then you throw in, oh, you have to compete with AI and you have to get more content out faster, but it can’t be the AI slop, so it’s gotta be better.

[00:08:56] Kari Hanson: So we’re doing, you know, our people are doing more with less. And then you throw in, well, AI has made outbound really challenging. Like, gone are the days of cold calling. And you know, it used to be marketing would contribute a certain percentage of the pipeline, outbound would probably do 25 to 40 percent.

[00:09:13] Kari Hanson: And you know, for us, we’re not seeing that. And so my marketing team is picking up the extra and delivering 95 to 100 percent of the pipeline with the same budget, which is the same budget that has to go farther. And as we start growing as a company, we wanna do more things and add more events.

[00:09:31] Kari Hanson: But we don’t have more money. And so it’s the more with less. It’s like on and on and on. And I do think we’re sort of at this place where there are certainly companies, there are certainly teams, marketing teams, who probably could do more with less and they could be a little bit more efficient. But I don’t think that that’s the answer.

[00:09:48] Kari Hanson: I think it’s more of AI can help us be efficient. It can fix a lot of the gaps, but also, we need to spend more on AI to, you know, you sort of have to slow down to move faster. And I think the potential for AI is really around not doing more, like not just the lazy button, but being smarter and being more intelligent and understanding, like, you know, what is happening, what is driving the biggest impact, how can I do more of that?

[00:10:16] Kari Hanson: And eventually at some point, being able to take the foundations of a go-to-market strategy that works really well, that’s based on trust, based on a relationship, based on authenticity, but scales that one-to-one relationship at one-to-10,000 at scale. And I’m not saying, you know, the bots are gonna talk to the bots.

[00:10:35] Kari Hanson: I don’t believe that. But I do think AI can help us get to a place where one person can talk to many in a personalized, authentic way very quickly. But that’s not an efficiency story at all. That’s more of an optimization story in my mind, and it requires investment to scale and get there.

[00:10:54] Steve MacDonald: So a couple of different things. I’m gonna ask them all at the same time, but you talked about building trust and authenticity, and most people are extraordinarily worried that AI is going in the opposite direction of that for a lot of the things that you just talked about. But trust is on the massive decline.

[00:11:12] Steve MacDonald: In fact, the latest Trust Barometer from LinkedIn and Edelman showed that of 32,000 international respondents worldwide, 61 percent think we as business leaders are being intentionally misleading. Intentionally misleading. So now put AI slop, as you put it, on top of that, we are adding gasoline to the trust epidemic that is happening here.

[00:11:38] Steve MacDonald: Right. So one of the things that you had said in our earlier conversation was that we need to use AI. And you said here, smarter. For more insight, more foresight into what we’re doing, and not look at it as just an efficiency tool, right? And better automation. Absolutely, done the right way, we can do that.

[00:12:01] Steve MacDonald: But you have a specific point of view on how do we get insight and foresight. Because like if you were to go to ChatGPT today and just type in what are the top five reasons why businesses aren’t using ChatGPT correctly, one of those things that comes up is a lack of the right data. In other words, garbage in, garbage out, right?

[00:12:25] Steve MacDonald: No insights in, no foresight out. We gotta train our AI models beyond just the standard, right? What they kind of know in the market, which everybody in the market knows. And you and I started talking about the voice of the customer as a really integral part of this. And that’s where I think the story changes from dire, oh no, what are we gonna do, to wow.

[00:12:50] Steve MacDonald: There is a path, there is a solution. And I just wanted to bring that up. And how does the voice of the customer enter into this conversation? Adding more predictability, more foresight, more insight so that we actually can provide more predictability in our growth.

[00:13:07] Kari Hanson: Yeah, I think for me, AI reminds me, at least where we are now, nobody trusts it. Nobody believes it. It’s wrong as often as it’s right. It can hallucinate. Sometimes it’s like, oh, it’s good enough, but when it’s wrong and it’s really wrong. Like if you get an email talking, Hey Steve, I’m gonna reach out to you ’cause I saw you were doing something with the NFL teams, and you’re like, I have nothing to do with NFL.

[00:13:32] Kari Hanson: Like, it’s so wrong. And so then you’re just like, oh, I mistrust it. To me, it reminds me of Wikipedia. When Wikipedia first came out, it was the wisdom of the crowd. Well, then very quickly everybody realized it’s actually not everyone who should have an opinion on an online encyclopedia.

[00:13:51] Kari Hanson: And suddenly you saw colleges and schools saying, you cannot cite Wikipedia as a source because it is unreliable. Because, you know, who am I to go have an opinion or make a correction around dinosaurs, for example? Like my son, who wants to be a paleontologist, would be horrified at the idea that I would have an opinion.

[00:14:10] Kari Hanson: And so, but this was the problem. And so then Wikipedia, I think over the years it has sort of course corrected a little bit. You have to have a reliable link. But you know, it started out as the wisdom of the crowd and it became the idiocy of the crowds because it was like the more people that weigh in, you lose more value because.

[00:14:27] Kari Hanson: If you wanna have an expert opinion, you need to have an expert. And I think the challenge with AI right now is because it’s based on everything. Going into your example around, you know, like a GPT or training the model to go do something, every company is using the same thing.

[00:14:44] Kari Hanson: And so you could say, here’s what my ICP is, here’s their title, here’s their company. And suddenly it’s telling you, well, here’s the content you could produce. But spoiler alert, it’s telling every one of your competitors the exact same thing. And suddenly everyone sounds the same and there’s no differentiation because what it’s missing, just like Wikipedia was missing the expert’s opinion—not opinion, the expert’s fact.

[00:15:07] Kari Hanson: I’m gonna cite the Encyclopedia Britannica. AI misses the context, and context is king. And I firmly believe it’s the reason that AI is going to change our jobs, but we are not gonna lose our jobs because we have the experience and the context, and specifically with the voice of the customer.

[00:15:26] Kari Hanson: That’s your context. And so, you know, one of the things we were talking about is I am a huge believer in voice of the customer. I think right now the challenge with a lot of companies is everyone, every department, is talking to the customer, but they have a different lens. So, you know, our head of product will be talking to customers.

[00:15:43] Kari Hanson: She’s asking questions about how are they using the product, what are they looking at down the road. It is a very specific lens, and I’m not gonna say she’s leading the witness, but she’s going down a certain path. If somebody from, you know, the customer success team is talking to them…

[00:15:57] Kari Hanson: They have a very different lens that they’re going down.

[00:16:00] Kari Hanson: If somebody from support is talking to them, everybody has a different lens. And I think this is where marketers need to sort of be the thread across all of them, because we have to connect all of the lenses and uplevel it a little bit.

[00:16:13] Kari Hanson: And when you start having those conversations and you can train your AI based on what your customers are saying, both the buyers and the users, which are usually different people, the executives, the influencers, the multiple points, you can add that context. Then suddenly the AI becomes very powerful.

[00:16:33] Kari Hanson: And I think it has a lot of potential for the go-to-market teams in many ways. But I also understand it is not as simple as just getting call transcripts because the call transcripts right now are very oriented into whoever is talking to that customer and they have a very specific question, and it is not connecting all of the dots.

[00:16:53] Kari Hanson: And so that context is not there, and you are training your AI on very specific lenses without the broader picture. And I think that is where, you know, the voice of the customer is gonna get lost if someone is not paying attention to it.

[00:17:07] Steve MacDonald: Well, here is an interesting fact, right? In the world of B2C, they have C-suite roles called Chief Customer Officer, Chief Experience Officer, somebody who is responsible for taking all those conversations, all those different lenses, and running their own conversations.

[00:17:26] Steve MacDonald: On top of that, and coming up with what we all know is really important. There is one voice of authority in our business, right? And it is the voice of the customer. But if we ask it from the unique point of view, like a sales team, they are having conversations every day, to your point of view, with prospects that turn into customers. But it is through the lens of a sales conversation.

[00:17:49] Steve MacDonald: There is actually a shield that is up in between, right? I am being sold to and I know it. I am not gonna sit back. It is why most CMOs, when they take on a new role, they just start calling customers, right? And the first thing we say is, this is a non-sales conversation. I am just here to learn, right? And we ask things like, what is it that we do for you?

[00:18:13] Steve MacDonald: Like really interesting questions that seem very generic, right? But you would never design a voice of the market program to run through a department that was set up to do something very different as their number one objective. Even customer success, their number one goal, cross-sell and upsell. Seventy-three percent of new B2B revenue, new annual revenue, according to Forrester, comes from existing customers, right? So a sales objective, a product development objective. And by the way, we have a roadmap we wanna show you, right?

[00:18:38] Steve MacDonald: So I guess here is my question. If we need to have marketing, and by the way, McKinsey, Gartner, Forrester, everybody has said and come out and said that the CMO should play the role of the Chief Customer Officer in a B2B organization. That is my first question. Then if we are all kind of in agreement that we need a voice of the customer that unites all these lenses, and that is the source.

[00:19:00] Steve MacDonald: To train our AI, right? On not just generic data that everybody has, but our unique go-to-market strategy combined with their unique needs. How do we go about doing that? And I will tell you why we are not doing it, because McKinsey came out and said only 15 percent of companies actually execute on a voice of customer program.

[00:19:18] Steve MacDonald: And I have had many CROs tell me and CMOs tell me, oh, I think that is too high, Steve. So that is the big question. How do we do this?

[00:19:50] Kari Hanson: Yeah, well, it is challenging for many reasons. And one, I do think a lot of B2B companies do have a Chief Customer Officer, but it is typically the person who owns customer success support.

[00:20:00] Kari Hanson: And, you know, their role is to make the customers happy, and they should know the voice of their customers in that perspective. And to me, I think it is not about changing somebody’s role. I think everyone should be talking to the customer. But I think.

[00:20:15] Kari Hanson: Instead of saying, well, I had a conversation with the customer and making that the voice, I do think this is where marketing needs to be sort of that overlaying, more strategic view of here is what they are saying to our product team, here is what they are saying to our customer team.

[00:20:27] Kari Hanson: Here is what they are saying to our execs. But then we also need to ask the questions that no one wants to know. And it is not just what are we doing for you. What are we not doing for you? What are you still worried about? When you go talk to your boss, what are the three things that are always on the table?

[00:20:43] Kari Hanson: And they might have absolutely nothing to do with our product, our platform, anything, but like, what are you really worried about? Because everyone typically says when you sell to a customer, they are worried about one of two things. Are they going to save money?

[00:20:58] Kari Hanson: Are they gonna make money? And it is like, well, maybe, but also maybe they are worried about something else. And I also think one of the voices of the customer programs, if you will, that people tend to forget is the customer that you lost, that churned. Honestly, why did you leave?

[00:21:13] Kari Hanson: And it is always like, oh, something with the product. But it is like, let the dust settle. Let them get away. Have a conversation with them. Have a conversation with prospects that you lost, and actually ask them, why did you go with someone else? And sometimes it is sort of that intangible, oh, well, it just seemed like they were more interested in me.

[00:21:31] Kari Hanson: Or, you know, I tried to, you know, maybe they were a customer and they left because they really wanted help. They were dismissed because you didn’t think it was a big deal, but it actually was a really big deal to them. And likewise, then you start finding these threads where then you go start to talk to the customers about, well, you know, why do you stick with us?

[00:21:50] Kari Hanson: Not product related. And a lot of times where you really get the differentiation, at least for us, you know, you’ll start hearing, well, when I work with so-and-so on the CS team, you know, it’s like she’s part of my team and she understands. And like, it’s sort of these intangible things, but that’s what makes everybody stand out because at the end of the day, especially with AI, you can put out a new feature.

[00:22:10] Kari Hanson: Somebody else is gonna come out with it too. And so I think, to me, I feel like every department should be talking to the customer, but you have to sort of have that layer on top of it. But also, the customer has to be more broad. It’s current customers, it’s past customers, it’s unhappy customers, it’s customers who didn’t even come to you

[00:22:26] Kari Hanson: to get that view. I think this is where analysts, you know, they’re not necessarily customers, but I always love, you know, if you ever talk to Gartner, my first question is, what do you hate about us? What do you hear when they, like, call my baby ugly, please. And because even if you’re not asking the question, they still have the opinion.

[00:22:45] Kari Hanson: So tell me, because as a marketer, the only way I know how to change your opinion is to know what your opinion is in the first place, right?

[00:22:51] Steve MacDonald: Oh, I love this. So let me ask you a question because here’s where I think you’ve flipped the model, because most of the conversations with customers that we’re having today start out about us, our product that we are selling, that we’re

[00:23:07] Steve MacDonald: creating a roadmap on, that we’re selling, that we’re cross-selling, that we’re upselling, right. And Gong did a big study and they showed that the sales rep talks two thirds to three quarters of the time. So our conversations usually start out about us, and that’s how vendors relate, right? We talk about us. Where what you just said is, I wanna know about your challenges, and they might be out here this broad where we’re gonna help you with this much.

[00:23:36] Steve MacDonald: But what they want is the trusted advisor, right? They want somebody that’s not a vendor selling them. They want somebody that comes in and understands their bigger picture and can give them a different point of view, can give them something else to think about, right? And hopefully within there, and almost always, there is a path for us as an organization to help them if we’re talking to our true ICP.

[00:24:00] Steve MacDonald: I think you just flipped the model there, because my biggest takeaway is talk to them about them, not talk to them about us. Is that, like, as a very broad umbrella over what you just said, a good takeaway?

[00:24:15] Kari Hanson: Yeah. Well, I think, you know, one of the best pieces of advice I got early on in my career was, we were doing sort of a voice of the customer survey.

[00:24:22] Kari Hanson: And you know, my boss at the time, she was like, you’re leading the witness. If you ask them what they like, you’re pointing them down a path. And I was like, oh. And it’s understanding when you’re having these conversations, you’re not there to solve, you’re not there to prove. Like, you just are interviewing them and hearing what’s going on, and then you start getting, but it’s just one anecdote.

[00:24:41] Kari Hanson: And the problem is you need multiple anecdotes to start seeing a trend. And so, you know, part of the challenge too is if you talk specifically about the product and you are like, hey, how do you like, we’re headed in this direction. Do you like option A or B? Well, they’re gonna choose A or B, and then that’s where you go.

[00:24:55] Kari Hanson: But if you ask some questions around, you know, in a perfect world, in three years, like, what would somebody in this space be doing? They might be throwing out option C. And you’re like, well, that’s interesting. But then if a whole bunch of people start throwing out option C, maybe you actually realize more often than not that your option A actually solves option C, but you’re using the wrong language or you’re presenting it very tactically, but it leads toward something bigger.

[00:25:18] Kari Hanson: And I think this is where if you can get them to talk. What’s on their mind? What are they working on? Like, what are they looking for? You can start getting those trends, and then you start connecting the department level. You know, what are they saying to the product team? What are they saying to the sales team?

[00:25:33] Kari Hanson: Because you start backing it up a little bit, because you don’t want to hear a couple things and then run in that direction. But it’s really about understanding where you view the market going and your value. Where do your customers and future customers see you? And what’s the delta between the two?

[00:25:47] Kari Hanson: Because that’s what marketing is, right? Fixing that delta. And it’s either accelerating, picking up on, you know, the one thing that they like. Maybe it’s the one thing they don’t like, but it’s just sort of hearing it. And I think, you know, going back to your original question of, you know, why is this so hard?

[00:26:00] Kari Hanson: Fifteen percent of marketing teams are doing it. The challenge is, I believe very strongly in this. I get very busy. I can tell you, like, I don’t talk to customers enough. Like, it gets really, really hard to keep this a priority because you have everything else coming. And then, you know, we actually had an open house at our office.

[00:26:18] Kari Hanson: Some customers came and I was like, oh yeah, this is so great. Like, just having these conversations. And it’s like, yes, I have to get back into it. Then you do it, and then we’re doing more with less. We all are doing more with less. And so making it an ongoing priority can be really challenging.

[00:26:32] Kari Hanson: But the more that you can train everybody, hey, if you talk to a customer, here’s one question to ask or pick their brain about this, you can start getting. This is where AI, going back to our original conversation, if you can feed the right questions, even in these other department level conversations,

[00:26:49] Kari Hanson: AI can still pull it out for you. And so then you can start, you know, over time still seeing what’s going on. Or you can listen, you can train the AI, these are the three things I’m looking for. Go listen to the first calls that we’re recording. What do you see coming up? And just see what’s coming up from a trends perspective to sort of bubble it up.

[00:27:08] Kari Hanson: Like, as much as I wanna be on the phone with customers all the time, we don’t all have time. And frankly, they don’t have time to do it. If every one of their vendors asked for 30 minutes, they don’t have the time. But we are talking to them. And so it’s still pulling the threads in a way that can intelligently influence it.

[00:27:25] Kari Hanson: But it’s all about what are the unasked questions, what’s on their mind, what do they care about, and then how do you feed into that?

[00:27:34] Steve MacDonald: So I have to tell you, we’ve covered a lot of territory here today and I just want to give you an opportunity to take all of this and say, if there is one thing that the C-suite executives that are gonna be tuning into this podcast, if there was one thing out of everything that we’ve talked about here today that you wanted them to take away, what would that be?

[00:27:55] Kari Hanson: I think if we went back to, you know, when you and I first started, we were talking about predictability and scale. I would say my takeaway is the goal is every company wants to scale, right? You need to have the growth, you need to hit certain digits to get funding, to be profitable, to head toward the next whatever you’re doing.

[00:28:11] Kari Hanson: You need to have the scale, right? Like nobody just wants to plateau. And in order to do that, it’s really about finding that predictability, but being able to understand that you’re not gonna have the level of predictability you’ve had in the past, and AI is not going to make you more efficient in that direction. It will make you efficient in other ways, but I think this is where AI can help you.

[00:28:33] Kari Hanson: The way that you can influence the predictability. Obviously, you know, we’re sort of dancing around it. We’re talking about brand, right? Like as much as we’re trying to optimize lead generation, demand generation, demand capture, pipeline creation, because then in theory, if I can create X number of pipeline, you can close X number of pipeline.

[00:28:51] Kari Hanson: We have a very predictable path. But the challenge is you might not be able to close at that predictable rate. I might not be able to create at that predictable rate, but the brand and really understanding that voice of the customer and where can you thread some things? You might be able to influence one or the other.

[00:29:09] Kari Hanson: And so maybe I bring in less, but you close more. Maybe I bring in more, you close less, but you know, to me that’s the piece that feeds ultimately the predictability in a very unpredictable way, if you will.

[00:29:20] Steve MacDonald: The voice of the customer is kind of like the fuel that feeds this predictability. I love that.

[00:29:27] Steve MacDonald: I know people are gonna have questions. Is it appropriate that I give out a link to your LinkedIn profile that people could reach out to you?

[00:29:34] Kari Hanson: Yeah. I’m Kari Hanson on LinkedIn. You know, I love to have random conversations. I love to, you know, sort of talk to people and brainstorm about AI, especially because I do think it’s going to completely change AI or the go-to-market approach.

[00:29:48] Kari Hanson: I do think that the way everyone is promising AI is gonna change it is completely wrong. And so I always love to hear people having the, well, here’s how it’s actually helping me, because the piece that we don’t have right now is, you know, the actual examples of, I move the needle doing this, I move the needle doing this, and the more that we can piece that together, then we’ll all be more predictable at some point, and the chaos will clarify a little bit.

[00:30:12] Steve MacDonald: I have to tell you, the mission of this podcast is to be the accumulation of C-suite executives all over the world that are dealing with their growth challenges in their B2B business. And we all have different insights. We have different perspectives. We have different backgrounds. And if we could bring all that together.

[00:30:33] Steve MacDonald: Share with each other, then that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats. And you were an amazing part of that rising tide today. I just wanted to say thank you for coming on.

[00:30:43] Kari Hanson: Oh, well thank you for having me. I love, I love talking about this, so hopefully it’s helpful.