Episode #261:

Brett Hannath, Corporate Vice President, Global Marketing at Intel Corporation, explains why many ABM programs fail too early when they are measured like consumer advertising despite much longer B2B buying cycles. He breaks down how misaligned expectations around timing and measurement often undermine ABM effectiveness, even when the strategy itself is sound. He also shows how ABM can strengthen sales partnerships by delivering deeper insights that align expectations with real business outcomes.

“ABM stretches beyond marketing tactics and functions. It extends into sales. A one-size-fits-all model does not exist. This discipline evolves over time. AI will add new possibilities, and new challenges, especially if the skills to execute are not in place,” – Brett Hannath

In this episode, Brett explains why ABM fails when treated as short-cycle advertising and how leaders should reset expectations around time, trust, and measurable outcomes. He explains how ABM strengthens sales execution through actionable insights and why modern teams must add engineering and AI capabilities to deliver on their promises.

Follow Brett Hannath on LinkedIn

Follow host Steve MacDonald on LinkedIn

[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives Podcast. I am Steve MacDonald, your host, and today I guarantee we are going to have a conversation that will make you rethink. We are going to rethink ABM at its core, and Brett Hannath is here now. Brett, you are the VP of Corporate Marketing at Intel.

[00:00:22] Steve MacDonald: And what you are doing and the way that you are rethinking the go-to-market motion, and want to share with us here today, is so refreshing. But at every turn in the conversation that we had before, I just captured myself thinking, that makes great sense. And so I want to get us right into it. But your background is interesting, and I think it helps form the way that you think about, you know, the reskilling of ABM. You started as a developer. In the day and age of AI and data and what we need to do with that, the skillset that comes from development, the importance, how it interfaces with us as marketers, the CMO role, and redefines that, that is going to play a big role in what we talk about here.

[00:01:06] Steve MacDonald: You are a big pop culture fan, too. And you bring some of that thinking into it. I would love to hear more about your background before we get started.

[00:01:17] Brett Hannath: Yeah. No. And look, honestly, it is an absolute joy to be with you today, Steve, and everyone else who is listening or watching.

[00:01:22] Brett Hannath: Yeah, I mean, I am a little bit of an oddball from a career perspective, number one, because I started as a developer. And you are quite right, but it was a developer in the eighties. All right. So it has changed a lot over time, obviously. But what I really appreciated was just how computers work.

[00:01:37] Brett Hannath: At its core, you know, how compute supports a business, how it supports a marketing function, how it, you know, creates new experiences for people. So I have always been technology-forward in just what I like, right? The number of Amazon Echo X versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in my house, or two-bedroom apartment, because I moved to California from Texas. It is just an indication of me just wanting to stay abreast of stuff, right? And technology, in all its forms.

[00:02:00] Brett Hannath: I think on the pop culture side, what I love about my downtime, a couple of things. One, I watch eighties horror, which is a little bit odd to some people because it puts me off.

[00:02:18] Brett Hannath: But I also thoroughly enjoy seeing how things burst into the pop culture zeitgeist. You know, K-pop Demon Hunters, for example. And you can be all blasé or Labubu, you know what I mean. There are just these things with marketing support, pop, and a herd in a very fragmented consumption space that are not only enjoyable when you consume them, but as a marketer, you go, how did that pop?

[00:02:48] Brett Hannath: Products, was it its activation, was it its promotion? I find it quite fascinating. And it is also a nice distraction, like K-pop Demon Hunters, from Xeon, core compute, and laptops.

[00:03:00] Brett Hannath: I mean, it is a nice escape for the brain, but it is aligned to what we do every day. Yeah.

[00:03:05] Steve MacDonald: Well, it is interesting because, you know, I think I have never met anybody else. I never thought about it this way, but often I am watching a movie or a show and thinking about how they develop the storyline. Because in the end, as marketers and ABM go-to-market strategy, we are weaving a story about who we are, why we should be trusted, and why we should be in the inner circle with our buyers in helping them grow their businesses.

[00:03:30] Steve MacDonald: So there is a lot to learn from there. I love it. Here is what I want to do to start us out before we talk about the evolution of ABM. It is probably good to talk about why you think that the model is fundamentally broken. What is broken about ABM, so that when we talk about the evolution and fixing it, you kind of know where that foundation is coming from?

[00:03:53] Brett Hannath: I think what is broken with ABM is a misaligned set of expectations as to what it can immediately deliver for you, right? I think it is across digital marketing. It is across what happens in the consumer realm, where I can attach an outcome to an ad, right? A click to buy.

[00:04:09] Brett Hannath: In ABM, which is a B2B space, and therefore a lot messier, multiple channels are required to convince someone of a message or change a perception, which may take 18 months to deliver an outcome. And I feel that ABM is sometimes misconstrued as a way to shorten the buying cycle, and I can measure its outcome in a matter of days, rather than reflecting the sales cycle.

[00:04:37] Brett Hannath: So I think that is an initial misconception. I also that what is broken is that sometimes ABM projects fail, and then people stop. It is not working. Turn it off. It is not delivering the value to me. And sometimes it just takes one: a perception shift about what it could deliver immediately versus over the long term.

[00:04:58] Brett Hannath: Two, how the approach may be tweaked to produce the types of things you are looking for. But I look at ABM as a layer cake, with many objectives beyond just looking good, creating engagement, or closing the deal.

[00:05:20] Brett Hannath: And setting your expectations at every part of that layer helps you understand the value that you are getting out of the thing. So for me, it is those two fundamental things. Come in with a firm understanding of what you are truly trying to deliver, because it is multifaceted.

[00:05:43] Brett Hannath: And adjust the expectations not only with you within your team, but with your stakeholders. Because ABM is now within Intel, used within an ABM campaign, we need an ABM campaign, when really, I would argue a lot of people do not know what it means.

[00:05:57] Steve MacDonald: The idea that it is a campaign, which is simultaneously used for demand generation strategy, short-term, right. Lead generation. Like the idea of a campaign.

[00:06:00] Steve MacDonald: I love how you talk about balancing short and long term there, right? Every C-Suite executive that comes onto this podcast, we ask the question, what do you feel are the two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth. The number three challenge is balancing the short and long term, and ABM is a long game.

[00:06:18] Steve MacDonald: ABM is about building relationships, establishing trust. It could be six months, eight months, or 15 months. So the idea, though, is that we go into our board meetings and one of the first questions is, “How is the quota going this quarter?” And what does next quarter look like, right? You know, we have very short-term pressures.

[00:06:46] Steve MacDonald: But by the very nature of ABM and building relationships with an entire buying committee, that is not a short-term strategy. So by definition, there is friction built in right from the very beginning.

[00:06:57] Brett Hannath: Yeah, I completely agree. And I love the points you make because I think also an understanding of ABM, not only as a pipeline creator, when marketing is driving the pipeline outcome, for me, it is driving a better partnership and connection with sales.

[00:07:04] Brett Hannath: Which has always been a perennial issue between marketing and sales. Truly, what value do you deliver? What value are you giving me to the leads I pass? Because I also see one of the biggest values of ABM is just intelligence gathering and then informing a rep to be better in person.

[00:07:29] Brett Hannath: So it is not only a tool to open doors that have not been opened before, but it is a tool to allow those doors that were already open, because the covered account is covered, to help them understand, well, you know, we detected this as a talking point you should use tomorrow. And see how that deepens the relationship.

[00:07:50] Brett Hannath: But then that comes, well, how do I measure relationship health? And how do you reflect that in macro terms to a C-Suite, going, look, I am improving the quality of conversations our reps are having, not just the results of the pipeline that is sitting in Salesforce.

[00:08:00] Brett Hannath: And that is what we are playing with inside Intel. I stress to the team. Okay, we have the manic focus on pipeline contribution and a percentage of the total value of the pipeline, right? But I also want to see which report you are sending to each rep for their covered account, and what we see happening across all the properties we own.

[00:08:10] Brett Hannath: All of the intent we see from 6sense, all of the MarTech that we have invested a lot of money in, gives us a lot of insight into our covered accounts. How are you packaging that up as true value?

[00:08:28] Brett Hannath: Because I know if I am a rep, I get up. What am I doing today? Okay, I have got the meetings in the calendar. But I should also be dedicating a lot of my time to research. Research into the market and the context in which my customer operates.

[00:08:51] Brett Hannath: And so I really see this ABM thing as this incredibly powerful motion that we need to tease out. What does my company need from me right now? Better relationships, since they are already established, but we just need to change perceptions within them.

[00:09:00] Brett Hannath: Or am I in just hard-mode account acquisition, right? Because they are new relationships. They are a new business we are trying to create, and we are having share-of-wallet-type conversations. But being very deliberate in what you choose to make it powerful for.

[00:09:15] Steve MacDonald: So, tell me if I am taking this away as the right takeaway, because you emphasized insights there. And here is another thing that has come up from the executives who have been on the podcast. There is nobody in charge of insights.

[00:09:32] Steve MacDonald: We have got Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Customer Officers, Chief Experience Officers, Chief Strategy Officers, Chief Innovation Officers, Chief Marketing Officers. We have CEOs and CROs, right? Who is in charge of insights?

[00:09:54] Steve MacDonald: But everything that you said there, like the ABM model and building relationships, is fueled by, and this is something that you brought up on our last conversation, fueled by trust.

[00:10:00] Steve MacDonald: Trust is fueled by, you said, sales reps should be spending a lot of time learning about the market, right? So those insights are what make them a Gartner Trusted Advisor, right? Not the seller. Nobody wants to be sold to, right? We want to be advised. We want to talk to somebody who feels like a peer, right?

[00:10:16] Steve MacDonald: Like a colleague of ours. In this model, and even Forrester came out, they did their predictions for 2026, and it was all about trust, right? They talk about how we have demand-gen campaigns, and we have brand-building campaigns. We do not have trust-building campaigns, but that should actually be the number one priority for CMOs.

[00:10:33] Steve MacDonald: Their recommendation was that trust-building campaigns should be the number one thing that we should be doing. And you talked about trust as an anchor for irreversible decisions. I think that’s the way you mentioned it. Tell me about that. Why is trust that anchor, and how does it form the new modern ABM model?

[00:10:57] Brett Hannath: I love the question. And it is so hard. Look, everyone is probably in the same position as me. A, the definition of trust, because it varies. Is it measured as brand loyalty? Is it measured as an engagement metric of a message? You promote that, trust me, because I am saying this, right?

[00:11:18] Brett Hannath: Or to your point, is it a measure of the effectiveness of a rep in the meetings they have because they are armed with the right materials and tools to build that deep relationship? So for me, trust is embedded in a few things. People cannot trust you if you do not have the product, period. And I think that is being tested immensely at the moment with AI.

[00:11:41] Brett Hannath: Right. If you look at the AI thing, just as it was with the dot-com thing, just as it was with, you know, you are talking about the insights. Well, that was all born of the analytics thing, turning insights into actions and all those types of things. So, you know, the IT sector, of which I am part, is very guilty of creating waves of overcommitment.

[00:12:04] Brett Hannath: If you overcommit and underdeliver, it is a basis for breaking trust. Right. I sort of feel that, with ABM, when you are targeting a message to an account, segment, or audience of a specific type, whatever you project through there has to be, in some form, true. And the AI example, I will give you a solid one.

[00:12:24] Brett Hannath: When Intel Corporation came out with the first stab of AI on the PC client, so we are the number one. We have got a hundred million AI PCs out in the world at the moment. It is a thing. Yeah. But when we first kicked it off, we said AI everywhere. That was our campaign line. And it was a great umbrella term for Intel Corporation, covering AI in the data center, AI in the cloud, AI on your client, andAI embedded in medical devices, right?

[00:12:51] Brett Hannath: But how do you build trust that AI is at the core of everything Intel Corporation does? We have a series of proof points, examples, and structures that would make you believe us. You claim that Intel AI is everywhere. And we learned the hard way, right? We go out with the umbrella term, and then our partners go, “Well, that is great, but what does it mean, number one?”

[00:13:18] Brett Hannath: And number two, you know, in a big OEM, like Dell or Lenovo, asks you what does AI everywhere mean in one sentence? Or our BU (Business Unit) in the data center, which is not technical enough. You are talking to a technical audience. You are not describing what everywhere is or what AI is.

[00:13:40] Brett Hannath: You know, they call it marketing fluff. And so, you know, we learned the hard way with these things. And that is the thing: for me, ABM is a way to target a message to a very specific audience you are trying to build trust with. But that fundamental platform of truth, if people do not believe what they hear or you have not explained it in the right way to their industry, to their job, to their company, then you are not going to build that trust in what you say, and you are certainly not going to help the rep.

[00:14:12] Steve MacDonald: And I have to tell you, to accentuate this point, we are all starting from a trust deficit. Go to the most recent LinkedIn Edelman Trust Barometer, right? Trust in Europeand the United States has been going down and down and down. 32,000 respondents, and 61% believe that we, as business executives, are being intentionally misleading. That is who we are selling to, right? That is the environment.

[00:14:39] Brett Hannath: It is so cool that you bring that up because, you know, trust is a very human thing, and there are very few things in my life I can trust. Trust in the economy, trust in my politics, trust in my job being secure, and that is their world, right? Then building trust on another leg of the life stool is even harder.

[00:15:02] Brett Hannath: How can you be the trust beacon in a world of distrust? To your point, I am taking lessons from this discussion, Steve. But it is a really incredibly important point. I mean, we are all consumers of a lot, and you are in the noise of that. How do you stand out as different, A, to reach, but two, to be believed?

[00:15:23] Brett Hannath: And to change that perception needle. The other thing too, like I said, it means different things to different people in different situations. How do you measure it? You know, in the world of being so manically focused on an outcome, as we should be, how do you measure trust? I mean, yeah, we can run a brand study.

[00:15:42] Brett Hannath: Do you trust Intel Corporation? And we do. And we are trusted. But in the moment, across that specific segment of tech in pharma or financial services, or a person wandering into Best Buy, I know this has been about ABM, but, you know, similar thing: it is trust in the domain you are trying to be impactful in.

[00:16:04] Brett Hannath: And I hate to say it, it just becomes even more complex in your Rubik’s Cube of what to prioritize, what to measure, what to do.

[00:16:13] Steve MacDonald: We have to keep earning that trust, right? You know, two years ago, Intel Corporation wasn’t known as an AI company, right? So when AI is everywhere, you have to build trust: even though Intel Corporation is an amazing brand with tons of trust, do they know what they are doing with AI? This is new. It is all new to us. Every single one of the people that you are selling to is trying to figure out their own AI strategy.

[00:16:44] Steve MacDonald: We are trying to figure out what it really means, right? So, someone is saying, “I can put it everywhere,” when I have not even figured out what it really means for my business yet. It feels like we are constantly having to evolve and redefine trust in our promises and how we articulate them. In our previous conversation, the glue that held all that together was the voice of the customer.

[00:17:06] Steve MacDonald: And you talked about how that is the highest voice of authority in the business, right? So everything we say, everything we build trust on, the barometer of it is believable, it is appropriate, is the customer right? So you had actually talked about that. We have got more data than we have ever had before.

[00:17:26] Steve MacDonald: You said data everywhere, voice of the customer nowhere. So, like, these are one of the most basic things, right? McKinsey & Company published a study concluding that fewer than 15% of companies actually executea voice-of-the-customer insights program. But no company would say, “We are not customer-focused; we are not customer-driven; we completely are.” But here is McKinsey & Company saying, well, 85% of you really are not.

[00:17:44] Steve MacDonald: Right? So, how do we take this voice of the customer? How do we take the noise of all the data and the expectations of AI, and like, how do we make sense out of this? It is confusing; it is evolving.

[00:18:07] Brett Hannath: It is so critical. And I remember the shift from the nineties to the two thousands, particularly in B2B, was a move from product features to value, then to customer proof of value, right? And I am old enough to have gone through that transition.

[00:18:34] Brett Hannath: And I have also seen the tension because when you drift too far to this side, you are not technical enough on the product feature function level to differentiate yourself because your competitors would all say the same thing. We solve the same business problem. But how do you do it differently? How do you do it better?

[00:18:59] Brett Hannath: And I think it is amplified even more in AI, Steve, because it is not a universally accepted fact that it delivers one hundred percent value against promise. And I think we have all seen the commentary around, you know, particularly in our world, when you read it, you know, only 43% of companies are seeing value from the AI experimentations that they do.

[00:19:02] Brett Hannath: So for me, voice of the customer, particularly when you are breaking into a space like AI, is less about the general promise, and it is more about how to get to the outcome. Here is the proven stack. Here is the software you need to install. Here are the steps that you take to train. Here are the steps you take to infer.

[00:19:24] Brett Hannath: Here are the environments that you should stand up to make it work. We saw this happen in the nineties when we tried to get people off the mainframe and onto Linux servers, and it wasn’t just, “Hey, move to Linux and save money,” or “move to Linux and be more performant.”

[00:19:43] Brett Hannath: It was. Here is the technical proof, here are the solution architectures, here is the consulting that helps you move. And our whole industry stood up to enable this shift to get that groundswell of support. And not only that, a critical, massive understanding in the general community of IT, of how to make it work.

[00:20:07] Brett Hannath: And I think that is where we are at the moment. It is a very new science. There are a lot of startups doing amazing things on a small scale, right? But when you are a big enterprise business that wants to commit wholesale and spend a lot of capital, spend a lot of people, and spend a lot of dollars, taking big bets on little small-scale companies is foreign to them.

[00:20:30] Brett Hannath: Which is why the success of things like SAP and Salesforce they are proven, right? I think we are just in this natural ramp of incredibly inspiring tech, but without that critical mass of general skills in the community, proven stacks, and leaders of solutions we would all love to be, quite honestly, right? We want to be that one. You know, NVIDIA has done a brilliant job because they were the first mover.

[00:21:04] Steve MacDonald: I have got to tell you, I want to stop, and I want to ask you about something you just said there. You started talking about redefining the role of leaders, redefining the role of the marketing department, and redefining the players within the marketing department. Never before did we think we should probably have some prompt engineers in here, which means we should probably have some developers in here, right? I see what I want to do, but I do not know how to do it, and I will raise my hand.

[00:21:38] Steve MacDonald: I spent about half of my working time over the holidays trying to write a multi-stage prompt, and I kept running into issue after issue because I am not a developer, right? One of the first things I did after the holidays was pick up the phone. I called, right? I messaged  

[00:21:55] Steve MacDonald: I cannot do what I want to do without your skill set. And you have done something amazing. You have taken a significant portion of your team and outsourced it to Accenture. And if you could tell us why and what kind of skill sets you needed, what kind of things you need to be able to dial up and dial down, and why you are redefining how your marketing department is providing the service internally needed for an ABM go-to-market strategy, I just thought it was fascinating.

[00:22:31] Brett Hannath: Yeah, no, and it is all related to Intel as a whole company, and we have got a new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, who is really pulling the company to be future-forward. He is very AI-centric. He believes AI is our business. And to your point, we did not have prompt engineers. We did not have hard engineers.

[00:22:51] Brett Hannath: It was all devolved outside or to our IT department. Yeah, so we were the business geeks, but we were not the tech stars. There were many other areas. And what I stress with the move to Accenture, which was actually the decision of our previous CRO or CCO at the time, was that he wanted the old infinity loop of the customer experience, right?

[00:23:16] Brett Hannath: From educate, to sell, to acquire, to support, to renew, all of you know that traditional loop. How sales, marketing, engineering, and business units all contribute their connected value to that loop to make it sustainable and grow. And so he made the decision, and it was a hard, deliberate decision to make, and even harder as a business to execute, because when you make that decision, it immediately has a human impact.

[00:23:48] Brett Hannath: And I do not want to belittle the huge amount of effort and experience that left the company because of the decision that we made, and that was hard for us to absorb, number one. That gave us the opportunity to completely reconstitute the marketing function in terms of what is needed, not only for today, but more importantly for tomorrow.

[00:24:09] Brett Hannath: So the prompt engineers, the data engineers, the Agentic AI engineers, on top of the great creative people, the great campaign people, the great ABM and MarTech engineers. And really, we are in the middle of this stand-up. So the decision was made in January. You signed the contract in June. I am not saying live, but you start activating in July.

[00:24:33] Brett Hannath: Then we turned the service on in September in its minimum viable product. Okay. So we are not seeing the benefits of AI yet because we just needed to run the events we committed to, all right, or support the partners with their activities that we committed to. So we spent a lot of time in Q3 and Q4 last year just stabilizing the majority of the outsourced execution framework.

[00:24:57] Brett Hannath: And we are quickly now pivoting to what this means for us. Now on the ABM front, we have that vision, right? You get all of these intent signals. I want an agent to write an email to address that audience with what they are currently doing today, and then actively inform the rep that, hey, we are doing this on your behalf, and here is what the response has been.

[00:25:17] Brett Hannath: As opposed to us compiling a PowerPoint and having a 30-minute update in a one-quarter meeting with sales. So the vision is clear on the possibility of this stuff, but, as we noted earlier, there is no packaged step for that. Like, where is Adobe taking their marketing MarTech? Where is 6sense taking Agentic AI within its platform or do we have to craft our own?

[00:25:42] Brett Hannath: And we are in the throes of designing something that will, A, quickly deliver something to us, but B, and this is my biggest worry, because the industry is so nascent, and we have seen this play out before, lots of little unicorns. I say small, but you know, they are big. They are not 10-million-dollar companies. They are 300 million, they are 1 billion, whatever, but they quickly get absorbed.

[00:26:06] Brett Hannath: By the Adobe that you abandoned or by the Salesforce that you made a decision to pivot from, and you have that whole thing that you have to manage. I am really worried that, A, we choose the right areas to jump on immediately, where you do not inherit technical debt, number one. Like, do I have to now have a full-time engineering team to keep this thing up to date and running?

[00:26:32] Brett Hannath: And B, you were very clear at the start why you were doing it, and you are measuring its outcome as soon as it goes live, and quickly retire it or deliver on its promise. Yeah. And I just think, just like ABM, this whole AI thing can make that so powerful, but be incredibly deliberate in distilling the vision from the promise to what you can deliver.

[00:27:00] Brett Hannath: Now, the Accenture relationship, to the original question, just gives us this flexibility. All right, so this quarter I need real engineers to develop the first pass. Now I need to beef up the campaign to light that motion up. Now I need to beef up my MarTech team to optimize the digital experience aligned with ABM.

[00:27:22] Brett Hannath: Because, as you know, the DX side is such an integrated part of the emails you send, the webinars you host, the physical events that weave into the whole ABM experience that you are creating. And this ability to go to them and say, I need that today, I need that tomorrow, take that down, put this up, was incredibly powerful to me.

[00:27:44] Brett Hannath: You have worked in big companies before. Ramping up and then down with a permanent workforce is difficult and in Intel, it was even more difficult because very publicly we were cutting costs, right? And so, to justify, “Hey, I need 10 engineers tomorrow to engineer an Agentic AI approach,” I would not get that approved. But now with this relationship, I can pivot up and pivot down.

[00:28:10] Steve MacDonald: It makes us rethink. I literally just did a podcast with the VP of Global Vendor Relationships at Google, and he talked very eloquently about the strategic power of outsourcing, right? Part of what you are talking about here, it is not just that we have to have the talent internally. We cannot rely on an outside source. We cannot control. It could actually be the exact opposite, right?

[00:28:31] Steve MacDonald: It is sometimes much harder to control internal teams and people than it is a contracted, outsourced relationship that you can manage and monitor, right? And they are held accountable by contract, right? So what you are doing, this is not about specializing. In my mind, as CMOs, we keep getting more and more added to our plates that we need to manage. We all do as C-suite executives just to run our go-to-market strategy, right?

[00:29:00] Steve MacDonald: AI was something that we did not get taken off of our table. We got a lot more added to our table.

[00:29:18] Brett Hannath: No, we do not. We do not. It just gets added. You are right, yeah.

[00:29:23] Steve MacDonald: So here is my last question for you. It is the most important one because we have covered a lot of territory here. But for the C-suite executives who are tuning into this episode, if there was one thing that you wanted them to take away from our conversation today, what would that one thing be?

[00:29:41] Brett Hannath: Yeah, and I do not want to sound like what everyone is saying a lot, but I will reinforce it just through my own experiences. If we look at ABM, it is an evolving science. I think everyone, like with AI, is looking for the proven model. I just want to turn it on, and it works. You know, the packaged software application, ultimate promise. We are not there yet with AI, nor are we there yet with ABM.

[00:30:08] Brett Hannath: Because ABM stretches not only within marketing tactics and functions, it stretches into sales. And so this one model fits all does not exist. So lose that. Just know this thing evolves. AI will add to it or present new possibilities, but new challenges, if you do not have the skills to make it happen.

[00:30:57] Brett Hannath: So for me, it is that, and I will reinforce that. When I first started doing ABM, it was a one-to-one motion. ABM was a 60K campaign targeting a single customer in the UK in a previous role when I was running the field. That does not scale, right? And so it suddenly changed to one-to-few, then one-to-many, and then used it as a one-to-many funnel down to a one-to-one.

[00:31:00] Brett Hannath: Right? So it is born of lived experience that this thing can deliver, but be open-minded about seeing it evolve as a science and how you need to evolve with that, and be open to it.

[00:31:12] Steve MacDonald: I wish that we had another couple of hours because I know that we could just keep going. But what I wanted to say here is that the mission of this podcast is to bring different perspectives, different insights, and different experiences for C-level executives who are trying to solve the challenge of growing their business for long-term sustainable growth.

[00:31:33] Steve MacDonald: And if we can learn from everyone else, what I have learned from our conversations is how there is no way that as individuals we can keep doing everything of the expanded role that we are being asked to play well ourselves, right? We need high-performance teams around us.

[00:31:58] Steve MacDonald: And getting those high-performance teams does not mean just hiring. It means outsourcing and bringing in excellence and being able to scale up and down the way that we need to bring in roles like prompt engineers and data engineers, the way that we have not needed to in the past, right?

[00:32:18] Steve MacDonald: We have to rethink our model about how we build our teams because high-performance teams are what create high-performance companies. And the role and the definition of these teams is evolving as we think about it.

[00:32:38] Steve MacDonald: So you have profoundly changed the way that I think about this and thinking about my own business, truthfully. So I just want to say thank you. This has been an amazing conversation, and I really appreciate you coming on the podcast today.

[00:32:56] Brett Hannath: No, look, you made me think about things differently, so I am going to adjust what I go do today as a result. And I love what you do, Steve, and just going out and distilling for people how they are experiencing the world, not only as an individual but also as a professional, because we are all in this together.

[00:33:00] Brett Hannath: We can all learn from each other. So I really loved being here and what you are doing, so thank you.