Updated 11/4/2025

Sarah McConnell:

0:00Our whole company philosophy, including our CEOs, is that the only mode is speed. In the AI world when things are moving as fast as they are, before your moat of your product used to be things like, you know, what was your differentiation from your competitors? And you could go down a litany of product differentiations and why you're better than your competitors. But I feel like AI has just upended that so much that now it really is speed and how fast can you bring something new to market?

Kevin Kerner: 0:21

So how do you launch an AI product? I mean, these days, I mean literally, really launch one in a market that's this crowded. You know, the old playbook, it's just broken. If you wait for a product to be in GA, you're probably already too late. Hi, I'm Kevin Kerner, the host of Tech Marketing Rewired. And my guest today, Sarah McConnell, is the VP of demand generation at Qualified. Her team is running what I think is a totally new playbook, and their entire philosophy is built on the only moat is speed. So what does this mean? It means that they launch and sell products while they're still in trusted tester mode. There's really no time to wait these days. And for Sarah, this isn't just a marketing slogan. She's actually customer zero. Her job is literally on the line, measured by the pipeline her own AI product, Piper, generates. So in this episode, she's opening up that entire playbook. It's really a great view on an AI product and how it should be launched. We get into how their CEO's keynote literally becomes the source of their marketing scripts. We talk about why they build an in-house video studio instead of using agencies, and we cover how their own AI is used for event follow-up, and it's locked a 70% jump in pipeline for events. This is really what the new go-to-market playbook actually sounds like, and I'm excited for you to hear it. But before we get into it, this episode is sponsored by Mighty and True, my company. We help B2B brands build marketing that moves as fast as their products. If you're interested in finding out more about Mighty and True, go to www.mightyandrue.com. Okay, I can't wait for you to hear this. Let's get into it. This is Tech Marketing Rewired. Sarah, welcome to the podcast. I'm so happy to have you here.
‍

Sarah McConnell: 2:03

Yeah, thanks for having me, Kevin. I'm excited.
‍

Kevin Kerner: 2:05

Yeah, this is great. Uh in light of the fact that I talked to Maura in the summer, your CMO. But so much has happened. I mean, even at Qualified, so much has happened since last time we talked.
‍

Sarah McConnell: 2:15

Yeah, it feels a lifetime.
‍

Kevin Kerner: 2:17

Yeah, it really has. So uh maybe to kick things off, you give a little intro on yourself and uh maybe a little bit uh for those of people that don't know, for those humans that are left in the world that don't know who qualified is, and Piper, uh just give us a little overview of what the uh what the product is and a little bit company.
‍

Sarah McConnell: 2:34

Of course. So my name is Sarah McConnell. I'm our VP of Demand Generation at Qualified. I've been here almost six years now. So I've been with the company and with the product through a lot of iterations. Qualified, we call ourselves an Agentic Marketing Platform because we have an AI agent named Piper. Piper is an AI SDR agent and she's really focused on Pipeline, which is why her name is Piper. So it's really interesting. I mentioned I've been here a long time. I've seen the evolution of the product. And when people think of qualified, originally we were a chatbot. So, you know, right hand corner of your website, you know, we could do some really cool things because we could read data from your Salesforce instance and your ABM instances and male engagement platforms, things like that. But at the end of the day, it was pretty constrained to that right-hand corner chat bot. And then over time with this AI boom, we become more of an AI native product. And we have Piper, the AI SDR agent. So she's no longer just a chat bot in the right-hand corner anymore with our Piper X launch. Gosh, what has been a month and a half ago? She's now front and center on the website. It's almost like an avatar that you can have a conversation with, and she will pop up, have a conversation. She can see you if you let her see you. She can have conversations, she can guide you through the website, she can highlight things. So we've really evolved from that simple chat bot to a full pipeline generation of your website using a Gentech Marketing or an AI agent.
‍

Kevin Kerner: 3:54

Yeah, I was telling you on the pre-call, I think you guys do probably the best job of actually making AI work. Like it's a product that's that's if you look at it and the case studies and then you see the demo, it's like, yeah, this stuff is actually working. The other thing that's exciting for you guys is there are so many people that use it. You have such a rabid fan base. You got Piperfest, you do all this other stuff. It's really a pretty good use case for AI in marketing.
‍

Sarah McConnell: 4:18

Yeah, it has been. I am very fortunate that we sell to me at companies typically. Our buyers tend to be CMOs, demand gen, people who own a pipeline number. So if your point of it actually seems to be working, I, for better or worse, get to be our guinea pig a lot of our product and find out what's working, what's not, give feedback to our product team. So it is, it always makes me proud to hear that it feels like it's working because it is something that I feel like I've been very closely involved with. Because we've, you know, if I'm gonna set her loose on our website and she's going to be in charge of inbound pipeline coming from the website, that's what I'm calculated on. Like that's what my boss and our CEO, to see if I'm doing my job correctly, they're looking at that pipeline number saying, uh, she has to work, or my job is in jeopardy. Um it it has been really great to see it become an AI product that our customers, even too, are willing to speak to and say that it's working for them because we talked about this a little bit earlier, but there's a lot of hype about AI products. I think there is a healthy dose of skepticism on whether or not there are results coming out of AI products. I think it's it's valid. There are a lot of products that are very cool to have, but they aren't really impacting bottom line. And Piper is not one of those products. And I don't just say that as a spokesperson for the company, I say that as a person whose job depends on her doing her job on our website.
‍

Kevin Kerner: 5:37

Yeah, it's awesome. Well, that's one of the reasons why I reached out to you. I was super interested in the Piper X launch, which I didn't know was on a month ago. That's awesome. Um, you know, you guys have done the launch so well, from what I've seen. I was really interested to sort of get into your head in terms of how the launch went. And what's so interesting to me is that there's so many people trying to launch AI products. And so if you could, from your perspective, I'd love to get in your head about how you actually think about a product launch there qualify, because I think a lot of people can can learn from it. So let's get into some sort of some of the main event here, which is kind of the launch playbook and how you think about things. Um and I'll take maybe we take it in stages, like from the initial strategy and ideation all the way through. And we can use the Piper X launch or not use it, whatever you think is best. Let's say you're using something like PyperX. Let's talk about how you actually go through that first meeting where the product team brings you in. Like, okay, product team, this launch is gonna happen. How how far out does your go live, does that meeting happen? Like, how much time do you typically have? And what's the key information that you usually try to get from product to start thinking about, okay, we're gonna have to launch something here.
‍

Sarah McConnell: 6:45

Yeah, it's actually really interesting. I have never worked at a company that does product launches quite the way that Qualify does. And I think one of the things, even going back a step further from that initial meeting with product, is a lot of it is driven by our executive team. So our CEO, he used to be a CMO at another company. So the blessing of that is he is very in tune with what marketers need. So I feel like he is very hands-on with our product because he's been there, he knows sort of the trials that marketers are going to run into. He also knows from an executive level what he expects a marketer to be able to come to him and say is working and isn't working. So, with all of that being said, a lot of times product will come not just from him, but he will have an idea of like, hey, this is something we need to be doing. And I think you mentioned it is hard to launch an AI product. Our whole company philosophy, including our CEOs, is that the only mode is speed. In the AI world, when things are moving as fast as they are before, your moat of your product used to be things like, you know, what was your differentiation from your competitors? And you could go down a litany of product differentiations and why you're better than your competitors. But I feel like AI has just upended that so much that now it really is speed and how fast can you bring something new to market? So that has kind of changed our launch playbook a little bit more than it used to when I was here two years ago, three years ago, before AI was really forcing this speed at which we work. So a lot of times it'll start with the concept of an idea. So Piper X is one of them. We knew it was something we wanted to do. We knew we wanted to break Piper out of this bottom right-hand corner chat bot and make her more because you know, we're saying she's an AI SDR. She needs to be more than just a chat bot. So working with our product team, our CEO usually will work with them and say, like, hey, here's the idea. And they'll come back to a timeline of like, hey, this is how long it's going to take to build something like this. There are phases we're gonna have to go through for testing. And I mentioned earlier, as a power user of our product, I tend to be more involved in the early stages of testing. So, you know, we'll do trusted testers internally. We'll work with our product team and they'll say, okay, once something feels like it's in a testable state, not GA state, but testable. We are so lucky that we have so many customers that have been with us for a long time. They really like our product that we have people like clamoring to be in our trusted testers. So we have a pretty good roster of customers, including myself, that will test out that product first and sort of give some feedback before we start talking about launch timeline. Now it's a roundabout way to also say we will do launches for like Piper X. She's ready. She's on our website. You can go to qualified.com, you can talk to her, but she's only in trusted testers with a lot of our customers. So we will move fast. I mean, she's ready to go. She is there. We're selling her. She's on people's site, but our launches will coincide with like when she goes live. It's not a wait until it is in a state. We can't wait because of AI anymore. I think that we have to move fast. Now, that isn't to say we're launching like half-baked products that don't work because again, it's on our website and it does have to work. But um, it's almost like they go together in tandem when we're talking about the product and when is that going to be live and when is a launch going to happen? Move so much faster than it used to.
‍

Kevin Kerner: 9:40

Wow, that's I hadn't actually thought of that. You're right. Yeah. And there's no reason not to get it up if you've used it and tested it, but it's not actually like a production. You're not, you're beginning to sell it. There's no reason to wait. And you can't wait.
‍

Sarah McConnell: 9:51

And I would say too, you know, I've been here since we were a very small company. We didn't have the luxury of doing that before. You know, you don't have the same customers. You have a, you really have to make sure the product is something where you can take it to those customers at a very ready state. Where now, because again, we have this roster of really great customers, we know that we can give them a product that they are willing to test and give feedback on. We also know that our product team is incredible and they're going to make something that's really good. So with our product launches, part of it is also just painting the vision of like, hey, here's where the product is going. And we'll start to tease those things with product visions. Like if you're a customer and we do product roadmap reveal events, where we'll kind of give you a peek behind the curtain and say, like, these are the things that are coming. But again, I think based on your stage of company, that's only doable for us because we have amazing customers who are excited about the product and they've been through a lot of product launches with us and they know that the outcome is going to be something impactful for their business. So they are willing to help us test that and give feedback.
‍

Kevin Kerner: 10:43

I mean it was super interesting. In the AIH, you just can't wait. And it's real So how do you productionize that when you're getting, when you know this thing's coming out? Do you have the when you're thinking about bill of materials and actually what you're gonna do? How does that process look like for you?
‍

Sarah McConnell: 10:57

Yep. So it's a few different things. We always we almost always start with a keynote, which you'll see our CEO Craig do. And that is really painting the vision. So, you know, he wants to get out there and tell you, why are we doing this? Like, why does this matter to you as a marketer? We're not just doing it for the fun of it. We're doing it because we've seen a very real business need, we've seen a real need in the market. So we start with those keynotes. Typically, our our product marketing team, our CMO, will work with our CEO to get down what is that story. And that kind of really guides the rest of our launches. And we tend to do launches in events. That's something our company is very event heavy. If you go look at our resource page, we put on a lot of virtual events because they do really well for us. So the event format is typically okay, what's the story we're telling? That kind of shapes itself as a keynote. And then going back to speed, the toughest part is we've got to show it. We have to demo it. So then there's a lot of work between the product team, the product marketing team on we need to get this into a demo ready state for that event because we need to show it to customers. So we never launch it before that is ready. And then typically we'll bring on customers to sort of do a validation of yes, we've used it, we've seen it, this is why we're excited about it. And that is our typical playbook is paint the vision, tell the story, then show the product. I think if you can't show the product, people aren't going to care. They're not going to get excited about it. And then really bring on those customers to tell everyone else, like, yeah, we've seen it, we're excited, and here's why.
‍

Kevin Kerner: 12:17

Yeah, I love that. And Craig's a good spokesman too. He's awesome. I mean, he's just good at painting the vision. But what a great what a great way to get the actual actual positioning and messaging about the product and its features and why have the CEO actually talk about it on camera. Yeah. Because that I mean that's basically the script right there. Yep. And it's probably pretty, I would guess it's pretty precious to them too. They want to get that right.
‍

Sarah McConnell: 12:38

Like how it's and it will we'll go through iterations of script for the keynote, and it really helps us like hone in on that story because you know, he'll go over it with the team. And again, I'm a user of it. I'll be like, ah, that doesn't the way we're that doesn't really like mean anything to me. That's not something that would get me excited. And then we'll kind of go back and forth until we get right, like, okay, this is this is why we're doing it, and this is something that will resonate with people. Um, Craig was a product marketer before he was a CMO, so it is very much in his blood to do that. But it is such a good forcing function to get the rest of the marketing team and the product team aligned with what we're bringing to market.
‍

Kevin Kerner: 13:13

I don't know why more brands don't do that, have the C have the human face of the CEO, and then more does such a great job at being a spokesperson. Then you have customers. It's kind of like the trifecta there. You get a little triangle of CEO, another spokesman, and then you got customers. It's really smart. Yeah. How long does it take for you to produce that? I'm just curious, like the the pipeline for that. Like, is it months or weeks, or what do you typically months?
‍

Sarah McConnell: 13:37

I would say any one of our launch events that we've done. I'm notwithstanding like product testing and getting product into a good place. Like once the product is in a state where we're like, okay, we can start to demo this. My typical playbook for any sort of launch event is I want to give at least three to four weeks for people to register. So that means we've got to work backwards from like, okay, launch date is, you know, if it was today 1022, we need to go back into September and say, okay, if we wanted four weeks, we need to launch registration and start to tease this mid-September. And then depending on what the product is, how long it's going to take to get the demo right, things like that, you know, it's going to take at least a month and a half. Now we've launched things faster. Like if it's something that is already built into the product and, you know, we're we're trying to do a launch of that, but we're not building something totally net new, we can turn them around in four to five weeks. Now the team doesn't love doing that. It's not easy. It's a whole team effort and it's hard. But all that's a really long way to say, I would say four to eight weeks is a typical turnaround for like launching it.|
‍

Kevin Kerner: 14:37

Yeah. And what you're thinking about your plan to actually get it launched, media, let's say that you use. I mean, your site gets probably a lot of traffic, I guess. Do you even consider paid media or search or what other channels, like how do you get the word out to get people to the events and stuff?

Sarah McConnell: 14:52

We typically use our email database. So again, you know, I've sound like a broken record here, but because our customers are really excited about what we're doing, we get a lot of engagement for customer-focused events. So product launches tend to be if I look at a Salesforce dashboard, which we do for every one of our events, including launch events and thought leadership events, they probably make up 70% of registrants. And then the 30% are, you know, prospects or net new, you know, people who aren't already in pipeline. Where a thought leadership event is much different than that, that is skewed much more prospect and less customer. But for a product launch, we're really going to focus on emailing them. So we'll do that through a marketing automation system. Now, the other cool thing is with Piper and her email functionality, which came out, gosh, I think April of this year is when she started being able to email, is we will have her do the email for us for pre-event reg. So we'll give her a campaign, we'll say, hey, email customers, invite them to this event. It takes a lot of pressure off of me and the demand gen team to not be responsible for sending those emails and segmenting the lists and all of those things and marketing automation, which is never easy. Um, so yeah, she Piper handles a lot of that invitation. And then for product-specific events, our sales team will also get really excited. Like they know this is gonna help them close deals. They know it's gonna help with expansion, things like that. So they will also do a lot of outreach one-to-one to people in their pipeline and prospects, and they will invite them to it. I think when we break down the numbers again, I would a majority of it is gonna come from email, whether the email campaign is for marketing automation or Piper, that's a majority of the registration of customers. And then the sales team is gonna make up like 20, 30% of the in like people registering for it.

Kevin Kerner: 16:31

Yeah.

Sarah McConnell: 16:32

Because they're also trying to close deals. So Yeah.

Kevin Kerner: 16:33

You have such a it's great to have a great uh customer base that loves your product. Yeah. It's kind of the Salesforce model, you know, it's like, it's like they're you you built a little army of people who really love the agentic stuff and they're willing to learn the next thing, right?

Sarah McConnell: 16:47

It is, it's really exciting. But to your point, we don't product launches, we don't tend to put a lot of money behind from a paid media perspective. Not that we haven't done it before and we've tested it in the past, but again, we find when it's product specific, people that aren't customers or in pipeline with us tend to not care. Like they care and it might be cool, especially in the AI world when like PyperX is really cool. Like PyperX felt like something very new and very different that was not seen in the market before. So that I think was one of our highest registered for launch events that we've ever done. For that reason, I think it spanned beyond customers. But for most launch events, the main people are going to care and want to sign up are customers, and you already have a line of sight to them through like your customer success team, your salespeople that are working with them on any expansion and upsell opportunities. And then, you know, if they've opted in and they're on your database, also using a Piper type campaign or a marketing automation campaign to email them.

Kevin Kerner: 17:36

And I guess one more thing about the messaging around the launch. This new Piper X does some things that I've never seen before, particularly like the vision part. It is it is so cool. And I was telling you before, as I was testing it out, how Piper knew what was in the background or could tell what I was doing, you know, glasses and stuff. It's really amazing, human-like quality. How do you think about with AI products? Because you got a lot of AI noise out there, how do you think about best showing the uniqueness of this AI product because it is kind of a category creation? It's a new, it's a brand new thing. Do you think about that a little differently? How do you think about that?

Sarah McConnell: 18:13

Yeah, for me, it's letting people get their hands on it. Because I think to your point, when you started like asking Piper questions and you started messing around with it, you see how cool it is. So I think the demo is always great. You know, a keynote is always great. Painting that vision is always it's all necessary steps. But if you can't drive people to go see it for themselves, it becomes much, much more difficult. So for us, we had a test drive page. So at the end of our launch event, we're like, hey, you can go see for yourself, go talk to Piper, go test her out. So I think the more, and then also kind of in that same vein, when we go to events now, because we do a lot of in-person events, I think that is something that qualified. We found a lot of success with, and part of that is because of Piper's pre and post-event follow-up, which is a whole other conversation. But showing demos at events now has become imperative. Before it was like, yeah, show a demo at the booth if someone stops by. But I'm thinking back to inbound. We had just launched Piper X. Hubspot Inbound was at Moscone, which is right down the road from our headquarters. And the way we set our booth up was like a vastly different booth setup than what we'd done before. And we had a loud speaker, like we brought in a giant speaker, we had a microphone because we were talking to Piper and we were like bringing people and we would be demoing her and it would stop people that were walking by. Like it wasn't like they had just come to our booth to see us. It'd be like they were walking by and all of a sudden they see Piper on your screen, and she's saying things like, Oh, it looks like you're at a conference. What conference are you at? And people thought that was really cool. So I do think it is about finding ways to get people hands-on and seeing it for themselves.

Kevin Kerner: 19:44

Yeah. Yeah, it's completely. Like I say, it is it is very jarring when you actually see it at work and you're like, it's the next, oh wow, that is something that really, really cool. And I I encourage everyone that is listening to this to go check out the demo because it's kind of it's kind of mind-breaking in how it works.

Sarah McConnell: 19:59

Yeah, because she's there. You can talk to her.

Kevin Kerner: 20:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's it's it's pretty amazing. Let's talk about production. I think one of the hallmarks of the stuff that you do is and not a lot of people can pull this off the way you do it, is really high quality video. It's really sharp, it's narrative, it's it's both the demo videos, and I was just wondering what's the secret there. Like, how do you pull those off? Why is video such an important part of what you guys do?

Sarah McConnell: 20:26

Yep, I would say so. Very early on in the company's history, we made a big bet on video. We also made a big bet on our creative team. We have a really large creative team because we do everything in house. We don't outsource anything. Found, you know, I've worked with great agencies in the past, but it's so much easier to move at the pace that we need to move, especially in an AI-first world where we're moving so fast. If people are in-house, they understand our product, we're not having to re-explain it to them. So the first thing is we brought stuff in-house really early on. And it's actually been a couple of years since we built what we call qualified studios. And we had it in our the last office we were in, we've actually since moved to a larger office and reset up a studio. So we have something that's always ready for filming. Now, the biggest shout-out goes to there's a guy on our team, his name is Danny, and he is our producer. And Danny is kind of the mastermind behind all of it. He's on all of our recordings, he's the one that's in the studio setting up the cameras, he's the one who's setting up the shots, making sure it all looks good. So having that person in-house is incredibly helpful. Then the other side of that is the demos. So I think doing polished demos, we do them live. They're not made up, they're not fake demos. And then that's going to require if you have to do a fake demo, that's gonna require a whole other skill set of designers and motion animators and things like that to make it work. Um, more, you'll see our uh CMO Maura do a lot of the demos, but our CEO has pushed a lot of people on our marketing team to know how to demo. Like I can go demo Piper at any given time. I have, I know the talk track, I know what she is capable of, and all of our product marketers can do that. Our CMO can do that. Now, part of that is because the product is very simple to use. And so it makes it simple and easy. But I do think having people that are comfortable demoing the product from a production standpoint makes it a lot easier. So we've got Danny in qualified studios, he's filming our keynotes. Then we're doing sort of like a riverside recording with the demos. So we're getting the screen capture, we're showing it happening. And then having the studio again when we have customers come in, it's just a nice space to have them if they're local and they want to come into the office and do the filming. So we're very fortunate in that we have such a large creative team that is very talented and lets us do a lot of it in-house.

Kevin Kerner: 22:35

Yeah, I completely agree. The the, I mean, I would, I would, if I was uh client side, I would build my own video team. It just makes them so easy these days. I mean, the equipment you need is pretty simple. The editing tools are amazing. You've got things like Riverside that just makes it super easy to cut to edit. So I agree. Well, um, I was going to ask about the customer interviews that you guys do, because you do so many. How do you like what is the system that you put together to get customers A to agree? And then B, how did you make have you made that system really easy for them? Like it's really unique, I think.

Sarah McConnell: 23:09

Customer marketing, I think, is one of the hardest jobs of marketing that I did not realize until I was here. It's incredibly hard to get a scalable system for customer marketing. I think it all starts with the product. If people like your product, they're willing to vouch for it. I think if you work at a company where the product doesn't work very well, your job is that much harder to get customers to come on and be able to talk to it. We are in the position where our customers do like our product. They use our product, so they are willing to join us. We have a really close relationship with our customer success team. We actually call them QSAs, which is qualified success architects. They work under our chief customer officer, Dan Darcy. And Dan is really well connected with our customers. He knows a lot of them. He takes the time to get to know them. He's always trying to have meetings with them. So when it comes time for a customer testimonial, he usually has his thumb on like the pulse of, okay, this customer, they're really excited about it because he's really close with his leadership team. So they're always, you know, funneling information up to him about who's doing well. We also have a um, I feel like I'm just doing like a award ceremony shout-out for all the people that do a good job, but we have a really good RevOps team too. Um, our SUP of RevOps, Kieran, runs a very well-oiled machine of RevOps and the way that our data is in our systems. So when you want to talk about a scalable customer marketing program, it starts with the data in our systems and we're able to then go and look at here's all of our customers. Are they happy? What products are they actually using? What's the sentiment there? And I wouldn't be able to do that, and our team wouldn't be able to do that if we didn't have the data in place in our CRM system to pull reports and then from there we can say, okay, Dan, QSA team. It looks like these five CMOs, they've been using our product for a long time. They've been trusted testers. It's showing their sentiment is green. What are your thoughts? Would they join us? And it makes it a lot easier for them to say yes.

Kevin Kerner: 24:56

Yeah. You want to hear too is you've kind of built a culture of the customer feedback. You want the customer feedback. You're very customer-centric. So it makes it easier because everyone knows that you want that customer feedback and test them ultimately testimonial. So absolutely.

Sarah McConnell: 25:11

Our team has always we try to be very cognizant. Um, you know, we've talked, we do a lot of things, we do a lot of events. So the team is always working together to be very cognizant of who are we asking? Have we done asks of them recently? We don't want to overload customers that are happy with us. We, you know, we're appreciative that they're willing to do these things. Let's not sour that relationship with too many asks. Now, again, if you're doing customer marketing at a company where you don't have as many customers, you kind of got to make those champions that are willing to like really go to bat for you over and over again. As we've scaled and gotten bigger now, we just are able to go to different customers and make those asks and be careful that we're not overloading anyone. And I do think that starts with like a good relationship and a good feedback loop with our customer team so they know what's going on.

Kevin Kerner: 25:54

Yeah. I'm dying to ask you too about events. You guys do so many events and they seem to be so well put together. I'm wondering, um, are there certain type of events that you're now leaning into more than others? What's working, what's not? I'm hearing a lot of people doing private dinner events and you know, the more personal things. I'd just be curious what's working for you guys.

Sarah McConnell: 26:12

Yeah. So we actually we have a pretty healthy mix of events. We do, we have our thought leadership virtual events. So that lives under like me and my team from a demand gen perspective. Because in my mind, that's a lot of content. And then it it lives with campaigns. We're talking about how can we reutilize the content in these longer-term campaigns. So the the big thought leadership we usually do twice a year. We call them summits. Like we have upcoming is our Agentic Marketing Summit. In April, we had our AI SDR summit. We had an AI workforce summit, we have pipeline summits, but those are our thought leadership events where we're bringing on those are virtual. We we host it through Goldcast. We've got a really good system down for those, down from like the way that we do prep docs for our speakers. I, you know, I've been doing this for a lot of years. So the system has gotten pretty, pretty turnky. I mean, there's still a ton of work for the team to pull off, but the way that we work with our guests, we try to make it as easy as possible. The way that we're doing the recordings, we have our producer Danny in house, so he's helping us with everything. So those virtual events, they're longer, they're a couple hours. We do them a couple of times a year. Then we do other virtual events like our launch events, so very product-focused events. So that might be anything from as large as a Piper X launch, which is huge, and you know, that's a huge internal push, to smaller customer events that we'll do like our roadmap reveal events where it's very customer focused. Again, all virtual, kind of the same playbook, but just a lower lift because they're usually shorter. They're like 45 minutes to an hour, so not quite as much filming and producing and things like that. Then on our events team side, like our in-person events team, they we started sponsoring more events. And what's interesting, I kind of mentioned the Piper use case. In the five or six years that I've worked here, we've, you know, slowly ramped up in-person events. Never in my career as a marketer has it been easy to make an ROI use case to do events. You get these massive lead lists, you hand them to your SDR team. They're like, I don't want to talk to any of these people. I don't know if they're any good, but I paid $80,000 for them. So I really want them to go follow up with those leads. And it's always been hard to justify the spend because it's hard to type pipeline to it. With our Piper email capability, I don't have to worry about my SDRs anymore. I just give them a lead. I give Piper a lead list from an event. She's able to write really bespoke personalized emails, do that outreach. I actually shared on LinkedIn a while ago, but we saw a massive jump in our event pipeline. It was some like 70% quarter over quarter increase when we turned on Piper campaigns. And it was just from her following up with event leads. And it was solely events. So now this Q3 of this year has been the heaviest event quarter we've ever done. Like in-person events are per events. That's amazing. And then the last one is we will do some small bespoke dinners. When we go to certain events, like we're going to SixtSense's breakthrough, where we know there's a lot of cross combination of customers. Like we know we have a lot of joint customers with Sixth. Is we'll do a customer dinner at like a nice restaurant. A few years ago, we tried some customer dinners and got burnt. They didn't do great. We didn't get good turnout. It was a lot of money. I think things have gotten better. You know, we we've been much more selective on when we do it, where we do it, when we know customers will be there. So we kind of do it all.

Kevin Kerner: 29:17

Yeah, I agree. In that, but isn't that so interesting that those events worked all along, big events, but maybe the follow-up wasn't just humans are not quite built for that. And then you put Piper on it and you're like, whoa, it just actually these events actually work.

Sarah McConnell: 29:30

Yeah, and we, you know, we would always it would always just put a bigger onus on the team that was on site before we had Piper doing that post email follow-up because and I I go to a lot of our events. I do a lot, again, I use our product, so it's great for me to go to events and get to talk to people about it. Um, but you know, I'd be demoing the product at the booth or I'd be talking to people at the booth at these events, and you just have such a limited time to get their attention and get them to no one wants, I mean, you're busy at these events, no one wants a demo. They got a happy hour to go to. Like they've seen a million demos. So being able to ensure that we've got the right follow-up after justifies the spend that we're putting into events and the time. It's a heavy lift for the team. So we've got to make sure it's worth it.

Kevin Kerner: 30:08

100%. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Just a couple more things. I wanted to ask you about uh measurement. So you launch you do a launch event like this. I wonder if there's anything unique in the way you guys measure launch day, launch month, but almost even the long tail. Like I'm wondering how the long tail looks for you for these type of things.

Sarah McConnell: 30:24

It depends on what we're launching, but typically it's event registration. So do we have people that are actually showing interest in the event? So I kind of mentioned we have a Salesforce dashboard that is fantastic. Our RevOps team set up it has just a drop-down menu. You can toggle to any single event we're running and you can see registration by type, prospect customers, anything like that. We have our goals in there of what a registration goal is. So we're always looking at how close we are to attainment and then live attendees like how many people actually showed up. Now controversial I'm less worried about people showing up live because we'll always send something out after the event. So I'm like, you didn't show up live. Doesn't matter you already showed interest you registered. So I care a whole lot more about register number. And then if the product has a call to or the the event has a call to action from it, which a lot of times we will do. So Piper X is the example was go to the test drive page and go test Piper out to see how the launch was successful. I'm going to look at traffic on that page and like are you engaging with the product? Did you go to that? Like did people actually care enough about our call to action to engage with it? And sometimes our call to action is sign up for trusted testers like are you interested in this product? And then we'll measure it by volume of people hand raising to say that they want to be a trusted tester before we go GA so it really comes down to interest from a registration standpoint. Are people going to that call to action that we want them to do? That's like our first line of measurement.

Kevin Kerner: 31:45

Yeah. Do you use any sort of attribution around how long it takes, number of touches, all that type of stuff. Seems like it's in your case, since it is so web heavy, your own organic property heavy, there's probably just a lot of visits back to the website, I would guess.

Sarah McConnell: 32:00

Yep we're always our marketing team this is a like a broader answer, but our marketing team is all we're all measured off the same thing and it's pipeline and website traffic. So we care very deeply about website traffic.

Kevin Kerner: 32:11

Oh it's smart.

Sarah McConnell: 32:12

So now if it's people coming back for repeat visits, whatever it is, that's always a healthy and the team cares very deeply about it because that's what they're measured on. So web traffic is very important to us and then pipeline. So if we're looking at expansion pipeline our events people and our product marketers when we're running events they will always pull reports afterwards and say there was X amount of pipeline in that room of expansion pipeline or upsell pipeline because we need our sales team to care and they're going to say like hey we had X millions of dollars of people sitting in that room you need to go close those deals. Like they were there. They showed interest they were there for the whole event. So we also do really look at that pipeline number um because that's all sales team cares about is dollar at the end.

Kevin Kerner: 32:53

I love the idea of pipeline in the room. So you're on this event, you know there's pipeline in this room.

Sarah McConnell: 32:57

Yep.

Kevin Kerner: 32:58

Let's go get it.

Sarah McConnell: 32:59

If it's a thought leadership event like one of our summits then we measure pipeline generated. So like how much pipeline is being generated which we'll also do for launch events because we can look at expansion pipeline generated from attendance. So yeah we'll we'll look at pipeline for both like created from event but also what's sitting open that then came and saw this product launch that can impact the speed at which we can close that deal.

Kevin Kerner: 33:19

Yeah. Okay. That's great. Yeah that makes a lot of sense. And I, you know I register for a lot of events that I'm not I'm planning on not going to but I just want to register so I get the I get the recording or whatever. It's probably I would say like 90% of the events I register for, I'm not going to go to I'm actually shocked at how many people come to our events live.

Sarah McConnell: 33:38

I'm like you know we're going to email you this right chat going and we'll do QA in the events. So I think a lot of times with customer events with launches, they do want questions answered so they will show up to ask those questions in the chat which I totally get. But yeah I'm always shocked at our pull through numbers I'm like what we're going to email you.

Kevin Kerner: 33:54

Why are you here? Well okay so let's talk really quickly last thing about sort of future forward stuff. I'm wondering as you know you've been there a long time you've been running Demand Gen which is an amazing job that you guys do. How do you see these these events launches evolving over time as AI sort of continues to change what's possible? And you're looking at any new tech or platforms or anything that you can see in the next year or a few years that you're like these could change for the future.

Sarah McConnell: 34:22

You know, I think from a very static baseline, no, I don't like I think we'll keep doing them probably the volume we're doing them, the things I think will change, maybe volume will change is because AI is forcing us and allowing us to move so fast, we'll probably do more product launches as we are able to build more things and do more things with Piper, the onus will be on the marketing team to therefore do more launches. The team has already done a very good job of incorporating AI into how we're able to scale doing them. Because if we're going to have the volume of the product launches that we're going to have to do with the same team size, that's going to be very hard. So you know like people on my team from a content perspective, they're already using a lot of you know Chat GPT agents, things like that where they can crank out content faster. I use it quite a bit for when I'm thinking about events when I'm doing like prep documents and things like that. So I as we continue doing events, just finding ways to make it easier to pull them off in the same level that we've done it, but not needing the same amount of lift. Yeah I think there's a lot of just you know smaller AI things between like the LLMs that we're able to use for helping with content creation or um you know small things like you know we've talked about Riverside we use Riverside for a lot of our recordings their AI functionality for like they have magic clips and they'll give you suggestions of what you can use or I can go and use their their auto transcripts. It's things like that that I think have just become more commonplace in our workflow that are making it easier and will continue to get easier as we do these product launches. Now I don't envision AI is suddenly able to just take the full lift off of our marketing team as we launch them. I think it is just taking pieces within the entire workflow of these launches and taking a little bit of pressure off people.

Kevin Kerner: 36:04

Yeah I agree.

Sarah McConnell: 36:04

So you're an amazing coworker but not a replacement in this use case for I don't think in this particular use case for launches no I think it still requires so much you know we talked about doing the keynotes I think there's still so much like I guess human in the loop is the buzzword for it but you need the humans there to hear out the message and like you can use an LLM to help you with ideation and come up with different iterations of what you think the talk track should be, but it's going to take your SMEs internally hearing it and saying like no that doesn't resonate with me or yes it does. And it still requires a heavy human involvement to pull off these type of product launches, I think.

Kevin Kerner: 36:40

Yeah. Yeah. And I would guess your team's probably pretty AI savvy like the marketing team.

Sarah McConnell: 36:45

It's so interesting I was just I think I was reading on LinkedIn the chasm I think between people saying like oh we use AI for everything and then you kind of talk to people and they're like no we still haven't found out like how we're using it or where we need to use it. So it's always hard to gauge are we using it more so than most are we using it. Let like sometimes I feel like I'm way behind the ball on AI stuff. And then I talk to other people. So I think it's all over the board but the team is no matter what leader I've talked to, it is encouraged internally. Like using AI to make your job faster and better, it is a culture. I mean we're an AI native company so of course it's the culture but that's not the case at a lot of companies so I think even just by encouraging the team to find more use cases to build agents for and to use AI for it just makes the team a little more curious and willing to go do those things.

Kevin Kerner: 37:31

Yeah for sure for sure. Okay well this has been fantastic. I could keep talking to you forever but I'm going to go to the next section that I wanted to do this our final question here for you. It's got called AR AI roulette. I warned you about this at the front part of the call I'm going to put a I'm so excited your profile and a little bit about what we're talking about here in the perplexity and it's going to ask me a question the best question you're going to get for this entire and my fingers are crazy I use perplexity a lot so don't do me dirty perplexity.

Sarah McConnell: 37:58

I'm I'm your biggest fan girl give me a softball here.

Kevin Kerner: 38:02

Okay so let's try this here let me go hit send okay here it's so fast it's crazy. Okay but do you think the future of product launches will be designed more for AI algorithms than human buyers? That's interesting. Could that shift make traditional marketing emotions obsolete in favor of what the robots look for algorithm algorithmic precision?

Sarah McConnell: 38:25

That is a you know what you said it would be a good question. That is a very good question. And my not great answer is I think it's a little bit of both. So I'm envisioning like even that just sparked my I'm like ooh for future launches there is we have a woman on our team her name is Sarah she's our AEO GEO expert. She's done a really fantastic job of like understanding how these LLMs are are scraping and learning and sourcing your content. I think the thing that will be impacted with AI for our product launches is how we put it live on our website. How is it structured? Is it being structured in a way that LLMs will reference it? So I don't think it will change how we run it. I think the creativity and what we're doing from a marketing standpoint will stay the same. I think how we put it on the internet and make it available for these LLMs to read and and who's and their citing and their sourcing will change. And then what's also really interesting about that question is Piper with the launch of Piper X, Piper can actually on your website if you're having a conversation with her like if you go to Qualified and you ask her, you know, tell me about a customer story she can actually go to pages on your website like in she'll take you there as you're browsing. Like it's not just like the it'll open on the website. She'll actually scroll down to certain things she'll highlight certain things. So to that point when we do product launches now we do have to think about the structure of the pages and how we're putting the videos on there because of Piper and that is an AI product. So it has changed kind of how we do those pages because we know that Piper needs to be able to read them. She's able to speak to them and also guide potential prospects to those pages and help them through it. So it has changed that structure in a little bit.

Kevin Kerner: 40:01

Yeah it's such an interesting use case because when I think of agent-to-agent interaction on a website I think of two agents talking in the background or LLM looking at a page and it kind of serving you up the information primarily in text. In your case, your agent, let's say your AI Piper is actually able to talk to someone live like a human and then pull up a webpage that they found through talking to the webpage.

Sarah McConnell: 40:25

So it's kind of adding a whole new dimension that I had to granted it has to be on your your domain like she's not going to take you off to some other but yeah she can guide you around the website I was messing with it the other day and I was like hey I'm a VP of demand gen. What content is on the website that I would find interesting and she was able to be like here's a piece of content and then she opened it up on the screen I was on and she dropped down and was like because you're a VP of demand gen I think you would find this part really interesting. I was like she's right that is really interesting. And I forgot we'd even done that content.

Kevin Kerner: 40:53

How did she do that? It's crazy. Are you are you seeing much traffic through AI search? Are you guys getting seeing any increase?

Sarah McConnell: 41:00

We are it was actually a big in our Q3 we do v2 mom which is a very I think it's a Salesforce centric like how we do our our measuring but part of our V2Mom for Q3 was AEO and we tasked Sarah on our team to help us out. You know we don't how do we do this? Because things are going really well at the company I think we've we've gotten a lot of traction we haven't seen as much of a dip in traffic I think as some of my peers have talked about as like search shifts from Google search to more LLM search. And I think a lot of people are seeing a pretty big dip in organic traffic. We've seen a pretty steady organic traffic that we're not seeing massive jumps but we're not seeing a decline either but we are seeing an increase in LLM reference people coming to our site. It's not like huge numbers but it is an increase for sure.

Kevin Kerner: 41:45

Yeah. You know what I'm seeing is it's highly qualified the stuff that we're getting because we get a lot of the people that come through ChatGPT or we get a lead is through an AI search. When they show up it's almost like you're they're you they've the vetting that the AI does is a different like a higher level of credibility let's say if they just found you through search. It's really interesting. Yeah like um they may have done a little bit more searching or talking to the uh to the LLM about us. So by the time they get to us they they've kind of gone well these guys are pretty good. They these one of the you know one of the uh best in the in the industry or whatever and they've just asked the AI basically like a reference from the AI.

Sarah McConnell: 42:23

I set up our V2 mom in a way that each each channel from our website because I you know I mentioned earlier web traffic is a big indicator for us in what we measure. So I have reports for all of our different channels and how much traffic is coming and then from there we also have how many leads are getting created from that channel and how many are turning into opportunities. So I can always reference like conversion percentages and stuff like that. Even though our LLM traffic our AEO traffic is a smaller percentage of our overall traffic I think at its best it's like 8% of all of our website traffic. Pretty good it does have a much higher conversion percentage than any of our other traditional channels in which people then turn to leads and opportunities. So it is one of those things where like you don't need the volume because you've got the quality of people coming but obviously I always want higher volume.

Kevin Kerner: 43:10

You're going to be asked for both.

Sarah McConnell: 43:11

If you don't want it you will prevent it never stagnant so I need both.

Kevin Kerner: 43:16

Well Sarah it's been great talking to you. I love the qualified team it's it's you're so fun to talk to and so uh you're doing so much innovation over there and it's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast. I'm sure people get a ton from it. If people want to connect with you or want to learn more about qualified how should they go about it?

Sarah McConnell: 43:31

Yeah go connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm always looking to talk to people on there my name's Sarah McConnell if you ever want to see things like I kind of mentioned the event report and we talked about you know seeing an increase I'm always willing to share that stuff. So if you ever want me to share any of my like reports or things that I'm doing I'm always game.

Kevin Kerner: 43:46

So cool. Thanks so much Sarah look forward to talking about

‍