Sinziana Ursu: 0:00

I do think that B2B marketing will get closer and closer to consumer marketing. I feel like that's already happening. So I think things like you know, like I think the brands will get bolder. I think having a strong B2B brand will matter more and more. I feel like the you know kind of how buyers interact with even enterprise buyers interact with B2B brands will get, will become a lot more and less and maybe like casual Hello everyone, my name is Kevin Kerner and this is Tech Marketing Rewired.Kevin Kerner: 0:33

Today, my guest is Cinziana Ursu, the VP of Integrated Marketing at Upland Software, with extensive experience leading demand generation and integrated marketing at companies like WP Engine, Dell and IBM. Cinziana is an expert in making marketing programs work from strategy all the way to execution. In this episode, we're going to get into the playbook or her playbook, I should say for modern integrated marketing, covering how to build campaigns with a real point of view, how ABM has evolved beyond acquisition, why you need one scorecard with sales, and how AI is becoming a critical tool for her to move faster and smarter. But before we jump in, I wanted to say the Tech Marketing Rewired is brought to you by Mighty and True.

Kevin Kerner: 1:14

Mighty and True, my company, helps CMOs launch the critical strategies they can't get to. So if you have a plan that's stuck due to bandwidth, talent or skill set gaps, our expert teams can augment your staff to turn that strategy into measurable outcomes in as little of time as one quarter. You can find out more about us at MightyAndTruecom. Okay, that's it, let's get to it. This is Tech Marketing Rewired. All right, hi Cinziana, how are you doing?

Sinziana Ursu: 1:47

Hi, kevin, doing well. How are you Thanks?

Kevin Kerner: 1:49

for having me. Yeah, it's great to see you.

Sinziana Ursu: 1:51

Same here.

Kevin Kerner: 1:52

Especially from your trip back from Romania that you just told me about.

Sinziana Ursu: 1:56

I'm fresh from family time and, yeah, doing great, excited.

Kevin Kerner: 2:00

Yeah, that's awesome. Hey, and, by the way, thanks so much for for I didn't even mention this to you when we're pre-call. Thanks so much for that for a podcast post on linkedin. You mentioned us with a bunch of other podcasts, so that's. That was awesome you never know.

Sinziana Ursu: 2:14

Thank you y'all. I'm glad I discovered I. I'm glad it's a great addition to my feed.

Kevin Kerner: 2:18

So yeah, you just, you just never. You do that. I do this thing, but you just never know. Does anyone listen to it, though? But it was great actually seeing it, and you and I met through the Tech Marketing Rewired dinner that we did here in Austin, which is great, I'm so glad we connected that way.

Sinziana Ursu: 2:32

Yes, it was a lovely evening.

Kevin Kerner: 2:34

Yeah. So I was actually super jazzed to talk to you because I haven't had really anyone that's been like really in integrated marketing. I've had a bunch of different types of people, but I would say that you're one of the key practitioners around this, one of the first ones I've talked to. So I was just. I just wanted to geek out a bit today on integrated marketing what you've seen working and not working, how things have changed. Of course, you've been at a bunch of different places, so I was really excited to do that. And then we have a special treat for everyone that you and I are planning at the end. That has to do with some AI tools. So really looking forward to getting into it. Can you really quickly just go through a little bit about your background, how you got to where you ended up, and then we'll get into it?

Sinziana Ursu: 3:13

Yeah, so hi everybody. So Susiana Ursu, I am down here in Austin and I've been in B2B tech for I guess 14 years now and I sort of jumped around from large companies started at Dell to WP Engine, where I spent a significant time in my recent career, and then Endboarder and now Upland Software and there's been kind of three sort of threads through my career Integrated marketing, which is campaigns, whatever you want to call it, engine and feel together, however you want to describe it, engine and fuel together, however you want to describe it, just kind of bringing different channels in a cohesive marketing program, as well as account-based marketing and digital. So those have been kind of my three areas of focus. More recently, I run demand generation and one of the business units at Upland, which is a portfolio company. A lot of different brands, so very a lot of opportunity to kind of bring different products and perspectives together under a unified campaign. So that's me.

Kevin Kerner: 4:14

Interesting. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, and you've been. I really love WP Engine and their go-to-market. You're a great company. So you've been about big and small and Dell and all that stuff. What do you think? That's the one. I'm curious, like. You've seen all these companies, all these different management styles, everything that you've done to build programs at scale at those. What do you think the most transferable lesson is across all of those companies?

Sinziana Ursu: 4:37

Yes, that's a great question. So I will say two things. When crafting a campaign, a program and you can think of account-based marketing, I guess, as both a program and a campaign Having a one unique point of view and a clear message that connects the campaign together, that would be one, and I know that's basic marketing. I think we're going to say, or I'm going to say a lot of things.

Kevin Kerner: 5:01

Yeah, but it's important.

Sinziana Ursu: 5:03

Isn't this marketing? So making sure you have a clear, distinct thing you're saying that relates closely to your audience and that you're very clear on what the thing is and what the audience is would be one, and that applies no matter the type of program. And then the second is really thinking cross channel, to use a buzzword in your program and campaign builds. So you know it's every campaign I built. There's usually a step in which, with a big or a small team, we all sit together and think about what is all the expressions that this campaign can take.

Sinziana Ursu: 5:40

What does it look like on the website? What does it look like in an outbound email? What does it look like in a marketing email? What does it look like on the website? What does it look like in an outbound email? What does it look like in a marketing email? What does it look like in the sales conversation? What is the enablement internally that we need to do around it? And I think that's what makes a campaign a campaign versus just a random tactic. So I think that's the second element that's really important 100%.

Kevin Kerner: 6:01

Like back in the day when we had offices, we used to take the full campaign idea and we would, when we started getting creative, we would actually literally put it on the wall so you could like see all the elements together. I don't know if people do that as much anymore, like they see the full thing, especially now with like vibe marketing. It seems so. It seems like there's the danger for marketers to now but oh, I got that, I just want do this, let's just do this one thing, the vibe thing. I wonder if it sort of stimulates more one-off things than this integrated channel view. I guess.

Sinziana Ursu: 6:35

I think that's a great. No, that's a great point. I think there's a risk of that there. I think it's similar to. There's always this balance that I think marketers have to hit, and right now, maybe even more than ever, around acting with urgency, like going out and activating especially if you're at a smaller size company not always, though and going out and doing the thing and testing it and I'm a big believer in that like go and test it and and see what's going on and make decisions based on that, but you do have to kind of balance it with what is the bigger question? Like what are we trying to say? Like, what is the full campaign plan look like, whether that's formalized or not? Just having that thought, because, yeah, I think that helps balance that impulse of all right, we're just going to go do it, and now we're going to build an app because it's easy, and we're going to build creative because it's easy, and there is a risk that it's going to feel disjointed.

Kevin Kerner: 7:28

Has the pressure changed over the years from the speed that your executives want to get stuff out? Do you feel like that's Because I'm on the agency side? I see it a little, but I wonder on the client side, from so many places is there a pressure now that's different than there was five years ago.

Sinziana Ursu: 7:47

let's say, I would say so. I think it's absolutely there's an expectation, because there's less because tools got better right and there's less like it is easier in some ways to create content of all sorts, whether that's video or, you know, written content, whatever it is. So I think that created some of that pressure and I do think there's like, as a marketing, as a marketer or as a marketing leader, I think it's important to kind of catch up the process to that. So, for example, I'm a big believer of getting like the creative story approved by executive leadership, whatever, before you go too far into the work, and that's like a simple practice that can be adopted and just doing that, no matter the size of the program or how fast you want to roll it out, I think just taking that step can really help you move faster down the road. So I think there's things like that you can do to balance that as well.

Kevin Kerner: 8:49

Yeah, that's a great. I don't think a lot of people do that these days, but now that we have Slack and collaboration tools, why not just use the campaign tagline or something and send it to internally? Would you send that to sales executives? Like, who would you send it to to?

Sinziana Ursu: 9:04

sales executives. Like, who would you send it to? Yeah, I think kind of I would probably send it to a few key leaders that, honestly, I have the potential of maybe stopping the campaign further down the road Sometimes that's sales.

Sinziana Ursu: 9:17

sometimes that's your direct leader, but I think getting those people's buy-in early and their input, not just their buy-in, is important. But I do want to also again I'm going to say balance a lot, I guess. Balance that with no matter how many tools or how marketing has changed or hasn't changed, it's still important to not do marketing by committee.

Kevin Kerner: 9:57

So I think it's important to, yes, get approval, get buy-in, get perspective from the people that matter, without you know, turning everything into a group project, especially the creative process, because that has its own kind of part. That's maybe not the best to if you don't show it and you need to show it to certain people because you'll start doing it and then down the road it'll get stopped, or you, uh, or you do show it to too many people and that becomes the roadblocks. There's like a balance there. I think that is really important. In fact, I think growth loop came out with some stat and that they were doing I saw chris o'neill sent this out about one of the biggest in the, the research they did. The biggest roadblock to speed was the planning process, the actual planning process. I can't remember what the number was, but they have some really good data on how frustrated marketers are because they just they come up with an idea and they just can't get it through the approvals and through the process. It just takes so long.

Sinziana Ursu: 10:40

Yeah, and I think some of that and getting ahead of that happens sort of in the teams you pick and kind of the companies you pick. And I was lucky to work in great companies where marketing had a seat at the table and creativity was valued and doing something different was valued. I think for the marketers that are in situations where that's not the case, I think that is legitimately a hard thing to overcome. A hard thing to overcome and you know you can have a process and you can, you know, do all kinds of you know communication exercises. But if fundamentally there's not an appetite in leadership to take a little bit of risk with marketing, that's hard to overcome.

Kevin Kerner: 11:21

Yeah, it's a cultural thing, right, it's like all the market culture. You need some support. Okay, this is fantastic. I wanted to start diving into a couple pick your brain on some integrated marketing strategies, and the one biggest strategy that I think I see pretty much everywhere is account-based marketing and account-based. I think people have used account-based marketing in some cases to just mean targeted marketing, Like just hey, we're just going to have a target of people and we're going to target the message to them. But it has seen somewhat of a resurgence. But there's a surge and everyone wants to do account-based. Why do you think that is? Why do you think there's such a big or do you think there's a desire to do more ABM stuff?

Sinziana Ursu: 12:00

No, that definitely is, and I think it's because everybody intuitively feels like this is a great idea, because a converse, and sometimes it's a little bit of an eye roll because it can be overused, right. So, but like, fundamentally, just, yeah, you should know who your audience is and you should tell them things that are personalized and speaks to them, and you should create channels that are right for that audience and package it all together. So there's not, I think all of those things really speak to marketers as like yeah, this is how we should approach it, especially if you're more in an enterprise space and you're targeting those larger companies and that kind of you know like feels like the right movement. So in that way, I think it makes a lot of sense. I think account base has also evolved over time because you know there's tools out there now, and have been for several years, that have made it easier in some ways to do a lot of these, and I think it's also kind of expanding outside of acquisition. So that's something I've seen recently that you know.

Sinziana Ursu: 13:05

Traditionally, I guess in my, you know, earlier career, account base was like sales wants to do a go after this 100 accounts. So what do we do? What do we tell them? How do we target them to break in and get that entry level conversation and now that's evolving into? We have 30 customers that we really love. We want to make sure they stay and maybe they have offices in different countries. So how do we use account base to extend across these GOs or across this different buyer, maybe in the company, and so on and so forth? So I think that has evolved quite a bit, but the fundamentals are still the same.

Kevin Kerner: 13:44

Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah, there's the account base experience now, which goes farther down into, I guess, the customer relationship. But we have a lot more customers that are using ABM for upsell, like a lot of upsell stuff, like you're a current customer and here's the next thing you want to get, especially these bigger companies that have some embedded foothold and then they buy another company and they have to. Then they want to do an expansion campaign, so I think it's very effective for that. Okay, so can you walk us through some of your experiences with ABM, maybe a little more tactfully, like what are the most important things to consider or what have you seen that works in running a successful ABM print campaigns at a tech company?

Sinziana Ursu: 14:25

Yeah, I'll give the things that I think matter and then I'll give like a specific example that I think might help. So the things that matter. Having none of these is probably going to be mind blowing, but I do think the fundamentals kind of matter, right.

Sinziana Ursu: 14:41

Yes Be clear on what your goals are, aligning with sellers around that and making it as specific as possible, right. So both covering the this is an acquisition versus a retention play but as much as possible putting a number to it. So at WP Engine, at certain points we actually attached the entire enterprise number to the account-based motion. So we knew that that's what success is, because we were going to hit it or not. That's what success is because we were going to hit it or not. Similarly, like not being, you know, being targeted enough to where you have a unique point of view that will kind of come through in your campaign. So, whether that is like a specific number of larger companies that want to standardize on your solution, maybe that is some kind of product trigger that tells you that it's time for that customer to expand, anything like that. That is like a very defined product or, I guess, audience driven thing that ties those accounts together and also gives you something to say. And then the other one is just consistency in that messaging across the different channels and thinking across many different things. So we, you know, like anytime I roll out of any type of ABM campaign, there's always like a website component, right, it's never just emails and ads Really thinking about like, have we enabled sales teams to have these conversations in the same way, if those accounts do come in, inbound things like what are some you know differentiators that we can do, like we did direct mailers that were, you know, super interesting in the past, like at the time at Mboarder, we actually send like a little gift box that had a QR code that took you back to the landing page, so you kind of had that real life excitement oh, I got a gift which people still enjoy and then it took you to a digital experience that then you can learn more about the product, so anything like that Also, I guess.

Sinziana Ursu: 16:36

Last thing, I would say kind of as an example so you know, word of the day is also helping do a lot more interesting things in ABM, especially on the kind of personalization side of things. So at mBorder we ran a campaign where we put in our customer information, like public information, anything that's in the news that you know came up about them, our communications, the account map that the you know the account rep put together all that. And then the LLMs are good at two things they can categorize information really well, and then obviously we all like to get help on writing from them. So we did those two things. We asked it to categorize what are the main pain points that those customer has, each individual customer had, and then we use those three or four bullet points in creating the one-to-one campaign. So you know email copy, you know landing page, et cetera.

Kevin Kerner: 17:36

Did it perform well.

Sinziana Ursu: 17:38

It performed really well. We've seen about 40% engagement from those accounts, which we measure just essentially as any kind of response, whether it was a form or a response to an email, something like that and that was about our benchmarks for the rest of our programs.

Kevin Kerner: 17:54

Yeah, isn't that super interesting. Like AI does such a good job of synthesis and it is a sort of human assist capability, Like it's almost impossible for you to as quickly or maybe even creatively bullet what the need might be. Like you could do it yourself but you'd have to do a lot of reading. And that's one thing I've found really helpful is the ability to load data and then have it just synthesize something that a human can look at and go, oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense and here's other ways that I can make it come to life from a personalizationization perspective. One question I have I don't know.

Kevin Kerner: 18:27

We work with some companies where the brand is so important that the ABM effort kind of gets a little bit neutered in the brand sort of standards, let's say, and these are typically bigger companies. But there's also the goodness of leveraging a brand because they're seeing your brand immediately. They might, you know you don't look like something crazy or talk like something crazy that isn't about your brand. So do you have an opinion on how creative you can get outside of a brand when you run an ABM campaign? Like, let's say, you want to do something really more branded like the Target company? Do you have an opinion one way or the other in that regard.

Sinziana Ursu: 19:10

I mean, I think my opinion is go for it. In some ways it's, you know, lower risk. You are still maintaining kind of that brand authenticity at the company level. But in this one-on-one messaging to this target account you're trying to get into, yeah, get a little more interesting, as long as you kind of keep it within the broad, broad brand guidelines, and I think so, yeah, so I think that is totally good to do and that's really how I think.

Sinziana Ursu: 19:42

More of personalization I feel like there was a time when personalization and ABM became almost gimmicky. There might be different opinions here. I'm not a big fan of like, oh, we're personalizing because we're going to say, hey, cincy, when you get to this landing page, to me that's not super impactful. Everybody knows now that that technology exists that can do that. So it's not as interesting to me as, like, we know that you have, you know, just got a round of funding, so congratulations on that Like something that's like specific to the company and or even just specific to them as a marketer, or something like that. I think it goes a longer way.

Kevin Kerner: 20:19

Yeah, I totally agree. It's like the visual personalization is kind of nice and neat, but I've seen some really cheesy stuff that's like this is not good. If this goes out to someone, it's not great. You're trying to lean too much into their brand or brand category. It's just bad. You know, the one place where I see really good personalization sort of data from personalization is in like gong transcripts or sales transcripts. It's amazing what you can mine from conversations that salespeople have had with a prospect and then you go after them with that type of stuff. We never used to have that stuff back in the day. I always get super excited about that.

Sinziana Ursu: 20:57

Yeah, I actually that was an unlock for me as well when I started my new role like I spent time kind of looking at where the top opportunities come from, like in our tools, and then layered listening to the actual conversations from those calls on it. And it was so interesting because you know attribution's messy it's always going to be some sort of messy and you know we looked at these tools and all these opportunities were coming from search or social, whatever it was. And then you listen to the calls and what we uncovered was most of those were referrals or they like saw a brand at an event or things like that influence that call and I think every marketer kind of knows that a little bit. But just seeing proof of it was helpful.

Sinziana Ursu: 21:46

And then we took that and turned it into we should have a referral program. Think every marketer kind of knows that a little bit, but just seeing proof of it was helpful. And then we took that and turned it into we should have a referral program and we did kind of a basic, basic one, but I you know it really unlocked that there's something there that we should focus on. So it was a whole new channel for us. We wouldn't have found that otherwise.

Kevin Kerner: 22:01

It's great. Yeah, I love the post-sale where did you or anything, where did you find out about us? It's like the most true thing because it's the thing that the person actually remembers. It may not be the first thing they remember, but it's what they remember that drove you and more often than not it is kind of nowadays. It's referral of some type. But even though I've been justifying marketing spend, I mean, even a referral is great. A referral without also a some air cover that you're actually a legitimate brand and you do this stuff is still. You still have to have the surrounding brand effort. You can't just go all off referrals right now also referrals are.

Sinziana Ursu: 22:42

You know there's probably a lot built behind a referral, like they might have. You might have seen your brand four or five times before they asked for a referral or went to a friend that's seen you interact with a product or whatnot. So, yeah, I think there's always multiple touch points and I feel like maybe now we're finally willing to accept that, but that there's always gonna be more than one thing that influences that conversation.

Kevin Kerner: 23:05

Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. One more thing on ABM that I think a lot of people struggle with is the sales relationship or the sales interlock. How important is it to you in your experience to have a almost ongoing and immediate relationship with salespeople when you're running ABM campaigns?

Sinziana Ursu: 23:25

Super important and probably one of the most important things to ensure success, and there's kind of, I guess, three things I would say that help also drive that in my opinion. One is the goal alignment piece, so making sure that you have a clear goal for your campaign and that it makes sense on the sales side as well. So if you that you have a clear goal for your campaign and that it makes sense on the sales side as well, so if you're committing to like a very small portion of their number, they're most likely not going to care about your campaign, and you know it's kind of hard to argue against that. Second is and you know I'm kind of been in this campaign management role for a long time so having like a strong operational framework on how you interact with sales. So not being afraid to, like you know, be clear on like this is how we're going to read the results on this campaign and it's how often we're going to meet about it and this is the agenda for the meeting Making sure you're looking at the same scoreboard, meeting, making sure you're looking at the same scoreboard.

Sinziana Ursu: 24:27

A lot of times, marketers and sales just simply have different reporting, whether it's like tools versus Salesforce or whatever it is, and that just you know from the get-go kind of breaks that relationship because you're losing that credibility. You're sitting there saying that you know these accounts are amazingly engaged and then sales might see that, well, we're not seeing any opportunities from it. So making sure you're agreeing on what good looks like and how you're going to measure it together. And then third is like making sure that you know building those relationships, like remembering that they're people too, and that can also get gimmicky, like you don't have to be. You know best friends with all your sales counterparts and go have drinks. You can, if you want that's always great but kind of learning their language and taking the time to be in their shoes, understand how they think about their quarters, what deals are top of mind, what aren't like, how they kind of think about their business. So you can gain that trust by speaking their language. I think that's also really, really important.

Kevin Kerner: 25:25

Yeah, I love it. I love that. The second two were great, but the top one is like I wouldn't have thought of that. Like if it's your, if it really doesn't mean much to them, they're going to completely ignore you. It's like oh, it's only 1% of my number this year. Great, good luck. Good luck getting any attention. Okay, that's a lot of good stuff. On the ABM side, I wanted to kind of pivot here because when we talked initially, you were one of the few people that I at your level, that was really experimenting with AI and particularly the generative AI side. I've done a lot of experimenting myself on generative AI, so it's really interesting for someone at your level to be really in the tools, like doing stuff and really trying to learn. What made you decide to want to experiment with some of these AI, these generative tools? Like, what is it in you that made you want to do that?

Sinziana Ursu: 26:20

Yeah. So I'll say a couple of things. One is I'm a learner at heart. I think I just kind of you know genuinely like to to to learn. I think it's a great time to be a marketer because we have, like, this opportunity for all new kinds of tools and and I think, before you kind of end up being very specialized, or at least you are really specialized in the side of marketing, until you know, maybe you moved up in a in in your career. Now every marketer can be any type of marketer a little bit right, Like we can all. We have more access to write content and as well as do things like video and and and design. So that's kind of the personal part of it. The second piece is I think it's a huge unlock for all marketing teams If more marketers can actually execute on the creative side.

Sinziana Ursu: 27:07

I feel like even at smaller companies, there's a little bit of a block between. We have this idea, we want to test it. You know like well, you know we need to get it on the road map of the creative team. We need to make sure it's prioritized accordingly, kind of what we were talking about earlier and tools. Like you, I've been playing around with Midjourney and Jasper a little bit. I know, hey, jen is really like a favorite for video. I'm starting to play around with that. It just allows to kind of quickly spin out some creative and then test it and learning some things from there. And sometimes it's going to work and sometimes it's not and I've been surprised either way, but yeah, yeah, it's prototyping, I guess, is what you're saying.

Kevin Kerner: 27:50

It's like, as a marketer, you always had to go to the art director or the copywriter to do something, and if you're really not a designer, you can get kind of passable stuff from it. What have you found works the best and what have you been like? Oh, this is a total fail. It's not ready yet.

Sinziana Ursu: 28:06

Yeah, so that's a great question. So I have played around with it. It took me a while to get to actually prompting appropriately for a creative output, so I think I walked into it with not enough humility and started playing around with the journey and I was like, oh, this is not going well, this is not what I'm envisioning at all, and so it was very disheartening. It took me much longer than I thought. So I think there needs to be some awareness around that and also, you know, there's a lot of great tools, a lot of great content, and people are sharing around learning how to use those tools. So I think leveraging that really helped me.

Sinziana Ursu: 28:46

The other thing is not having a specific use case in mind is also dangerous. So I'm finding, just from conversations, a lot of marketing teams kind of jump in and they're doing things, but I think it's still important to start with, like, what are you trying to solve? Like, do you have a bottleneck around? You know block production? Do you have a bottleneck about creative? Do you just do you want to unlock a new channel, like social influencers or something like that, but you don't have a person or the bandwidth on your team, so you're using AI to kind of help you get that in market faster. Do you need to do more research? Are you expanding into a new ICP? Whatever? It is kind of defining that clearly before you start playing around in the tools, because they're very distracting and for people like me that have a brain that can jump all over the place, it is very easy to get lost in them.

Kevin Kerner: 29:40

What's the best thing you've ever created, where you're like, wow, I created something that's really cool. What's the what worked the best Video images, copy like what was it and what did you create it in?

Sinziana Ursu: 29:52

Eventually images got really cool, but it took me a long time to get there.

Kevin Kerner: 29:56

Yeah, mid-journey stuff. Yeah, it's real.

Sinziana Ursu: 29:59

And then honestly, like it's interesting, like the strategy stuff sometimes surprises me. So, again, I've been a campaign marketer for a long time. I have my preferred templates of oh, this is how you do a kickoff and this is what the campaign plan looks like, and having AI create comparisons to that is sometimes sometimes does a really good job, at least for 80% of it there, and that's an unlock and it's a little scary. Uh, but and I found this surprising, like all at once- yeah, I, yeah, I'd have some similar experiences.

Kevin Kerner: 30:33

The research side is really good when they launched the deep research stuff in chachapiti and also gemini. It's just man, it can. It's amazing what it can go out and find and synthesize for you. It's really pretty mind-blowing. Have you tried?

Sinziana Ursu: 30:46

Did you find yourself kind of having a whoops moment of like? Oh this used to take me four days of my whole life. Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Kerner: 30:54

And then I started thinking well, what is the value? The value of a strategist or even an agency that's working in this stuff is not going to be going and getting and even to some degree synthesizing it. It's basically the context you place on top of it. It's the human in the loop part where you're going okay, this is great information Would have taken me two weeks to build this. I got it in like 45 seconds and so everything just gets accelerated, but you still need the human. There still has to be some level of human creativity and context, or it's. It's just, you know, research at that point it's just not very useful. Have you tried? I've been really impressed with canva, some of the canva ai stuff. Now it's not great, but it's good. The image stuff. And then hubspot's pretty good. Like some of the. We do our drag and drop newsletter and we put images in a few sections where we don't have images and it does a really good job of like producing like little cool images.

Sinziana Ursu: 31:48

So yeah, like things like that you would have had to send to a designer yeah it's just so much easier, and I think that I get back back to the testing piece too, because you know that, I think you know there's there's something to be said, especially for the creative and engagement side of yeah, just get more variations out there and see what works, because sometimes even the best designer's gut just doesn't work. People just like something different. But there is so much overhead around that and now you can quickly spin off five versions of this ad and see which resonates.

Kevin Kerner: 32:22

Yeah, unbelievable. You have variations and variations and copy. It's just it's an amazing time to be living. It's just nuts, okay. So let's look ahead a little bit, because you have got such this historical perspective on integrated marketing. What do you think will matter most if I'm a person working in integrated marketing? What's going to matter most in the next two or three years as an integrated marketing marketer?

Sinziana Ursu: 32:44

Yeah, I mean I feel like I think the fundamentals, like the, you know the? Do you have a cohesive story? Do you know your audience? Are you thinking through all the channels? I don't think that's going to change. I do think. I mean, I think the reality of it is that teams will get smaller or they will just be, not necessarily that anybody's going to like get fired over. It's more that the need for larger teams I think it's going to decrease.

Sinziana Ursu: 33:10

For, for this context, I think we would be able to automate and kind of use some of these tools for production, especially where we won't need as big of a, as big of of uh, as as much people, but we will still need somebody to kind of coordinate and like understand how to work within the different types of technologies or agents or whatever it is.

Sinziana Ursu: 33:32

I do think that B2B marketing will get closer and closer to consumer marketing. I feel like that's already happening. So I think things like you know, like I think the brands will get bolder. I think having a strong B2B brand will matter more and more and I feel like the you know kind of how buyers interact with even enterprise buyers interact with B2B brands will get, will become a lot more frictionless and maybe like casual, like there'll be a little less of that seven step purchasing process. I think people will expect to see the product earlier and I think that will have to show up in a company. It's like you'll have to be comfortable kind of introducing the product early in the process, having videos, having ways to like kind of show people what they're buying before they have that sale conversation, and some of that is already happening. But I think it'll continue to accelerate.

Kevin Kerner: 34:31

Yeah, really good. Do you think that the I mean as an integrated marketer you kind of have to be a Swiss army knife of pretty much everything, glue that holds everything together. Do you think the skills change? What will be the skill need? Will it need to be pretty much the same or is there any new? Like, if I'm an integrated marketer, how should I be looking at my skill set over the next two or three years?

Sinziana Ursu: 34:54

That's a great question. I think there's two ways. There's two kind of paths. One is continuing to work on, like the technical skills, whether that's fluency with AI or understanding of tools.

Sinziana Ursu: 35:09

Marketing has been very tech-driven for a long time, especially for this B2B world, so I feel like that's going to continue. So the same way that every marketer was a marketing ops marketer at some point because there was so much automation. I think that trend is going to continue. And then second is just remembering that you're marketing to people. So continuing to focus on, like kind of the creativity in marketing and that can mean that that's probably not a course, right, that can mean different things for different people, but not being afraid to get out of your own world, looking to those brands that do a good job, not to copy, but to kind of you know, maybe understand how they look at things. And, yeah, like pushing, not being afraid to kind of push those boundaries and think of yourself as a creator, even if you have a product that maybe at first glance feels a little more technical or not as exciting, I guess.

Kevin Kerner: 36:06

Yeah, isn't it interesting? Like with AI, I think you were saying you get close to the customer. It seems like there's a possibility that some marketers might actually become much more removed from the customer because they think they can use AI for pretty much all the information they need about the customer. But I think what you said got me thinking that really, ai can take the stuff away from you that you don't really want to have to do every day. You can automate the bad stuff and do the good stuff, so it should give you more time to actually get closer to the customer.

Kevin Kerner: 36:38

So, your messaging is more locked, you're creative better because you have more time to spend on the good stuff versus the mundane stuff. And I don't think we're there yet. Like the AI and agents and automation stuff is just not where it needs to be yet, but you know it will get closer. So I think that's really good advice, like staying close to the customer, because some marketers might actually be farther away with all this AI stuff.

Sinziana Ursu: 37:07

It's a really interesting point because I guess, yeah, the other thing would be I do think marketers are getting more involved in the deal cycle and later into the deal cycle and I do think that will continue, so that, you know, infamous kind of passing of the lead like, okay, this is a marketing lead, now sales is going to take it. I think that will disappear. It's been kind of blurred for a long time now just because of the way people purchase. So I think that's going to continue as well and marketers will become more kind of complementary to the sales cycle later on, whether that's by helping communication, by creating events, by helping, you know, kind of bring a tailored experience of some sort to the account, and they will be, you know, staying with the deal much later, which I think it's beneficial for everybody.

Kevin Kerner: 37:48

Yeah, fantastic. Okay, I could talk to you all day, but I'm gonna I'm gonna try to make us both famous in this next portion of the Tech Marketing Rewrite podcast. So I talked, I warned you about this before, so in this version, I usually do AI roulette, but since you're such a good sport, I've uh, cindy and I are going to actually going to try to write some music together so we can edit this any way we want. If we screw it all up, I'll edit it out of the podcast. We'll see if. I'll see if this works so.

Kevin Kerner: 38:17

I've been geeking out with this tool called Suno and I'm going to share my screen here and um, this is now sharing this screen. First, I'm going to do a little test here to see if you can hear this Cincy.

Sinziana Ursu: 38:32

Got it.

Kevin Kerner: 38:34

Okay, cool. So what we're going to do is we're going to try to write a some lyrics here and we're going to put in a style and this is going to. With the way the Suno works, it's complete AI songwriting. Basically, I've been amazingly impressed with the thing. It's just really freaky how well it does and as a former musician, I'm like, oh gosh, this is really crazy. So let's think of we're going to have her write some lyrics for us here and I'm going to go into the full song mode and let's give me some top of mind thoughts about what you want to write about today, cincy. What did we talk about? That resonated with you as a songwriter.

Sinziana Ursu: 39:16

Ooh, I mean, you know, account-based marketing now versus later.

Kevin Kerner: 39:22

Is still as hard today as it ever has been as it ever has been.

Sinziana Ursu: 39:33

Are your customers delighted or freaked out by your personalization?

Kevin Kerner: 39:36

They'd be freaked out by personalization. Okay, cool, that's perfect. So let's write some lyrics here. So this thing will go and it'll give us a couple of lyrics here that we can look at. I was going to do auto, but heck, let's just go all the way. I think of you as the title of the first one. I think Customers are going to freak, customers are going to freak. I kind of like this one. I do like I think of you. Yes, because it's more introspective. So let's select this one. Okay, give introspective. So let's select this one. Okay, give me a style that you like. If you're in your car on your way to work and you want to listen to some music, what would you want?

Sinziana Ursu: 40:15

Okay, now that you said you're a former musician, I'm like embarrassed. So what's your favorite type of music?

Kevin Kerner: 40:20

Well, you can see, but I have drums in the background, so I wasn't really a musician, I was a drummer.

Sinziana Ursu: 40:27

So I don't know if that counts a drummer counts more than more than I do. Oh, I don't know.

Kevin Kerner: 40:33

Let's we mentioned taylor swift before, but we have all these.

Sinziana Ursu: 40:37

It's very timely.

Kevin Kerner: 40:38

Let's do it okay, we got uh let's see a big week. She got a rap, techno, yeah, okay, let's do it. Let's just do Taylor Swift Power Pop Top 10 Hit. Let's put it as really catchy, okay. So here we go. Here's two. We're going to play a few seconds of this and then we'll post it on LinkedIn as our duet, our, our, our band launch party.

Sinziana Ursu: 41:17

There you go.

Kevin Kerner: 41:21

Can you hear that she thinks?

Sinziana Ursu: 41:28

I'm gonna fall for it. I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

Kevin Kerner: 41:34

I don't know A little um. Is that a little more?

Sinziana Ursu: 41:40

emo Blank 44-esque.

Kevin Kerner: 41:40

I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Okay, let me get to this one. What'd you think of that?

Sinziana Ursu: 41:49

It's a little too emo. I think we're. It's a little. Yeah, it's a little. Blake 44-ish. We did better with all this looking than that.

Kevin Kerner: 41:54

Yeah, hold on, we might. I might try another one here, then we'll edit Hold on, here's the second one. She thinks I'm gonna fall for it. I'm not sure. I'm not sure We'll get you to kill Forrest.

Sinziana Ursu: 42:15

I think that it will be worth it All right, I'm excited.

Kevin Kerner: 42:19

Not so sure. Not so sure, not bad, pretty catchy. Remember, this is about account-based marketing. Crazy, that's really a lot for an account-based marketing song.

Sinziana Ursu: 42:50

Yeah, I mean you've got to feel very strongly about account-based marketing. I wonder if maybe the prompting of the lyrics it sounds like it needs a lot of, maybe it needs a little bit more.

Kevin Kerner: 43:01

Yeah, I still think it's hilarious. It's so funny.

Sinziana Ursu: 43:06

It's kind of sad too, because some of these songs sound like what would be playing on the radio. So I guess that says something about the quality of the music. I don't know if that says something about the quality of the tool or the music, but yeah.

Kevin Kerner: 43:18

I like the second one better than the first one.

Sinziana Ursu: 43:21

I'm voting the second one.

Kevin Kerner: 43:22

Yeah, I would go second one. We'll put it out on LinkedIn and we'll see if people like it. We'll probably. I think it's impressive for what we just did. It took us like 15 seconds. But as a songwriter, I wouldn't be too. Yeah, susie, this has been great. This is really fun, and you had some amazing integrated marketing wisdom to impart on us. I know people are going to want to get a hold of you, so how should people reach you if they want to reach out?

Sinziana Ursu: 43:53

LinkedIn. I'm the only Susiana Ursu, so yeah, find me and connect.

Kevin Kerner: 43:58

All right.

Sinziana Ursu: 43:58

Find me more active out there, so it's on my to-do list for the year.

Kevin Kerner: 44:03

Oh, you did awesome. I really appreciate your time and I hope to catch up with you again soon.

Sinziana Ursu: 44:08

Thank you so much. Have a great day.

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