Kevin Kerner: 0:00Hey, this is Kevin Kerner with Tech Marketing Rewired. In this episode, I sat down with Maura Rivera, who's the CMO of Qualified, a leading agentic marketing platform that helps companies rethink how AI and humans work together across the sales motion. Maura and I had a great conversation about the rise of AI agents in marketing, especially in the sales funnel. We walked through their platform, including Piper, their AI SDR agent, and how they've transitioned much of their inbound activity from human-led reps to AI, all while redeploying those team members into newer, higher leverage sales roles. We also dug into how she's managing AI messaging in a very crowded market, how AI is reshaping the structure of marketing teams, what websites will look like in an AI-first future and why orchestration between agents, not just automation, may be the next frontier in go-to-market. This is really a great one. Maura was a lot of fun to talk to. Let's get to it. This is Tech Marketing Rewired, All right? Well, hi, this is Kevin Kerner, and welcome back to Tech Marketing Rewired.Kevin Kerner: 1:05

Today we're talking to Maura Rivera, who's the CMO of Qualified, and they're doing some amazing things in agentic marketing. Maura's been at Qualified for what? Five years or so and has been helping lead the company from an emerging startup to what I think is one of the most recognized names in the RevTech space. Before that, she spent time in product marketing at GetFeedback, was in customer marketing at Campaign Monitor and started her career in marketing at Salesforce. A great seasoned leader In our short time, knowing each other's sharp mind for, I think, go-to-market strategy and driving growth, and if you look at the stuff that they've done at Qualified, it's really an impressive marketing effort. So, Mara, thanks for joining us and I am so happy that you're here.

Maura Rivera: 1:50

Thanks for having me, kevin, and thank you for the warm introduction. I appreciate it.

Kevin Kerner: 1:54

Yeah, my pleasure. You know I have a lot of friends and customers that use Qualified and they can't. You know all of them say great things about it. There might be a few people watching this that don't know who you guys are, so maybe you could start with just a quick overview of Qualified and then we'll get into some more fun questions.

Maura Rivera: 2:12

AISDR agent and she's designed to help marketers generate more pipeline and do it at scale. So what we're really focused on is helping marketers kind of leave the traditional funnel where they're doing all of this stuff to generate leads. They're relying on humans to work those leads and they're hoping pipeline comes out. On the other end we have this agent named Piper who can generate pipeline for you autonomously and at scale, and it's been pretty exciting. We launched her as a product a year ago and we've had over 500 companies hire her and kind of adopt this new way to generate pipeline. So it's been a really fun ride because it feels like we're at the forefront of just some massive transformation that's happening in the workplace right now with agents and we get to sell to marketers and being a marketer that's really fun. We get to kind of help, you know, work hand in hand with them and where it's all going. So it's pretty fun.

Kevin Kerner: 3:10

That's a tough bunch to sell to too.

Maura Rivera: 3:12

It is yes, they're critical.

Kevin Kerner: 3:14

Yeah, they're a little skeptical at times. I think it's really cool what you've done with, I guess, anthropomorphizing the AI, which we're talking a lot more about. Like a lot more people are doing that and I want to get into that because I think it's a key part of your go-to-market message and brand. But I want to like first start digging in into this. They qualified. I originally thought of it it was just a chat bot, but now it's handling a huge chunk of what an SDR used to do and, being a former SDR, I just find it fascinating, like some of the stuff that you're able to, how far you've taken it. So where do you see, just at a core level, where do you see AI replacing right now the SDR role today? Like, what tasks or motions are getting absorbed first?

Maura Rivera: 3:59

Yeah, we're really focused on the inbound funnel. So that's why we focus on marketers. You're doing all this stuff, you're driving traffic to your website, you're doing events, you're generating content, and when you have hand raisers who want to get in touch with your sales team, that's what we see as a really great opportunity to automate that function. So when we look at the AISDR role, we kind of see outbound, which is contact, enrichment and prospecting and looking to break into net new accounts. That's definitely there's an art to that.

Maura Rivera: 4:28

And then we look at the inbound, and that's where we're focused, which is, if folks are showing intent, if they're showing interest, how do you get them to a meeting as quickly as possible? And that's where we think an agent is really ripe to kind of take over that function. So that's where we're focused, that's where we see it going. And when we build our AISDR agent, we want her to be able to do everything an inbound SDR would be able to do from knowing everything about your buyer to engaging with them across all your channels email and website and, most importantly, like working towards conversion and pipe gen and getting a meeting on the books with qualified buyers. So inbound is our thought is, why wouldn't you automate that function? If you have hand raisers who want to talk to you, why would you send them away? Why would you give them the opportunity to go explore your competition or another vendor? Get them into a meeting as soon as possible, and agents are perfect for that.

Kevin Kerner: 5:20

Yeah, it's really an amazing opportunity if you think about it, because they used to talk to us about, like the time to time to connect. You know if you had some call in or you had to get a human and if you're not getting back to them within a certain amount of time or a form or something, you need to get back to them immediately. So it kind of shrinks that time to conversion at the really critical point where, ok, something's going to happen here, let's get the person into the right. So it's an obvious and, I'm sure, technically challenging thing to do. Is it too early, is it too human dependent to fully hand off at this point any of the inbound motions? I'm curious to see your perspective on how far can it go and when will we get to completely like? If it doesn't go all the way like, when will we get to completely human out of the way?

Maura Rivera: 6:08

Yeah, I mean, I think agents are perfect for that early qualification, that early engagement, the meeting scheduling. Those are all tasks you can automate anyways. I'm curious to see what happens kind of beyond stage one, pipegen, like will an agent be able to take over the selling motion, the demoing motion, the pricing conversations? I don't know. I think a lot of those still require the human element and like the emotional intelligence and being able to understand how to run a sales cycle properly. I think that's where co-pilots come in, where they can lean on an agent to help guide them and give them insights and next best actions. But I think kind of that stage one to close still requires some of that human element yeah, yeah, and you would know you've been.

Kevin Kerner: 6:54

When we're talking kind of the pre stuff, you were telling me that you've implemented it in your own company, like you use in your own company. How did your sales team react to it? Like what's the?

Maura Rivera: 7:10

did you get any resistance to like making this move? Yeah, you know what our sales team loves it because inbound pipeline never been higher. But that took some time to get their confidence in it. And, to be honest, kevin, I was nervous at the beginning Also. We launched Piper, our AISDR agent, in April 2024. We knew we needed to drink her own champagne, eat her own dog food, whatever the phrase is. We knew we needed to use her for our inbound motion and I was a little nervous. I was like this is our brand on the line. If somebody comes to our website and wants to talk and she doesn't do a good job or she doesn't get that meeting booked, like I'm accountable for the pipeline number to our company, to the board, etc. So I was a little bit nervous at the beginning and one thing that we've seen now I can say confidently is like Piper can run circles around human SDRs, not because humans aren't great, but they can't work 24 seven. They don't work nights and weekends. They don't always have the ability to answer intelligently right away if they're a new rep. So my mindset has shifted, but I needed to get myself there.

Maura Rivera: 8:11

What we're seeing a lot with our customers is they crawl, walk, run with deploying an agent in their pipe gen motion. So what that means is a lot of folks will say, okay, we're interested in how we can kind of infuse an AISDR agent like Piper into our inbound motion, but I don't want to change it overnight because that's scary and you don't want to mess anything up. So we see a lot of customers who will start with an agent kind of crawling, which will mean she'll work weekends and she'll work nighttime and if she can work all the leads that maybe your human SDRs wouldn't have time to work anyways, like top of funnel event follow-up or content nurture. And then when they walk, that's when they have the agent work 24-7, kind of on the front lines but still ready to hand somebody off to a human if somebody says they want to talk to a human, and then they run, which means they just have an AISDR agent handling all of their inbound. We're in the run phase right now.

Maura Rivera: 9:07

We've actually redeployed all of our inbound SDRs to prospecting and outbounding and Piper is the AISDR agent who works for me as the CMO. She works actually for a guy on my team and he's a GTM AI manager, so he's overseeing the agents that work on our team and so that's also been cool because these new jobs have arrived and kind of come to be, which is managing the agents, and we're seeing a lot of our customers follow that same trend, which is let me crawl, walk, run. We have a lot of customers who now proudly say we don't have inbound human SDRs anymore, we've redeployed those calories and they just have Piper and it gives them scale, it gives them autonomous pipe gen and if the numbers didn't prove that at work, they wouldn't do it. So they have the results to show them it's possible.

Maura Rivera: 9:58

Quantum Metric was just a customer of ours we were just talking to, and they have an AISDR agent powered by Qualified who's working all of their MQLs, their entire inbound funnel, and the results are fantastic because they're just getting more juice, because they have the capacity to work all of them. So it's been cool to see. But you can't expect to get there overnight and I think, as a vendor, it's our job to lead people on this journey and give them best practices and build their confidence in an agent so that they can go to their boss and say, okay, we're ready to to like, get this really ingrained in our workflow.

Kevin Kerner: 10:30

It's amazing. You know people talk about like AI taking jobs, but I think you've just proven that you had all these people that were handling the inbound. Well, those people you transitioned to outbound because probably, I would guess, you have more leads going into the outbound funnel. So you got more stuff coming into outbound. You redeployed those and then you created a job to manage the agent. So I don't think no, I don't know if we know where we're headed with how this is going to work out with employment and people taking people's jobs. That's a pretty good use case, for actually, in this case, it really didn't affect, it really didn't drive the jobs down, it just changed them.

Maura Rivera: 11:06

Totally, and you know SDRs, it's a revolving door you have to get the good ones get promoted. The ones who aren't great, they leave the organization. So as a SDR manager, you're always trying to backfill, you're always recruiting and hiring, and so that's where a lot of our customers will go, is they don't? They don't like redeploy those calories right out the gate.

Maura Rivera: 11:29

But if somebody leaves, if somebody gets promoted, they'll backfill them with the agent and they can use that headcount, those headcount dollars also like put them back into the marketing part of the business deploy new campaigns.

Maura Rivera: 11:37

Maybe there's like a digital campaign you didn't have funds for anymore, but you can use that headcount cost for, have funds for anymore, but you can use that headcount cost for. So I think one thing we talk about a lot is like that's a job that maybe those folks didn't want to do anyways, and maybe there is new opportunity in the business. And there's like all of these jobs you know, you look at lamplighters or data entry specialists and over time they've evolved into like those people can do other things too within the organization, and that's okay. Like those people can do other things too within the organization, and that's OK. But when we launched Piper, there was a little bit of resistance and I think now marketers are like OK, I can see how we can do this, the right way for our company and the right way for our people too. That every it's kind of a win win.

Kevin Kerner: 12:18

That's an awesome thought. I've never actually thought of that before, that there are jobs that just you know maybe no one wants to do and you're actually like, let the AI do it. Piper can handle it. Piper's got thick skin, she'll just go off and do this stuff. So that's a really cool thought. I hadn't thought of that before. What do you think? You've implemented this on your website and other customers have done it. I wonder what you think about. You know it was always traditional web form and then it got to be chat and now you've got this agentic thing that's on your site. What do you think about the evolution of the website experience when you have this AI first go to market motion? Like, how does the web user experience change, or does it change at all?

Maura Rivera: 12:58

I mean, I think it's absolutely going to change. I think that if you look over the last two decades of website production, we have hierarchies and folks really have to do a lot of work to find what they're looking for. But buyers today are trained in this chat GPT era where they have a question, they want it answered, they have a follow-up question, they want it answered, they want what they're looking for surfaced to them immediately and I think agents now have this ability to really have the buyer lead the experience that they see on the website. I see a future who knows when this will happen where like websites are really like chat GPT, where you're asking questions, you're interacting with them, you're finding what you want. And I think agents are kind of the stepping stone to that, like Piper, the AISDR agent.

Maura Rivera: 13:47

If you arrived on the site, kevin, we'd be like okay, we know you're in our pipeline, she's going to surface this offer for you, she's going to be there to answer a question. If you leave, she'll follow up with you over email and ask about this product you were showing interest, so she can help kind of get you what you're looking for and then also guide you down this buying journey. And I do wonder also, just with the rise of generative engine optimization and all of this work we used to do on the website, how relevant is it anymore? A lot of what we created was for us as marketers, to get that SEO juice. So I think the website will transform to get the buyer what they need as quickly as possible, based on their how they like to consume information in this chat GPT era. And then also we're going to figure out like maybe we don't need all that long form SEO content, we just need to answer questions for people in a really succinct way.

Maura Rivera: 14:40

So I'm curious to see like what the B2B website looks like in a few years.

Kevin Kerner: 14:44

Yeah, that's mind blowing. Did you see the NL Web announcement that Microsoft did? It was about they're creating a web. I guess it's a structure of a website that's entirely optimized to be read by agents and so.

Maura Rivera: 14:57

Oh, interesting.

Kevin Kerner: 14:59

The next step of that thought process, that thought experiment. Think about, like you have an agent that's talking to a human, but have you thought about the agent actually talking to another agent?

Maura Rivera: 15:31

Yeah, I think that's the next big wave, which is like agent orchestration, because if you have agents deployed throughout your entire organization like we have Piper, who's our inbound agent, but we also have an outbound agent we're using this company relevance and they're doing prospecting for us, and we have an agent who's inspecting all of our in-pipeline deals and giving us summaries of what's happening there. Those agents need to be able to talk to each other, just like humans would be able to talk to each other. So that agent orchestration is paramount. I think a lot of folks let's fast forward to the end of the year they'll have bought all this software, but if it's not working together, what's the point? Just like if your humans weren't working together, that doesn't work, your business breaks. So I think that's the future, which is like the agent to agent, collaboration and orchestration.

Kevin Kerner: 16:21

Yeah, composability and getting things to talk together. It's the key. It's like it's what's opened up all this stuff, really the ability to have these things talk together. Okay, so I've been dying to ask this question because you've done I mean, I think your company's done this masterfully, because I, like, I went through all the Piper Fest stuff and it's just, and then you know, I didn't really know Piper that well before. So and you call her, you know you're calling her a she and it's a person and you're managing it and I, you know you gave the AI an identity. You know personality and, in the event, what inspired the creation of what drove you to actually name her. You know Piper, the brand.

Maura Rivera: 16:56

Yeah.

Kevin Kerner: 16:57

And why Piper? I'm just curious why Piper too.

Maura Rivera: 17:00

Yeah, I mean it was. It was really intentional. You know, back in 2024, when we launched her, there were a sea of AI launches and I was saying every website went into dark mode. Every website had wands and, like chat, gpt type, every website said AI powered this, ai powered that. And you're like what does it all mean? Did you just slap that on your website and make it, you know, and make it seem like it's AI?

Maura Rivera: 17:25

And so we had a lot of discussions, when we were going to launch this product, of an AI SDR agent that she needed to operate like our best SDR. So actually, when we were in like the product development phase, we kept referencing this woman, blake. She was our first ever SDR and she was the best. Everybody who came to our website. She installed their go-to-market data. She knew if we had a close loss opportunity with them. She knew where they were located, where they were in the funnel. She was so friendly and approachable and contextual in her messaging. She was my dream SDR.

Maura Rivera: 18:00

And so when we were building this product, we kept being like well, this agent needs to be like Blake. They need to like, be on message, they need to do the research, they need to work towards pipeline and conversion, just like Blake. Would Blake's now this, like this leader at our team. She leads a big sales function, but when she started in her career here six years ago, she was the best and we kept saying it needs to be like Blake, and we kept. We had this feeling of like. We want folks to feel like they can hire this agent onto their team, they can hold her accountable to hitting her targets, they can have insight into the work that she's doing, like it wasn't just an AI tool. We were building a teammate. We were building this AI teammate, this agent who worked for us.

Maura Rivera: 18:43

So if you see the picture of Piper, it's actually the AI version of Blake, which is funny. So Blake like that faith. If you see her, you'll see the resemblance and Blake is one of my brother's good friends, actually and folks will be like did I just see Blake on the 101 on that billboard? And I'm like no, it's Piper, but inspired by Blake. And then we named her Piper because she generates pipeline. That's the goal she's working towards 24 seven. She's not just a Q&A agent. She's not just there to like to answer questions. She's trying to book a meeting with the account executive. She's trying to work towards pipeline goals. We even have Piper on our leaderboard, like we can see how our outbound SDRs are doing, like we can see how our outbound SDRs are doing, and then we Piper's listed and if Piper's not doing her job, we've got to talk to her and figure out what we can roll out.

Maura Rivera: 19:29

So it was really important to us. But we had a lot of conversations before that of like is this weird? Will people, how will people receive this? And I've been blown away at the reception. And the cool thing is, kevin, some of our customers have hired Piper and they call her Piper, like Asana. If you go to their website, it's Piper. But then we also have a lot of customers who've made their agent their own. So like Ox named their agent Bella and Greenhouse named their agent Daisy, and we have, like, this whole sea of agents out there powered by qualifieds because we want them to represent. Like Brex named there's Brexton, like we want them to represent their brand. So it started this cool movement of folks feeling like they really have this addition to their team yeah, well, it's genius because, um, it's an agent and this it's interacting with people.

Kevin Kerner: 20:16

A lot of agents are just in the background like doing their thing. When I taught, when I did talk to Chris of Growth Loop Chris, the CEO Growth Loop last week, they have the same thing and they talk about their agents as people, but they haven't named them yet. I think the naming thing is really interesting. Has Blake asked for royalties yet?

Maura Rivera: 20:38

We'll make sure she gets proper recognition because it is you know, it's her brand also and it's cool because she's been with us since so early on. So, I think she's like. She's like. I'm flattered, but she was part of the decision to make sure that she was cool with it because it is, you know, yeah, leveraging her brand.

Kevin Kerner: 20:55

It's great to have a model SDR like that. You know they're like gold for sure. No-transcript. How did you pull that off? There were just so many people that were raving about the product.

Maura Rivera: 21:30

Yeah, it was definitely intentional. I think that right now there's so much AI hype and for us to have customers with a real agent in production who've seen results is something really special. Real agent in production who've seen results is something really special and I think that inspires other customers to feel like, okay, this is real and I can do the same for myself. So I think in my backgrounds in customer marketing, there's no better megaphone than you can give than to giving it to your customers If they can talk about their use cases and their success stories and their learnings and their findings and what they iterated on. I think that that's key and it's been cool because we did a Piper Fest last September, about six months after we launched, and we had a lot of customers there and they were talking more to the vision. I'm excited about hiring an agent. I'm excited about where this can go and then fast forward to the Piper Fest. That was one year after launching this agent, and then fast forward to the Piper Fest. That was one year after launching this agent.

Maura Rivera: 22:25

It was really fun to watch all of these folks talk about real results. Asana was talking about 22% increase of pipelines since launching Piper. We had dozens of customers talking about with solid pipe gen numbers. So that's a fun place to be and I think as marketers you want to feel like you're investing in technology that's going to not just be shelfware but move the needle in your business, and so to have that is really fun. It makes me really proud that we have all of these happy customers and I think it's a testament to our product. It's a testament we have a really hands-on customer success organization who are really involved in making folks successful. So it's all kind of working together.

Kevin Kerner: 23:03

Yeah, that's awesome. I would imagine in the AI world, events and face-to-face communication are going to be really valued now because everything is going to be. Everything is so cold and impersonal with AI can be, I should say, but in terms of your overall launch strategies or marketing strategy, event is a piece of it. How do events do events, other types of events or what's the other strategy that you use to sort of get the word out about this, about Piper and her capabilities, like where you put events with other stuff that you're doing?

Maura Rivera: 23:32

yeah, I would say like since we launched Piper, we've gone a lot bigger on brand advertising. There was a feeling when we launched her of, like folks are excited about this idea of agentic marketing and hiring an AISDR agent. So when we launched her we did billboards for the first time.

Maura Rivera: 23:47

We did a commercial for the first time. We did podcast advertising for the first time. It opened up this confidence in doing bigger brand plays because we felt like we had a really exciting story to tell. So those are kind of like that brand awareness bar. From a paid perspective, we're really focused on owning the AISDR category. A lot of LinkedIn advertising to our target accounts.

Maura Rivera: 24:13

Events just help us with that relevancy. We're, of course, doing third-party events, but also owned virtual events. Those have become part of our playbook, which is a big quarterly virtual event. That's not like Piper Fest is very customer centric, but we'll host like an AISDR summit or big events just to bring together marketers to talk about where it's all going. And then we're always focused on product launches, showing innovation with Piper and everything leads up to Piper as like she's getting stronger and smarter and more capable. So, yeah, that's kind of that's kind of our playbook. And then content content's a big part of it, like just a lot of video content, a lot of podcasts, just to kind of stay top of mind for folks.

Kevin Kerner: 24:54

Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, the event side is going to be, I think, as I think, in the space. Particularly if you're a marketer, you want to talk to other people about this stuff, because, no one really is the expert at this point.

Kevin Kerner: 25:04

So it's kind of fun to talk around it and just see what other people are doing. It's very much like when social first launched, when no one really knew what it was and everyone was trying to like figure it out. There was no expert. So communities like this, like our conversation that we're having and other ones, are really important because there's a lot of innovation happening and it's happening so fast, faster than ever. Being able to talk to other marketers about this stuff is super, super important and I was really glad to see you guys did that with Piper Fest. You have more of the community stuff going on.

Kevin Kerner: 25:35

From a content perspective, I think I mentioned when we talked before. I was just so amazed how much content you guys put out. This is a lot of it Tons of resources, helpful resources, the events and all the information you put out. Just generally about the AI agent space, I'm just curious what your content operations looks like, like. How do you, how do you make it work like that? How do you get that volume? Would you be interested in what you're doing? Yeah, I think we realized early on in this agentic movement like we've got to be.

Kevin Kerner: 26:01

How do you get that volume? I'd just be interested in what you're doing to get that done.

Maura Rivera: 26:04

Yeah, I think we realized early on in this agentic movement like we've got to be out there with a point of view, we've got to help guide to your point, kevin. It's really leveled the playing field, which is a good thing, but everybody is looking over their shoulder and researching and I feel like it's lit this fire under marketers. There's so much newness out there how this fire under marketers of like I got to. There's so much newness out there how do I navigate it? And we wanted to be positioned as subject matter experts on how to think about bringing agents into the fold for marketers.

Maura Rivera: 26:33

In our team we do everything in-house and that's allowed us to move really quickly. We have a stellar marketing team. A lot of us have been around for a long time, so I feel like there's just a everybody works really well together and everything kind of goes through the through the machine. We have a great program manager. We manage everything in Asana. We're doing everything from landing pages to eBooks, to video content, to these virtual events, and we are really focused on speed, because things are changing so fast that if we wait a quarter to publish something, it's not relevant anymore.

Maura Rivera: 27:05

So, how can we like keep this drumbeat? One cool thing that we did a few years ago was we actually built a studio in our San Francisco office. So if we have a demo we want to capture or a keynote to capture, we go into our office and we have this like big cool studio and we have a guy on our team who captures and edits the footage and we can turn content around in a day. So that's also just allowed us to move quickly and not be reliant on agencies or waiting or because it's like you can't wait, you got to get the story out there.

Kevin Kerner: 27:36

No doubt.

Maura Rivera: 27:38

And our CEO used to be a CMO and he's like a big believer in just high quality content and that's kind of been part of our DNA since we first started was like you just got it. You got to keep that both the production high, but also just like you need to pump it out quickly but keep the quality high. And that's always the balance. Which is, how do you keep both of those things?

Kevin Kerner: 27:56

Yeah, for sure, are you? Have you baked AI into your content operations or do you use it in the marketing?

Maura Rivera: 28:04

How do you use it in the marketing? How do you use it? I'm just curious. Yeah, I mean a lot of different things.

Maura Rivera: 28:07

We have, like, our video teams, definitely using a lot of AI functionality, even for little things like podcast sound editing or for doing a first pass at a social clip that we can push out. Our writer, our head of content, pr she's probably one of our most AI savvy folks. She's using Notebook LM to pull together a bunch of podcast interviews and surface great soundbites for our executive team, for executive thought leadership. I feel like the list goes on and on, really, of how we can use it and that's what allowed us to be more efficient, kind of how we produce everything. We even have one of our ACDs or creative directors right now. Associate creative directors like toying around with some totally AI generated brand videos. That's all AI generated and we're seeing if we can get one of those into the market. So it's. I think it's fun because it's opened up this creative outlet to see what we can get.

Kevin Kerner: 29:00

It's so fun. Well, I'll race you more because we're doing the, because we're doing the same thing with the brand video, with VO.

Maura Rivera: 29:05

Okay, what do you?

Kevin Kerner: 29:06

think, because when I saw that, I was like there's no reason you couldn't create some sort of short brand video, whether it's, you know, just something funny or surrealistic, but still fits the brand, and you can do it. And once you get good at it, you can do it in, you know, maybe an hour, a couple hours or so.

Maura Rivera: 29:22

You might need to put it into After Effects and add some stuff or Premiere A few things here or there, but the opportunity for VO3 for short form video is just incredible, just incredible the opportunity it creates, Because a long time ago I was on the video team at Salesforce and Salesforce does the most beautiful videos in the world, but we would put a lot of time and a lot of money and a flyer whole team out and do all this B-roll footage and it just makes me wonder, hmm, how would? How would you create a video like that today, in 2025? Because there was so much blood, sweat and tears? Yeah, I think it's. It's changing everything, every aspect of marketing. I think it's fun.

Kevin Kerner: 30:02

Yeah, it really is fun. It's a great time of experimentation. It's awesome In terms of the marketing structure of your team. Maybe in this AI world, how do you see the marketing team changing or the roles changing? I always ask the question to get perspective on how you see, from a skill set perspective or a structure perspective, how the marketing organization might change.

Maura Rivera: 30:26

I mean, I just think the way the candidates we're looking for are gonna continue to evolve, like I think we will always need subject matter experts a really great product marketer who understands the ins and outs of positioning.

Maura Rivera: 30:39

A really great content marketer who understands like big picture storytelling. A great creative who has a vision for brand and look and feel. So I think we're still going to need those subject matter experts, but we're going to need to bring folks onto our team who understand how can they leverage AI to move faster, how they can push us to maybe abandon the old way of doing things and embrace new technology. And so I think it's just about the folks we're looking for, making sure that they're forward thinking and they want to embrace change. But then I think some of those skills that are really niche skills, those will still serve a lot of value for folks. I don't think those go away. I don't think every marketer becomes a generalist who has an AI assistant. I think you're going to have subject matter experts who can intelligently use AI to kind of get you know to the front of the pack.

Kevin Kerner: 31:30

So, and the folks?

Maura Rivera: 31:31

on my team who are vocal about we should try this, or have you used this Like? That's such a delight because they're bringing new ideas and innovation every single day.

Kevin Kerner: 31:40

Yeah, so tools first mentality, like I wonder how I could do this with a tool, but it is. For me. It's been hard with our teams to get them to make that shift. We're starting, we're just about ready to start some hackathons where we do I think I saw someone who posted this they had done the same thing, maybe it was Clay does it where they do their marketing team or their teams do hackathons where they give them a challenge and say, hey, here's the tools you can use. We'll separate into five different teams and go build something and you give them all the AI tools to do it. You give them Gamma and you give them Jatch, ept and you might give them like a relay app for agents and stuff.

Kevin Kerner: 32:19

And you say go build something, and we're about ready to start that, and I hope that what that does is begin to unlock things for people. There's a certain amount of fear, I think, that some people have they're going to break something or it's. You know, they're not technical, but it really is super accessible at this point.

Maura Rivera: 32:35

Yeah, it probably was Clay. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people are doing it, but I just went to a event with G2 and with Clay and us and Sixth Sense sponsored it, and they were talking about those hackathons, because Clay especially seems like tech that the sky's the limit. I was asking our ops guy. I was like, oh, if I wanted to, based on LinkedIn job change, do this and sync that data in and then fire off this campaign. He's like, oh, yeah, we could, we could build that. Like there's this new openness to building. Like, yeah, we could figure that out.

Maura Rivera: 33:04

I feel like years ago it was like no, that's not possible.

Kevin Kerner: 33:08

Need a full stack developer. Can't do that. How do I get to the data? It's impossible.

Maura Rivera: 33:12

Yeah, but it's good, kevin, that you're encouraging your teams, like you know, with us. You know our eng team is using Cursor and every it's like if there's an agent that can help you move faster, do it. But I think that needs to come you know that needs to be part of the culture of the company that you're encouraging that shift?

Kevin Kerner: 33:31

Cool, I have one more question and then I'm going to. I want to ask you a lot a generated question here. But what's the? What's the one on unlock? You're still chasing for your team Like what's the next step for what you're trying to do?

Maura Rivera: 33:43

I'm still curious about how this agentic movement is going to change analytics for marketers. That's like the one unlock. That's my dream, that I have an agent that I can go to, just like I go to my head of marketing operations and say build me a dashboard for this, show me the trends in our pipe gen, show me which campaigns are working and aren't working, and do it in a way that's not pre-built dashboards that they have to go edit, but just like generative analytics, and I think that's where we're going. So I'm curious I feel like so many of the like the front end things have changed, but I'm curious about marketing operations and analytics, how that's all going to just put more data in the hands of our marketing leaders to make smarter decisions and be less painful to try and build for marketing ops professionals. So that's the unlock I'm looking for. I think it's coming.

Kevin Kerner: 34:36

Yeah, less painful. Not replace them, but just become less painful. I really like what like a snowflake's doing with their AI inside of the CDP. It's really we're just at the very beginning of it. But the fact that they're making it so conversational with the CDP and then you can get more data than ever into the CDP, it's just we're right at the beginning of that. I don't think we're far away from that, mara. I think that's you know that's going to happen where you can have conversations with the data and it just creates not just the text output, but it creates dashboards and all kinds of ways to yeah, and the insights and to yeah, that's right.

Maura Rivera: 35:11

Or recommendations like maybe you should be doing more of this based on this.

Kevin Kerner: 35:14

Yes, yeah.

Maura Rivera: 35:15

Like acting like a teammate with you know it's a strategist in addition to kind of that like data scientist.

Kevin Kerner: 35:21

Yeah, and then maybe that emphasizes good management skills at that point by the individual. Like we'll all need better, the ability to manage the agents better, or the AI better it becomes. You know you have got to manage people today. Yeah, you know, and you're just, you're just going to have to manage a really, really smart fast thing Totally.

Kevin Kerner: 35:42

In the right way, because you can set it off in the wrong direction. Or you can you know you can, so that that critical, critical thinking still has to be there or you can really go really fast in the wrong direction.

Maura Rivera: 35:53

Yeah, you need those guardrails, you need that ownership, you need somebody who's managing the agent. It's not just set it and forget it, at least at this point. But it is a whole different skill set and I think for folks who go to interview for their next job, if they can say you know, yeah, I manage this agent and this agent.

Kevin Kerner: 36:22

Like that's awesome to have that skill set. These new jobs are being created like who are probably light years ahead of folks who are 10,? 20 years older than them. Like he's working for the Texas Parks and Wildlife and in herpetology there's no one's using AI yet, and so I'm telling Luke you got to just go full on, be the guy that does the.

Kevin Kerner: 36:36

AI thing for herpetology. So think of all the other industries out there where that's going to change. The people that adopt it and become good managers of it are going to be very valuable.

Maura Rivera: 36:48

Yeah, I think that's great advice. He can be the mover and shaker at that company.

Kevin Kerner: 36:52

Okay, so I do a thing at the end of these. I warned you about this.

Maura Rivera: 36:56

I know.

Kevin Kerner: 36:58

And you still showed up. So it's pretty simple. I load a question into a perplexity and then I hit send and it's basically just give me a provocative and spicy but respectful AI roulette question based on your LinkedIn profile and then the questions that we have. So I'm going to hit send here and see what it gives me. Rexy's real fast.

Maura Rivera: 37:18

This is a first Kevin I've never had this, oh really, oh, that's good.

Kevin Kerner: 37:22

Okay, mara, you built Piper an AI SDR agent with its own brand personality, and even a festival. If Piper suddenly gained full sentience and demanded a seat at your executive table, what's the first marketing campaign you'd assign it and what's the one thing you'd be terrified? It would do better than you. Oh, oh, my gosh.

Maura Rivera: 37:44

Well, the thing I'd be terrified she'd do better than me is like answer a question that I got about our product or integrations or something really complex, because an agent's trained on your whole website and all your messaging so she's could probably answer most questions about our product better than me. And then what was the other part? What's the first thing?

Kevin Kerner: 38:04

I would have her do?

Maura Rivera: 38:05

She could do everything.

Kevin Kerner: 38:05

What's the first marketing campaign you'd assign it?

Maura Rivera: 38:11

what's the first thing I would have to do? If you could do everything, what's the first marketing campaign you'd assign it? I mean, this is like such a big question. I mean I really we're trying to go bigger from a brand perspective and get our story out there. So I would see what Piper could do to make sure that every one of our target accounts knew that we had a great offering for an AISDR agent and could get those folks nurtured and into our funnel. So that's a big that's a big product.

Kevin Kerner: 38:33

That's probably the only prompt. That's probably the only prompt you'd need to give a fully sentient AISDR agent. Just go get me all these people.

Maura Rivera: 38:43

Go figure it out. Piper, I don't care how you do it, just come on, well, we have had a few things where we used to prep our inbound SDRs when we were launching a campaign Heads up, we're going to see a spike in website traffic. Be prepared with the messaging. And we had this one Slack conversation once that someone was like hey, should I let our SDRs know? And somebody replied like no need, piper's got it covered. And we were like we should screenshot that and make that into a billboard because that's the future.

Kevin Kerner: 39:08

Yeah, that's it right there, right. Well, Maura, this has been super fun. I'm really thankful that you spent the time here. If people want to get a hold of you or want to learn more about Piper and Qualified like, how should they go about it?

Maura Rivera: 39:20

Yeah, go to qualifiedcom and you can chat with Piper and have a conversation and see her in action, and then Maura Rivera on LinkedIn.

Kevin Kerner: 39:29

So we'd love to connect.

Maura Rivera: 39:30

Thank you, Kevin, for having me. This is really fun.

Kevin Kerner: 39:32

Yeah, yeah, great, great job and good luck with everything agentic in the future.

Maura Rivera: 39:36

Here it's going to be a fun one, you too.

Kevin Kerner: 39:39

All right, thanks a lot.

Maura Rivera: 39:40

Thank you.

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