Transcript:

Rick Currier (00:00)

Well hey Ben, nice to have you on the show.

Ben Henson (00:02)

Rick, it's such a great pleasure to be here, man. just completely excited about today's conversation.

Rick Currier (00:08)

Yeah, my only regret is we couldn't do this in person. I know we were trying to nail it down. We're both in Bay Area, but we're both busy startup founders on a budget. here we are.

Ben Henson (00:17)

That's what happens. Yeah. So sometimes it's as good as I suppose.

Rick Currier (00:22)

Yeah,

I know. You were just telling me you did another show. What was the other show you just did recently?

Ben Henson (00:27)

⁓ I was just on, I just, ⁓ go, go to market engineers, something I don't actually remember the name of it, but it was really, really cool. Yeah. was a interesting, ⁓ concept around. We have all these go to market engineers or this is this new role and title and sort of how are they thinking about AI and, really deploying that

Rick Currier (00:38)

Yeah, was it? What was it

Ben Heson (00:55)

across the go-to-market motions, which is just such an interesting and fascinating title. It's seeing new innovation in roles is probably one of the most interesting things that I've been seeing over the last 12 or so months, really with the advent of AI and then, know, companies like Port Movista, it really adopting all of that new tech and saying, hey, listen, there's a different way to be able to go to market is all part of that story.

Rick Currier (01:05)

Yeah.

Yeah, it's funny. I was reading an article recently about how the CEO needs to own go to market and just that the whole, you know, just thought process and strategy around go to market just shifted so much in the last couple of years and continues to shift in terms of just what does it mean, the technology involved, the strategy, who owns it and so forth.

Ben Hnson (01:44)

I can remember back to the conversations around, should the BDR be owned by marketing? Should the BDR be owned by revenue? Should the CMO roll to the CRO? Should the CRO roll to the CMO? And now we're seeing that with the CEO as well, where everyone wants their hands and fingerprints on these different highly, highly critical functions within an organization. I mean, it just makes a ton of sense

Rick Currier (02:10)

Yeah.

No, very cool. Very cool. Why don't we just take a step back and give a proper introduction of who you are, where you work, what you do. yeah, I think that's probably a good place to start.

Ben Henson (02:18)

Sure. Yeah.

Well, you know, like you, I've spent my career in media. I started out and as I like to say at the turn of the century with, at a really small company at the time called BitPipe and BitPipe was a lead aggregator. I it was one of the earliest content syndication platforms that took content from a whole host of different B2B tech companies andsurface that and made it available in aggregate form for IT decision makers, business decision makers, et cetera. And they were quickly acquired by Tech Target and I stayed at Tech Target for the next seven years. Went through their public offering, that's where we met originally, way back when we were young men. And then after my time there, I transferred out to California.with TechTarget and was really happy to be there. And then when my time at TechTarget ended, I worked at another media company called Tipit at the time, which later was acquired by Ziff Davis. That was under just the excellent stewardship of Craig Rosenberg and Scott Albrow. Two guys that went on to later found Topo, which was also acquired by Gartner. And then I've spent the next 11 plus years at Integrate starting up the B2B.side of that business with a bunch of just absolute heroes of mine, guys like Jeremy Dempsey and Tom Click and Jeremy Bloom. we really started that B2B side of the business. And over the progression of those years, we always wanted an unfair share of budget. And we were trying to figure out how are we going to be able to acquire that? How are we going to get an unfair share of budget? And that really turned into the lead management platform. Our idea at the time was,What if there was an integration? What if there was an API that fed these leads directly into your Marketo or Eloqua instance back then? Those were really the only two marketing automation platforms for enterprises. And as that evolved, really quickly realized, jeez, if we standardize these lead formats, if we validate the data within it, if we...

create tools for suppression and deduplication, then we're going to continue to be able to offer a product that's just meaningfully better than everybody else's. And that, of course, evolved into the product becoming the software, where I ended out my tenure there leading the growth department at Integrate, working with our clients on some of the most complex problems that they had. And then after that period of time, I

I left integrate, which I just actually celebrated my two year anniversary from leaving integrate and did some advisory work for the first year. Did a little CEO whispering for a plus, round startups and helping to, you know, move off of founder led sales and into product market fit and ICP development and things of that nature. And ultimately I met my co-founder Brandon Santos who had

come to the problem slightly differently, but he and I both wanted to address a core issue that we knew was possible, which was how can we let the buyer stay in their own self-described buyer's journey, which they've told us loud and clear they want to do, but be able to do it in such a way that it doesn't feel like friction. It doesn't disrupt their process, but still allows us to have these really great exchanges and collect really meaningful data.

that will then help them in their journey and understand what the problems they're trying to solve and what opportunities may present themselves within that. And also deliver to the organization, the sponsor of that event, the ability to really understand person-level intent and understand really truly who this individual is, what they're trying to solve for and how they might be useful or may not be. I think that we...

often are so in search of the right prospect at the right time for solutions that we discount sometimes how valuable it is to be able to disqualify people early in that process as well.

Rick Currier (06:51)

Yeah. Let me ask you a little bit about some of the challenges and I want to get into, you know, some of the technology that peel is offering. You you've been in this space for a long time, working just closely alongside lead Jen, right? From different aspects of delivering leads to managing it from a platform perspective. Are we facing the same challenges today that maybe we saw 10, 15 years ago? Like what, is the state of, you know, pipeline and lead generation today? And where do you think it's kind of falling short? Cause I'm hearing it all the time. Stalled pipeline.

or there's just not enough pipeline and leads aren't converting. So what are you seeing ⁓ as it relates to some of the customers you're serving?

Ben Henson (07:29)

Well, the buyers are more educated today and they know what they want and they realize they're the ones that hold the checkbook. And so they don't want to follow our path and our process. They want to follow their own. Their interests are very self-serving and about their organizational need rather than if it's end of quarter and we're trying to close a deal or anything of that nature. so the approach in itself is different.

the buying teams have expanded. were just talking about CEOs getting involved in the go-to-market motions. And I think we're seeing that across departments, across organizations. If we think about who the buyer is today, I would say they're more educated, they're a more informed prospect. And they then have decided that they want to shortlist

They want to do all of their own research and be able to be presented with very down funnel solutions at a down funnel time, but maybe not take any of that context other than what they find themselves on the earlier parts of that process. So the, the smart marketer and the smart seller today is thinking about how can I serve that new evolved buyer in new and interesting ways.

which has really brought on the advent of things like AI for use in a very purposeful way to be able to help them qualify or disqualify themselves very quickly and then continue moving.

Rick Currier (09:05)

Very cool. Let's talk about some practical applications of that. So how is AI helping the smart marketer do that?

Ben Henson (09:11)

And that, mean, I think that's, that's the million billion or trillion dollar question today is really what of all of these different AI solutions is something that I can really find that has that meaty middle that has an ability to be able to deploy quickly that isn't going to have weeks and months of ramp time and needs to know, you know, everybody within my organization's blood type before it can get going. You know, it's how can I get this stuff out into the market? And then once it's out in the market, how I'm able

to evolve things in a very specific way so that I can trust the data that's coming back and I can trust this agent. And I use that term both in the term of AI, but also as the tip of the spear for an organization. have to have a lot of trust and faith in that. Humans don't always get it right, but at least we know that they're coachable and trainable and we can hear this information back from them. So.

⁓ the ways that I, I see AI working today, start as simple as AI note takers and, you know, think back to when you had a chicken scratch, everything on Post-its and notebooks and, know, try and type along, or maybe look at the entire transcript that's evolved and all of that process is now entirely gone. Now, after every conversation, we have a beautifully summarized notes to do is follow ups next steps.

all of those different pieces. think that's a good example of how AI can work today and make a meaningful, even transformative step forward in our go-to-market motions.

Rick Currier (10:49)

Now, I think you hit on something that I see all the time and that a lot of the marketers I talk to that are utilizing AI, it's very, ⁓ how should I say, performance driven at the individual level. I'm not seeing a lot of adoption at the organizational level because of what you were just talking about. The commitment at the organizational level is so large for lot of these AI projects. You're having whole committees, you're getting compliance involved, legal, right? And so there's this gap.

right now that I think is being underserved where I think there are some plug and play AI tools out there. know Peel is one of them that I think can be adopted very quickly without a lot of the headache and resources to go along with it.

Ben Henson (11:30)

It's all about outcomes. And I think if you think about outcomes and who you want those outcomes for and what outcomes you're trying to derive, that's how you can unpack a ton of these different, much more complex feeling or sounding initiatives. In AI, it's both the hot topic and it's also one of these things where, you know, at,

The end of everyone's day, they want to go sit at the dinner table and look at their person and say, today was a good day. Today I moved the business forward. Today I did something really cool, something really interesting. And AI has so much promise for that, but it also has frustrations and complexities if you try to go too big too fast, if you try to deploy at a scale where you find yourself just stuck in the mire rather than actually moving business forward.

Rick Currier (12:22)

Well, let's talk a little bit more about outcomes then. So how is AI helping with conversions, right? I think one of the top KPI outcomes marketers are looking for when it comes to engagement and qualification, how is AI helping in that area?

Ben Henson (12:35)

Yeah, I I think, I think, I think that is for many that the nail that everyone's trying to hammer, right. Is really trying to understand how can I just go do something that will allow me to tell my CMO, allow me to tell my board, Hey, we're using AI. We're using it in this specific way. So if I could use Peel as an example, Peel is asynchronous AI led conversations. now rather than.

deploying a BDR, deploying multi-sequence nurture tracks for every action that a prospect has done, now you can deploy an asynchronous AI-led voice conversation. And you can just learn a little bit more about what that individual may be doing. Or our most recent product, Talkables, allows for full interactivity, a full voice conversation with what was traditionally a flat file, a PDF or an ebook, an analyst report.

analyst report or a white paper and the ability, the ability, man, to be able to take something like a pitch deck that everybody has and is 60 pages long. And sometimes you cut and copy and sometimes you kind of rip out some pages and you may be personalized it just a little bit for each individual prospect. You're sending that to, but typically you don't most don't.

Most don't really take that work because they don't think that anyone's going to read it. And they're usually right. You know, and, part of the problem with all of these kinds of assets is the way that content has been consumed for the last millennia is you started the beginning and you finish at the end. But that's not what people actually want. What people want is to have it personalized to them.

to be able to pull out those few salient points that they're trying to understand very quickly, decide if it's of use, and then move on. So when you wrap one of these legacy flat files, like an ebook or a white paper or a PowerPoint, within the container of a talkable, now you can engage with that completely. And you can speak to that content as if it were a person.

And it'll automatically speak any language that you'd like it to speak in so that you're able to turn the part of your brain off if you're not a native English speaker in assets in English that requires you to try and do this business level language translation. And it allows you to have the content personalized to you. So, Hey, this is my environment. How would it help me? How could I be supported in this way?

So now you have this ability to meaningfully, in a transformative way, change the content that you're using, give it to the people in a digestible way so they can experience it, engage with it, learn from it. It's infinitely patient. It can give any answers to any questions as long as it's within that content. And then the company gets all of that rich information, all of that personal level intent, all of that

language that they use and where they spent time and how they engage with it. And now they're able to go back as a seller, as a customer success leader, as a product leader and go support them because they understand the complexities of their particular environment without scheduling a 30 minute zoom call, without bouncing diaries back and forth to try and find that right time without.

having the recency bias of, let's talk about this thing, because I just talked about this on my last call. It's entirely about them. And that's where it always should have been.

Rick Currier (16:26)

Yeah, I know what I love most about this, think is, you know, I've been doing Legion like you for 20 years and it really hasn't changed much, right? I mean, we put a gate up in front of a flat static asset and we ask for information and then we just hand over the asset and basically say good luck, right? And this has really changed that game and adding a personal assistant, you know, to every asset to your point to personalize that experience. It's really changed just the whole nature of...

lead generation in terms of how we're collecting information, but more importantly, serving the customer. want to ask you about from the sales perspective now, what does this mean for the sales reps? We've talked about from the marketer's point of view and the information we're getting and how we're empowering them, but there's always that gap between marketing and sales on some of these programs. How is this supporting sales in their follow-up efforts?

Ben Henson (17:16)

I think this is probably one of the greatest keys to what Peel's doing, what AI can do in general, which is very specifically around information delivery. And as you were just saying, you know, the marketing go to market functions, whatever the tactic is, whether it's a physical event, whether it's a webinar, whether it's content marketing, whether it's a brand campaign, typically if a prospect takes an action.

you receive basic business card information and maybe a singular line about what that thing is that person has done. And over a period of time, over the years, we've surrounded that story with things like, well, we'll get a little bit more refined by using an ABM list or a suppression or duplication. Or in the later years, we...

started to think very seriously about intent and predictive modeling. And, know, this organization bought this stuff a couple of years ago, so it's probably ready for X, Y, or Z. And there's been people from that IP address who have downloaded content on A, B, and C and therefore something, but that doesn't really tell any.

story, just gets sort of data around a story that you might like to tell back to that prospect. With AI and again, I'll kind of talk about my recency bias with Peel. Now we're able to give what we would consider person level intent, actual language that that user has said, actual directionally information, where they have gone, what they've consumed, how they think about it, the language that they use, et cetera.

So now we're able to deliver back a lead that looks entirely different than it ever has. It is no longer just basic business card information, feeling like a flat file, like what we gave to our prospects. Instead, there's dimension and ⁓ color within that individual and sort of how they think about things. What did they do? How long have they spent time on that? What are some of the things they've said about it, et cetera?

So now we can actually go in and help support them right from the get. Imagine the entire discovery call being done before you get on the phone with them. That allows for that second call to be the first call. And the second calls where the magic can really start to happen, where you understand their environment, you understand what architecture they're dealing with, you're understanding the problems that they're trying to solve for, and you're understanding the language that they use while they're trying to solve those problems. That's a different deal.

Rick Currier (20:01)

Yeah, think,

yeah, no, and from what I've seen, what excites me the most of selling for 20 years is not everything that you just said, but also the recommendation on what to do with the information. I think so much of what I've seen as a seller is just bombarded with information on what we know, but it's still up to me as a seller to figure out what to do with that information. And from what I've seen from Peel, it's the recommendation of all the insight of that information. Here's the next step you should take as a seller based on this information.

you know like everybody sales sales are busy and they're going from one lead to the next and if there's a you know concise definition of here's what we learned and here's what to do okay good I'm good to go

Ben Henson (20:41)

Absolutely. I mean, I think you're right on the money. And I think part of that education is for the seller and part of that education is for the prospect, giving them the language to open up that aperture to see what all of the potential solutions are for that problem. Not to use a goofy and old, ⁓ old adage, but there's more than one way to skin a cat. You know, there's, there's a whole lot of ways to think about this stuff. And if

Rick Currier (21:03)

Yeah.

Ben Henson (21:08)

The buyer is on their self-directed journey and the buyer is doing the research that they want to do. Well, they may not know all of the different options that are available to them and all the different ways that their problems can be solved. And I think that that's part of the challenge historically. And the current opportunity is educate the prospect, educate the seller, educate the marketer, feedback to the product marketer, feedback to the product team.

Now you have this real time loop of voice of the customer, voice of the audience, voice of this specific niche of audience, et cetera.

Rick Currier (21:47)

So I feel like we can't talk about AI without looking forward. So whether from people's perspective or the marketer's perspective, where do you see this all going? What are you most excited about as we look ahead?

Ben Henson (22:01)

There's so much in front of us. mean, the opportunity for us as marketers, for us as sellers, for us as an entire industry is just exciting and dynamic. And the best is yet to come. I truly believe that. I don't even think we're in the first inning. I think we're in batting practice right now. And when I think about it, I think about the evolution of how we're going to exchange and interact.

with prospects and customers, whether it's our website. And I could see a peel that just exists that you just start talking to the peel rather than doing any sort of searching contextually within a website. can see ⁓ the way that we're disseminating information, the way that we're following up with information. I think about a traditional nurture track today. And you go, maybe you spend...

$250,000 sponsoring RSA that happened a few months ago. And then you get that lead list and that lead list is still coming over in a spreadsheet. You're still getting that lead list at the same time as the other 150 sponsors of that event. And now you're trying to say, how am I going to make some noise, create some differentiation, and be able to go out and have an interesting conversation and impact potential with this.

individual prospect at this much larger organization. And when we think about sort of how we're going to be able to do that stuff, I think it's going to be more voice. I think it's going to be more asynchronous. I think it's going to be more custom on the fly, able to personalize to that individual. I think all of that stuff is potential.

Rick Currier (23:50)

Yeah, and I think from my perspective, one of the interesting things that Peel does is it still leaves control to the brand, right? So, you know, there's, you know, looking at like chat, GPT or a lot of other tools out there, brands don't have any control, right? And I think, you know, Peel can apply to any sort of content experience. Like you're just talking about a website, but you still want to control some brand elements in that and make sure we don't go off the rails in terms of the information we're conveying to the customers, right? And from my experience with Peel, it's very easy to do that.

Ben Henson (24:04)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean, think that Chet GBT and all of the other LLMs are really, really terrific. And there's so much efficacy in use and prospects are using them today all day long. And they're taking your white paper and they're downloading it and they're loading it into Chet GBT and they're asking you to summarize it and they're, you know, asking you to personalize it to them. But the challenge is, that the company will never know about that.

All they'll receive is that basic business card information. So the more that marketers can lean into these new waves of technology and how they're working, the better. And the reason is, is because that information will be fed back. And part of the challenge is how do we keep the engagement high? How do we keep the learning high? But how do we keep it on properties so that we're able to sort of be a part of that conversation?

rather than give some information and then have them go off and do their own thing. And I think that that's really some of the art and science behind where to deploy AI, how to think about it, where you want your first initiatives and projects to really, not just be focused on, but have meaningful outcomes from.

Rick Currier (25:37)

Well, Ben, from my perspective, Peel is something you got to see and experience yourself. So where should people go to do that, to learn more information, to take appeal of themselves?

Ben Henson (25:48)

Yeah. Well, you know, we, we've really leaned into the whole idea of vibe coding and vibe marketing. So if you go to get peel.ai, you're able to go and actually build campaigns for yourself. You can go build a conversation. You can go load in one of your white papers and create a talkable out of it. And you can do that right on property, right?

Rick Currier (26:08)

Very cool. Ben, well, thanks for coming on, man. It's been a lot of fun. And hopefully we'll do this in person next time. All right, take care.

Ben Henson (26:13)

Yeah, I hope so, Rick. Thanks so much for having me, All right,

see you.