Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 376 Q & A with Chris Golec

Summary

In this episode of Sales Pipeline Radio, host Matt Heinz talks with Chris Golec, founder and CEO of Channel99 and Demandbase. They discuss Chris's long history in entrepreneurship, his passion for solving fundamental business problems with technology, and the importance of hiring and nurturing great talent. Chris also shares his insights on the evolving role of AI in B2B marketing, the need for accurate data for AI efficiency, and the balance between human and AI interactions in the go-to-market functions.

By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing

If you’re not already subscribed to Sales Pipeline Radio or listening live Thursdays at 11:30 am PT on LinkedIn (also on demand) you can find the transcription and recording here on the blog every Monday morning.  The show is less than 30 minutes, fast-paced and full of actionable advice, best practices and more for B2B sales and marketing professionals.

We cover a wide range of topics, with a focus on sales development and inside sales priorities.

This week’s show is entitled, “How AI Can Improve Your Marketing Investment Decision-Making“ and my guest is Chris Golec, Founder and CEO of Channel99.

Tune in to Learn:

• Key insights on the evolving role of AI in B2B marketing
• The need for accurate data for AI efficiency
• The balance between human and AI interactions in the go-to-market functions

Listen Now | Watch the video HERE | Read the Transcript BELOW:

Matt: All right. Welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. I’m your host, Matt Heinz very excited to have you here. We’ve got a great guest today. Great topic. Lots to talk about. If you are joining us live in the middle of your work day, the middle of your work week, thank you so much for being part of this.

If you are watching and listening on demand, thank you so much for continuing to listen, subscribe, download. We are 373 episodes in, Chris, and closing in on a quarter of a million downloads. So thank you everyone who continues to listen and check this out every episode Sales Pipeline Radio is always available past, present and future at www.salespipelineradio.com With us today. I consider you a friend, Chris, we’ve known each other for a long time. Founder, CEO of Demandbase been in the B2B marketing space for a long time. Currently founder and CEO of Channel99, Chris Golec. How you doing, man?

Chris: Great. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Matt: Why do you keep coming back?

You know, starting any company, let alone a tech company, let alone a SaaS company. I’ve had people describe it to me as chewing glass. And as a founder in a different business that resonates sometimes, what is it about entrepreneurship? What is it about startups that keeps you coming back?

Chris: Yeah, it’s just a passion for innovation and building and making a difference. I started my career at DuPont and went on to GE and then it was at GE where I met a couple of guys that we started a supply chain software company back in 1995 when everybody was on dial up internet.

So I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I seek out opportunities where something’s just fundamentally broken and where technology can make a big impact it’s exciting to me.

Matt: Watching from a little bit of distance I think one of the commonalities I notice about the companies you build the teams you run It’s just the quality of the people like you have good people at the companies that you run, I imagine that is a priority.

Can you talk a little about people and culture and why that’s important.

Chris: Yeah, and thanks for recognizing that is important to me. You know a software company the asset is the people And, you hire great people, you’ll find the opportunity to make the products and keep customers happy and growing.

But it was early at, Demandbase, we’re probably 25 people. And I had this like slide in this mission to hire, world class talent and retain talent. And it takes more than a slide, right? You got to really invest in it. And we did that at Demandbase and it’s not about the free snacks.

It’s about transparency inclusion. It’s about having a diverse workforce and really listening to people and sharing. And we were ranked, I think in the top 20 places to work in San Francisco for 10 years in a row. I think in 2016, we were in the top 10 on glass door out of 500, 000 companies.

So pretty awesome stuff. And it’s an accolade to the company. not necessarily to me because it’s all the employees that make it a great place to work as well. And, still today, like even though people have moved on to different roles and opportunities, I still stay pretty connected to a lot of the Demand based crew, so to speak.

Yeah, no, I bet. That’s awesome. you mentioned, always wanting to look for things that are broken. And I feel like any conversation we have in B2B marketing, no matter what the topic, ends up coming back to measurement and attribution. It’s hard and it’s getting harder as the go to market motions we’re running get more complex. Of all the problems that do exist out there in B2B and there are many, why was measurement the focus area for you that you dug into with Channel99? Yeah, I think measurement is the starting point. And I’ve, to be totally honest. I’ve always been a little bit of a attribution hater because I’ve always thought it was incomplete. The data’s not right.

It’s ignoring a lot of the signal that’s out there. And to me, in 2022, when I started this company, it was like, now we have the opportunity to solve these data problems first. And then let’s layer in AI to not just measure marketing, but how do we improve it? Like, how do we make a big difference and really leverage machine learning and AI to do much more predictive type modeling and be able to ask natural questions?

Matt: Like, how do I improve my LinkedIn campaign? and have it come back with the right recommendations and then monitor the results and get smarter and smarter. I often talk about the volume of data that exists, but our inability to really leverage it, right? This massive library of insights, but like all the books are on the floor, right?

And even if you were to put them back on the shelves. You need books to talk to each other and that’s where the metaphor dies. But I think about even 370 episodes of Sales Pipeline Radio There’s a lot of people that have listened to this. Like what impact does that have on pipeline?

What impact has that had directly on people following us and getting to know us and then eventually maybe calling us or telling a friend about us and they call us All those connections are– the data’s there but like, how do we actually make those connections? This is where I’m hoping that AI and better technology will eventually just be able to do that for us.

am I smoking? Is this where we’re going?

Chris: You’re exactly right. Like in marketing, people are using AI to write blogs that are mediocre, right? They’re using AI to create videos and PowerPoints that aren’t as good as a designer. And the biggest opportunity is really leveraging AI to sit on top of the data and make recommendations, understand performance opportunities, and always on world’s smartest marketing ops person.

And that opportunity is now, however, when I talk about the data, you got to solve some of the data problems because the AI is only as good as the data it sits on top of, and I know every marketing ops person that’s listening to this is probably shaking their head yes, because there are a lot of challenges and a lot of the legacy attribution tools out there haven’t addressed them.

They, frankly, they have ignored them.

Matt: I was literally having this conversation with another CMO yesterday about this data problem, the fact that like we expect AI to do all this stuff, yet the data continues to be broken. Like you just contact information, right? The fact that like we get emailed for a job that we had four jobs ago or 20 years ago, and people think that’s the way it works.

Crazy. You can go to LinkedIn, you can see where I work now. You would think that it’s not private information, some of that. So the fact that we haven’t even made that, I think it has kept a lot of people pessimistic about the idea that we’re actually going to improve all that to help the AI do what we think it should be able to do.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. And I think a big part of this, Matt, too, that people don’t recognize on the surface is that a lot of these things of, what’s working, what’s not, it all depends on who you’re marketing or selling to. So if we have a customer that’s using, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, maybe an ABM technology, LinkedIn, and they say, what’s the most effective?

I’m like, for which audience? Because you’ll get totally different answers whether you put in, medium sized hospitals versus, large enterprise software companies. And they’re all effective in different ways. And so you really have to peel these things apart. And I just find with our business, we’re training these AI models on how to do B2B marketing.

And how do you find out and make changes to make the dollar efficiency higher, to make the pipeline generated per dollar invested higher and all those types of outcomes. And, so it’s a journey, right? And, but it’s really exciting because, we want to make a difference.

To me, nobody wants another dashboard. It’s measurement. I didn’t start this third company just to do measurement. Cause that’s just not that interesting on its own.

Matt: Yeah, no, I appreciate that. We’re talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Chris Golec. He’s the founder of Demandbase. He’s a MarTech OG basically, and now has founded and is CEO of Channel99.

Is it possible that we have, or could over rotate on measurement? Cause I joke about like this podcast, like how much pipeline did it generate? Is that really the measure of an effective podcast? Is that really the role of a podcast? Are there some things that we don’t need to, or shouldn’t minutely measure? I legit don’t know the answer to this question. I’m curious what you think.

Chris: This whole trend around measuring people and paying people on MQLs– I just think that’s been very short sighted versus pipeline. And the reason we all know my pipeline is important.

Any salesperson knows that, but the other reason to get it right is that typically, at least in the software world, 50 percent of your customer acquisition cost is pipeline and it’s fascinating to me that a lot of companies don’t really dive in and understand that what percentage is this fixed expense versus variable and, a big part of its pipeline.

So if you can get more efficient and drive down your customer acquisition cost, you’re increasing the value of the company by a lot, because especially as companies get bigger, the later stage investors are looking at lifetime value over CAC and all these different KPIs and marketing has a ton of influence over that.

Sometimes I don’t think they realize it.

Matt: Don’t realize it or just as as some of this gets more complex, it seems like you have to understand it to be able to interpret and communicate it. and I think about this a lot in terms of the role of a , to not only lead the strategy and lead the team and lead the company with their leadership peers, how deep into the weeds does an effective CMO need to be today in terms of understanding how AI works and understanding how the data works and how the data flows together? On one hand, I’m like, you can’t [00:10:00] possibly have the bandwidth to do all this. You have to have good people to do it. But also there’s a level of understanding some of this that wasn’t taught in any MBA program that I was part of, because it’s all brand new then if you don’t understand it, how can you manage it?

Where do you find that balance point?

Chris: I always find that great CMOs kind of recognize what they’re really good at. And they fill the gaps, right? And I I put marketers or CMOs and they either come up through brand and are really good at brand position, message, the softer side.

And then you have the CMOs that come up through like operations are very numbers, pipeline oriented. Both are really important. And so if the CMO is inherently more on the ops side, they really need to have an exec that knows brand. But the self awareness is the most important part, because as you know, marketing is a organization of specialization, versus sales is an organization of scale, the same kind of skill sets.

And I think understanding that as a CMO and filling those gaps is the most important thing.

Matt: I think you can say that for any role, right? yeah. And I see this in job descriptions for CMOs sometimes. It’s you’re looking for a unicorn, right? And it’s saying, I’m looking for a full service agency.

That doesn’t exist. agencies are good at one or two things and then want to get paid for everything. And sometimes it’s better to say, here’s what I’m good at, right? And I’m going to backfill with people on my team. And I’m going to also recognize where my blind spots might be. I think it actually is a strength and a point of courage.

When someone could stand up and say, I don’t know everything, and things I’m not good at, and I’m going to bring in the right people to be able to do that.

At some point maybe you bring in the right robot, Chris, to do that. And I think we were in this phase where we’re imagining where AI is taking us.

And in some cases I’ve seen people say, I don’t need to hire sales and marketing anymore. I’m just going to have a go to market engineer do it all through robots. That march will continue if we’re sitting here in five years. What do you think the balance between human and robots is and go to market functions?

Chris: Oh, gosh. I think there’s a dramatic improvement in efficiency, but the creative, the differentiation, all those things are still, are unique to a person’s skill set. but a lot of the repetitive activities that are still prevalent in SDR roles and things like that absolutely can be automated.

But I think it just elevates everybody’s job to be more strategic. A lot of the things that we’re solving for right now, marketing ops owns and or digital marketing owns. And it’s taken the grunt work and making it just much faster and more accurate. So I don’t think anybody in marketing ops fears their job.

I think it’s finally I can get to work on things that are more exciting.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. And I think the complexity of the go to market motion is required to actually predictably drive results it’s going to continue to outpace what the technology can allow. The technology is getting better, but the complexity is growing faster.

And we need smart people to help orchestrate that, internally and externally. Externally, so that there’s a cohesive set of programs that have some connective tissue in the eyes of the buyer, but also the seller motions, just people getting things done inside of companies is getting more and more complex.

Like we desperately need better technology. We desperately need AI to be able to fill some of those gaps, either to do things that we don’t need to be doing manually by people anymore, but also things that have not been possible in the past. They can unlock some of that creativity and potential inherent in humans that I think is uniquely human as part of the process.

Chris: That’s right.

Matt: What do you think that implies for leadership? Cause I think we are going to move to a world where we are starting to think of AI and agents as a part of the team. Does that make a difference? Does that change things in terms of how you think about like an effective leadership style?

Chris: I think it’s on leadership to really help your organization educate themselves and learn how to adapt and adopt AI to make their jobs more effective and more efficient. There’s a lot unfolding as far as self education.

Sometimes it’s the younger folks in an organization might just be more curious and savvy and take it upon themselves to learn, but others in the organization, you’re doing them a favor by encouraging them to take a class or education or get certified. And I think every organization should be doing that for also the careers and benefit of the people in the org.

Matt: Yeah, I agree. This has been great, Chris. Thank you so much for doing this. There’s a lot of characters in our industry and you’ve always been one of my favorites just because I think you’re a great, straightforward guy and you do it the right way. And just the teams you build and the cultures you build.

Not only was great for those moments, but the ripple effect when people that learn from that and appreciate that and then go somewhere else and recreate that. Like I think about, Peter Isaacson and others from back old school days, just always makes me smile.

So thank you for being who you are.

Chris: it’s important. I have, two guys in the next room that were at Demandbase years ago.

Matt: Love it. Love it. Hey, if people want to learn more about you, hear more from you, learn more about Channel99, where should they go?

Chris: Just go to Channel99.Com and reach out to me on LinkedIn and we’ll connect and I can share more about what we’re doing.

Matt: Awesome. Thank you much for being here. Thanks everyone for listening, watching both live and on demand. We’ll be back next week. More great guests, more great content. That’s it for today’s Sales Pipe Radio. We’ll see you next week. Take care.

Chris: Thanks Matt.

Matt interviews the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to info@heinzmarketing.com.