May 15, 2025 • 15 mins
In this special episode of Sales Pipeline Radio from the Forrester B2B Summit 2025 marketplace floor, Matt spoke with Ed Grossman, Chief Data Nerd at NavigateIQ.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Matt Heinz (00:15):
All right, we're back live on the show floor at Forrester, B2B Summit.
Thank you again to the Forresterteam for making this possible.
We've had some amazing interviews withForrester analysts with some B2B ROI award
winners and, here now with Ed Grossman.
I'm just reading yourLinkedIn profile, Ed.
It says, yeah, that couldhave been a mistake.
Chief Data Nerd.
That's your title that you gave yourselfat NavigateIQ also co-founder of Activate,
(00:39):
illustrious career in B2B go to Market.
Ed thanks for being here.
Ed Grossman (00:42):
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate all the work you do andthis is great to see this podcast here.
Matt Heinz (00:46):
It is fun to be here.
And I'm glad we are to make thiswork that we get you on here as well.
I asked you what you wanted to talkabout, and you had one word that could
take us somewhere between three andtwelve days, and that's attribution.
And there's so many different angles onlike attribution in terms of like, why is
it a problem, why are we getting it wrong?
But what fascinates you aboutattribution as a problem in B2B?
Ed Grossman (01:07):
It's a great question, Martha Schwartz and I founded Activate
a few years ago, 15 years ago.
And part of our philosophy of what wasdriving us then was this idea, this kind
of risk abatement that we saw in markets.
Every marketer wants tode-risk their marketing budget.
They want to make their spendmore productive, more useful,
(01:27):
and over time, moving away from.
You know, banner ads and billboardsto demand gen and nurture and things
that have a knowable return has beenvery popular with its own risks.
Of course.
Yep.
But the motivation there isone around risk and efficiency.
And one of the things that we thinkabout and that is measurement how
(01:49):
do I know if I'm making progress?
Right?
And one of the biggest barriers forpeople to be a kind of maximally efficient
across their entire marketing budgetis they can't today reliably measure
the effectiveness, the influence, theattribution, whatever words you wanna use.
Yeah.
They don't really know as well as theywould like, how well the various things
(02:11):
I'm doing are affecting not just opensand clicks and cost per acquisition
but following through to opportunitycreation, opportunity wins and revenue.
And so that's just fascinating fromthe same motivation for Activate is
here at NavigateIQ and that is to helppeople be more efficient with their
(02:31):
spend so they can be more productive.
Matt Heinz (02:34):
I would argue that in many cases we're measuring the wrong things and
that we're trying to tell the wrong story.
And I've talked to a lot of companiesthat struggle with attribution
that can't even articulate to melike what data they're prioritizing
or what story they're telling.
When we talk about data and narrativedo you agree that those are important?
What are the components of thefoundational elements that you need
(02:56):
to have in place to have a chanceat a strong attribution story?
Ed Grossman (03:01):
I have a couple of minds of this.
So one of the, I don't know if I'll winthis overall argument or this, or where
our industry will go, but yeah, I actuallythink attribution is the wrong thing
to measure and we all talk about it.
I don't know if we'll everdisplace it, but what we're trying
to do is we're trying to, withattribution, we're trying to assign
(03:21):
a dollar value to the thing I did.
I did this thing, how much was it worth?
And I wanna know that dollar so that Ican then go make decisions around that
so I can move my money to the places thathave the most productivity per dollar.
Right?
But you don't actually need to knowthe dollar value of the action to
know whether or not it was useful.
And I think if we look to otherareas of science, we see they're not,
(03:45):
you know you can't determine todayrunning, what the value of that on
your health outcomes will be, but youdo know is valuable or conversely.
Eating too much sugar or drinkingwhatever health activities or even your
genetics, we know they have a fact.
We don't have to assign anumber to know that there's a
difference in your risk profile.
There's a difference in youroutcomes if you have these things.
(04:07):
And so I think we can learn from theother sciences to say, even if we don't
attribute a specific dollar value tothat marketing activity, we can know
whether some activities are more highlyassociated with producing the positive
outcomes we wanna see versus others.
And certainly we can, rather thanargue about how much dollar it was and
(04:27):
whether sales actually is worth more ormarketing is worth more, we could say,
why don't we just stop doing the thingsthat are clearly not producing revenue?
Right?
That'd be a great first step, right?
If we could do that, and maybethen we'll come back to the
revenue attribution dollar amount.
Or conversely, let's look at the thingsthat are clearly moving the needle.
And let's do more of those.
(04:48):
And so again, I don't know that I'llmove the industry or even really trying
to move us off this discussion ofattribution, but I ultimately, I do think
it's the wrong thing to be looking at.
Matt Heinz (04:58):
I think it's a great way of thinking about it.
'cause if you could take that off thetable too often we associate attribution
with credit and it becomes a politicalexercise inside an organization.
I think a lot of companies thatare here at Forrester, they are big
companies selling complex products.
Mm-hmm.
And so we're talking aboutmonths, quarters, if not
years of sales cycle length.
Let's not pretend we can narrow thisdown to, oh, that digital channel or
(05:20):
that whitepaper download that day.
Almost all the people in this roomhave to have a body of work mentality.
Right.
So trying to figure out what gets credit,like unilateral credit is ridiculous.
Ed Grossman (05:32):
Absolutely.
We've launched NavigateIQ,we build dashboards.
We aggregate customerdata to understand this.
Yeah.
And we purposely do notshow an attribution dollar.
We could, we've got it.
We could choose the, is it1/10th of revenue or whatever
number you'd want to choose.
But we avoid that.
Yeah.
We don't wanna get caught inthat trap of credit, as you know.
Right.
But we can begin to see, oh, look at that.
(05:54):
Deals are not closing unless they havecertain buyers on the journey, or if,
unless we have a certain set of touches.
Mm-hmm.
Or we're not seeing accounts reallyqualifying themselves for conversion.
Unless we see, you know,15 people from the account.
We can learn a lot about how to improveour effectiveness as marketers without
(06:15):
having to get into argument with the salesperson about the value of the credit.
Matt Heinz (06:19):
Yeah.
One of the other challenges companieshave often when they're trying to
figure out their attribution storyis a culture change to get there.
Mm-hmm.
To realize it's not gonna belike marketing versus sales,
sales versus marketing.
That body of work and thinking about itholistically requires an organization,
not just the go to market teams, but theexecutives, the board, all the people
(06:40):
that are overseeing where the moneycomes and how the money gets displayed.
It's way more complex thanpeople want it to be, and I think
that's an inconvenient truth.
That is just a reality in marketing.
How does that cloud or maybehelp focus the attribution story
companies are telling internally?
Ed Grossman (06:54):
You know, I do think it's a cloud in part because marketers are
walking in saying, I want to know thevalue of this so I can argue for budget
to go, if this is worth a dollar, then Ishould be able to spend a dollar on it.
Right?
So that's where they're startingand they're getting clouded.
I think conversely, we know that if ACMO can go in and say, Hey, look, here's
(07:14):
the top 10 deals, to the salesperson,to the financial person their CFO, their
CRO, and say, here's how I supportedthat deal over the past two years.
Here's how that name got in the database.
Here's all the times I touched it.
Here's how many of those people you spoketo and how many more you didn't speak to.
If I could do that for thetop 10 deals, I'm part of an
effective conversation about.
(07:36):
Why and how we're helping to supportwhat you're doing as opposed to
an argument about what it's worth.
We wanna talk about wheream I supporting you.
I think the other piece is the promiseof AI that will help us with this.
And I don't mean it's gonna help usfigure out the attribution number 'cause
I'm gonna stick with my guns on notwanting to focus on a dollar value.
Yeah.
But rather if you can look atevery deal, at every account and
(07:59):
every touch and every buyer title.
And you can pass that to a large languagemodel and begin to ask questions like
what marketing activities should I stop?
Matt Heinz (08:10):
Right,
Ed Grossman (08:10):
right.
Well, we know the data's in there.
We could look at every deal everywebcast, which webcast, which lead
gen provider has the least numberof deals associated with them.
Let's just cut them off the bottom.
Right?
That's the place to start.
Right?
And I think AI will help usbegin to find those trends.
Not because it's, impossiblycomplex, just because it's a huge
(08:32):
amount of labor to go throughall that data and look at it.
Can I look at the topics ofcontent that tend to be more highly
associated with me winning deals.
So that I could see if account'sdealing with this content.
Yeah.
I'm probably gonna close them.
Matt Heinz (08:45):
Yeah.
I think the way you guys arethinking about attribution is
refreshing and I'm excited to seeyou guys grow this opportunity.
Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio livefrom the Forrester B2B Summit Marketplace
Floor with Ed Grossman, the Chief DataNerd, his title, not mine for NavigateIQ,
Chief Strategy Officer to Activate.
And I think what the worldreally wants to know Ed.
How does a philosophy and musictheory major end up doing all of this?
(09:06):
Like, I did not know that untilthis morning , that's what
you studied at Boston College.
You are studying towards a PhD inphilosophy of religion as well.
A lot of us in B2B didn'tnecessarily study B2B in college,
but that's a unique set of stuff.
I'm very interested.
Ed Grossman (09:21):
No one reads LinkedIn that far down you scrolled all the way down.
I have no idea.
No.
I think that taking apart complexproblems which happens in music.
Yeah.
And it happens in philosophy.
Mm-hmm.
Is important for business.
Yeah.
And I am just, bynature, a curious person.
(09:42):
Mm-hmm.
And so when someone says to me, Ihave this problem I want to know more.
Yeah.
And helping marketers get tothe bottom of these questions.
What's working?
Yeah.
Is this moving the needle?
Can I tell if, for instance, what doesmy idealized buyer team look like?
I'll give you another one.
What real correlation does intenthave to an account becoming an
(10:08):
opportunity or a deal closing.
We know what maybe an intentprovider hopes it does and they
will have some good case studies.
Yeah.
But if we looked across every deal,what would it actually correlate to?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm curious about these things.
And I think that by exploring themwith customers, not with a goal.
NavigateIQ doesn't have an ax to grind.
Yeah.
We're not trying to push leadsor webcast or intent or Yeah.
(10:29):
We just wanna know what's happeningand try to get to the bottom of it
the best we can and we think that'llbe a real way to help marketers.
Matt Heinz (10:35):
That analogy I think is really fascinating 'cause I think about
philosophy and think about music andjust how complex both of those get.
Like for anyone that loves music,like you can experience something
that really tugs at your emotionsand can change the way you feel.
Music theory is incredibly complex.
Ed Grossman (10:51):
I have a friend who studied computer science in college
and is a programmer engineer.
He's a bit older.
When he was getting outta college,there really weren't computer
science majors in most universities.
Yeah.
But the computer sciencejobs were typically recruited
from music theory majors.
Mm-hmm.
Because the music theory structures,can be a little mathematical.
(11:13):
Yeah.
But they also flow over time, likeprogram needs to, and so there's
a lot of complexity there in musicif you like that kind of stuff.
And so for me it's very connected.
It's complexity moving over time, andit's actually I'm not gonna say music
theory and marketing attribution are thesame thing, but they're pretty close.
Matt Heinz (11:31):
I, well, they're not the same thing, but I think the analogies in terms
of complexity are fascinating to me.
And it's not surprising, giventhat you said that, like why
trying to find some like.
Insights and direction outta thatcomplexity is interesting to you.
So sitting here at Forrester so fartoday, I feel like this conference has
talked about buying journeys, buyinggroups, a little bit of AI, a lot of
sales, marketing, product teams, creatingbetter alignment amongst each other.
(11:54):
If we're sitting here in twoyears, the same conference, what
do you think we're talking about?
What do you think the focusareas from the content?
Ed Grossman (12:00):
Well, I hope that we're talking about the non-trivial
impact that AI is having.
Yep.
Beyond you personalize an email and youchanged a quarter of my webpage and an
agent that had some interesting ideas,but I hope we're talking about the way
that AI is truly identifying actions forus, to change is replacing or improving
(12:24):
some of our own actions and outcomes.
I think AI is a huge boon forour entire industry and will
not take away jobs but add jobs.
So I hope that, but I don't knowI remain unconvinced that the use
cases, the actual use cases that Isee real marketers engaging with AI
remain pretty few and far between.
Matt Heinz (12:46):
I'm with you on a number of those fronts, including
you like I have no freaking idea.
I remember, I think we're both oldenough to remember Mary Meeker, right?
Yeah.
Who used to write the Internet TrendsReport and there was one year she
came out and said there will be atime not far from now when mobile is
where people start, where that willbe the primary device, and we need to
start having a mobile first mentality.
I remember reading that and thinking like.
Yeah.
That's nuts.
There's no way.
And now she's a hundred percentright, but we take it for granted.
(13:09):
And I think AI two years from nowis going to be somewhat similar.
It is gonna be revolutionary and it'sgonna change a lot about how we interact
with the world and in the workplace.
And in two years we willtake it for granted.
We will be onto the next thing andthose that lean in on it will be better
employees, will be better professionals,will be better humans as a part of it.
Ed Grossman (13:25):
Yeah.
I think you're right.
And I think about the things that, toyour point about Mary Meeker the things
that mobile and the internet combinedenabled that we didn't even conceive of.
And we think about Uber mm-hmm.
And Airbnb.
The, this, yeah.
It, the houses existed.
The cars existed.
Cab company, all these things existed.
But yeah, this moment happened whenyou could carry that device with you,
(13:48):
and you could communicate with anybodywho had a car, and so Uber was born.
Yep.
There will be entire new industries,ecosystems, software platforms, tools that
we use, ways of marketing that we havenot even really conceived of yet if AI can
deliver on this promise, I hope it does.
We'll see.
Matt Heinz (14:08):
Well I think, you know I would argue AI has already
delivered just in terms of helpingus understand like what's possible.
Mm-hmm.
And I think about the people that havecreated some of those leaps in innovation.
Mm-hmm.
And they're exponential thinkers Imean, Mary Meeker among them to be
able to see what's in front of them andsay, this is leading to something that
very, very few other people can see.
Now what we forget is thatmany of them are wrong.
(14:29):
Right.
Yeah.
For every Mary Meeker talking aboutthat, there's other people that
thought other things were gonna happenthat we're not talking about here.
Yeah.
'cause they didn't happen.
And so we don't remember their names.
We remember Mary's name, right?
Yeah.
Ed Grossman (14:37):
Survivor Bias for Mary Meeker on that one.
Yes, exactly.
So you're right.
And sitting right around us, there are anumber of booths that say, in fact, almost
every booth says AI somewhere in it.
Yeah.
And so, there will be some survivors andwe will agree that they were brilliant
in their time, but we'll probably forgetabout the 80% of people who missed it.
Matt Heinz (14:55):
Well, and there's so many different angles of it.
Like I'm staring across at a booth thatsays that they are the very first casual
AI marketing intelligence platform.
What is casual AI?
I don't know.
Maybe we'll find out someday.
Maybe.
We'll, I'll be like, I'm sitting,maybe this is like the, my
2025 version of mobile first.
It's like everyone's gonnabe talking about casual AI.
I hope not.
But it could be.
We don't know.
It could be.
I'm happy we're not talkingabout social selling anymore.
(15:17):
It's just part of selling.
It's better, it's better now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ed, thank you so much forjoining us today, Ed Grossman.
Where can people learnmore about NavigateIQ?
Ed Grossman (15:23):
NavigateIQ.ai.
Mm-hmm.
Sorry to say that there.
That's alright.
Whole discussion but yeah.
www.navigateiq dot a i andMatt, thanks for having us.
Matt Heinz (15:34):
Awesome.
Shout out to Martha over here makingsure we're saying the right things.
Ed Grossman (15:37):
Martha co-founder of both Activate and NavigateIQ.
Matt Heinz (15:39):
Awesome.
Thank you, Ed, for being here.
Ed Grossman (15:41):
Thank you.
All right, we're back live on the show floor at Forrester, B2B Summit.
Thank you again to the Forresterteam for making this possible.
We've had some amazing interviews withForrester analysts with some B2B ROI award
winners and, here now with Ed Grossman.
I'm just reading yourLinkedIn profile, Ed.
It says, yeah, that couldhave been a mistake.
Chief Data Nerd.
That's your title that you gave yourselfat NavigateIQ also co-founder of Activate,
(00:39):
illustrious career in B2B go to Market.
Ed thanks for being here.
Ed Grossman (00:42):
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate all the work you do andthis is great to see this podcast here.
Matt Heinz (00:46):
It is fun to be here.
And I'm glad we are to make thiswork that we get you on here as well.
I asked you what you wanted to talkabout, and you had one word that could
take us somewhere between three andtwelve days, and that's attribution.
And there's so many different angles onlike attribution in terms of like, why is
it a problem, why are we getting it wrong?
But what fascinates you aboutattribution as a problem in B2B?
Ed Grossman (01:07):
It's a great question, Martha Schwartz and I founded Activate
a few years ago, 15 years ago.
And part of our philosophy of what wasdriving us then was this idea, this kind
of risk abatement that we saw in markets.
Every marketer wants tode-risk their marketing budget.
They want to make their spendmore productive, more useful,
(01:27):
and over time, moving away from.
You know, banner ads and billboardsto demand gen and nurture and things
that have a knowable return has beenvery popular with its own risks.
Of course.
Yep.
But the motivation there isone around risk and efficiency.
And one of the things that we thinkabout and that is measurement how
(01:49):
do I know if I'm making progress?
Right?
And one of the biggest barriers forpeople to be a kind of maximally efficient
across their entire marketing budgetis they can't today reliably measure
the effectiveness, the influence, theattribution, whatever words you wanna use.
Yeah.
They don't really know as well as theywould like, how well the various things
(02:11):
I'm doing are affecting not just opensand clicks and cost per acquisition
but following through to opportunitycreation, opportunity wins and revenue.
And so that's just fascinating fromthe same motivation for Activate is
here at NavigateIQ and that is to helppeople be more efficient with their
(02:31):
spend so they can be more productive.
Matt Heinz (02:34):
I would argue that in many cases we're measuring the wrong things and
that we're trying to tell the wrong story.
And I've talked to a lot of companiesthat struggle with attribution
that can't even articulate to melike what data they're prioritizing
or what story they're telling.
When we talk about data and narrativedo you agree that those are important?
What are the components of thefoundational elements that you need
(02:56):
to have in place to have a chanceat a strong attribution story?
Ed Grossman (03:01):
I have a couple of minds of this.
So one of the, I don't know if I'll winthis overall argument or this, or where
our industry will go, but yeah, I actuallythink attribution is the wrong thing
to measure and we all talk about it.
I don't know if we'll everdisplace it, but what we're trying
to do is we're trying to, withattribution, we're trying to assign
(03:21):
a dollar value to the thing I did.
I did this thing, how much was it worth?
And I wanna know that dollar so that Ican then go make decisions around that
so I can move my money to the places thathave the most productivity per dollar.
Right?
But you don't actually need to knowthe dollar value of the action to
know whether or not it was useful.
And I think if we look to otherareas of science, we see they're not,
(03:45):
you know you can't determine todayrunning, what the value of that on
your health outcomes will be, but youdo know is valuable or conversely.
Eating too much sugar or drinkingwhatever health activities or even your
genetics, we know they have a fact.
We don't have to assign anumber to know that there's a
difference in your risk profile.
There's a difference in youroutcomes if you have these things.
(04:07):
And so I think we can learn from theother sciences to say, even if we don't
attribute a specific dollar value tothat marketing activity, we can know
whether some activities are more highlyassociated with producing the positive
outcomes we wanna see versus others.
And certainly we can, rather thanargue about how much dollar it was and
(04:27):
whether sales actually is worth more ormarketing is worth more, we could say,
why don't we just stop doing the thingsthat are clearly not producing revenue?
Right?
That'd be a great first step, right?
If we could do that, and maybethen we'll come back to the
revenue attribution dollar amount.
Or conversely, let's look at the thingsthat are clearly moving the needle.
And let's do more of those.
(04:48):
And so again, I don't know that I'llmove the industry or even really trying
to move us off this discussion ofattribution, but I ultimately, I do think
it's the wrong thing to be looking at.
Matt Heinz (04:58):
I think it's a great way of thinking about it.
'cause if you could take that off thetable too often we associate attribution
with credit and it becomes a politicalexercise inside an organization.
I think a lot of companies thatare here at Forrester, they are big
companies selling complex products.
Mm-hmm.
And so we're talking aboutmonths, quarters, if not
years of sales cycle length.
Let's not pretend we can narrow thisdown to, oh, that digital channel or
(05:20):
that whitepaper download that day.
Almost all the people in this roomhave to have a body of work mentality.
Right.
So trying to figure out what gets credit,like unilateral credit is ridiculous.
Ed Grossman (05:32):
Absolutely.
We've launched NavigateIQ,we build dashboards.
We aggregate customerdata to understand this.
Yeah.
And we purposely do notshow an attribution dollar.
We could, we've got it.
We could choose the, is it1/10th of revenue or whatever
number you'd want to choose.
But we avoid that.
Yeah.
We don't wanna get caught inthat trap of credit, as you know.
Right.
But we can begin to see, oh, look at that.
(05:54):
Deals are not closing unless they havecertain buyers on the journey, or if,
unless we have a certain set of touches.
Mm-hmm.
Or we're not seeing accounts reallyqualifying themselves for conversion.
Unless we see, you know,15 people from the account.
We can learn a lot about how to improveour effectiveness as marketers without
(06:15):
having to get into argument with the salesperson about the value of the credit.
Matt Heinz (06:19):
Yeah.
One of the other challenges companieshave often when they're trying to
figure out their attribution storyis a culture change to get there.
Mm-hmm.
To realize it's not gonna belike marketing versus sales,
sales versus marketing.
That body of work and thinking about itholistically requires an organization,
not just the go to market teams, but theexecutives, the board, all the people
(06:40):
that are overseeing where the moneycomes and how the money gets displayed.
It's way more complex thanpeople want it to be, and I think
that's an inconvenient truth.
That is just a reality in marketing.
How does that cloud or maybehelp focus the attribution story
companies are telling internally?
Ed Grossman (06:54):
You know, I do think it's a cloud in part because marketers are
walking in saying, I want to know thevalue of this so I can argue for budget
to go, if this is worth a dollar, then Ishould be able to spend a dollar on it.
Right?
So that's where they're startingand they're getting clouded.
I think conversely, we know that if ACMO can go in and say, Hey, look, here's
(07:14):
the top 10 deals, to the salesperson,to the financial person their CFO, their
CRO, and say, here's how I supportedthat deal over the past two years.
Here's how that name got in the database.
Here's all the times I touched it.
Here's how many of those people you spoketo and how many more you didn't speak to.
If I could do that for thetop 10 deals, I'm part of an
effective conversation about.
(07:36):
Why and how we're helping to supportwhat you're doing as opposed to
an argument about what it's worth.
We wanna talk about wheream I supporting you.
I think the other piece is the promiseof AI that will help us with this.
And I don't mean it's gonna help usfigure out the attribution number 'cause
I'm gonna stick with my guns on notwanting to focus on a dollar value.
Yeah.
But rather if you can look atevery deal, at every account and
(07:59):
every touch and every buyer title.
And you can pass that to a large languagemodel and begin to ask questions like
what marketing activities should I stop?
Matt Heinz (08:10):
Right,
Ed Grossman (08:10):
right.
Well, we know the data's in there.
We could look at every deal everywebcast, which webcast, which lead
gen provider has the least numberof deals associated with them.
Let's just cut them off the bottom.
Right?
That's the place to start.
Right?
And I think AI will help usbegin to find those trends.
Not because it's, impossiblycomplex, just because it's a huge
(08:32):
amount of labor to go throughall that data and look at it.
Can I look at the topics ofcontent that tend to be more highly
associated with me winning deals.
So that I could see if account'sdealing with this content.
Yeah.
I'm probably gonna close them.
Matt Heinz (08:45):
Yeah.
I think the way you guys arethinking about attribution is
refreshing and I'm excited to seeyou guys grow this opportunity.
Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio livefrom the Forrester B2B Summit Marketplace
Floor with Ed Grossman, the Chief DataNerd, his title, not mine for NavigateIQ,
Chief Strategy Officer to Activate.
And I think what the worldreally wants to know Ed.
How does a philosophy and musictheory major end up doing all of this?
(09:06):
Like, I did not know that untilthis morning , that's what
you studied at Boston College.
You are studying towards a PhD inphilosophy of religion as well.
A lot of us in B2B didn'tnecessarily study B2B in college,
but that's a unique set of stuff.
I'm very interested.
Ed Grossman (09:21):
No one reads LinkedIn that far down you scrolled all the way down.
I have no idea.
No.
I think that taking apart complexproblems which happens in music.
Yeah.
And it happens in philosophy.
Mm-hmm.
Is important for business.
Yeah.
And I am just, bynature, a curious person.
(09:42):
Mm-hmm.
And so when someone says to me, Ihave this problem I want to know more.
Yeah.
And helping marketers get tothe bottom of these questions.
What's working?
Yeah.
Is this moving the needle?
Can I tell if, for instance, what doesmy idealized buyer team look like?
I'll give you another one.
What real correlation does intenthave to an account becoming an
(10:08):
opportunity or a deal closing.
We know what maybe an intentprovider hopes it does and they
will have some good case studies.
Yeah.
But if we looked across every deal,what would it actually correlate to?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm curious about these things.
And I think that by exploring themwith customers, not with a goal.
NavigateIQ doesn't have an ax to grind.
Yeah.
We're not trying to push leadsor webcast or intent or Yeah.
(10:29):
We just wanna know what's happeningand try to get to the bottom of it
the best we can and we think that'llbe a real way to help marketers.
Matt Heinz (10:35):
That analogy I think is really fascinating 'cause I think about
philosophy and think about music andjust how complex both of those get.
Like for anyone that loves music,like you can experience something
that really tugs at your emotionsand can change the way you feel.
Music theory is incredibly complex.
Ed Grossman (10:51):
I have a friend who studied computer science in college
and is a programmer engineer.
He's a bit older.
When he was getting outta college,there really weren't computer
science majors in most universities.
Yeah.
But the computer sciencejobs were typically recruited
from music theory majors.
Mm-hmm.
Because the music theory structures,can be a little mathematical.
(11:13):
Yeah.
But they also flow over time, likeprogram needs to, and so there's
a lot of complexity there in musicif you like that kind of stuff.
And so for me it's very connected.
It's complexity moving over time, andit's actually I'm not gonna say music
theory and marketing attribution are thesame thing, but they're pretty close.
Matt Heinz (11:31):
I, well, they're not the same thing, but I think the analogies in terms
of complexity are fascinating to me.
And it's not surprising, giventhat you said that, like why
trying to find some like.
Insights and direction outta thatcomplexity is interesting to you.
So sitting here at Forrester so fartoday, I feel like this conference has
talked about buying journeys, buyinggroups, a little bit of AI, a lot of
sales, marketing, product teams, creatingbetter alignment amongst each other.
(11:54):
If we're sitting here in twoyears, the same conference, what
do you think we're talking about?
What do you think the focusareas from the content?
Ed Grossman (12:00):
Well, I hope that we're talking about the non-trivial
impact that AI is having.
Yep.
Beyond you personalize an email and youchanged a quarter of my webpage and an
agent that had some interesting ideas,but I hope we're talking about the way
that AI is truly identifying actions forus, to change is replacing or improving
(12:24):
some of our own actions and outcomes.
I think AI is a huge boon forour entire industry and will
not take away jobs but add jobs.
So I hope that, but I don't knowI remain unconvinced that the use
cases, the actual use cases that Isee real marketers engaging with AI
remain pretty few and far between.
Matt Heinz (12:46):
I'm with you on a number of those fronts, including
you like I have no freaking idea.
I remember, I think we're both oldenough to remember Mary Meeker, right?
Yeah.
Who used to write the Internet TrendsReport and there was one year she
came out and said there will be atime not far from now when mobile is
where people start, where that willbe the primary device, and we need to
start having a mobile first mentality.
I remember reading that and thinking like.
Yeah.
That's nuts.
There's no way.
And now she's a hundred percentright, but we take it for granted.
(13:09):
And I think AI two years from nowis going to be somewhat similar.
It is gonna be revolutionary and it'sgonna change a lot about how we interact
with the world and in the workplace.
And in two years we willtake it for granted.
We will be onto the next thing andthose that lean in on it will be better
employees, will be better professionals,will be better humans as a part of it.
Ed Grossman (13:25):
Yeah.
I think you're right.
And I think about the things that, toyour point about Mary Meeker the things
that mobile and the internet combinedenabled that we didn't even conceive of.
And we think about Uber mm-hmm.
And Airbnb.
The, this, yeah.
It, the houses existed.
The cars existed.
Cab company, all these things existed.
But yeah, this moment happened whenyou could carry that device with you,
(13:48):
and you could communicate with anybodywho had a car, and so Uber was born.
Yep.
There will be entire new industries,ecosystems, software platforms, tools that
we use, ways of marketing that we havenot even really conceived of yet if AI can
deliver on this promise, I hope it does.
We'll see.
Matt Heinz (14:08):
Well I think, you know I would argue AI has already
delivered just in terms of helpingus understand like what's possible.
Mm-hmm.
And I think about the people that havecreated some of those leaps in innovation.
Mm-hmm.
And they're exponential thinkers Imean, Mary Meeker among them to be
able to see what's in front of them andsay, this is leading to something that
very, very few other people can see.
Now what we forget is thatmany of them are wrong.
(14:29):
Right.
Yeah.
For every Mary Meeker talking aboutthat, there's other people that
thought other things were gonna happenthat we're not talking about here.
Yeah.
'cause they didn't happen.
And so we don't remember their names.
We remember Mary's name, right?
Yeah.
Ed Grossman (14:37):
Survivor Bias for Mary Meeker on that one.
Yes, exactly.
So you're right.
And sitting right around us, there are anumber of booths that say, in fact, almost
every booth says AI somewhere in it.
Yeah.
And so, there will be some survivors andwe will agree that they were brilliant
in their time, but we'll probably forgetabout the 80% of people who missed it.
Matt Heinz (14:55):
Well, and there's so many different angles of it.
Like I'm staring across at a booth thatsays that they are the very first casual
AI marketing intelligence platform.
What is casual AI?
I don't know.
Maybe we'll find out someday.
Maybe.
We'll, I'll be like, I'm sitting,maybe this is like the, my
2025 version of mobile first.
It's like everyone's gonnabe talking about casual AI.
I hope not.
But it could be.
We don't know.
It could be.
I'm happy we're not talkingabout social selling anymore.
(15:17):
It's just part of selling.
It's better, it's better now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ed, thank you so much forjoining us today, Ed Grossman.
Where can people learnmore about NavigateIQ?
Ed Grossman (15:23):
NavigateIQ.ai.
Mm-hmm.
Sorry to say that there.
That's alright.
Whole discussion but yeah.
www.navigateiq dot a i andMatt, thanks for having us.
Matt Heinz (15:34):
Awesome.
Shout out to Martha over here makingsure we're saying the right things.
Ed Grossman (15:37):
Martha co-founder of both Activate and NavigateIQ.
Matt Heinz (15:39):
Awesome.
Thank you, Ed, for being here.
Ed Grossman (15:41):
Thank you.
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