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August 6, 2024 • 23 mins

In this episode, we talk about a topic that's top of mind for many, AI. Join us in exploring the variety of uses of AI in marketing operations, from enhancing reporting and data analytics to troubleshooting and automation. We share real-world examples and discuss the pros and cons of integrating AI into your day-to-day processes. Whether you're curious about AI's impact on the job market or looking for innovative ways to optimize your workflows, this episode is a must-listen for anyone in GTM operations.

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
welcome to driven UPS Power Talk
I'm Jasmine Moore and I'm Rebecca Heisy
we're two work besties
who have spent over a decade learning the ins and
outs of sales and marketing
on this podcast
we discuss all things go to market operations
the people processes
and technologies that make up the engine of a thriving
go to market function let's get to it

(00:22):
welcome back to this episode of Power Talk
how's it going Becca it's going great
how are you jazz
I'm good it's a nice dreary day
you know how I love rainy days
yeah that's not really my speed but
so we have a fun topic today
today we are going to be talking about something that
I feel like everyone's talking about it

(00:43):
we're going to be talking about AI
some folks are thinking AI is going to replace them
yeah is that wild
um can it replace us
is it that powerful
where it can actually take over some of our jobs
I don't know yeah
I don't know I mean
I think there's pros and cons
it's definitely a hot topic
I think
a lot of people are kind of trying to dig into this

(01:05):
and speculate so we would love some opinions later
but yeah everyone's got an opinion
yeah
but today we're gonna dive in to how we're using AI
in our day to day as operators
using AI marketing operations
sales operations what are some of those use cases
yeah
so my first use case
and something that I use it for regularly

(01:28):
is in my reporting and data analytics
so as someone who has
often times been in charge of reporting
after a quarter quarterly reports
monthly reports
I've Learned how to leverage AI in that reporting
we all know that there are multiple phases of reporting
check out that episode

(01:49):
and in one of those phases
after I gather all of my reports okay
I know what happened in this period
I know what happened in last period
now really
what's important is
extracting the insights
and understanding what that means
and what actually happened yeah
so what I've actually done is
I've extracted the raw data
and I've given the data not the personal data

(02:12):
but I've given data points to chat
GBT about channel performance
lead performance month over month
and what I'll ask it to do is identify trends
and give me okay
did we get better or did we get worse and by how much
and of course in my everyday dashboard
I can see the trend lines

(02:33):
but I can't see until I actually do the math okay
this month we've increased 10% month over month
which is 40% better than we did this year last month
yeah
I could do that and it's what we've all done for years
but it takes time right using AI in that it I mean
it does it in seconds yeah
it speeds it up for sure

(02:54):
and I think that's a really great point
because
when you're even just an individual contributor
you are really in the weeds of things
but a lot of times
you're responsible for then going to senior leadership
and being able to say
the story right
we did this you know
about reporting and
and it is so nice when
maybe you're

(03:15):
not in front of those senior leaders
on a regular basis and
you do need to be able to break it down a little
bit better and check EPT
or any kind of like
AI tool that can kind of give you a little summary
or a way to rephrase it that maybe isn't as technical
as the way you might do it
as an individual contributor
you can present it a little
bit better to those senior leaders
and it's I think

(03:36):
a really great use case around
being able to use it for reporting yeah
so not only are you identifying the trends
cause I like to okay identify the trends
where have we improved and then and then I also have
we have to take that human element to it and say okay
I know that this is our strategy this month
and that's that could be why we've increased so much

(03:58):
obviously it's going to require that
but being able to take
that amount of time out to identify the trends
and really synthesize that data is very helpful
and then to your point asking it okay
what are your key takeaways
and it might prop some ideas on
what you should be focusing on
yeah definitely
and that's huge right
because you don't wanna continue down a bad path

(04:20):
and maybe even check EBT can then tell you or any again
any other AI cause now there's Genesis
there's all these other you know
new AI tools but um
using that then to even say okay
how can I improve this what are your ideas
to fix some of these problems that we're seeing
maybe if you're consistently seeing an error
or if you're seeing some growth
maybe it's

(04:41):
being able to then pull out those points and saying
these are the specific areas that have increased
month over month or whatever
so those are the areas you need to maybe continue to do
in in your campaigns or whatever you're doing
and it will always take you back to the data yeah
a lot of times when you are talking to appear yes
there is no replacing the human aspect exactly feedback

(05:04):
but Chat
GBT may put you back on board to focus on the data
actually there's an outlier here
what happened here is bringing your attention to
you had a huge spike last week
just so you know and then it's not gonna know why
but you know why yeah
and it's bringing your attention to that spike
yeah definitely that's a good use yeah

(05:24):
for sure I think another really good
area for AI in general is just troubleshooting
and being able to look at formulas
for instance um
you know a lot of times again
this kind of comes back to maybe reporting
but you're also system admins
or you're looking at things
and you need to use Google Sheets

(05:46):
or Excel or Salesforce formulas
and how do you speed that up a little bit
you know we have so much on our plate day to day
and now you don't need to spend hours
trying to make sure that your formula is right
in any of these these areas and
and so being able to go to
a tool that can
help you get there a little bit quicker

(06:06):
I think is a benefit for sure
I remember times where
I was trying to either create a formula
field in Salesforce or even report formula
feels like row level summary formulas um
I do use those all the time
years ago I would spend hours scouring Salesforce
Trailblazer community looking for um

(06:28):
the specific formulas
because I wasn't at the point where I could
just create the formula yeah um
now we're at a point where you can tell LGBT
this is the real level summary formula that I want
to create to give me the formula and it will
and you
there's some back and forth that may need to happen
it may not know your probably won't know your specific

(06:50):
um API feels
but you can fucking play
that's a huge time saver
and it just allows me to spend more time
looking at the data
rather than figuring out the formula
yeah definitely
I mean even I remember
I mean
maybe we're starting to age ourselves a little bit
but even just going to YouTube and trying to find
someone who already posted a video on YouTube
about what you're trying to do
I mean because when we started

(07:11):
we didn't have this kind of stuff
it was just Google and hopefully some community chat
you know centers that you could go to or um
you know I think maybe read it too
but like you know
you're trying to constantly dig
and search for someone else
who had the same use case as you
if you couldn't figure out a formula and
or even in Excel you know
they give you those prompts to be able to create

(07:32):
the formula but sometimes they don't work out
sometimes you get those error signals when you're like
I don't really know what I'm doing wrong
so even if Chat
GBT or an AI tool gives you the wrong formula
or does it still doesn't work
you can go back and say reiterate
reiterate like to help me to fix this
I'm still not getting the right answer
and it will continuously give you a new sort of path

(07:54):
that just helps you get there so much quicker
it's nice when you're creating a formula in Salesforce
and you'll check this in tax
and if you get an error
you can pop that error into chap
GPT and it will tell you oh
you got this error for because of X y and Z oh
that's nice let me rewrite this formula try this
and this has saved me so much time

(08:15):
and I've just corrected my formulas
and been able to work so much faster
and spend time on the things that matter yeah
definitely I think another area to
depending on how technical people are
and what their roles are I mean
I'm sure people have found many other ways then
then we'll even cover in this episode
but if you are in marketing
and you're doing actual coding

(08:37):
or you're doing HTML
or you're doing other things like that where
I mean really
it's crazy how one small little thing can
can screw up your whole code right
so being able to even use an AI
tool to just read through it and say like
where's the error there or how can you know
how can I even improve this

(08:57):
if I'm learning code
or I'm just in the beginnings of my career
and I think that actually helps you learn quicker
because you're you're starting
to see where you can improve
instead of just having massive errors
I mean yeah
imagine having a full page of code
that's giving you an error
and you trying to dissect it yeah

(09:18):
where the error is but rather than doing all of that
and spending out literally hours and doing it
yeah
pop it into an AI tool and it could tell you in seconds
this is where your problem
yeah and maybe it doesn't have the answer
but at least it'll tell you where your problem is
and it will probably provide some suggestions
and how to fix it right
so I think those are definitely super helpful

(09:40):
you know features of it
you know and another thing that is really helpful is if
again depending on your role
because this is very general
you can be in marketing offs or sales apps
or any kind of operations
where you're using some kind of AI tool
but just even tech support
yes you know
Cha TPT has been my tech support on many occasions

(10:02):
because again
going back to the community and the forums
yeah I love Marketing Nation
and I used to spend a lot more time on it especially um
when I was first learning merquetto
and I was figuring out how to be creative
and how to actually make the tool do what I wanted to
it to do right
and I would need to depend on the documentation

(10:23):
so reading the documentation
yeah as well as the community
which I still say depend on those
those are huge and wonderful resources still
but if I have a quick technical question now
like how can I make marquedo do this
how can I make Hubspot do this
I will pop it into chat
GPT before I go to the the forms
and to your point
those community support groups are amazing

(10:46):
because you still again
you don't wanna lose that human element
you still need those people to
run through random scenarios
that maybe you've never gone through
and chatty BT
or an AI
tool might not even have those scenarios in place yet
so you always still need those human elements
and
you have to be able to go back to those real use cases
with real people but it exactly that

(11:07):
like if you're running through those stuck things
that you are like
I don't have time to now read through all these forums
I have 5 minutes and my meeting is coming up
and I have to be able to do this now yeah
I you know
you need to get a little bit quicker answered
so helpful helpful place to go
you know especially with the
multiple text act that we deal with on a daily basis

(11:30):
being able to you know
plug in any tool that you're struggling with
and getting that support
and let's talk about that like where does it fall short
because how great it is
it does fall short in a lot of ways for sure
just this past week I was working in a tool
and I was using it as my tech support
and I was trying to figure out how to um

(11:53):
perform a certain automation
and I couldn't figure out how to do it
it was a new idea that I had
and I was going back and forth with Chat GBT
and then I just started to stop and think about okay
maybe if I use a different feature
of this specific tool and try it this way
and that actually worked and so
I think the critical thinking aspect just isn't there

(12:16):
because it's going to answer exactly what you ask it
yeah but sometimes the answer is not in your question
and your you need to think outside of the box
so that's what it doesn't do
it doesn't think outside of the box yeah
it doesn't have that human element like
you know that you sometimes really need
you need to be able to dig deep sometimes
and it's really just going to say well

(12:37):
here's what I have so far in my database haha
and and sometimes there's more knowledge out there
in the human element versus in the computer element
so I think for sure it lacks that human touch
that human you know experience really
and another thing that
I think it also sort of falls short on is the motion

(12:58):
so we use it a lot to generate emails for marketing
for sales emails
and although it's really great at wonderful yeah
it's very wonderful at giving you something right away
and consolidating the information
you're trying to email to people
but at the same time
we've seen in data that
it's so much better when you have a personalized touch

(13:20):
so from a sales perspective
we know that emails that are sort of canned
don't open well they don't we don't get responses
we don't have you know
maybe our bounce rates are higher
but when a human person actually goes in
and puts that personal element into it
uses a little bit more of emotional tones
and words that really resonate with people

(13:41):
that is when you start to see better results
so even though you can kind of
spit out something a little bit quicker
it's it's
definitely
falls short on the emotional aspect of things yeah
and that also goes into how you're prompting it
AI is wonderful for creating content
you can tell it to write an email about X y and Z Yep

(14:02):
if I were to give a prompt to chat GBT
and I were to say hey
write an email about living in the suburbs
buying a house in the suburbs
it could probably give me a great email
but then if I prompt it until it about the audience
adding some of that human element yeah hey
write an email to someone who has

(14:22):
lived in the city all of their life
and has never even been to the suburbs
and who has always lived in apartments yeah
write an email about living in the suburbs
and it's going to make it a little bit more
personalized audience
a little bit more right yeah
I think that
but then there's still that story aspect to it
and even I've seen this when I've used it

(14:43):
it uses a lot of the same verbage
it's so then you start to see okay
I need I need to have that human element again
to go in and refine this a little bit more
because I don't wanna keep using the same words
and I and I want it to be maybe just
you know more colorful
I want you know
I want something that a human really is going to say

(15:05):
this made me feel this way
I wanna give it that emotion and a computer
it's a machine it's a machine
it can't do that yeah
it that's the that's the whole thing
it's still
you still have to have that human touch to it
I think and and so it's definitely not there
it's not replacing a human fully in that
and I don't think it will no

(15:25):
it falls short there and I think um
it will enable us to do our jobs quicker and better
and at a higher quality in some aspects yeah
in some aspects
but some aspects we can outperform chat GBT
definitely we can think more critically
and we can add the human touch that is needed right

(15:47):
and it's really interesting too
because I've started to listen to other podcasts that
are kind of touching on these different AI
elements to things
and it's just really interesting how
even though
a lot of people are afraid that it's going to replace
jobs now
I think it's actually going to create new jobs
because 1 people have to be able to really

(16:08):
know how to use these AI tools the right way
so they don't get those those funny AI moments right
like where random pictures are tweaked and
and come out all crazy
and not anything like you intended um
but then they're starting to use them to develop more
enhanced things for just personal benefits
like health apps and just different things that are

(16:30):
you know people really need and maybe
maybe there's not always the human element to it
but an app with a little bit more AI
technology can enhance and
you're gonna need more people in those types of fields
who are knowledgeable in those areas
maybe make a marketing operations app
yeah that does data analysis using AI there you go

(16:51):
there you go
so overall I mean what do you think
I think it's not a chance
no I don't think so either it's going to replace us
yeah I love using it every day yeah
I agree it helps keep using it in your reporting
I would love to hear some more ideas on how
marketing operators are using AI

(17:12):
for sure how are using it in sales apps
and across all go to market teams
I have one other story though before we kick this off
so everyone is super afraid of you know
new technology changes
but I did read an article that back in 1850
some New Yorkers went on strike
because sewing machines came into place oh

(17:34):
so I mean I think we
I think we did okay with some sewing machines
and we still have Taylor we still have Taylor
you still need them
and they use sewing machines and it's okay
so I think I think we're okay
we'll be alright we'll be alright

(17:55):
now it's time for coffee time coffee talk
my favorite part yes
what are we gonna talk about today alright
today we are going to talk about oh shoot moments
oh shoot moments oh shoot moments oh
you know those moments in
when you're in ops here in the trenches
and yep something happens and you're just like

(18:19):
haha definitely
and I
I wish we all had little cameras that could just get
our facial expressions when that happens
because I think that would probably be a really funny
you know sort of little skit later yeah
later after it's done and you've moved on and yeah
I'm talking years later okay
because sometimes

(18:39):
something happens that you were traumatized
for a while I agree
so it hits hard sometimes it's hard the age old oh
shoot mom
yeah marketing operations
we all know what's coming to
we've all been there
we've all been there sending an email
it teaches you though yeah
it teaches you
you learn sending an email to your entire database yeah

(19:03):
you only meant to send it to a small segment
that one burns that one burns a bit
I think I still have nightmares about that yeah
I think I still wake up in I haven't for a while
but I
could see myself waking up in the middle of the night
just making sure that that audience is correct
because I mean
in tools like marketto and you're selecting an audience

(19:24):
yeah you want an email to send the bullying logic could
you know depending on how late you're doing yet
one or should be an end
and even with the most experienced people
sometimes you just make one mistake happen yeah
mistakes happen we're human yep
and then that should have gone to 700 people
could go to 70,000 people yes

(19:46):
that's the biggest oh
shoot moment I think I've ever had that top side yeah
I agree I think that one
I think almost everyone in marketing ops
has almost had that experience
and it's it's crazy to think that right
because we all could learn from each other
that we know that that happens
but again we're human and we make mistakes and again
it's like you have a lot of work

(20:07):
you make one wrong little logic in there
and it throws everything off right
or even maybe when you send
to customers versus prospects
or prospects versus customers
and you just don't forget
you don't remember to like
add one field in to just change that logic
you're so worried about the rest of the criteria

(20:28):
that you forget one little thing
and it's you know
that just throws everything off
I think that's the biggest
oh shoot moment we should have ended with that
but yeah I think I have a couple more
I think so I think there's a few more you call out
and so how about when you create this new
exciting automation I'm gonna automate deal stages
yeah and this is great yeah however

(20:51):
I've been there when you activate the automation
you don't think about okay
what field am I changing in this automation
and is that field in a different automation
that triggers on its change
and so what you could be doing is
you could be doing a great workflow
and automating a deal change
but are you triggering five alerts
many years ago I had um

(21:13):
I had just hired a new Salesforce admin
and we were doing some data clean up
and I think this was like her second week of work
and we had a bunch of
old Salesforce opportunities that we needed to
for some reason they weren't closed out
and so we needed to change them to
something where she had to do
use dataloader and change this information however

(21:35):
there was a
an automated workflow that sent an email to leadership
that hey
whenever an opportunity is one
send me an email and so
her switching
all of these opportunities
triggered so many emails to leadership team
and this poor girl listening to what I asked her to do
she was just be sure to like

(21:56):
but I hadn't thought about yeah
the the things that yeah triggered from this change
so that was a huge
in my career but lessons learn I never did that again
right
and that's the truth it once it happens that bad you
you are good to go you are
you know going forward

(22:16):
I have to always check these things
I mean I've had things like that happen to though
where I've set up automation rules
and it's reassigning I mean
reassigning tasks to people that aren't even the
the account owner
and then you're just in panic mode because you're
you don't even your brain kind of stalls too
because even though if you're in a calm state

(22:38):
you probably could think logically and say
I need to go do this and change this or turn this off
but in that moment
you're so overwhelmed by the fact that you know
something's broken that you kind of freeze
and you just like how do I go and fix this right now
yeah I wouldn't wish that on anyone
I would not either
and another one that definitely comes to mind too
and I think this is one everyone also

(23:00):
I'm sure has experiencing
is having your token or dynamic field without any data
classic yeah
or or the data is bad and everything's in caps
and you're sending it out
and then the emails look so off
or there's just nothing there and you're saying hi
blank yeah
haha alright

(23:21):
so that wraps up our coffee talk
in this episode on using AI and marketing operations
let us know what you think is AI going to replace us
and also share some of the use cases that you're using
that is helping your day to day
in marketing operations see you next time
subscribe and follow us on all social media platforms

(23:44):
keep up with us
and all of our hot takes on all things go to market
operations see you next time
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