54. Buyer Enablement in the Age of AI: What Sales and Marketing Need to Know

For this episode, I had the pleasure of chatting with David Kirkdorffer — marketing veteran, recording artist, hat enthusiast, and self-proclaimed connective tissue between sales and marketing. We talked all about how sales and marketing can actually get along, the evolution of enablement, and what happens when buyers (and AI) start running the show.

🔑 Key Takeaways from Our Conversation:

• Sales and marketing should be allies
  David and I have both seen our fair share of friction between the two functions, but alignment starts with empathy. He shared how marketing should serve sales like a customer — and how simplifying CRMs, decluttering processes, and building real relationships makes a huge difference.

• We're not in a sales-led world anymore
  The buyer journey has changed — again. Buyers want to self-educate. They're forming shortlists before they ever talk to a rep, and in many cases, the first vendor they speak to is the one they buy from. So your content better be out there, and it better be useful.

• From Sales Enablement → Buyer Enablement → AI Enablement
  While sales enablement is still necessary, if you're not building content that helps buyers make confident decisions on their own, you're missing the mark. Oh, and now we’ve got LLMs and AI agents becoming buyer research tools — so your content needs to be LLM-ready too.

• Dark social isn’t so dark anymore
  Your buyers are hanging out in Slack groups, Zoom communities, and private DMs — not your lead forms. Attribution is a mess, but influence is real. The best way to stay visible? Build for discoverability. That means un-gating helpful content and optimizing for the new “search” — LLMs and AI summaries.

• Startups and stages matter
  David broke down how sales and marketing roles shift as companies evolve. Founders need to let go (eventually), and marketers need to recognize when one-off sales tools are necessary — and when they’re slowing scale.

• Let sales sell
  Don’t make them CRM power users. Don’t overload them with fluff. Give them tools that help them — not just your dashboards. And when in doubt, talk to them.

🎧 Whether you’re in sales, marketing, or somewhere in between, this episode is for you if:

• You’ve ever wondered why your content isn’t being used

• You’re trying to support reps in a virtual-first, AI-enhanced world

• Or you just like thoughtful, strategic banter (with hats)

💬 Let me know what you took away from this episode. And if you're curious to dive deeper into AI readiness for marketing content, you can connect with David on LinkedIn — he’s the only David Kirkdorffer out there. Seriously.

Until next time —
Keep it human, keep it helpful, and keep selling.
– Lee