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Kyle Lacy dives into the tried-and-true tactics that still get results and explains why AI SDRs (Sales Development Reps) aren't quite ready to replace the human touch just yet. Whether you're a marketer or a sales pro, this video will give you practical insights you can start using today. Don't miss out on the strategies that actually work!
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Andy:
Question for you, what's your take right now as a CMO on these AI SDRs?
Kyle: I firmly believe that at some point in the future, I'm going to look back on interviews. like this podcast, like this, where I've been asked about the future of AI and especially AI SDRs. And I'm going to shake my head because I was a complete idiot. But the reality is right now, as I'm sitting here on September 4th, 2024, I do not believe it. I have yet to see it displace a team of human beings.
Andy: Today, my guest is Kyle Lacey. Kyle's a marketing powerhouse who has spent the last 17 years building, scaling, and winning in high growth software companies. He's currently the CMO at Jellyfish, which is an engineering management platform that's changing how tech companies really operate. Now, Kyle's track record is nothing short of impressive. He was a CMO at Lessonly, where he grew the marketing team from eight to over 70 people and achieved a 20X revenue growth rate. He's also held a leadership positions at Seismic, OpenView, Salesforce, and ExactTarget. And if that wasn't enough, Kyle's a three-time author with books published in five languages across seven countries. Now, what I love about Kyle is his blend of creativity and data-driven decision-making. He's not afraid to color outside the lines, whether it's creating memorable marketing campaigns like the Golden Llama or diving deep into pipeline models and ROI metrics. Kyle has a unique perspective on balancing brand building with demand generation, and he's not shy about sharing his strong opinions on what works and what doesn't in modern marketing. Now, in this episode, we're gonna dive into Kyle's thoughts on everything from AI and marketing to the enduring power of direct mail and in-person events. We'll explore his approach to building high-performing marketing teams, his take on personal branding for marketers, and how he balances his career with family life. Now, whether you're a seasoned CMO or just starting your marketing career, I guarantee you'll walk away from this conversation with actionable insights and a fresh perspective on what it takes to succeed in today's marketing landscape. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and would help us out a ton. With that, I bring you Kyle, y'all. Hey, what's up? What's up, man? Thanks for your patience. I didn't read the 145 part. I'm an idiot myself. That's OK.
Kyle: No problem. Sorry. We have a we have a standing like conversion rate. Group that meets every week to go through like Funnel conversion. And so I needed to be on it.
Andy: Oh, well, tell me about that. Okay. Funnel convert. And what are the funnels you're running right now? I'm super curious on that. And sorry, we're just getting right into it, man. So. No, it's okay.
Kyle: What, how do you, how do you want to handle this? Is it video audio? Like what's the, give me the. It's both.
Andy: So it goes out to my newsletter of 31 K like go to market folks. So it's just called Andy's newsletter. So very basic. Yeah. Just keep it super simple. Um, and then it also goes on my YouTube, which is like a thousand subscribers right now or something. We haven't really pushed a lot to it. Um, but yeah, mostly the newsletter. So. Yeah. And it'll be video format on there. And then it goes on Spotify and all like the podcast whole network, you know, from, from transistors. So, um, yeah, so we typically keep it super conversational. Um, the way we typically format it, we might timing wise, we might need to see what's going on here, but, um, the way we typically run it is I do three go to market, um, things that are working for you. three that you're testing and three that everyone should avoid, right? And we kind of like, we started what's working for you. And then we kind of go down the list. Um, just time dependent is typically how we run it. So, all right. So one more time, three, yeah, three go to market, um, experience or things that are working for you. So three go to market motions that are working three that you're experimenting with and three that you should not, um, Three that you should avoid. So maybe we just do one, one in one though, just for timing purposes. Um, we might want to, let's just, we can do one, one in one.
Kyle: So you tell me, I think, I think I could do like, let's, let's not stick to, do you have post editing or are you just going to publish?
Andy: Yeah, well we post edit for sure.
undefined: Yeah. Okay. So yeah, cool. So I, let's try to do three, three and three and then we can, um, If we get to three, two, three, one, two, whatever, whatever. Yeah. Okay. I think we can, I think we can do it.
Andy: I like it. I like it. I like it. So, okay. So we started this call, um, and we just jumped right into it, Kyle. So for everyone listening, um, Kyle is the CMO at jellyfish previously, the CMO, uh, less than Lee, which was acquired by seismic, uh, if, and correct me if I'm wrong here. and any of this, this is just from some research or maybe I'd be misspeaking. Yeah. And so you went through that acquisition. Now you're at jellyfish. I think you took some time off in between there a little bit, just full dad mode.
undefined: Yeah. But mainly to get my sanity back the honestly, I mean, that's a complete, that's for a completely different conversation, but yeah, yeah. It took, took a four to five month break and then found jellyfish.
Andy: Yeah. And what'd you do in the four to five month break? Like what?
undefined: Uh, I mean, I, I, I actually had my, I remember the first week of me being me having left seismic and having like four or five calls a day. And my wife was like, What are you doing? You're supposed to be taking a break. Like, why are you just so the first thank God for her the first two months or so I read I was just hanging out doing house stuff. And then I started picking up the conversations like two months in what I wanted to do next. But a lot of it was. Taking the kids to Camps in the pool and because it was in the middle of summer for the most part. Yeah So yeah, I mean it was a lot of read.
Kyle: I did a lot of reading did a lot of hanging out Yeah, which we're reading actually we're doing marketing books. We're reading.
undefined: Oh, yeah, I very rare. Honestly, I rarely I'll do three or four a year that are business books, but most of my reading is an outlet for me. It's not like I do enough reading on my day-to-day.
Andy: Yeah. You know what's great? I was just talking to my wife about this and she runs sales at Attentive. Oh, great. We were chatting and like, She's like, I don't see you really read business books anymore. And I'm like, you know what? I like just stopped because I feel like they all just repeated the same old thing. Either one, it was like, just like repeating the same thing in a different way. Or it was two, they told you something that was just outdated. And like, things change so fast now that like, really, I think education in any of this marketing or sales or any of this just comes from like experimentation now. Right? Like, yeah, for sure. trying shit and then like figuring out if it works. And that's the way you're going to learn, like how to do, you know, figure out a channel, um, versus like reading the books. That's my opinion. I could be completely wrong. Um, but I feel like you hit like this threshold or plateau and you're like, okay, I've heard it all. It's all just a like rinse and repeat of like Russell Brunson or like, you know, something like that.
Kyle: Well, I think, I think that if I, the hard part isn't, Taking in information, you do that a hundred times a day. I think it's, it's spitting that information back out in a way that's meaningful for your teams and for the rest of the industry. I, for me, it's writing that's the hardest part, right? And getting everything in my head out. It's not consuming information. I don't have any problem with consuming information, which is why I don't need to read. a book on the weekend about, you know, the next marketing trend. Like I do it enough. I'd much rather do sci-fi or something different.
Kyle: Yeah. Yeah. I agreed on you on that one.
Andy: Agreed with you on that one. So, all right, man, I want to get into the tactics here. Typically what people really love when we get, when we do these and when it goes out to newsletters, like What are you experimenting with right now from a go-to-market side? And I think from a marketing standpoint too, Kyle, I was talking to someone, an executive at Lacework recently, and she was like, I was like, what are you doing for marketing? She's like, honestly, I have no idea right now. And so,
Kyle: Yeah, I, I, I, you know, I'll tell you the things that are working and it's your listeners might just roll their eyes because they're pretty traditional. Like I'd love to, I'd love to sit here and be like, we bought some AI tool and it's completely revolutionizing. Everything we do is a marketing org and it's like robots are running marketing. It's the best thing ever. Look, organic search, working. Organic search continues to work. You know, virtual events continue to work. Putting people in a room continue to work. Direct mail continues to work for us. It's worked for me for years. And, you know, it's, I think it's, I mean, maybe that's traditional stuff now, but from an experimentation standpoint, Even within those three, there's so many experiments you can do within those, but you know, it, from a pipeline perspective, I mean, the, the traditional stuff still works for us and shit.
Andy: I mean, yeah, absolutely. And it's almost like it's the traditional channels, but you're tweaking it. You're tweaking the items within those channels to work today. Right. So like, let me give you an, so you mentioned organic search, so. Is that just blog posts that you're doing? Or are you doing like these AI generated blog posts?
Kyle: We've experimented with AI generated. We were using a software called DemandWell previously. And so yeah, we've experimented with AI content, of course. But it's everything from landing pages to blog posts to a lot of different stuff. But a lot of A lot of the organic, or even like direct mail, you know, it's not the Dan Kennedy that my dad was doing 20 years ago. You know, we use postal, we use on-demand printing, we use a lot of stuff that is technologically advanced in my opinion and personalized, but it's still direct mail. It's still sending a physical product to a person. Right. It's just now it's built into our workflows. They're highly personalized. You know, we have a fricking brand store that you can go buy swag from, and that's a little bit, you know, it's just a differentiator for us.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. The brand store. Yeah. We have one of those too, which is hilarious. We, we, we kind of spun it up, but we were like, okay, like this is from our brand store, right?
Kyle: Yeah. Yeah. See that's. Yeah, that's good. That's good swag. Right. And I, I'm a, I'm very, if anybody has listened to me before, I'm very passionate about that. It's not, you can put your logo on something, but if you, if you make it look and feel like a, a retailer, you know, that's just, that's so much cooler. It just sets your, it sets itself apart.
Andy: I just look at stuff and I'm like, I want to create something I'm going to wear, you know, like if I, if I'm not going to wear it, like I'm not going to freaking, I'm like, it's not going to be part of the brand.
Kyle: Like, you know, so from an experimentation standpoint, it's testing designs. It's having a great designer. It's having, whether that's a contractor or somebody on your team. It's experimenting on what types of swag people like. Is it jackets? Should you do on demand? Should you warehouse stuff so it's cheaper? There's tons of things to experiment in with that. And then the tools as well. I mean, I've used Postal for years, but there's other tools out there that you can use to send personalized direct mail. So, I mean, it works for us and it's worked for me the past three jobs I've had.
Andy: Yeah. Okay. Question for you, what's your take right now as a CMO on, on these AI SDRs? Have you, have you toyed with them yet? Where's your head?
Kyle: No, I, you know, I, I, I firmly believe that at some point in the future, I'm going to look back on interviews. like this podcast, like this, where I've been asked about the future of AI and especially AI SDRs. And I'm going to shake my head because I was a complete idiot. But the reality is right now, as I'm sitting here on September 4th, 2024, I do not believe it. I do not believe it. I have, I have yet to see it work. I have yet to see it displace a team of human beings. Now, do we use AI to help complement our outbound efforts? Yes, 100%. But it's an assistant, right? It's the same thing as GitHub's Copilot. They're coding assistants. They help engineers write better code, write more code, ship things faster, be more productive. Same concept applies to outbound BDRs. I'm sure there'll come a time where SDRs will be replaced. I'm sure there'll come a time where RevOps. I mean, I have no idea. Who knows? But right now I have yet to see anything close to a team of five BDRs producing meetings to drive revenue and bookings. So until I see it done, I'm not going to spend money on it.
Andy: You know what's funny? I'm with you. And why I'm with you is it's so ironic because these AISDRs can personalize instantly for you, send a thousand emails. But now when it's personalized, I look at the personalization and I go, that's AI. And I looked at all the things I've responded to in the last month as an exercise, because I'm going to write a whole LinkedIn post on this. And every single thing I've responded to has been an automated email that has not been personalized.
Kyle: Yeah. Well, look, look, I'm fine with using AI for outreach. The problem is, is that who are you going to get to close the deal? Who are you going to get to have an extremely qualified opportunity Now, if you're a high velocity sales motion and your sales cycles are like five days and you can buy some AI chat bot that will talk to somebody that will then you can put a credit card, maybe it will work. I am not in that world. I'm not in that world. I saw a pitch the other day of a chat bot that will actually call somebody and ask them questions. Yeah, I've seen that too. Okay. Fine. But what happens when you book the meeting and they have to talk to a human being? Yeah. I don't know. Again, I'm going to look back on this and be like, Kyle, you just could not Yeah. Not see the future. Yeah. I haven't seen it yet.
Andy: I haven't seen it yet. Yeah. And you know what? So the way, and the way I've been looking at it too, that I think is been interesting from the cold email, like the AISDR and all this stuff is like, I think for me, the mindset shift has been like, look at cold email specific. Cause that's what a lot of these AISDRs are doing. They're just like cold emailing at the right time telling you, you know, they're doing all those tasks and. I've been looking more at cold emails like an ad. versus personalizing. So, you know, when you see an ad on Facebook that grabs you, you can like do a link click or whatever. I'm like a huge nerd when it comes to this stuff. You probably do it too. My wife's like, you click on every ad you see. And I'm like, yeah, I just want to see the funnel.
Kyle: You know, like. I click on all my competitors ads. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Kyle: Right. I click on those. I click on anything that grabs me. I'm like, Ooh, that was.
Kyle: That's my experiment. That's my experiment. I just, incognito. I just go click on all my competitors.
Kyle: Yeah, there's a secret there. That's competitive.
Kyle: I mean, but no, you're right. But you are 100% right. I do think that my here, here's the deal. Yeah. And I'm sure that I'm gonna get LinkedIn messages or emails about this, whatever, feel free to try to prove me right. As whenever an AI can generate a meeting that drives a actual revenue, I'll experiment. Yeah. If they can drive actual revenue, you know, you can create pipeline all day long. Yeah. But if it doesn't close, who cares? Who cares about any of this? If it doesn't create bookings, cause that's why we're in business is to create bookings is to create product for customers that love what we do. And that's it. And I think it's an assistant, you know, it makes a hell of a lot easier to review earnings calls. for, you know, especially if you're in enterprise sales, like why not? It makes a hell of a lot easier to do, to review competitive information, right? Like there's tons of, I mean, I use it daily. I use AI daily, but I don't know. I could talk about this for an hour. I just don't the same with the same with content production. Yeah. Yeah. Creativity. It's going to be a long time before you can replace somebody that's creative with a robot. Yeah, I mean, that's the reality, especially in writing. You know, I think the jury's still out for search content. But, you know, I'm open, I'm open to any of it, as long as you can prove that it's not just smoke and mirrors, which a lot of these products are right now.
Andy: And the way the analogy that I thought about it in this is like, I don't know if you remember when Instagram came out, but Instagram and Instagram, like people are like, Oh, photographers are dead, you know, like, we don't need photographers anymore. You know, like you. Yeah. And it just made more photographers.
Kyle: Absolutely.
Andy: And the ones that were great, like all really good, it made them even better. Right. And so that's kind of the analogy that I look at it.
Kyle: So here's, here's mine. Here's mine. This is, this is the best one I can come up with. Uh, my first software job was at a company called exact target. It was, we were the largest email center in the world in 2012. We were bought by Salesforce. We IPO, we were bought by Salesforce. So it's the marketing cloud at Salesforce. It was exact target. I have a slide from 2012 talking about how a bunch of people are saying email is dead. And I'm on a podcast with you September 4th, 10 years or 12 years later for your newsletter, which is great.
Andy: That's being sent via what? It's email, man. Email.
Kyle: So you can tell me things again all day long. I mean, it's just a hype cycle. But it's, it is helpful. I'm not saying that AI is not helpful. I use it. Like I said before, but the fact that it's going to replace people doing their jobs a hundred percent of the time, like in the near future, I think is unrealistic.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. And let's go on. How are you experimenting with, how are you using email right now? Like, are you doing it for like newsletters? Are you doing it for like, how are you using it to promote and build pipeline? I guess is the question.
Kyle: Well, we have the tradition. I mean, we have the traditional automation, like marketing automation that we do. We have a product newsletter and then we just started experimenting with the LinkedIn newsletter feature. Which, you know, I do think that email will continue to work and should. And I do think it's interesting, where I would love to experiment is more of like the influencer world where you have people like yourself or you have people that are writing to the masses and you have this personal brand renaissance period. I don't know what's, I mean, it's, it's been happening since the pandemic really, where people are going out their own producing their own content, creating stronger personal brands. There's a lot that could be done there on the marketing side that I would love to experiment with in the near future. We've started talking about doing that, but how do you bring people in the fold that aren't part of your brand? I think that's more interesting on the email side than jellyfish coming out with another newsletter. I think it's how do you tap into paid advertising? How do you tap into the influencer market with LinkedIn and other social accounts, TikTok? How do you tap into them writing about you in a meaningful way? That's more interesting to me on the email side than what we would do as a brand.
Andy: And have you seen anyone do that? Well, like the B2B influencer marketing?
Kyle: Not yet. I think it's, I haven't either.
Kyle: Yeah. Yeah.
Kyle: I mean, I, I think that I would, I mean, the best influencer campaign that I've ever seen was Marketo's, uh, 50. Now I can't remember what it was called. Uh, they, they highlighted 50 marketing leaders. at their summit, they had banners on the side of the building, but this was 10 years ago. So what's old is new again. I mean, it's just, it's all it is is a cycle.
Andy: Yeah. It's just like a, it's a recycled version of it. Now it's less like marketing leader, you know, and more like who's got the biggest audience that's kind of in that niche, you know?
Kyle: But I found, you know, I found, I've done a lot of work with Nevada. And the reason why it works is because we use the product and we love the product. Yeah. If somebody, you know, if it's, if, if you're having influencers do posts for you and, and do video and write about you and they're not a user of the product, I just think it doesn't work because it's not meaningful.
Andy: Yeah. You can kind of sniff right through it. Right. It's like, yeah, you can stay in. I see a lot of feet every day and I'm like, Yeah, I can sniff through that this is one a sponsored post, but that's, that's okay. You know, that's, I get it, but you can also sniff through like, Hmm, the way you're talking about how to use it. I don't really know if it's really benefiting you like that. And if it's really that great, cause I've, you know, I've heard the opposite from everyone else. Right.
Kyle: So, I mean, yeah. And I, yeah, I, when I am doing something like that, 99% of the time I've used the product or I'm using the product. Yeah. Um, and that's, but I think it's really interesting for marketing leaders, for marketers to try to figure out how to experiment with the people out there who are trying to build, you know, if, if I want to reach engineering leaders, am I going to the smaller newsletters that have 1,800, 2,500 subscribers, or am I going to go to Lenny and pay a huge amount of money for his, I mean, I don't know how many he has. It's, it's unbelievable.
Andy: I think he's got 500 K or something.
Kyle: Yeah.
Kyle: But what, what, like from an experimentation standpoint, I think that's interesting to me. It's interesting to me too. How do you tap into the people who are strong influencers with smaller groups of people? Um, and that's the same concept as Instagram or Tik TOK or any of those other where You know, if you have a marketer that has a strong following of 500 people, maybe that's stronger than going and picking up a Kyle that has a thousand and it doesn't work. Right. I just think it's interesting. It's interesting to talk about from an experimentation standpoint.
Andy: Yeah, no, I agree. And yeah, I think that's the other. you know, who was it recently? Gary B or something where someone asked them and they were like, would you rather have, you know, like a hundred thousand TikTok followers or like a thousand emails? And he was like a thousand emails. Yeah. And I'm like, same, right? Because it's owned.
Kyle: Cause you own it. I think that's it. That's always been, that's always been, I mean, that's why exact target was bought for 2.8 billion. Right. Because it's an owned property. It's like, and that's always been the case. And so, you know, I, I think, you know, should you, should you avoid experimenting with AI? No. Should you avoid experimenting with all of these bright, shiny objects? No. But if you, all you're doing is experimentation and you're not, you don't have a foundation set with what actually drives growth. You're going to, you're going to cycle out of your role every 12 months and you're, the business isn't going to grow the way it should.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. It kind of reminds me of that, uh, that it was at a Warren Buffett quote about money. Right. It was, and I know I'm relating this, but it was like off the sanity, but it's basically like, if you want to make money fast, like do this. But if you like the way to make money, like the most money is to wait. Right?
Kyle: Yeah, it's like, if you want, you can make money fast, but if you want to build wealth or something, it takes time, something like that.
Andy: Yeah, it's like your best thing is time or something interesting like that. And it's kind of like marketing. I'm, you know, what I'm seeing is like, if, like, if you want to make money, basically, do the basics well, and then like experiment within the basics versus kind of as a foundation.
Kyle: And then kind of get crazy, you know, once you've got like a foundational aspect working, I also think that we as marketers, we are dopamine trained. And the younger the marketer gets it, in my opinion, the more dopamine train they are. And I'm highly like, I'm that way. I just turned 40. Right. So I'm, I mean, I'm, I feel like an old man for the most part, but that's where bright, shiny object comes in. It's like, Oh, an AI bot that will write all your search content by, by, by, by, by. And then it, and then it fails because it was a new technology. And you're back to trying to find the next thing to fill the void because you need that quick win. And. You know, the past three roles, the quick wins have never worked.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Ever going back to the basics, right? It's almost, it's like sales too. Cause a lot of people are in marketing listening. There's a lot of people in sales. It's like a lot of the stuff that's like showing up well, being organized, like running a great process. Like all that stuff is still what wins deals, right? Like against competitors and all that fun stuff. So, and guess what?
Kyle: As a market leader, it's what the board cares about. Yeah. They don't care. Like that's it. So you can go bring your bright, shiny object to the board meeting, but they're not going to care.
Andy: Yeah. And they shouldn't do for us work.
Kyle: Yeah. Like show me the bookings number.
Kyle: Yeah. Great.
Kyle: Yeah. Great. I'm so glad you're experimenting with this AI SDR, but you, you were, you were at 40% quota attainment last quarter. Great job.
Andy: Good work. Yeah. Good work. Now, now what? Now what?
Kyle: I'm going to get so, so much hate for this. I'm sorry. AI SDR companies. My, my fault.
Andy: Well, now the AI is going to see that you were on this saying that word and now you're going to get actually bombarded with more AI.
Kyle: Or, or it's like I sell chat GPT. Good morning. How are you doing every time I log in? Cause I'm just afraid that. farther down the line, it's going to think I mistreated it in some way and like, yeah, terminator on me.
Kyle: You're going to see the Tesla robots showing up to your door.
Kyle: I drive a Tesla. So that's the problem. It's just going to randomly run me into a telephone pole. It's like you, what did you do to open AI Kyle? Like, I'm sorry. You're oh, you're screwed. I was too demanding.
Andy: Yeah, yeah. Well, I know you have to run, man. So Kyle, yeah. And let me know, are you going to Sasser next week?
Kyle: I am not. Yeah, I went last year. Loved it. I'm bummed that I have to miss it. But I've got an onsite for jellyfish. So got it.
Andy: Got it. Well, hey, we'll catch up again. Let's do this again in a few months or something. We'll get something. Yeah. And, and good to meet you, man. I know we, we kind of just hopped on and went and, you know, rolled with it. So good to meet you too.
Kyle: Thank you for, thank, thank you for chatting. And I'm always, I'm always open to these types of conversations. Don't hate me AI.
Kyle: Yeah.
Andy: I'll send this out. So the AI bots can get all the information and I'll let you know when we do that, Kyle. All right, man. So thanks, Andy. See you soon. Appreciate it. Bye.
