It is interesting to think about the impacts of AI at all levels of the sales process.

I still believe this is one of the best slides I ever made, as I continue to be shocked at how many company leaders don’t understand the difference between the purposes of marketing, product marketing and sales comms. They kind of lump them all together in one undiffieniated mass in their minds.
Now, AI is changing both the customer search experience and the way content is produced, which completely upends the traditional tactics used by product marketing managers.

My initial observations:
1. No one reads anymore. I’ve said this already for two decades, especially when thinking about dreadful B2B content that just shouts tone deaf at it’s customers. Now, AI agents will do all the parsing for those customers, so content needs to be accurately detailed and hyper expanded for machine reading. No customer will suffer your dreadful B2B copywriting anymore.

2. When you finally reach a real human, you better have hyper-customized video content made just for them, with compelling storytelling, gorgeous visuals and snappy editing. Yet still, most companies can’t even begin to understand how to produce –any– video content, much more thousands of customized pieces. And OMFG what are you doing still emailing prospects attached PDFs like it was 2005?

3. Stop chasing perfection. Perfection is a mirage always somewhere in the distance. I’ve repeatedly seen well-intentioned company owners completely cripple their product marketing teams chasing their visions of perfection, rather than shipping fast and iterating faster. Now AI makes that “perfection” time penalty even more deadly, as AI rewards good-enough as long as it is immediate and readily available.

Maybe its because I myself was a specifier for the early part of my career, but overall, I preach a core theme that transcends tech trends:
If you don’t respect your prospect’s time as the single most valuable commodity of their existance, you are letting your B2B ego produce dreadful B2B shlock that is killing sales prospects.