1007: Boost B2B Revenue with MarketMate AI: Optimizing Marketing Strategy with Nathan Schlaffer

Robert Plank 0:06 Hey, welcome back. We are here with Nathan Slifer, who is the CEO and the co founder of market mate AI, which is an AI powered marketing platform that aligns b2b sales and marketing teams for revenue growth. So we're going to be finding all about this amazing generative AI tool, and also how to use it, what it can do for us and how to not get overwhelmed. So Nathan, glad to be speaking with you.

Nathan Schlaffer 0:29 Yeah. Glad to be here, Robert, thanks for having me.

Robert Plank 0:32 Glad to have you. And so whenever this whole AI, stuff comes up, I get sort of like, I go from, like, stage one is like, what's even the point of this. And then stage two is like, cool, I can see it getting all of its uses. And then stage three, I'm, like, completely overloaded, and I kind of like the brain burns out. And so am I alone in this when it comes to like using some of these amazing tools like yours? Yeah,

Nathan Schlaffer 0:56 Robert, I think you hit on the nail, you hit the nail on the head is there's a lot of AI tool fatigue, people like myself, started using GPT, when it came out earlier this year. And we were so excited about the possibility of automating a lot of the typical work that marketers do, like, you know, content development, messaging, creating sales tools. But one of the things that we saw, at least in market made was, Hey, there, there's too many tools out there that do one thing. And it's hard to know, as a marketer, where should I start? So we really specialize is helping the marketer. Think of it from a workflow perspective, like, Hey, I have a marketing campaign, I have to develop a press release content, I have to develop a landing page, write some emails to promote my product or service? How do we take these entire projects and automate them with AI. So we're really focused on ease of use, making it simple because I myself was a marketer for 10 years, so I can feel the angst and the overwhelm that that's pretty common right now with with AI tools out there.

Robert Plank 1:58 Wonderful. And I like how you put it in that it's part of the workflow, because maybe the problem was too many times, there's like the surface level kind of experimentation, right? Like, oh, I didn't know I could use chat GVT to write my LinkedIn post, let me use that once. And then cool, that's, that's fine. But then it's, it's always seems to be like new and awkward. And I just find myself just either looking at the new tools, or looking at the new functionality. And it seems like what you're saying is figure out a way to build it into your process. That way, you sort of take the tool for granted in a good way. And that will, your focus can be on the better usage of the tool, because you hear a lot about how with, with AI, especially it's garbage in, garbage out. And the prompts are really important. And then also the kind of back and forth and knowing what you're looking at and being good at at editing and saying, like, try this again, or I don't like this piece. And so how do we kind of tap into that, that better workflow mindset versus just experimenting? Absolutely

Nathan Schlaffer 2:58 great, great examples there. And I think many marketers have done exactly that is they're collecting all of these prompts and kind of keeping a prompt library and say, I want to do this, I'm going to use this Crumped I think one good place to start is, Hey, what is your goal from a marketing perspective? For example, if I am, if I am developing content, and I want to personalize it for my audience, first, I have to start with, Hey, who is my audience? You know, what are my buyer personas? What are their pain points? What are their motivations? What do they care about? So what we've done is we've kind of taken the prompt engineering out of AI, you've said, Hey, we're gonna handle that on the back end, you just fill out a form and describe your buyer persona, what are their pain points, you know, what is their job title, what problems keep them up at night. And then once we have an AI model that understands your audience, what their needs are, then it can speak their language. So we start by training an AI model on your audience. And I think all great marketing starts with who your audience is, and what they care about, how do I educate them from a thought leadership perspective? And then afterwards, we can have the AI rapidly personalized content at scale. So what I mean by that is, if you have an upcoming marketing campaign, you're probably thinking in terms of your content calendar, how do I create top of funnel content that's educational, middle of funnel content, that maybe they're the consumers in the consideration mindset, and they need to compare options, and you have that type of content. And then you have bottom of funnel content. That's more now I want to convince them why my solution is the best solution out there to solve their problem. What we've done is we've taken an AI model that can learn the buyer persona, and then essentially create that entire top, middle and bottom of funnel content for you in 20 minutes. So you don't have to spend weeks kind of what prompts should I use? We've created all the prompts for you through templates, you just put in a few inputs in a form and then it outputs the content for you in days rather than a week. So So that's essentially how we approach it. Were like, let's not even do prompt engineering, it's too complicated. Let's focus on what marketers do best, which is really understanding their market, trading and AI on their subject matter expertise, and then having the AI do the heavy lifting and create the content for you. I

Robert Plank 5:14 love it. And this is a very interesting and helpful mindset you have about this your sort of strategy, which is to say, there's this buyer persona, and there's all these things that they're they're thinking about these problems, they have what keeps them up at night. So there's, there's that aspect of it. And then there's a matter of, then you want to create all this content that speaks to them. But it's not just one big piece of content, it's part of your content calendar, and then when to kind of crack that now to solve that problem. In smaller pieces, you say? Well, there's kind of the three stages of awareness, so to speak, right? Where there's like, first, they're kind of just researching possibilities. And that's the more general content. And then there's the more like selling them on your solution. And then there's like the about to buy questions and like the real up and close and personal with your product. And it definitely makes sense how that can come together. And if we kind of use those inputs, we get better outputs versus kind of maybe the a lot of the ways that we're we've been you and I have been talking about, it's almost backwards, right? When you like collect prompts, or you try prompts, it's very like, start to finish, which can get messy. But then if you start with the end in mind and say, well, here's where I want to speak to, and then What content do I create, it's a lot less of a mess, and it's a lot less overwhelming. And so to help us kind of really understand this concept, do you have like a fun story like a success story case study of someone using your market mate tool and kind of applying it and filling up this content calendar, for example? Yeah,

Nathan Schlaffer 6:42 I do. There's a company called player zero. And we did a YouTube video with them, where we actually walk through one of their product launches that they had coming up, they basically have a software that collects intelligence about their customers and helps with prioritizing different product releases for software companies. So one of the things that they had to do is, hey, we had to write a press release, we had to make a big splash in the market let people know about our product or service. So what we did was we had market made, which is our platform, basically walk through their buyer personas, they're selling to Vice President of Product Management. So we created a persona for the VP of Product Management. And the persona, basically had, you know, what are the challenges that a VP of product has, they want to prioritize releases that that match customer needs, they want to drive their business objectives and revenue growth, they want to prioritize the product roadmap. So once the AI model created the buyer persona, and they didn't have to do any prompting, they just typed in, hey, we're targeting VP of product, here's what they struggle with, here's a little bit about our solution, what we do, we were able to generate a persona for them. And then the AI model knew what a press release was, because we've trained it on the back end, this is how you write a good press release. So it automatically generated a press release for their buyer persona, for their product or service value proposition so that the message would align with with their audience. And then what we did was we said, Okay, press release isn't enough. This is a marketing campaign. So we need some, you know, LinkedIn posts, we need a few advertisements, maybe a one pager describing our solution that we can use as a as a handout. So we had the AI tool generate all of these things for us. And I think in an in a 90 minute session, we're able to generate two weeks worth of content. So it's very impressive. The power of AI if it's trained and directed. And that's kind of where our focus is, is hey, if you're a b2b company or software company, then in you need not just content and you need the AI to understand your audience, their pain points, your messaging, like what is your product value proposition? What are your features, and then be able to speak your customer language, that's our specialty is like, hey, let's train AI. So it knows your customer as well as you do knows your message as well as you do. So you can create content that resonates so you can personalize content for your marketing campaigns. Wonderful.

Robert Plank 9:03 And I can see how the me maybe a lot of the frustrations come up along when someone's just using like, like naked chat GPT. And they're like, they're not really using, they're not using all this data, they're just like, hey, write me a press release, not really knowing, like how I mean, the it's not the A's fault, it's just guessing about what you want. And then who knows what it comes back with as far as like the length or if it's missing anything, or if it's not the way you want. And so it seems like by kind of using your tool as this extra layer, they can get the best practices figured out and they can kind of make sure it involves all those proper elements for like a real press release, not just something that is just kind of made up on the fly with very little data to put in there. And so And you're also kind of making a little bit of a mental note there of just just by accident, I've been using sort of these generative AI tools to say I'm making piece of content number one, and let me just generate really quick We like pieces of content like two, three and four, right? Like, if I'm making like a, like a Facebook post, I'm like, Okay, well create me like a email blast and create me like a YouTube script and create me LinkedIn posts. That way, I can just, I tell myself, it's only a few minutes of just like copy and pasting and clicking, and I get these extra little bit of promotion that otherwise I wouldn't have gone to or in the old days would have taken me like an hour plus to figure these things out. And remember that this sort of stuff. And so, so this is a great tool that you've built. But you and I both know that a tool can can be misused, right? Someone might just not understand it, and like, put it a bunch of just bad, bad inputs and get some bad outputs. So have you come across that? Or like how how people that may be frustrated with your tool? And how can we maybe like get them on the right track as far as using this tool so that we they get the best benefits? Yeah,

Nathan Schlaffer 10:54 great question. I think one of the ways that it at least that we've had to educate a lot of the market in using the tool is one big issue is hallucination is and this is not just a one AI tool, but all the AI tools, where if it's not given proper context, sometimes AI can make stuff up. So one of the ways we've helped mitigate that risk is we've added in the ability to cite your sources. So the AI will actually say here, here's where I'm drawing this information from. So you can go and read it yourself. And then I think another thing as well as really understanding the proper context that you're giving the API is, the more detailed you are, the better the response will be in, for example, one of the capabilities that that we have in our tool is, when I'm naming my products, I want to create a brand architecture or systematic way of naming, this is product A, this is product B, this is product C. But one of the challenges, there's many different frameworks out there for for naming products, you know, there's the branded house where you have, like, you have like Apple, and you have Apple, iPhone, Apple, iPad, and you have like the parent brand and the sub brand. So one of the things that we were able to really do was a train the AI on Hey, here, here's a description of what each of those frameworks are, so that the AI can generate your naming conventions for you and name your products or your platform for you using some best practices. So I think part of it is understanding the limitations of tools, understanding what they're capable of doing. And understanding the right inputs to feed to it to really get the output that you're looking for our philosophy with market mate is we want to make it as easy to use as possible without being a professional prompt engineer. So we've kept our forms very simple, where we just have inputs, and then you generate and then you get an output. But for anyone out there that's using AI tools, it's very important that you provide as much context as possible to really get what you're looking for out of it. And we've all experienced that when we're saying, hey, write this piece of content for me chat GPT. Or if using Google Bard or cloud to another gem, generic LLM tools. Unless you provide the context, you're not going to get the quality output that you're looking for. Yeah.

Robert Plank 13:15 That's very helpful. So context is important. And I found myself doing that more and more aware. Like, I'll load in a bunch of just a bunch of raw materials, right? I'll load in like my blog posts, or like YouTube transcripts, or like, even like transcripts of like, say, like this podcast we're doing right now, I'll just load in some transcripts. And just to kind of give it give it way more than it needs to work with so that we if it like uses, like 5% of it, I'm like, Okay, well, it got that that rights context right there. And so that's helpful to, to think about it in that way. And what you're making me kind of think about is kind of the importance of going back to basics, right? Because there's like the, there's like that curve, where like, when you first learn something, or you're first getting into it, you think you know everything. And then the more that you you know, the more you know, you don't know if that makes sense. But then you kind of you get this knowledge really deep and embedded in you. And it's really easy to just forget, like the basics. And so you're reminding me that, even though the last couple of months, I've I've like gone like on Wikipedia, and looked up SEO just like what are the basics of SEO? Or like, I'll go on YouTube? And I'm like, is there like a three minute video of like, what is a press release? Even though if I know it, or I think I know what it just helps to, like go back to like the bare essentials. And especially when someone like breaks down the pieces, like even like you've done this a few times. You said like you know, there's this concept and here's like the three or four pieces. That way when the the AI generation comes back, I can be like, Okay, does it have these pieces, not just based on what I'm like thinking or feeling intuitively, but on that the very basic YouTube intro video or Wikipedia page. And so you've mentioned that so you can use this tool for kind of importing like your buyer persona. and figuring out things like LinkedIn posts or press release? Is there like a way to like explain all of it like, is there like it market made? Or offer all this or all these pieces? Like, what's sort of the overall sales pitch for market mate?

Nathan Schlaffer 15:12 Yeah, so the overall pitch is there's hundreds of AI tools out there. And they're overwhelming and prompt engineering as an intuitive. If you're a b2b marketer, and you're like, I just want a simple framework to adopt AI today, we develop this four step framework we call the buyer centric AI framework. And it really has four steps, and it forms an acronym that's pretty easy to remember a lead. So L is learning your buyer persona. So we start with training an AI model on your customers, you know, what are their pain points, you know, what problems keep them up at night, then once it understands your buyer personas, then we use it to E enhance messaging. So we use the AI to develop product positioning, what makes your product better than the alternatives that your customers have out there? You know, what's your product value proposition? What are the functional benefits for your customer, and then this recording features or proof points. And then once it understands your messaging, and your audience, now it has the foundation to do marketing for you. So now our AI model gets into a in the lead framework, which is automate content at scale. So at this point, we're taking knowledge of your audience and we're having the AI write content rapidly for your audience. So generate a press release, like like the example you share, generate a YouTube video script, generate a blog post for me all for the same audience and mentioning the same points and in the tone that your brand wants. So it can be friendly, it can be humorous, it can be educational, so you can you can tweak the tone that you want for your audience in your brand. And then finally, is the D part of lead which is drive sales enablement with guardrails? So in b2b organizations, often you hire a new sales rep, and they they want to learn about your product and service and they also want to learn, you know, if I'm writing an email to this prospect, or I'm on a call, what questions should I ask to uncover needs and pain points? What emails should I write to really resonate with that prospect? Also, if I'm at a trade show, how do I pitch a prospect? What's my elevator pitch for different buyer personas, right? So what our software does is it drives sales enablement with guardrails, which means it writes prospect emails, it generates qualifying questions, it creates sales pitches, but it does it with the guardrails of I'm tailoring this content for your buyer personas that I've already been trained on, and your value proposition. So you don't reach messaging consistency, which is a huge problem in in software organizations that are growing, especially because the founder started the company. And then now as the product is grown and evolved, and your brand has changed, people speak about your product in different ways. And it creates confusion in the marketplace, like what is your brand about I hear one thing from your salesperson, another from your marketing team? What's your message. So our our company is the first one that really aligns messaging between sales and marketing. Because the AI writes the emails, the AI creates the sales pitch, and it resonates with your audience. So through this lead buyer centric framework, really the the business benefits are we help companies lift their revenue, we help them shorten their sales cycles, we help them generate higher quality leads, because now the AI is not just speaking from ignorance of your product or message. It's speaking with your customer language, and it's resonating with your audience. And it's speaking to your brand. So so that's really what makes us unique is where the first AI that really speaks your customer language. And that's able to align sales and marketing at a b2b organization. That

Robert Plank 18:38 sounds amazing. And like you're putting together the pieces that we might not have thought of, or might not have implemented or with all the sub pieces. And so it so say, say I wanted to fill up that content calendar, right, say I wanted to have like a new YouTube video every day where I spoke for five minutes about podcasting. Like when I kind of go through this process, I find myself getting back to the overload where like when I just do it without an amazing tool like yours when I just try it with just regular chat. I say things like Well, give me 100 ideas. And I like choose like the top 10. And then like out of these 10 I'm like well like give me like 10 sub ideas and I end up like ping being caught in this place of like, when it just spits out a bunch of text. I don't trust it. Or I'm like, Well, how good can this be? But then when I try to like more micromanage I'm just like, I feel like I'm doing so much brain work, and then I never quite get to the finish line. So am I alone in this problem of being like, either there's like a flood of stuff and I don't even know how to go through it or I'm like, inching along as far as the building of the output.

Nathan Schlaffer 19:42 Yeah, great, great analogy. There's like, I feel like everyone, especially as a marketer loves to tweet things because we we're very particular about the way things should sound, our audience and the words we should use. So you're definitely not alone in that and One of the capabilities that we realized early on to incorporate in a tool like market made is we have to give people the ability to refine things. And one of the, I guess the the poor experiences we had with all alums is like you're scrolling through your chat, and then eight chats ago, you really liked what you had back there. You kind of went down this rabbit hole, and you get something completely different. So how do you get the best of both and really, I guess manage your workflow and make it easier to tweak and modify it to get to the end result faster. So what we've done is we've added the ability to refine your content in the tool, so you can say, change the tone, change the audience. But then you can also undo and revert back to what you had. And I think that sounds so simple on it's on the head. But it's something that really is marketers like it's essential that Undo button is something that we literally look for when we're tweaking things and doing things but but I think the way to approach it is think of it from if we're running a podcast, or if we're running a marketing campaign, start with your messaging or your audience, your persona. Then once you have your messaging nailed down, and you have your content calendar, maybe you have a theme for each month that you're going to cover, then have multiple channels. And you know, how am I can convey this message across channels, because, you know, a customer requires on average, seven touch points before they remember your brand. So how are you approaching them from every different channel. And then what marketing aid would do, for example, is it'll generate top of funnel, middle funnel bottom funnel content, you can say, hey, here's my persona, generate ideas for me for content. And it'll create ideas for top, middle and bottom. Now you don't start from scratch. And let's say, Hey, I don't like all these ideas. But I liked some of them. I liked the blog post, I liked the checklist, and I like the scripts. Now I'm going to click a button that says, hey, write this content for me, like a menu, I choose which ones I like. And then it writes all of the content for me. So it doesn't start with one at a time. And I think that's that's part of the beauty of having a platform that can automate entire content packages. As I don't have to do one piece at a time, I can actually design the entire package for my campaign.

Robert Plank 22:13 That sounds amazing. And I mean, you're hitting the nail on the head as far as the things that have been missing with just using like the the generative AI sort of chat tools, right where you mentioned, like the the Undo feature, and then even just the ability to to be able to pick and choose and easily reference or just like have more of like a menu like a better interface. There's been so many times I'm like, I wish it was like a bulleted list or like a multiple choice or something. And so I think this is what a lot of people need, as far as getting some of these marketing fundamentals figured out and getting their content out there and their messaging and their press releases, and so much more. And so how can someone know if they're a good fit if their company can use your tool? And if they are, what's the next step here?

Nathan Schlaffer 22:57 Yeah, I think the the main thing is if you're a b2b marketer, so you're selling to other organizations, this is a great tool for you. It's specialized for b2b. And also, if you have a marketing team, let's say you're growing, you have one marketer or five marketers, and you're saying, hey, how do I do more with less? I don't know that much about AI. But I see it, I see that those marketers who are adopting AI are getting a step ahead, how does my team get a step ahead, then you should really have a conversation with us, I'd love to talk to you visit our website, www dot market mate ai.com. And we would love to see how we can use AI to help your organization do more, with less help you achieve your marketing goals with the same amount of resources. So b2b companies, companies with one or more marketers are really an ideal fit for us. I

Robert Plank 23:45 love it, especially how you said do more with less, it doesn't necessarily have to be like revolutionize your whole business. It just like means like, you can put your your workers to better use or you can just get more of the output. And that's a wonderful way of thinking some of these things through, especially if we've been frustrated. And especially you said, you don't even have to be like an AI junkie enthusiast, you can just say, Hey, I know there's this tool just like how if, if everyone on in your on your street was walking, and one day someone started driving a car, you're like, Well, I don't need to know how to build a car how to change the oil. But if I'm seeing that these cars, cars driving down the street, maybe me driving a car myself what would benefit me and would get me to where I want to go faster. And so we're speaking with Nathan from market made AI and as we're winding down our conversation here, I always like to ask for like a quote more or less than just to really like put a cap on things and especially because there's so much of what you've done as far as your own personal growth in your company that we just have not had time to get to. So if I asked you for a quote, moral or lesson that you've either found really helpful either in this situation with your company or just entrepreneurialism in general, what comes to mind for you quote, moral or lesson?

Nathan Schlaffer 25:02 Yeah, there's a great quote, I think, by Calvin Coolidge about persistence that has really stayed with me my whole life. I guess part of it is, hey, you know, what makes people successful. You know, there's lots of educated people that aren't successful. There's lots of people that are talented, but maybe don't reach their goals. And part of it is nothing really replaces the pace of the place of persistence and just hard work. And I know that's, that's kind of a cliche at this point. But that's how we started as hey, we were to marketers, we learned to build platforms and SAS products. And we got this far, because we were persistent. And we believed in the vision, and that's what I would encourage, especially those younger marketers out there, who are trying to figure out, hey, what career should I choose, you know, should I get into, you know, marketing operations or market research or be an entry level marketer and a demand gen or an agency is really know yourself, know, what your skills are, your your talents are, what you're passionate about. And try to find the intersection of that with what your what your, what companies are doing and what industries have so and then remember, it's persistence. So if you're not sure you don't know where to start, just do something and try a lot of different things. And once you find that thing, be persistent, stick with it. So that's my quote.

Robert Plank 26:16 And it's an amazing, cool and amazing advice. There's, there's probably four or five success factors right there. There's opportunity, there's luck, there's skill, and we all kind of have these randomize values. And if you feel that you are a little bit short on some of those pillars, well then persistence can make up for and I just love that term persistence because the hard work is built in. But it's not like unnecessary busy work. Persistence means you have a goal and you might come across and you might hit the barrier, but you have you're figuring out ways through or around the barrier. So persistence is that name of the game. I love it. And we've been speaking to Nathan at markets mate ai.com. So go there now click the button and being being using it so that way you can use AI instead of kind of waste of time chatbot instead, you can make AI work for you and feed it your buyer persona and get these marketing materials and see that ROI from your AI to throw a bunch of acronyms in there at once was just fun. So Nathan, wonderful speaking with you. Great.

Nathan Schlaffer 27:17 Thanks for having me. Robert. Hope you have a great rest of your day brother.

Robert Plank 27:20 You as well. Thank you for tuning in to the marketer of the day podcast. marketer of the day is managed by d f y and podcast. Claim your 12 podcast boosters at Def Why podcast.com/free