Lisa Cole - The "Brand Gravity" Effect: How to Stop Chasing and Start Attracting

In 3, 2, 1.

Welcome back to Becoming Preferred, the podcast where we interview the brightest minds in.

Business today to help you level up.

Your game and become the best version of you.

If you're an entrepreneur or a marketing leader, you've repeatedly heard the mantra, do more with less.

But our guests today say that's the wrong goal.

She believes we shouldn't just be doing.

More, we should be redesigning the work itself.

Lisa Cole is the Chief product, product marketing and AI officer at 2x, where she heads their AI center of Excellence.

With over 20 years of experience and three major B2B transformations under her belt, Lisa has become the secret weapon for CMOs looking to bridge the gap between human creativity and machine efficiency.

She's the author of Brand Gravity, the Revenue Ramp, and her highly anticipated new book, the Limitless cmo.

Today we are going to talk about how to move from being a cost center to a revenue engine, the reality of AI adoption, and how to build a brand that has enough gravity to pull customers towards you without having to chase them.

Join me now for my conversation with Lisa Cole.

Well, hi, Lisa.

Welcome to the program.

We're delighted to have you.

Thank you for having me.

I've been excited about this conversation for some time.

Me, too.

I know we had you previously scheduled and we had some conflicts and we had to rearrange on your calendar, but, hey, we're delighted and I'm excited about the subject matter.

Now, before we get into it, where are we talking to you from today?

Where's home?

I'm in Rochester, Michigan.

Rochester, just north of Detroit.

We talked about that earlier.

Most people think understand Canada is actually south of Detroit.

You could throw a rock and hit Windsor and you can see the Canadian flag there, and I've got a nice little bridge there.

But it's kind of weird knowing that Canada is actually south of you.

So, interesting part.

And Detroit's going through its own little resurgence and renaissance as well.

So good town and great Greek food, too.

Great sports, too, from what I hear.

It's a good time to be in Michigan for sure.

Hey, well, you're a transplant.

You're not from there.

Where did we grow up?

So let's go back in time.

Before we get into the main topic.

Our listeners always like to understand where you came from.

What was the impetus of the story?

So you're back in high school, Lisa, you're going to decide what I'm going to be when I grow up.

What was the thought?

What was the initial goal?

And how did you end up where Lisa is today?

Funny how that kind of evolved.

I grew up in Rhode island and in high school and certainly my first year of college, I thought I was going to be an accountant.

But at that time, and this will certainly date me, I was selling cell phones and had gotten this amazing job offer to go as a senior accounted zach, a major accounted zach for Sprint, actually.

I have to go back and look at the days, but it was the world's worst job.

I took it.

It was a lot of money, a ton of money.

But sales and marketing hated each other.

And I had, you know, a sales manager that didn't want to provide any guidance on who to target within these organizations to sell cell phones to.

Accounts and marketing just really didn't want to support anything beyond giving me brochures.

I was stuck in the middle anyway.

But what I was floored by was just how much they hated each other.

And I couldn't imagine how a company could grow sustainably with these two halves of their go to market motion, the go to market engine, pointing fingers at each other, not productively working together.

And I thought, you know, I should focus on solving this problem for companies.

And so I, I shifted and pivoted into marketing.

And the reason I pivoted into marketing is I really didn't enjoy sales.

I didn't like carrying a quota and I wanted to feel more strategic in nature, become a growth driver for a company.

So that's where it started.

Interesting.

No, it's funny you should say how they hate each other.

I still see that today.

We've got silo, we see, see them siloed, and you've got marketing, you've got sales, and marketing comes out with a great campaign, they give it to the salespeople, they resist it or say, this doesn't work, you got to disconnect.

And then they blame each other.

So I've always felt that they should report to the same executive and it should be in one silo because to me it's a left hand and a right hand.

If it was a twin engine airplane, it's the left engine and the right engine.

You've got to have these things working in harmony with each other.

What do you suppose that is?

Is it how it starts off the discipline?

Where does that come from, that dysfunction?

Now, with 25 years of experience, I think underpinning it is that they actually compete for resources.

They compete for budgeting and funding.

Most marketing, well, most executives don't really even understand marketing.

If you look at kind of the growth trajectory of a company, when it goes from A startup all the way to, let's just say a global enterprise.

Marketing's role in the business evolves.

But it starts as the doer of things, maker of pretty creative assets for sales, to support sales conversation.

So lack of understanding of the function.

The two actually compete with the CEO CFO for funding.

It's usually a trade off and depending on what happens from there, they usually have misaligned goals and objectives right from the start.

They're usually not using the same language.

They might use the same words but they're defined differently.

It's kind of the whole underlying system by design, it's been designed that way.

And so this is why we're still hearing some of these challenges today.

It's interesting, I remember when I started my career there was an old adage in marketing.

We used to say, hey Mr. Or Mrs. CEO, if you're spending a million dollars in marketing, we know half of it's going down the toilet.

We just don't know which half.

But that's changed, hasn't it?

Evolved.

Now we know where the are going and we know what the results are to that.

How's it change?

So how have you seen it evolve from when you started 25 years ago to where it is today?

And where do you see it going?

The relationship or marketing's role in the business?

Marketing in general, like it seems like it was always done en masse and now I know that you work on aligning with the goals, their values like the old ways have changed.

We don't have the media buys the same way.

We don't have where the profit centers were.

The influences are different.

It's hard to get your voice out there.

It's hard to get noticed if you.

Look at the underlying, just that 25 year timeline.

I remember when I started the very first question a company would ask is should I have a website?

Right.

That's the complexity of the presence in person or a web front store.

Then it went to mobile phones, smartphones, social media, community forums.

It exploded.

So by design, marketing had to continuously evolve to make sure that you're findable, understood and chosen in all of these watering holes.

Just the sheer complexity of the channels where someone could interact with your brand has forced marketing to become certainly it's enabled and forced it to become far more targeted, personalized and of course from there just the number of channels we have to support.

We've had to become technologists over the last two decades.

Yeah, there's over 21 channels as you know, and I think they're growing and from my account, we've got five generations of buyers that are out there.

I'm kind of on that older end of the buyer, but we consume less just because we're getting rid of stuff these days.

How do, how do business owners, how do entrepreneurs navigate that?

Like, how do we manage that in today's world?

To find, we've got to identify where our buyer is and then what's the best channel to market?

Like for me, you know, LinkedIn, mine's mostly B2B.

We do publish on the podcast is on most of the sites, Insta and Facebook.

But I don't like it.

Like, to me personally, it's too much work.

So I have somebody who loves doing that, and that's their joy.

But how do we choose the right forum, the right channel for our organization?

Well, this is one of the places where the answer to the question is the same that I might have answered a decade ago.

You quite literally have to know who your buyer is and ask them.

Now, there are different ways of doing that research and understanding who those influencers are and buying in the context of a B2B sale.

So a company trying to sell something to another company, if it's considered purchase, you not only have to know who the primary buyer would be, but you've got to know all those individuals, both inside the company and outside the company, who's influencing that purchasing decision and make sure that you actually understand what their unique needs and wants are.

And then from there, be able to kind of design and produce, if you will, messages and offers that make sense for each one of those individual needs.

But the underlying principle there is still true.

You actually have to ask them.

Some people are advocating for the use of synthetic data in situations where good enough is directionally sound and it can support getting to market faster.

But if you as a company, at least when you think about that core buyer, genuinely reach out and understand what is it that they're trying to accomplish, what are their jobs to be done, what are their needs, wants, motivations, and stay on top of that.

So you have to stay in market.

Right.

I do think the marketing officer needs to spend a lot of their time talking to customers in the market.

It's interesting how it has evolved.

You've got all these channels and now it's which channels are appropriate for me, and then what's the messaging going to be?

What's the story I'm telling?

Because there's so much that's out there.

How do we break through that noise?

Now, one thing that you talk about and you write about is, is that, you know, let's go back 20, 25 years, salespeople would go, and they were the ones who were educating the market, they were educating the buyer.

Today, the buyers, they usually know more about you do in the application before they even contact you.

They do.

So I think you talk 70, 80% of the buyers, they've done most of their homework and it's being able to be ready for them.

Unpack that for us a little bit because that's a huge evolution.

About a year and a half ago, there were three to four different independent studies done on how companies buy from other the buyer experience research reports.

The one that stood out for me the most was sponsored by six Sense.

It was conducted by Kerry Cunningham.

And what they effectively did was analyze hundreds of major purchases in the B2B environment.

They surfaced not just how complex that is, how many people are influencing that decision, but they also surfaced how many touch points needed to be had with each influencer of that buying committee over time, and how much of that was done anonymously.

And the study basically came out and the other two or three actually reinforced this was that you could look at a buying committee of greater than 10 or so likely doing some research, or they're weighing in on this decision and there's more than 1,000 touch points over the course of months, long before they actually will reveal themselves to your brand, long before they'll reach out directly and want some sort of interaction with a human.

And the most startling data points came out is that by the time they've actually made that decision to engage with your brand directly, they've effectively picked their finalist list.

About 85% of the time they have their finalists chosen and then by the time they actually make the decision, their number one pick on that finalist list wins 90% of the time.

So they'll have a finalist list most of the time before they reach out.

So you might be number four on that list, right?

That's if they found you.

And then they'll go through that whole validation process with sales reps, which is the point I want to make come back to, and they're still picking their number one on the list.

So it's not only rare that they move off the number one position, but if you think that you could add yourself to that list after they engage for some reason, it's not going to happen.

So you're not going to disrupt it.

You're not going to disrupt it.

If you're in pole position one, you've got the advantage the lead, the inside track, it's going.

So that begs the next question.

It's yours to lose, right?

It's ours to lose.

The role of the sales rep.

This is one of my favorite shifts just as a marketer because I have a little bit of a bias here.

But over the last 20 years there was a point in time where the primary source of information to support a decision making process had to come from sales reps.

The sales reps were the educators.

They were the ones that were kind of hand holding.

Think of the way we used to buy a car, we used to go into a dealer and they did all the education well.

Now the role of the sales rep isn't the educator.

Marketing is the one that makes sure that you are both findable, understood and chosen in all of these watering holes, whether it's a human or even now an AI agent doing the research.

And then it's sales job to validate what they have learned throughout those thousand touch points.

With all these chosen vendors now you could lose it though.

And so one of the interesting other data points that came from this research was that if sales was giving inconsistent messaging, if they did not pick up where the last interaction with your brand left off, they could invalidate the position.

They could lose it for you.

And so this is why marketing needs to care about not just what happens until they reach out, but I'm on the hook for making sure sales is enabled to have effective conversations that pick up where their research left off.

Marketing is really important across the whole journey, not just the lead generator that throws something over the fence.

Right now my bias is on the sales side and the sales strategy side.

So let's use our car example or any other example that comes to mind.

You got the marketing strategy.

They've already done their homework.

I believe their job is to have those high value conversations and to help guide and they're reinforcing it.

But they have to be curious.

They have to look at application.

Their role, their role has changed.

It's not as you say, it's not educating from your perspective if, because we talked about how they hate each other.

But I think I'd get on just fine with you if I was working the sales department because I believe the way you're going to.

What advice would you give to the salespeople?

What do you think they need to do from your perspective in order to take advantage of that and be able to work in alignment with marketing?

Understand what it was that the company and or the buying influencers, the people that they're talking to understand what it was that they were researching, what they've confirmed through that process, what questions remain for them.

You can, even before you engage with them in that first interaction, you can pull all the data in terms of what they've been consuming.

So we have three kind of layers of signals that are gathered before they are now passed to sales.

The really effective sales reps are the ones that take the time to understand the context behind all those interactions and they are kind of picking up where it left off and to your point, developing the relationship and supporting and enabling the rest of that so that they're isn't any sort of friction, that there isn't something that feels inconsistent.

Those three forms of signals, the first, we do have intent data.

So even if they weren't interacting directly with our brand, there's more than enough data out there to say what it was that they were actively searching for.

Surging topics.

For example, one of the leads I passed to my sales reps this week, they were focused on org transformation, business restructuring and marketing budget cuts.

Like quite literally, that's the intent stuff.

And then for us, they were consuming a couple of assets that were almost how to reimagine your operating model.

So you put that together with your first party data and then you can do some research on the actual influencers themselves.

Those that you're meeting with, pull it together and just use that to your advantage versus using the same rinse and repeat messaging that you might use with every selling conversation.

You have to be as relevant as we have to be in all these, you know, thousand interactions.

If I was as sales, I would come and as you said, I would inquire and look for the context.

How did we arrive, where we're at?

So where am I getting this client, potential client in their journey?

Could marketing do a better job of being proactive with that with the sales department?

Absolutely.

So one of the things that I have been advocating for is that marketing needs to care as much about what happens after you raise the flag to say somebody should pursue this or follow up with whatever you want to call it, an account, a lien, whatever word.

Marketing should care about that.

And if they do care as deeply about what happens after they pass this or hand this over to sales, then they are going to want to share in a very proactive way, not just those insights, not just that data, but how they could use it to support their selling conversations.

One of the things I did for my team, I built a custom GPT that basically turned all of the intent keywords the active surging topics, any of the assets that we have in our library.

And it basically says if these are the topics that were surged and these assets.

Here's proposed messaging you could use just to make it easier for them to connect the dots between the data and what they should be doing differently for that interaction.

That's a simple thing, right?

But that's a marketer who cares about what happens after I say here's a.

Lead for you to pursue or incentivize them both together as a team effort like here's.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I think that can work.

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And now back to my conversation with.

Lisa Cole in your book Brand Gravity.

Stop chasing leads and start pulling buyers into your orbit.

Which I thought was a great title by the way.

You introduce an approach to modern B2B marketing where you talk about instead of chasing leads, create a magnetic, magnetic attraction that draws buyers to you.

Yeah, unpack that one for us a little bit.

There's a lot in there.

Sure, if you believe all the stuff I was talking about earlier.

The research that's showing that a lot of this buying journey is now happening anonymously and it's across nearly a thousand touch points.

If you believe that to be true.

The easiest analogy, when somebody says, well, all right, I believe it to be true.

What do I need to do differently?

Just imagine, if you will, when a person or a company like they decide they need to search for a solution, they have a problem they want to solve, they're online Likely this is where this is initiating.

And that online could be a simple Google search, it could be a chatbot, it could be they're digging into a community forum, believe it or not, asking a question at Quora or Reddit.

Imagine now they've launched into orbit.

This is the analogy.

And where we see these buyers tend to spend most time is where there's significant digital mass that's answering the questions that they are seeking to solve for.

And so the premise behind brand gravity is that in order to have a strong brand gravity, in order to pull buyers to you, you've got to have substantial digital mass that not only attracts them to you in the context of their questions, wherever they're asking it, but that it's strong enough to keep them with you and support their entire buying journey.

Keep them with you long enough until they have shaped their finalist list.

And at which point you also need to make sure that as part of that digital mass that you are making findable, that it also contains information that supports the questions that they ask after they engage with your sales reps. Because that's also part of this data is that they'll go back and forth to these various sources so they launch into orbit.

You have strong digital mass that actually pulls them to you.

If you're effective at kind of building a preference through all those interactions, you'll be on that finalist list and you'll win before they've actually talked to your.

Sales reps. Makes sense to me.

And like I say, gravity or use it as an acronym, so it's well defined within the book and you've already highlighted on parts of those and it really provides that playbook.

This is why I was looking forward to having you come to become the obvious choice or in our language, the preferred choice, first choice, emotional favorite.

So how do you become the emotional favorite?

So for companies and entrepreneurs that there's mid size and large, I know you work with all kinds, but for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, people just starting their business, new startups, where's a good place to start?

They don't always have those big marketing budgets.

And so if they're operating on a shoestring and or they want to start somewhere, what's the best place to start?

Well, maybe let me at least put everyone's fears at ease.

If you're an entrepreneur with zero marketing budget and you need to start, recognize that this book was inspired by founders.

It actually was inspired by startups.

I had noticed that startups were actually stealing attention and market share from these industry leading large Trusted brands.

And when you dig under the surface, what they're doing is these are, they're now called creator led startups where the founder is building in public and they basically spend a substantial amount of their time just putting smart and helpful content out in the world.

They are quite literally almost giving the secret sauce away for free.

And they do that so well that, you know, someone like me, on a weekend while I'm folding five hours of laundry, I can binge listen to a podcast and by the time I actually decide, all right, I'm ready to actually solve this problem if I reach out to you.

Michael, I already trusted you because I just listened to you for six hours.

And at this point now I get on a phone conversation with you.

I not only trust you, I know you absolutely know how to solve my problem for people like me in companies or situations like mine.

And I would much rather buy from a person than buy from maybe a brand that hasn't been giving away smart and helpful content or hasn't demonstrated that it actually knows me and what I'm dealing with.

So I think now is no better time to be a founder or entrepreneur if you're comfortable with just putting your point of views and your secret sauce out in the world.

Well, I think you're right.

It's the personalization you're talking about.

When I started my career over 30 years ago, we faxed content, so we had books, so we wrote books, we had those things and that was it, that was your media.

There was no YouTube, you know, and I worked with those companies as they were developing.

And I'm thinking, I'm not sure how this is going to go.

You know, you talk cell phones.

I started in cell phone business in the mid-80s and sold the company because I thought cell phones aren't going anywhere.

It was a buck a minute.

$2,500 For a GE star that gave you a tumor.

And you know, you have that close to your 12 minute battery life.

It was this thing's cool.

And I sold the brick phone.

That was my first phone I sold.

Was the brick phone, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Now we are dating ourselves.

Yeah, we are, I think with the tools.

So we used to do fax.

We would fax out sales tip of the week and thousands of them.

And it was all done by fax, then email technology that all came on board and then we started to email all of those things.

Well, and again, I'm giving away my top strategies, tactics, frameworks almost for free, but in within emails.

Then as it evolved again with the podcast.

The podcast is.

We're season six now.

It's the evolution of the content.

And so what happens is people, you know, they'll go, well, how are you monetizing this?

How are you monetizing that?

And I'm going, it's really about street cred.

It's really about staying relevant in today's world.

Because to your point, I can now connect with you wherever you're at.

So if you want to read about this, we've got that covered.

If you want to listen to it, have that covered.

And then talk to you and then be authentic.

Let's talk about that in the role.

Because I really love the younger generations today.

We give them a little flack sometimes because millennial kids are now complaining about the Gen X and Gen Y group, which we always complained about as baby boomers, about the millennials.

This is our future.

So every generation kind of complains about the one below it.

What are you seeing from a market point of view or authenticity point of view?

What are table stakes today?

I'm not sure that I would necessarily say it would be generational, but I do believe that if you want to stay relevant in the age of AI, and I wish I could come up with a better way to say that it is your secret sauce, your superpower is going to be wherever is uniquely human.

And today, and sure as heck in the next three to five, seven years, the way you stay relevant will likely be the imperfections of being a human.

I do think that that's what people are going to crave the most.

As they, you know, now they're even experiencing AI in a variety of different channels.

They're going to grab onto people's imperfections.

We're now actually not being as careful about misspellings in our social media posts.

And we in a podcast or a YouTube say, you know what, I don't have all the answers, but here's what I have learned along the way.

What not to do ever again.

And so here are the mistakes.

Maybe that'll help you.

We don't have to be perfect.

And I think that's going to be what differentiates us from others in the future.

I got H to H, human to human.

And I think that's why entrepreneurs are winning.

These starter led, creator led companies are stealing a share of attention from big corporate brands because corporate brands feel the need to be perfect, right?

Everything has to be polished and perfect.

Guess what?

Founders just be human and vulnerable and share and build in public whether it's successful or not.

And it will win.

Well, I think you're bang on.

I think the technology AI has democratized small businesses.

Like we can compete.

You know, I work with many enterprise clients and we're able to produce things quicker, faster, better than they do.

They have to go through so many hoops half the time or it's like a big battleship hitting the brakes.

And we can create content like Monday's our content day for us.

So we'll do the podcast, then we'll create a series of posts that come from this particular episode.

So we're repurposing it and we use AI to help us fine tune that.

How do you see AI playing a role there?

Like to me personally, I love it, but it depends on the tool for the trade.

So you can use it for search.

We've had AI forever.

We've had agentic AI since 1967.

And so it's calculators are AI.

So how are you seeing those tools take shape and are there some must haves that small businesses should have?

Well, I think number one, definitely start with a point of view.

And this is just advice for anyone.

What is your point of view in terms of what is your secret sauce?

Your source of competitive differentiation?

That part of your company that needs to remain uniquely human in those scenarios?

In those use cases, AI can be your strategic thought partner.

One of my favorite things about kind of the emergence of AI is that I have an always on thought partner in my pocket 24 7.

So Saturday night at 11 o' clock I get hit with an idea and I want to flesh it out with a thought partner I can.

And that's in an area that might be a strength if I'm faced with a challenge.

And it's not a strength of mine.

Guess what?

It's actually trained and it's got the expertise that can get you about 75% of the way there to address a gap that you may have have.

I've never really been a great product marketer.

Now I have a partner in my device that actually can help me offset a weakness of mine.

So that's that in that layer of your secret sauce, the next layer down, which is execution.

Right.

So you gave an example where your secret sauce is the point of view or it's this core asset, could be the conversation you and I are having that is uniquely human.

You might have used AI as your thought partner in preparing for what your approach would be.

Now you've got to think about scale and so brand gravity.

That requires your being intentional about every one of these assets to Create all the derivative assets content Flywheel.

You could take a long form video or a long form audio asset and effectively turn that into 100 assets.

It could be shorts for YouTube, it could be shorts for LinkedIn, it could be brief audio clips that you can reference to and different assets.

It could also be the thing that gets repurposed into your blog, your LinkedIn posts, all of those derivative assets.

AI can do that at a click of a button.

Now you've got to keep the human in the loop.

The human is editing those pieces, but the original thought is original.

It's human.

It was your core point of view, right?

Yep.

So the human created the derivative, the core asset.

AI can help create all the derivative assets.

The human is going to make sure it's good enough before it gets published.

And then AI can help you disseminate that information into different channels at scale.

And this is how a one person team or an enterprise team should really be thinking about leveraging AI for scale's impact 100%.

I think it's a good collaboration tool.

We use it for operations, we use it to look at our priorities.

We look at it for market, for searching.

Helps us fine tune things and validates us too.

We get it to get brutal with us, but it's also choosing the right tool.

So if I'm doing something that's web based, if I'm building a deck, I need a drill, I need a saw, I need a hammer, I need.

And to me, the AI focus on different tools depending on what we're doing.

Do you find in the marketplace that you know, with the technologies that are out there and they're evolving and you explained it really well as far as where does the human come into it again, what are the EQ kind of skills that we need to have that I think are resonating?

Let me phrase it this way.

People ask me all the time, say, well, I'm creating all this content, but I'm not getting the likes, I'm not getting the vanity metrics.

And I tell them, and based on my limited knowledge, I say, look, it's about impressions.

They see that you're producing, they see that.

They might not be attracted to that article, that post, but they see you're active, they see you're involved and you're really competing against just that other guy.

That other person.

Yeah, all right.

That you're competing.

You just want to be better than the person you have to compete against, not necessarily the organization.

Is that how you see it?

I do.

I would often say it just Thinking the most common piece of feedback I get is not just for me, but also the company I work for.

Geez, I saw you once and then I see you everywhere now.

And I may not drill into one piece, but they do recognize me as a thought leader on a particular topic because they see me once and now they trust and engage.

So I'm always looking for anything that'll build trust that there is an ongoing presence so that everywhere thing is true.

My measure of success here is engagement.

That's the big piece.

Overall, when I think about AI, though just in general, I think I take a very human centered approach.

I do not think AI replaces humans, but I do think it's going to change the body of work that we do as the technology evolves.

And the radical difference with AI versus any other tech.

And we've been using tech now for two decades.

Right?

Think about marketing and sales motions.

We've been using it since the advent of websites and email.

This stuff is advancing.

Every couple of weeks meaningful step changes.

And so the soft skills I think we should all be nurturing is, well, first we never lose sight of the actual customer.

Whoever we need to talk to, we continuously understand what their needs and wants are and how that's evolving.

You can use AI to do that research at scale, but still you are responsible for understanding your audience.

Secondly, when you think about this kind of next evolution, you've got to be thinking about what good enough looks like.

And so that's where your taste comes in.

Those of us that have experience, we have to start from a soft skills standpoint, really distilling what it is that we think good enough looks like and be confident in our ability to kind of manage against that.

Regardless of who person or AI is doing the execution work.

Getting that clear is helpful from a skill set standpoint.

Those of us that are good at managing people, whether that's an intern or a senior strategic hire, if you're good about identifying what needs to be done and giving instructions and all the enabling tools to help that person do that work, you'll be just as good at doing that with an AI agent as you would have been with a human.

If you are not a good manager, you're going to have real issues moving forward because AI is going to require clear instructions and context and feedback.

All those things still matter.

And I'm sure this goes without saying, you have to be okay with change.

Yeah, well that evolution.

But if you can't delegate, if you don't know how to frame the delegation, it's just Going to exasperate that, I think.

And I mean, that's an area I have to work on and focus as well.

Well, Lisa, you've got a book, actually your upcoming book, which I believe gets released today.

It does.

Cmo, congratulations.

I know how hard that is.

So in an era where marketing budgets are being squeezed and the average tenure of a cmo, it's shrinking, what does it actually mean to be limitless in today's market?

I think for all the things that have kind of pushed us into a place of more pressure than we've ever experienced, do more with less is more true today than ever.

I think the very things that we have viewed as limitations or constraints are the very things that we can use to our advantage now to free ourselves from constraints.

Through the years, marketing leaders in particular have always struggled to earn their seat at the table within the C suite because we've historically been the doers of things, the order taking function for the organization, with the way that AI is influencing the way people or companies buy from others.

Right.

We just talked about the need for brand gravity and with how AI can be used by marketers.

Those two things.

If we run marketing like a business and we leverage AI in meaningful ways, we can become limitless.

We've just talked about what a solopreneur can execute against at scale.

Can you imagine what, you know, let's say B2B marketing orgs that have more resources could do if they, they change the way they work.

And so we are at that stage now where there's as much opportunity as there is, you know, things, constraints.

No, I love that.

And you do more with less than you argue for redesigning how work gets done instead of just working harder.

I've just started actually this year, 2026.

That way is.

I love working, I love what I'm doing.

But once the grandbabies start to show up, it's like, how do I.

How do I take Fridays off and Because Friday's a natural day for me to do that.

Right.

And it's difficult because sometimes, you know, playing with the toddler for hours versus working on a new project, it's different, right?

But I've really made it a point of doing it just because my kids got ripped off when I was building my career early in life because I was always gone or working hard.

So I've made a vow, hey, I don't need to work that hard.

How do I work in a smarter way?

And it's compartmentalizing that.

And I think AI can actually do things that way.

But what is one fundamental flaw or flaws that you see most B2B companies in their structure and how they structure their marketing departments today and how would you do it?

They've not changed their mindset.

So when you think about the B2B marketing leaders, when they recognize they have a body of work to do, their first mindset that they're going to have to change is this nature of, well, I need more headcount, I need another person.

I need either capacity or a skill set I don't have.

So that's one.

But the biggest mistake that we're seeing now from an AI adoption standpoint, when somebody says why?

I feel like AI is everywhere, but I can't point to any sort of impact, it's because they've not actually changed the work underneath it.

My starting question, my favorite question to ask is how long does it take for you to get a campaign from an idea into market?

How many days?

99% Of the time they don't know the answer to that question.

So I will tell them, go get the answer to the question and come back to me when they do.

They're almost always horrified because the number of days it takes can actually sometimes extend 90 to 120 days to get from an idea, which is usually inspired by some shift in the market.

So there's an opportunity that emerges.

You're telling me it takes you a whole quarter to get a campaign in the market to seize that opportunity.

And then I'll ask, well, why is that?

Because if you haven't asked a question, why does it take you?

Oh, well, it goes from here to here.

It gets approved, a brief gets written, it goes to this team.

This team then produces some assets.

These seven people all have to review and approve the asset.

All the derivative assets, right.

It just kind of extends.

They never actually reimagined how the work should get done.

They've not addressed all of these silos and hands offs.

They've not gotten their house in order.

And so the very first recommendation that we have is go and taskify your workflow, understand how the work gets done, and then conduct a hackathon to come back and say, now, based on what AI is capable of, what should this look?

Based on what AI can do for us, do you really need three people from three functional groups to review and approve the copywriting for an email or for an ad?

If you don't document what good enough looks like and then begin to automate it or at least have one human in the loop and not three You've got to kind of reimagine the work itself.

But it has to start with.

Do you know how the work gets done today?

Yeah, you've got to start from scratch.

It's almost like just redefining it and redesigning it.

And every week.

Well, but every couple of weeks I look at what's the perfect week look like.

And it's evolving and it's changing.

And the perfect week now for me is Monday, it's content.

So podcast interview today.

We have four interviews today.

Right.

And so we produce it and then.

But I don't do it Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Fridays.

Right.

Grandkids.

Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday.

I've got that sectioned off into different times.

That is workable, it's enjoyable.

Working within my own energies, working.

And it's redesigning it.

Which actually brings me to my next question.

I want to talk about your role at the AI center of Excellence.

You had the AI center of Excellence at 2x.

So for the entrepreneur who feels behind on AI, what are the three pillars of successful AI adoption?

Strategically, that actually impacts the bottom line rather than just being cool tech.

Well, I'll apply it to the entrepreneur.

So this would likely be different advice for a large enterprise marketing team.

For the entrepreneur is understanding the core job to be done.

What's the outcome that you're looking for?

That's number one is getting clear on that.

That's rarely ever I need to do a thing or produce a thing.

It's.

It's normally something like, I need to drive audience growth on YouTube or on LinkedIn.

Okay.

Once you know that, then from there it's a matter of, okay, what's the body of work that exists that I need to get done and how can AI help me?

If the single thing you take from this as an entrepreneur is that you remember to put a post it note somewhere on your computer monitor or maybe on your laptop that says, how can AI be used for this?

Do that?

That's the first thing.

Because then that will change the way that you operate.

You will operate in an AI first way.

And if you don't know how AI can help you, the good news is you can actually ask it, say, this is what I'm trying to accomplish.

How might I use you to do this work?

And then maybe the third piece is you're not behind.

Right.

You're actually in the top 5 to 10% that are kind of leaning in this moment.

What I think will happen is if you can stay on top of how the technology advances in the context of your use cases.

You'll maintain that competitive advantage, but don't let it slip.

And so that means you've got to make an ongoing commitment and there are a number of sources of information that can help you, someone like you in your world kind of understand how to apply it.

That matters.

So stay on top of it.

Be a continuous learner 100%.

Well, the new book's called the Limitless CMO so they'll find it wherever they get their books.

Oh beautiful.

That looks absolutely gorgeous.

And your other book brand, Gravity from last year, 2025 I believe.

And both excellent content so I can't wait to order my copy and we'll send them to the website.

We'll have all your contact information.

Lisa Gold there Lots of great insights, lots of great value.

Thank you so much for sharing time with us.

Just lots of lots of useful tools, strategies and some tactics in there.

So thanks for being our guest today.

Thanks for having me.

As you are listening to this episode, what is one idea that you've heard this caught your attention and why does it matter so much to you?

And who is one person who you can share that with, either sharing this episode or just sharing that insight that occurred to you while you were listening?

Perhaps it is moving from vanity metrics to velocity metrics so that you are measuring how fast the lead turns into revenue rather than just tracking clicks and likes that don't impact the P and L. Or maybe it is embracing AI as a professional co pilot to handle high volume grunt work, allowing you to spend more of your time on high value, high empathy human interactions that build deep emotional connections with your brand.

Thank you for listening, for learning and for investing in yourself so that you can become the best version of you.

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