Marketing in the AI era: Ben Slater

SVP Marketing @ Beamery

Hey friends, I’m Akash! Software Synthesis analyses the evolution of software companies - from how they're built and scaled, to how they go to market and create enduring value. Join thousands of founders, operators and investors that are building, scaling, or investing in software companies. Reach me at akash@earlybird.com.

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Software marketing is undergoing a lot of change as lean AI native companies take a first principles approach to demand generation and brand building.

I discussed some of the most immediate lessons for founders with Ben Slater.

Ben Slater is an accomplished GTM and marketing executive. Most recently he was SVP Marketing at Beamery where he joined pre-revenue as employee 5, built the marketing team from 1-50, and scaled the business beyond Series D and to a unicorn valuation. He currently works as a CMO advisor to some of the fastest growing European and US startups. Beamery is a European unicorn building software for HR teams, backed by Index Ventures, EQT Ventures, OTPP and others.

We cover:

• How brand may be one of the only remaining moats in software

• Founder-led content and how to execute it well

• How to test new channels

• Creating heroes in your category

Thanks Ben!

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Companies have been reporting strong ROI with AI-assisted SDR emails, but lot of marketers worry about losing authenticity. What's your framework for deciding how to augment marketing with AI?

The reality is that everything and everyone should be augmented. Every employee in the company should be using AI in a meaningful way during their workday. The question is where AI is most valuable - right now that's the analysis and aggregation of information, automation of process, and enriching of ideas.

If you look at marketing operations, you can use AI to improve and enrich lead scoring or account scoring, pulling in broader information around your ICP. Within ABM, you can use it for account research, personalisation, and creating more effective campaigns.

The problem with how AI SDR is being applied in a lot of businesses goes back to that adage of garbage in, garbage out. Taking a highly generic email and sending it to more people doesn't actually help. Email is still in many ways the best channel - there's so much overload with ads, and the cost profile continues to change. With email, in most cases, you can get into the inbox of anyone, but then you have a chance to either stand out, impress, and convince - or just be the same as everyone else.

The problem with AI SDR is yes, it offers efficiency and reduced cost, but particularly with pure outbound motion, in most cases it's just more of the same versus necessarily a better product. There's more of a clear role for it in inbound, where a lot of the work is just processing information, routing, and qualifying leads to the right place. The task there is slightly simpler. I would still see this as augmented within the SDR function today versus a pure replacement.

Marketing budgets have been slashed in the last few years. Companies are operating with maybe half their previous spend, which forces reflection on resource allocation between priorities like brand building in the long term versus demand gen in the short term. How do you think about balancing these when marketing leaders are seeing smaller budgets?

This idea of more with less is going to continue. There is a pre-GenAI and a post-GenAI marketing organization, and that structure looks different and needs to look different. The reality is it is smaller and able to operate with less resources for many obvious reasons.

In terms of the particular question, we're approaching a period where brand is going to be maybe the only competitive moat. Cutting spending there may have an upswing in terms of the short-term pipeline coverage or short-term revenue, but this sacrifices the long term in many cases.

Once a company crosses the Series A or Series B threshold, it should be spending, give or take, 30% on brand. And that is only going to increase as the business grows and scales and develops more repeatability in core demand workflows.

The ease of creating a copycat solution today with similar features and functionality is an incredibly low barrier to entry. So I think brand building is becoming more important, not less.

The brand building aspect of most modern AI companies is really getting more attention these days. What are some best practices you've seen? Could you give specific examples of companies who've done it well?

Simply put, authenticity and being human is more important. The barriers to entry for creating content are very, very low. Therefore, what matters are the things that are more innately human - conversations with customers, events, content mediums like this interview where there is an element of human-to-human interaction. Things that still require a strong level of human interaction.

Looking at AI companies specifically, there are agentic software companies with a very central message around replacing humans.

While it's sensationalist and has helped them develop a strong media strategy and brand, the right message is showing how a company delivers genuine outcomes to customers. There's so much sameness in talking about how fast or powerful a model is, or how the model allows companies to do X, Y, Z. What's needed is showing the tangible business outcomes for customers.

Off the top of my head, I think Writer does a good job of that. I've seen their message and positioning evolve a fair amount. They were early to market on the AI side. If you look at their website now, it covers the classic objections an enterprise might have in terms of bringing onboard AI: How do we make this work? How do we go from experiment to sustained implementation? And it also talks about the real value that their customers are seeing.

Mid-market deals (roughly in the range of $50-100k ACV) are taking as long as 9 months to close according to recent data. That's close to what enterprise deals take to close. How should founders think about the cost of serving the mid-market versus moving further up-market if the sales cycles look the same? What are the implications for marketing?

I think it probably creates a more challenging strategic question for a lot of businesses. Should we try to go up-market quicker? Because if the internal cost of sale is the same, why wouldn't we try and sell for a higher ACV? Why wouldn't we try and accelerate the path to product maturity to be able to do that?

We saw this actually at Beamery. The smaller deals that we tried to sell in the mid-market weren't meaningfully different in time to close and weren't meaningfully different in complexity in terms of organizational change management compared to a large enterprise. So it made that segment make less sense for us over time.

When we look at the marketing implications, I think it's quite simple. Your investment profile needs to change. The traditional BDR model may not make sense due to the projected CAC, or maybe your pipeline coverage model changes. If you were expecting to close this business within two to three months and now it's taking six to nine months, you're behind. Obviously, it means that automation, scale, things that you can do with AI to augment your team versus hiring additional people and raising your overall cost, become more important.

It's super challenging. One of the reasons behind this is that as a software company, you're not just competing with other vendors in your category. You're competing with a far broader range of ways that companies could distribute their spend, and a lot of that is going towards generalieed models. That's incredibly challenging for a lot of SaaS companies because the competition, even if you don't see it, has increased significantly.

Product marketing seems to be getting much more traction lately, and it's probably changing in the world of AI. Companies struggle to differentiate in a much noisier market with a plethora of solutions. How do you think about the role of product marketing in this post-LLM world? How can newer generations of product marketers best position their companies in ways that resonate with buyers?

Proportionally, the investment in product marketing in technology businesses will go up, and those skill sets will become even more valuable than they've been in the past. Having built and hired product marketing teams in London reveals it's a challenging market - the density of talent is quite low. It's far easier in the US. The situation is changing, but slowly.

The fundamental question vendors have to answer is: Why this? Why now? Why us? That's more challenging today than before given the barrage of noise that customers are seeing.

It comes back to the points discussed earlier. It isn't just about the capabilities of a product. This is about the outcomes delivered to customers. What is the evidence that a company can do the things it says? And how is that story told through customers versus just through feature and functionality messaging?

Companies seem to be blitzing past metrics associated with product-market fit at record speeds today. They then need to diversify their channels given they would have had huge success with their first channel. How have you thought about channel diversification? How do you decide which new channels to focus on, both in marketing sense and the broader go-to-market?

You can get quite a long way with one or two channels that work really effectively, but there comes a certain time where the carrying weight of that channel drops and you hit a local maximum in terms of what you can get out of it.

Creating a robust testing framework for bringing new channels online and staying on top of the leading indicators is essential to understand a channel's success.

What does that mean in practice? With a high velocity business and a short ROI window, it's much easier because the tangible impact on revenue becomes visible quickly from, let's say, starting to spend money on TikTok versus just spending on Meta. For an enterprise business, it takes much longer - potentially six to nine months or more to truly understand the impact of that channel.

So what do you do? First, what are your core metrics? If it's a lead-based model, are you looking at MQLs or broader lead scoring? If it's an account-based model or hybrid, what are the signals that you typically use to test success? Then, are you seeing incremental improvement after the introduction of this channel on those core metrics? Are you seeing that improvement carried through the funnel?

It's really easy to cut marketing off at the opportunity creation stage and say, "This is helping us to create pipeline. Fantastic! This is a great channel, and we're getting great cost efficiency." What can sometimes happen, and I've seen this in the past, is that pipeline just completely drops off a cliff after the opportunity qualification stage. It goes nowhere.

To give you a more tangible example, you often see this with channels like content syndication, where you can generate target leads in accounts that you care about with a profile that you care about at a pretty cheap cost compared to other channels. Often, there's enough interest there to get someone on the phone and maybe enough to get the initial shaping of an opportunity - great positive early lead signal. Then it goes nowhere.

This channel more than any other looks great from the outside. But when you really analyse it, you're spending a lot of money not really creating tangible revenue. Obviously, once you have that full ROI picture, it's far easier because you understand the tangible impact on revenue. But I think you need to be structured in terms of the gates all the way through the funnel as well.

There's a perennial tussle between marketing and sales on who's making the mistakes on not focusing on the ICP.

That's right, and I think that's inherent behind a lot of these questions. Do you really understand your customers? That's more important than it was before. How are you developing that ICP? Are you doing that based on win/loss data, gut feel, or some pretty robust data around not just who closes, but where you have high quality of revenue?

So who is staying with you, who is buying new products, who is showing high usage, and then pulling that into your front-facing go-to-market model.

Couldn't be more important in today's world where companies blow up, but we have questions about quality of revenue.

A hundred percent. And a lot of these AI companies, if you actually look at the retention, it's not great. There's a lot of situations where it is a test case, pilot or a project, then it goes nowhere. This is a key piece that's super important about going from experiment or project to sustained success for AI.

There's data showing that earned media is far more impactful than paid. What's your approach on how companies that are seed or Series A can succeed at earned media?

The thing to recognise, particularly in the early stage, is to put it quite bluntly - no one cares about your company or your brand in most instances. Starting from that perspective of realism, how do you counter that?

The idea of "Why this? Why now? Why us?" is the central red ribbon to the story that you need to build as an early-stage company, and at the early stage, the story is the strategy.

Building that story isn't just about the company. It's about the category - the category being built or evolved or changed. What has changed in the world that is making this more important for businesses? What is the brilliant future that will be enabled by the company and the things being driven for customers? And what is the evidence that the company can actually deliver that to customers?

Then, take that strong story and think about how you can channel it into different aspects of media. The one we see a lot right now is founders focusing on LinkedIn. That's great if there is a distinctive point of view that genuinely brings value to the market. I think there's a lot of noise out there. Content is harder than it was before in the sense that it's very easy to get to a certain level of quality. But if you have a strong point of view that's genuinely differentiated, if you're using strong data from your customers or from the market, you can stand out that way.

The final piece is, if you go back to a lot of the principles of building a successful category, a lot of it comes down to building and finding a new hero for that category.

For us, taking the specific case of Beamery, we built and designed a new category in the world of HR tech. The development of a category often comes down to finding someone within the organization that you can put on a pedestal, who is going to be a big part of driving that organisational change or that new reality that you're talking about.

That's what a successful community is for a business. The community needs to stand for something. It needs to be for someone. At Beamery, the community was designed around a person that was becoming more important than ever before - the talent operations manager.

These professionals are called different things in different businesses, but essentially, they drive the process change, organisational change, etc., that allows for the success of new talent technology. Similar to a marketing operations manager or revenue operations manager - the person behind the scenes who doesn't necessarily get a lot of love but makes the trains run on time.

The community built for this persona - content, podcast, training, certification, community, events - was a huge part of how the category became real for people. When these professionals were involved in deals, the deals closed faster, more regularly, and for more money. They would reliably advocate for the company inside businesses.

Yes, that person was not necessarily the decision maker, but they were a figure that was growing in importance inside business. You see this with lots of other organisations as well. Take Box - Box sells to CIOs, but the person that they made the hero of their category is the IT manager. It's about shining a light on someone that should matter but doesn't today.

One final question, which is quite topical lately, is the future of SEO. Companies are already beginning to post data on how much of their traffic is coming via ChatGPT or Perplexity. Do you have any views on this? How do you imagine the future of SEO developing?

It's kind of wild, isn't it? The traffic drops that some companies are seeing. The HubSpot one is pretty broadly published in terms of the volume of that drop.

It means a couple of things. Number one, when creating content, it needs to be laser-focused on that ICP, because some of the more generalised queries a business might previously have captured won't come in the same way.

There's a lot of advice out there around writing for these AI engines, and much of that is pretty valid, but more than anything, all of this makes a lot of what we have already discussed more important. It makes your brand more important. It makes your community more important. It makes having that strong relationship with customers more important. This kind of always-on, in-the-background engine that companies have relied on isn't going to work the same way, and therefore, finding other channels that make up that shortfall becomes necessary.

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Jobs

Companies in my network are actively looking for talent:

• An AI startup founded by repeat unicorn founders and researchers from Meta/Google is building 3D foundation models and is looking for a 3D Research Engineer, Research Scientist and ML Training / Inference Infrastructure Engineer (London or Munich).

• A Series A company founded by early Revolut employees is building a social shopping platform and is looking for Senior Backend, Frontend and Fullstack Engineers and Business Development Managers across Europe (London, Toronto, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Remote).

Reach out to me at akash@earlybird.com if you or someone you know is a fit!