Jason Mlicki (00:01.7)
Okay, Jeff, so we are starting our research on the future of the marketing organization, and you brought us a really wonderful guest, a real marketer, who’s going to talk about how she’s really using AI. Am I right, Brie? I’m joking. So with us is Vice President of Marketing for Stitch, Brie Jones. Brie, welcome to the show.

Bri Jones (00:28.428)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Jason Mlicki (00:30.188)
why don’t you start off by just telling us about you and your role? And the joke I was making was about a LinkedIn post about that you just made recently about people being annoyed with people that are from running programs around how they’re going to show you how real marketers are using real AI or something along those lines. And so my joke was that that’s what we’re have here to have you talk about, which is not actually true. So

Bri Jones (00:47.8)
Yeah, I did.

Bri Jones (00:53.006)
Yes, I do like to make fun of all of the AI hy hype on the internet on LinkedIn.

Jason Mlicki (01:00.159)
so yeah, tell tell us about tell us about you, tell us about Stitch, tell us about kind of your career. Just get us get us going.

Bri Jones (01:07.244)
Yeah. So I currently am the vice president of marketing at Stitch. Stitch is a four-year-old marketing services company that primarily helps enterprise brands kind of rethink their Martech stack and their customer engagement programs. I actually was brought on Stitch as the first employee after our two founders and it helped it grow from what it was as just th the three of us now to about 1080 employees, probably nearing 200 by the end of the year. we’re across the US, UK, and Canada.

And I’ve kind of accidentally been a professional services marketer my entire career. Getting back to actually college internships, I interned at an agency that specialized in helping services companies with their branding. I worked for our career services office. I interned at a financial services company and then have spent the last decade in various kind of like IT marketing workforce development consultancies.

Jeff McKay (01:59.418)
The accidental marketer. I love that.

Bri Jones (02:02.134)
Yes. Yep. I didn’t choose the professional services life, it chose me.

Jason Mlicki (02:04.306)
That’s that’s your new podcast, that’s your new show.

Jason Mlicki (02:09.594)
I think

Jeff McKay (02:10.755)
Feel like the same thing happened to me too. I just kind of stumbled into it, but I I love your description of that. Well, you clearly found your people. Jason, do you remember the episode we did? Probably don’t because you’re getting old, and it’s several years old, where we talked about how to get the most out of your high potentials and young Turks.

Bri Jones (02:12.27)
Yes.

Jason Mlicki (02:38.982)
I mean everybody remembers that ’cause you talk about it literally all the time because you’re so old you don’t remember that you’re talking about it. I’m sorry, I’m teasing I’m teasing. It’s kind of a tip for tat there.

Jeff McKay (02:46.799)
Well Brie Brie in my mind, if you looked up in the dictionary Young Turks, her picture would be in the dictionary next to the expression Young Turks because she is definitely a a talented marketer. I love what she’s doing, it’s Stitch and we’re glad that you’re here, Brie.

Jason Mlicki (03:13.69)
Hey hey Bri Brie, out of curiosity. So that was my next question. Is is like no one’s looking up what young Turks is in the dictionary ever, by the way. And and does it offend you that he calls you a young Turk? Is that offensive? Because you because you’re like, what is he talking about? Exactly. Exactly. So that’s exactly my point. You know, I think I think he’s tilting at windmills. I’m not now I’m going deeper in the episode bank for you, Jeff. no, we’re glad you’re here. I’m saying. Okay.

Bri Jones (03:13.976)
Yeah. Thank you. Now I have to look up what Young Turks is in the dictionary.

Bri Jones (03:26.67)
That’s where I have to look it up and decide. Yeah.

Jeff McKay (03:38.031)
I remember that one.

Jason Mlicki (03:43.355)
So I want to clarify a couple of quick things real quick. So in four years, Stitch has gone from zero to 200 employees and in marketing services company. And d just dive a little deeper into what you what you mean by marketing services and what Stitch actually does. And then tell us a little bit more about the marketing org, if you don’t mind.

Bri Jones (04:05.112)
Sure. Yeah. So marketing services, what is unique about Stitch in our space is that we sort of sit in this blend between IT services company and marketing agency, where we both do implementations and migrations of major software. So we are we have deep partnerships with two technology platforms called Braze and Databricks. And so we do implementations, migrations, technology consulting, org change or org design change management. But then we also do just like managed ongoing campaign services. And so

Once we get a brand up and running on Brace or Databricks, we’re doing the ongoing work because obviously marketing never stops. And so there’s always a campaign to run, a new audience segment to be integrated in, you know, from Braze to Databricks. And so we do this great job at bringing clients in, but then working with them long term, which is sort of how we sit in this hybrid of marketing services. And then my team is well, my team is a team of five. I’ve got myself, I’ve got a solution marketer, a content marketer, and two designers.

And then I do also include the alliances team usually when I talk about our team. And so if you bring them in, that’s seven. We have a partner marketing manager who also owns our events and then our head of alliances as well.

Jason Mlicki (05:17.126)
What do you constitute as an alliance? Your relationships with with Brays and and Dabric?

Bri Jones (05:23.298)
Yep. And so we do a lot of channel marketing. I would say probably sixty percent of our marketing efforts and campaigns and content are really focused on building those channel relationships.

Jason Mlicki (05:35.958)
And your marketing budget is zero, is that what you told us? That you told us

Bri Jones (05:40.047)
Kind of, yes. we are very, very lean and it’s really interesting because I’ve been in roles where I have had budgets and been able to invest in impressive tech stacks and all of those things. And yet without any of those things to stitch, we have still seen the scale that we have and and I think that marketing’s influence and impact within the organization are at a depth I have not seen before in any of my roles. And so I actually yes, we don’t have a budget. Like we essentially

kind of have like a business as usual budget we operate with throughout the year, which is our very lean tech stack. Pretty much we use CRM website. That’s about it. and then we have like, you know, swag gifting budgets, and then anything that we want to invest in on top of that, whether it’s an event, an agency partnership, like it kind of has to go through a rigorous review process. But that means that we are not doing any wasted marketing spend. Whereas I’ve yeah, been in rules where we have huge paid media budgets and

Spent a lot of money to get a lot of nothing in return.

Jason Mlicki (06:44.956)
Jeff, you’re you’re looking very inquisitive. You know, listeners can’t can’t see his face.

Jeff McKay (06:47.63)
Hmm, I’m just thinking about this. So if you had to guess, even though you don’t have an official marketing budget, what what percent of revenue do you think you’re spending on growth?

Bri Jones (07:10.422)
Are we including headcount in that budget?

Jeff McKay (07:13.903)
Yeah.

Bri Jones (07:16.898)
Like two and a half to three percent.

Jeff McKay (07:22.32)
Okay, that’s fair.

Jason Mlicki (07:26.042)
Okay. Go ahead, Jeff.

Jeff McKay (07:29.57)
You’re the first person I’ve ever heard describe we operate with no oper or no marketing budget. Such a young Turk expression.

Jason Mlicki (07:38.277)
I

Bri Jones (07:38.306)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mlicki (07:41.159)
I well, I think she’s the first one to admit it as the as the reality. Right. Right. I think there’s a lot of firms that don’t really have a marketing budget. they just don’t say that. They say, yeah, yeah, it doesn’t matter. Okay. So let’s jump into this. you know, really the heart of the matter here is and and I think all that contextual stuff is super helpful because I think it’s good for us to think about kind of where you’re coming from, both through your career and kind of your current role.

Jeff McKay (07:45.285)
that may be true.

Jason Mlicki (08:09.234)
Because I think what we’re trying to get at is how AI is is changing the marketing org. And so I think kind of the first question we had for you is just if you were building the marketing organization that you have, or or not, maybe don’t teach that’s the wrong question. If you’re building marketing marketing organization today, what would you do differently? You know, in knowing what you know about AI and the changing buyer landscape, what would you build differently relative to what you’ve built so far in the last four years?

Bri Jones (08:37.772)
Yeah. I would say that I have built my team in the AI era. So my first hire I did not make until until the spring of twenty twenty four. And so that by that point, AI was already kind of embedded in our day to day, at least in terms of just like basic chat functionality. And so how I think about building my team is really focused on more like strategic

Almost like strategic content roles, and I can sort of explain that here in a little bit. But I actually, funny enough, I made a post about this a few weeks ago. Like I came up as a digital marketing manager and I would say like that would not be on my radar to hire anytime soon. if anything, if there’s like specialized digital functionality, like investing in AEO infrastructure, that to me feels like something that I would want to divert to an agency and not bring in a house. I would say that all of the people that I

have hired, I expect to own things end to end, which is maybe different than it was ten years ago where you had your content person and then your digital person posted it on the website and got it on social media or built the email about it. Like I expect all of my team to be able to do all of those things at once. And so they’re owning something all the way from concept to how it gets in front of our audience. And so like I hired my solution marketer first and I really did that to make sure that marketing is staying connected to the business. So and how that has

How that has shifted since AI has evolved so much in the last couple of years has become really cool. And I’ll talk about that later. yeah, making sure that everything that marketing talks about is rooted in the business. So making sure that we know all of our client engagements that are happening, what are the results they’re driving towards, what are the use cases we’re implementing, what are clients saying about us? And so kind of like customer advocacy, product marketing, hybrid. And then she feeds all of that into our content marketer, who, like I said, I expect to own things end to end. So she’s writing emails, she’s

writing blogs, she’s thinking about social media, she’s running a webinar, all the above. She sets up the registration, does the follow-up emails. And then like I said, I have two designers because we do also invest a lot in supporting our sales team with proof of concepts and kind of like personally branded presentations in the sales process.

Jeff McKay (10:48.556)
So do you describe that as a generalist?

Bri Jones (10:53.751)
Yes.

Which I would say is also probably how I have come up throughout my career and so that is like the expectation I have of others on my team is I think we move faster and think smarter when we all all are thinking about the full picture.

Jason Mlicki (11:11.324)
So if I hear you right then, what you’re essentially saying is your in house model be a would be a collection of generalists, folks that can go end to end on really all anything, I guess. And you would outsource anything that requires a specialization. what what do you see as stuff that requires a specialization right now? And and has that changed over the last four or five years?

Bri Jones (11:18.573)
Mm-hmm.

Bri Jones (11:39.821)
Yeah, I would say kind of going back to any of those more digital oriented capabilities, like I mean, we do a little bit of paid media in house, but even then, actually what we do is really LinkedIn thought leadership content. And so we run that in house. If I were wanting to explore PPC or, you know, investing more in AEO infrastructure, which we are doing a little bit of outsourcing to our web guy right there or right now. those are the things because they’re also evolving so fast. Like

I don’t wanna hire an AEO expert internally at Stitch when who knows what that’s gonna look like five years from now. and so I would rather just sort of be able to ebb and flow with an outsource relationship there.

Jason Mlicki (12:20.22)
Yeah. Are there things that you saw go ahead, Jeff.

Jeff McKay (12:21.998)
Now two designers no, go ahead, Jason. complete the thought.

Jason Mlicki (12:26.544)
I was gonna say, are there things that you saw as specialist roles five, ten years ago that you that are now generalist roles and things that were journalist roles that are now specialist roles? Have you seen you know a changing in the guard on those things?

Bri Jones (12:40.426)
Yes. So funny enough, my first job out of school, we had outsourced basically all of our like hub spot operations to an agency and still kinda like building the landing pages and this is also like I also think that this is a very dated way of doing marketing, but companies still do it, but whole the whole like fill out a form, you get the ebook, you go to a landing page, you get the follow up email, you get dropped into a workflow. those things we outsourced to an agency and then I actually that was my first time firing an agency ’cause I like

I can do this all by myself. And then we also had outsource podcast production to that same agency. And I would say that that’s something I would expect to have in house too. Granted, maybe outsource like production efforts or any of that. But in terms of running the content, I would want to keep that in house if we were to have a podcast.

Jeff McKay (13:28.826)
Two designers seems l excessive for a five-person team. Tell us more about the importance of the designers and the work you’re doing.

Bri Jones (13:32.054)
Yes. Yeah.

Bri Jones (13:38.967)
Yeah. So that’s because we’re sort of in a creative adjacent field marketing to marketers. First we just like put a lot of emphasis into building a really unique, strong visual brand. And so, we something that we talk about a lot as a team is like democratizing our brand. And so we have really, really strong, robust, like literally 200 page slide templates. We are building out new ones all the time for like kind of different functionalities, but

We have a strong brand. We make sure that anyone on the team, whether it’s a solution architect to a salesperson, to a client partner, can all use our templates to get something to 90%. But where we come in is kind of adding that polish and supporting a lot of our decks to make sure that, like I said, we’re we’re taking these to like CMOs, like they care about brand. So we want to make sure that we are putting our best foot forward. But then also, let’s say that we are pitching to Chipotle and we wanna say, Hey Chipotle.

If you moved from whatever you’re on right now from a marketing platform perspective to Brace, you can explore gamification. Here’s three gamification concepts that we’ve mocked up for you are that are things we could build in Brace today. And so we do a lot of those things for our sales team as well, which has always landed really well for us to show up and sort of competing against these digital agencies, but have that creative layer on top.

Jason Mlicki (14:59.516)
Got it. So it’s that you talked about that then diagram before that you you kind of compete with agencies and with IT services firms at the same time. And so in some ways it’s it’s it’s competitive parity. can the sales reps get to ninety percent or can they only get to forty percent?

Bri Jones (15:07.8)
Mm-hmm.

Bri Jones (15:16.962)
I would want to grade each of my sales reps individually. On that.

Jason Mlicki (15:19.666)
Fair enough. Fair enough. Okay. a couple of the things struck me as you were talking. You and you kind of alluded to this. You know, you c you said, you know, years ago you you were hub outsourcing all of your HubSpot operations, basically, and now you brought that in-house. You you you were outsourcing podcast production. If you had a podcast, you’d bring that in-house. are what what are you seeing as stuff that’s critical to have inside and stuff that’s critical that that you would

I’m I guess I’m asking a question I already asked, but I’m asking you to answer it again in a in a way. What’s critical to have in-house and what stuff that you you see as not as as as critical, I guess. Does that make sense?

Bri Jones (15:57.603)
Yeah. Yeah. And I would say my answer to that is like anything anything that feels close to the brand. because that’s where kind of like I said, my first hire was a solution marketing manager, and her job is to make sure that we as a marketing team are staying close to what we’re actually delivering every day for our clients. And so I see that too as sort of like the foundational layer. But then anytime that we’re producing a podcast where we would want to

talk about the work we’re doing for our clients or interview a client. Like to me, that has to stay close to kind of the heart of the brand and the team. I would say I would say that like HubSpot operations could be outsourced. However, it’s also so easy and fast to do that that just feels like an efficiency thing at that point to keep that in house. but that’s where I’ve really struggled to outsource content in the past, just because Stitch has such a unique brand and tone and perspective that

I feel very protective of it and would want to keep it for people who kind of like can understand the full context of who are the players. Like I always t talk to my team about like when we are thinking about the Stitch brand, we have kind of specific people at Stitch that we try to embody. We have their actually their pictures on the slide of like, would so and so say this, would so and so say this. And so to me, if I’m trying to talk like the people I work with every day, an agency can’t do that in the same way my team could.

Jason Mlicki (17:17.68)
Yeah. ‘Cause they’re they’re they’re not spending time with them.

Jeff McKay (17:22.83)
Yeah, so that’s a big ask of junior marketers. You’re asking them to be strong across a wide array of of capabilities to really go deep on the culture and understand the cultural elements of Stitch, and have business acumen.

You know, so that they understand what’s really going on behind the scenes and what you’re trying to achieve as as an outcome. Finding people like that is tough.

Bri Jones (18:03.274)
It it is tough. I would say I’ve done a good job at it. definitely there’s been learning curves, especially when I just think about like the backgrounds that each of my team members have come in with. Like some like my first hire, my solution marketing manager, her name is Emily. Like she just came in and got got it immediately because she actually previously like she was truly my unicorn hire. She sat on an enterprise Martech team for five years before she came to Stitch, and so she was the client.

And she asked really smart questions in the in the interview process where she would say her gap is is like, I’ve never written a blog before. And I’m like, anyone can write a blog. Like, I would much rather you kind of have that like customer context and understanding because that’s going to make any blog or content piece you produce that much stronger. For my teammates who have come in without that level of understanding, we do a very rigorous onboarding that’s like three weeks. We have like 500 decks created. Like they are getting, if anything,

probably oversaturated with context and learning and we make them get all of their bra certifications. And so we we ramp really fast. And I also like set very clear expectations up front that I have high expectations of my team and I’m going to give everyone a lot of coaching. And they should like know that that is me trying to grow them in their roles versus trying to like micromanage everything they want to do. Like my goal is to get all of my teammates to a point where I’m not giving them feedback, but I also realize that I’m setting a high bar and I need to help them.

Clear

Jason Mlicki (19:31.91)
Yeah. Okay. let’s shift gears a little bit. So I’m really curious to talk a little bit about where you think things are going. and let’s start with with your role. You know, as as the leader of the marketing organization, how do you think your role needs to change over the next five years? You know, if we if we fast forward ourselves five years, what do you think your role looks like relative to now? How has it changed and how’s it the same?

Bri Jones (19:58.443)
That’s a great question. I feel like I’m still growing in my career, so I could answer this in a lot of ways.

I th and this actually has nothing to do with AI at all, but one gap that I have seen essentially across every company I’ve worked at now is a gap between how the brand talks about itself and like kind of the brand pom promise, the value it says it delivers versus like how it like gets translated down into your day-to-day consultants. And so one area that I actually think like marketing specifically and services should think about growing into is like the enablement and education side of things, especially actually with AI.

Things are changing so fast. The way that we deliver projects is changing, the way we price projects is changing. And right now those efforts are kind of happening ad hoc across the organization. Like, you know, sales of zoning, how are we transforming from TNM to outcome-based pricing? We have delivery thinking about how are they doing optimizing their workflows. And it’s really hard to find someone to come in as a linchpin between those things. And so that’s an area where I see a lot of opportunity.

At stitch, but then even I have to assume that something similar is happening across a lot of sort services organizations. So how do you come in? And then also make sure that those efforts are being mirrored across the brand story that we’re telling and like, you know, how are then are we talking about the outcomes that we’re actually driving in our messaging and our marketing? And so that is to me like a huge just opportunity for the CMO role to grow into is thinking about mirroring those two together.

Jason Mlicki (21:33.884)
Sorry, Jeff. I was expecting you to lean into that, so I and you didn’t. So

Jeff McKay (21:38.969)
I was I was gonna lean into that because what you described is what we’ve been talking around the I C triad, and that integration.

How how is that playing out at Stitch?

Bri Jones (22:02.062)
Can you ask the question in a different way?

Jason Mlicki (22:04.018)
I’m with you, Bree. I don’t know what he’s talking about.

Jeff McKay (22:05.679)
What does that look like day to day? What does that look like day to day?

Bri Jones (22:10.222)
Like in terms of who is serving as the linchpin or who are running these different initiatives forward. Yeah. So

Jeff McKay (22:13.519)
Yes. Cause I assume that’s you. That’s you to a large degree right now.

Bri Jones (22:20.714)
Yes and no. I would say that like I I have a good visibility into what’s happening across all the teams and I’ve definitely been someone who’s bridged gaps and kind of connected the dots for the team, but like it it’s also happening a little bit in silos, which is crazy that we’re kind of seeing that as a company that’s less than 200 people at this point. But like, you know, our head of accounts is sort of owning how we are transitioning from TM pricing to outcome-based pricing, our head of

delivery is owning how are we embedding AI to do more efficient delivery of projects. But then also if you still ask our day to day delivery person, like they are still they have a lot of questions around how can I or like how can I make sure I’m s hitting my billable targets if I’m being told to be more efficient with these different agents and automations that we’re building out. And so there’s just still a lot of things happening that are all connected, but they have not been connected together.

Well, internally through like a shared story, I would say that we’re talking about.

Jason Mlicki (23:28.174)
all right. So then when when you when when you look around your peers and you hear and you hear from other marketers, what do you what do you think they’re getting wrong about where marketing is headed? You know, because you threw out briefly that you’re like, I don’t think this works anymore. And that was the you know, HubSpot landing page, gated form, I guess drip nurture.

What what where wh what are the bets that you’re seeing marketers make that maybe seem like they’re headed in the wrong direction?

Bri Jones (24:04.056)
That’s a good question. I would say some of the things I’ve heard my peers talk about, well, I feel like that’s just truly across the spectrum. I would say there are some who like are leaning really, really heavily into kind of AEO optimization, like optimizing for AEO, all of those kind of like parameters that go into it. I will say, and maybe I’m like an anomaly here. I I invested a lot in SEO early on, and like that infrastructure seems to be paying itself off in dividends still through AEO.

Jason Mlicki (24:20.679)
Mm-hmm.

Bri Jones (24:33.832)
and so like to me that almost feels like someone getting a little bit caught up in a a gimmick. when there’s like still so much to be figured out and like it seems like it could be a distraction from day-to-day marketing. Granted, I will also say my audience is the enterprise marketers who are not using search and LLMs to find us, like it’s very much a trust and kind of having your brand in the right place is game for us. But we do get a a decent amount of like passive leads through those channels. So I will s I won’t say it’s not for anything, but it’s not like a core focus of ours.

Another area where I just have like seen a lot of investments being made and I have been guilty of this too. And I think it will only get worse as people are freaking out about AI and just want to like kind of like pour money on the problem is I think a lot of us have actually like really overcomplicated our tech stacks and invested a lot in technology that we did not need, without kind of mastering the basics of brand and and point of view and like really thinking about where our customers are. And so I think those two kind of overlap with each other as I think that

Marketers would collectively benefit from chilling out a little bit and like getting back to basics versus like trying to just be like, I need to buy all these tools that are measuring my my AEO sentiment and all of the stuff, because even what those tools will say is like, it’s an imperfect science. We don’t actually know. And it’s like, then why am I paying all this money for this tool that’s like still figuring itself out? Like to me, that feels like maybe I’m behind, but I will wait until that seems to be a little bit more baked out before I’m gonna invest in it.

Jason Mlicki (26:03.526)
Got it. So so my sense is based on what you said that you’re seeing marketers kind of go hair on fire because traffic collapsed and now they’re kind of like, well, we got to rebuild the whole marketing model around AEO and we don’t even really know what that is yet. I’ve described it as what when I was in the mid nine, you know, I’m as Jeff pointed out, I’m kind of old, but in the in the mid nineties when SEO became a thing.

Bri Jones (26:10.691)
Yes.

Bri Jones (26:20.216)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mlicki (26:31.078)
That was the question that people were constantly asking is how do we get found in search and nobody and search engine optimization wasn’t even a phrase or a concept yet. Like that language wasn’t didn’t even exist. So SEO wasn’t a a skill, it wasn’t a task, it wasn’t a person, and it wasn’t a software. And so you were still kind of just figuring this all out. And I I still kind of feel like that’s where we are on this. I mean, yeah, we’ve labeled it and given it a name, but I just think that the the remedy to to you know is just all over the place.

based on what I’ve seen. So there’s a lot of hypotheses and a lot of hunches, but I don’t know if any of them are a hundred percent baked in reality. So

Bri Jones (27:09.858)
Yeah. And granted, like if that is a way that you’re getting your customers, then yeah, panic a little bit, like try to figure out how you’re going to adjust to this new norm. But I also think if a lot of marketers actually stepped back and wondered where they’re getting their customers, they would realize that like this is not as like detrimental as they think it is.

Jason Mlicki (27:31.506)
If we were to fast forward five years from now and look back on this time, I think we kind of talked about this a little bit in your these last comments, but like, what do you think we’re going to look back about marketing organizations and say, boy, we had that all wrong? why why did we do it that way? Or why did we build that way? or I gosh, I can’t believe how antiquate it is. I cannot believe that we had people whose full job was this. that’s crazy.

Bri Jones (28:02.135)
I would say it’s probably still a lot of the same of what I have talked about. I think

Bri Jones (28:13.41)
I think like actually if anything, I would be curious to see how wrong I am about like the importance of investing in AEO. ’cause I do think that that’s probably the biggest thing that we’ll see changed. Obviously something we didn’t talk about a lot today yet is like thinking about workflows and like content creation with AI. And so I think that those roles will change and evolve. but I yeah, I don’t know.

Jeff McKay (28:41.829)
Are you using a Gentec AI right now and as part of your organization?

Bri Jones (28:49.012)
yes, significantly.

Jeff McKay (28:52.697)
And how are you applying it and what type of results are you seeing?

Bri Jones (28:56.588)
Yeah. I would say obviously increase content output. However, that comes with its own challenges. So I would say kind of my most unique use case, which I alluded to earlier, is that we invested really early on in building our own internal AI infrastructure. It’s called Stitch AI, very creative naming people over here. but what it does is like really gives us access to that organizational context that even like like I said, my first hire, Emily, solution marketing manager.

Her job was to make sure that we had all that context of what’s happening across the organization, what use cases are we running? But she had to do that by literally kind of like having moles inside the organization who she was always talking to, asking what they were working on. Now with the introduction of Sitchai, like we can just ask, like, hey, what’s happening with XYZ account? What what are some examples where we have seen you know, like gamification campaigns drive success. And it can like pull from all of our client documentation.

And so like that has like kind of changed the way that we can produce that content and make sure that once again we’re always borrowing from real client examples. And so there’s that from like a context perspective. I do use a couple of tools, and actually I’ll just give them shameless plugs if that’s okay. But like Peerbound is actually the only marketing technology tool that we invested in early on. And it is kind of like a a customer advocacy tool, but our main use case is actually sourcing customer stories for our sales team. And so

they’ll go into Slack and prompt an AI bot and be like, give me all of our use cases in, you know, financial services where they were doing journey optimization and it will tell you all of those. Granted, what I always say to the team is the content that that’s spinning out is only as strong as what you guys are telling us, because we feed all the content into that. But it’s nice because I’m guessing every marketer listening to this podcast has gotten 500 million asks from sales team of the same, you know, formula of what case studies do we have and

this industry doing this thing. And I have never been asked that in the last three years because they don’t have this AI bot that gives them more answers than I ever could. and it also I think reinforces the importance of sharing that context internally so we can continue to sort of feed the beast. And so we use that. And then I also recently invested in a tool called Markup AI that is helping with brand governance because what what AI is great at in terms of pre-

Bri Jones (31:20.006)
increasing content output is or it increases the content output, however quality and consistency and kind of avoiding those AI tells has become, I think, the new challenge. And so markup lets you essentially like set all of your brand guidelines. So like don’t use these AI tells. You know, if you’re naming a product or a partner’s product, make sure you’re using this capitalization or these, you know, trademark symbols. And so I can do all of that so that when someone wants to go post on LinkedIn,

I don’t have to edit every single post or cringe when I see what’s being put out there because they just use an AI tool to make it. So we do that. we we have piloted a lot of demand gen AI workflows, but I think going back to AI is kind of like dumping gasoline on a fire if you don’t have it kind of embedded into the right context. And so we invested a lot in these AI workflows and lead scoring and

enrichment and it just it didn’t fit within how the organization actually goes to market and thinks about these things and from a scale and process perspective it just kind of like made us go faster than we needed to. And so we put a pause on those things.

Jason Mlicki (32:35.836)
Can I c ask a clarifying question about content? So are are you do you have an agent that’s making its own content on its own?

Bri Jones (32:45.984)
No, it has to be prompted. That would be terrifying if it was making its own.

Jason Mlicki (32:47.868)
Okay. Okay. Okay. And and and how how when you say content is up, volume is up, what w gimme give me some give me something, some anchor point here. What what are we talking about? How but how much content are we talking about and what types of content?

Jeff McKay (32:50.557)
Yeah.

Bri Jones (32:57.87)
Mm-hmm.

Bri Jones (33:07.032)
I would say blog has been our main focus. we also like this happened synonymously with also hiring a content marketer, and so there’s that. But I would say going back to me having the expectation that my relatively junior marketer is supposed to have all this organizational context and like be act like an investigative journalist, the way that she’s kind of using those sources is now different. So she can work with Stitch AI and kind of get all the right questions together. So that way when she’s going to talk to a solution architect.

about a new campaign that they launched for a client, she’s not starting with like zero. So she can go in like really smart questions of like, hey, I saw that this journey drove X results. Is that right? Like, and I saw that you ran into these issues in the documentation. Like, was this right? And so it just kind of accelerates that process of collaborating with SMEs. And then two, another cool use case because our stitch AI is kind of plugged into Slack. It’s plugged into all of our Google Drive.

Because it’s a HubSpot, so it just has all this context in that I can say, tell me everything that we’ve said about Databricks Customer Lake, and it will kind of pull the voices from across the organization and turn that into like a content piece for us. And granted, things need editing, but I have been really impressed with how good things are when it’s borrowing from all these different sources to kind of capture the sentiment across the organization.

Jason Mlicki (34:26.962)
Okay. all right. And then and then back to the agentic AI question. Do you have any autonomous agents that are running inside the marketing org that are doing anything specific? Any any specific tasks? Have you done anything have you done anything with?

Bri Jones (34:41.878)
Yes. We have w well, we have two and both are actually sort of like scanners for us. And so, I built one and actually this is one of those things where I’m like, I don’t even want to know how many tokens this uses every day. That’s none of my business. I probably should start to care about it, but until someone tells me not to or t tells me to care, I’m just gonna like let it run on the on the background. but I essentially built this yeah, automat automated

process where we have a target account list in HubSpot and I connected our Citch AI to it. So every day it scans 50 of the let’s say 300 accounts on that list and we’ll run a Google search for LinkedIn profiles for relevant ICPs. It will search to see if we have contacts in HubSpot, search industry news, earnings reports. so it basically tell and then it scores if like there is enough signals to reach out to someone. And then if yes, it will draft personalized outreach copy and like

pull in from customer examples of like, hey Chipotle, I saw that you recently mentioned in your earnings report that you plan on experimenting with gamification as part of your loyalty program. Here’s like three other examples where we’ve done that for QSR brands and the results it’s drove. So it’s pretty sophisticated and multifaceted. it definitely is not perfect and sometimes it hallucinates, but I would say that is probably our most like complex use case at this point.

Jason Mlicki (36:07.162)
And are you seeing that get used? Like like the like are the sales teams or whoever the the end output is this intended for, are they taking it and running with it? And is it having an impact?

Bri Jones (36:18.574)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So it’s not having I this and this is actually on my to-do list is to like probably remove the personalized outreach copy writing component of it because what it is doing is because we are so channel and partner oriented, is it’s prompting our sales team to be like, that’s one of my target accounts. Like now I have this new tidbit of information or context about this company’s priorities. I’m gonna take this back to my partner so we can kind of do a joint game plan about how to get into that account. And so less of like the direct outreach component, more of

surfacing relevant context to have a reason to go reach out to get an intro.

Jason Mlicki (36:56.144)
sense it’s the intel it’s basically it’s basically a a a a digital intent gauge or something along those lines digital intel slash digital intent all kind of wrapped into one okay got it jeff anything else you can think of that we wanted to aspre that we haven’t as parri that we should have asked

Bri Jones (37:05.635)
Yeah.

Bri Jones (37:10.55)
A little bit.

Jeff McKay (37:21.539)
Yeah, Brie, I would like you to give some advice to the CEO, managing partner listening to this podcast right now, thinking about wow, Stitch is doing some really cool stuff. That’s a lot of stuff that they’re doing. How would I start to build something like Stitch? Should I build something like Stitch? because I’m a

Two hundred person firm, give or take, a few. What advice would you give them?

Bri Jones (37:55.681)
Yeah. I would say, and this is where I feel lucky, and I will give a shout out to my boss Michael, because I think that he is someone who just inherently gets marketing and sees the value of it. Like that’s proven by me being his first hire before consultant, before literally anyone else when he was starting Stitch. And so I think that he does a great job because I’ve seen this before where it’s like marketing’s responsible for revenue, pipeline, whatever. And so that becomes om almost like overindexed on in terms of

what you want to see out of the marketer right away. But I think Michael really understands the importance of having a brand that stands out in this market space and a strong story and a strong point of view. And so he gives us the space to invest in those things without being like, what’s the pipeline? Like how much pipeline did we get from that website tagline change? so but obviously he does hold me accountable to goals. I do own pipeline numbers. I own opportunity sourced goals every single quarter. But I think that that’s

not all that Michael sees the value in marketing for. And so I would say if you want to invest in a marketing function like Stitch, you need to understand that there’s a lot of immeasurable things that the marketing team can be doing to drive value for your organization. And I think that’s where maybe our our lack of marketing budget and really lean marketing team with high expectations serves us well is because I feel like we have done a good job at avoiding like the marketing waste cycle or like random acts of marketing for the sake of it. Like everything we do is very intentional and purposeful.

And so I would say like that should be the focus versus like overindexing on a demand gen engine when you don’t have the brand to support it.

Jeff McKay (39:28.687)
Mm. So lay the foundation, well positioned company owning the market, clear ICP. You didn’t use any of these terms, but that’s what you’re that’s what you’re saying is is get focused first. and be clear about what you’re wanting to achieve.

Jason Mlicki (39:39.602)
Yeah.

Bri Jones (39:41.026)
Yes.

Jason Mlicki (39:51.435)
heard balance. I heard that you know you can’t overindex on pipeline and lead gen, nor can you only focus on the long term. You can’t just focus on brand and future demand. You have to you have to put some priority on both. out of curiosity before we wrap, how do you arm wrestle those two things?

Bri Jones (40:04.397)
Mm-hmm.

Bri Jones (40:15.402)
I would say it’s not so much arm wrestling. It is making sure that there is a balance when I like so we kind of we organize our work by quarterly objectives and I try to make sure that we kind of have an even split of like these are brand building projects. Like we just dropped our biggest content piece of the year last week, which is basically our like case study lookbook is what we call it. That’s brand building. Of course, like we look at engagement stats, but we’ve removed any sort of barrier to entry so we don’t gate the content. We don’t

Like every kind of view is anonymous. And so there’s that component of it. Of like, but I know that that is something that initiates conversations. It just kind of reiterates our brand positioning of like, we’re not just gonna talk to you in big buzzwords. We’re gonna show you how these things actually get done. so there’s that. But then we also are currently owning a a number where we’re tracking how many opportunities we’re sourcing from marketing content, which is via webinars, via our website, via events. And then we also are owning like a

assisted bookings number. And so my team’s responsible. So like my designers, for example, they obviously do a lot of fun brand stuff, but they also track every single deal that they support the sales team with. And so we are accountable to making sure that we are assisting a certain percentage of our bookings each quarter. And so to me it’s just it’s not an arm wrestle. It’s a making sure there’s a there’s a split that feels aligned with what the business needs from us at the time.

Jason Mlicki (41:36.86)
Thank you. All right. Well, Brie, this was fabulous. I appreciate you joining us. I it was super helpful. and thank you for listening. And thank you for It’s because I jumped in on you. I’m sorry. I no, no, it was great. I I appreciate you sharing your story, sharing where Stitch is in the cycle and kind of your vision of where marketing needs to go in the AI.

Bri Jones (41:46.262)
Yeah, yeah, like I didn’t get to say that at the beginning as my longtime listener, first time caller. Yes. All good.

Jeff McKay (41:50.992)
Ha ha ha

Bri Jones (42:07.256)
Yeah, thank you guys for having me.

Jason Mlicki (42:09.17)
All right, cool.

Bri Jones (42:16.367)
Ku