Mike Moreno-Marketing with Machines. A New Playbook for Visibility!

Overview:

In this episode of Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders, Mike Moreno, a seasoned product marketer with deep technical roots, joins Kerry Guard to explore how AI, particularly generative tools like ChatGPT, is reshaping sales and marketing. Based on his experiences at Intel, Cloudera, and Cloudflare, Mike shares insights on blending human narratives with AI efficiency, crafting resonant messaging, and navigating the evolving landscape of generative engine optimization (GEO). Together, they unpack the importance of aligning brand, PR, and product marketing to ensure consistency across platforms and stand out in the era of AI-driven search.

Transcript:

Kerry Guard 0:00

Welcome back to Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. I'm Kerry Guard, your hostess with the most assist and CEO of MKG Marketing, coming to you from the Isle of Guernsey. With me today is Mike Moreno, a proven leader building the future of GTM with AI. He has a decade of experience scaling SaaS and cloud businesses at powerhouses like Intel, Cloudera, Cloudflare, and Exabeam. With a background in software engineering and deep expertise in Cloud Machine Learning and high-performance computing, Mike has a rare ability to translate technical innovation into market traction. Most recently at Sada, he launched AI driven solutions that generated millions of new revenue. Now he's diving into how generative AI is transforming sales and marketing. So much to unpack, and I'm here for it. Mike, welcome to the show. Thank you, Kerry, glad to be here. Excited so glad to have you a long time no, see.

Mike Moreno 0:59

Yes. It has been a while and but it's been a fun ride. Tell me about that ride. Yeah, I finished up at SADA back in January, currently in the process of growing prospecting. Have a couple of clients for my own agency focused on product marketing and trying to help small businesses, kind of what we're gonna talk about, whether the storm or the challenges of AI as it comes to, you know, messaging, their products.

Kerry Guard 1:26

Look at you go, welcome to the fractional show. Exactly. That's exciting, yeah. So you started your own, your own thing, you have a couple of clients.

Mike Moreno 1:35

Yes, I have a couple of prospective clients that we're talking to. So I'm very excited about that very cool, maybe a product launch I'll be working on here with them, as well as assessing how we can build kind of a better go-to-market digital framework for another client in the healthcare space. So lots of stuff is going on. I know I'm one of many in the world of kind of fractional marketing, PMM digital marketing, you name it, because it's just an exciting time, even though I know it's a challenging time for many marketers, because we've I can reflect back on last year and just seeing how I went from the year before using Chat GPT, to the world we are in now, and just kind of like assessing that things have definitely changed, and things. And many marketers need to understand that.

Kerry Guard 2:25

There seems to be two camps in the land of fractional people who feel like it's a moment in time and a blip, given the current market, and others who feel like this is the longevity and the way the world is going in terms of marketing departments, what's sort of your as you're dabbling here and getting into the mix of it? What do you what camp are you currently falling on? And I'm not saying you have to stay there forever, but as you go down this journey. Where are you feeling like this new fractional world is coming up? Is it here to stay, or is it just given this? Just people are using right now to get through an interesting time?

Mike Moreno 3:13

I think businesses and decision makers are trying to manage their budgets, obviously, and their knee-jerk reaction is looking at AI is this is a simple way for me to get more out of less people, which is probably a true statement. Yet I do think there may be a disconnect in assuming that you could hire a junior marketer who's using AI tools to give them the same results they would have gotten from a seasoned marketer who understands the product, understands the market, understands product positioning, and understands storytelling. There's there's a tremendous amount of knowledge that's been accumulated from go to market experts over the years, and when you just make the assumption that chat GPT is going to give you all the answers to somebody you're paying half or a quarters as much as you will be more seasoned, I think you're going to find it a little more challenging than you expect, because there's just like I've always branded myself as kind of more of a technical Coming to marketing from the technical angle. I studied computer science. I've worked at Intel for 10 years. I understand hardware and software dynamics pretty well and how these technologies are influencing business solutions. And there are the marketers and product marketers who come from the writing angle, great at building those stories. And I think both are very valid. But I think, you know, business decision makers who are hiring, bringing on marketers, might be kidding themselves. If they think they can just grab somebody who's Junior chat GPT is just going to educate them, and somehow they're going to do some magical work. And I think people should be cautious. So that makes me think it's. Temporary thing, and that maybe, you know, as things change, they're like, oh, I need these full-time employees to be working for me, not just rationally.

Kerry Guard 5:08

But I think the idea of hiring, you know, one person to do many people's jobs is is a struggle, and so I think the fractional side sort of helps solve a bit of that where you bring on sort of a fractional team versus a single person, and you still need founders make this. They make this mistake all the time where they skip having a marketing person there, whether it's in-house or even as a fractional, and jump right to working with an agency, and then they don't understand why nothing's working, right? And so I, I Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see how it all pans out. But I, I do think fractional is here to stay, but I do think it's going to find itself into a certain niche of what, of where it makes sense and how it helps companies get on the map and start to grow, and then they will need to bring in an in house team, because there's too much work for a fractional team. But I think it's going to help those smaller companies who need marketing get marketing faster than just waiting around for, you know, the the revenue to be rolling in and the product to be finished, so to speak, they can get they can get they can get ahead a little bit quicker by bringing in fractional when I say fractional, I'm talking about those seasoned people like yourself. I think it's going to give them access to people like you who have the experience, opposed to having to go with somebody with lesser experience, because they're cheaper and potentially faster, but don't really know what they're doing and relying on Chat GPT to get it done.

Mike Moreno 6:47

There may be an inflection point in the sense that you can bring somebody fractionally like me who has tons of experience, they're using the AI tools, and you're really going to get a lot of productivity out of those individuals in a shorter period of time, where, I think in years past, the knee jerk was I need this agency, and I think the culture I've seen over the last few years is in the organizations I've been At, is this desire to get these Uber professional, designed agency that your friend told you about. You're the CMO, and you're picking them, and a lot of it's kind of this brand based or perception based, I think things are going to be there's going to be more of a level playing field where maybe a newer agency who has a niche focus will be able to maybe accelerate those startups faster than them just having to wait, save their money. Oh, I gotta buy this. This. What agency, I gotta work with them. And I think that things are gonna kind of balance out a bit in that sense, because I'll be honest, I've seen some of these larger agencies, and they're great and they'll do great work. But then at the same time, I feel it's very surface. It's not that they don't understand the product, the positioning, the narratives that need to be said to get the eyeballs and the attention that the company needs. At that time.

Kerry Guard 8:15

I've been sort of designing websites for the last few years now, thanks to I used to fight with WordPress and CSS and all that, and then I quit, like, ready to quit. I was like, no, not doing this anymore. And now there's a new tech stack out there that I use, called Tailwind, with Next.js, and it's like game-changing in terms of never having to touch CSS ever again. And so I got back into it. And the thing that I've learned over the last two years in doing websites is that it's not actually about the website, it's to your point, about the you know, where do you sit in the market and where's that empty space married to that thing that makes you different and unique, that nobody else is really leaning into with the tone and voice of the brand, and what are those? And then you put SEO on top of that, and sort of bring all that together before you even touch the website. And that takes, like, just sitting with a client to even unpack all that takes weeks before you even really start to work. Yeah, yeah, it's been absolutely fascinating, and doing that kind of deep level work that you're talking about, and I am so I do think this shift is coming where people are understanding that that has to happen, and it's all well and good to have a pretty website, but what? It's just a vehicle for, really, the most important stuff, which is what you're saying and why you're saying it, how you're saying it. So, yes.

Mike Moreno 9:50

And that's where I approach things in everything I do is with that, that first messaging, document, messaging, and positioning, who is the customer. Yeah, those are the first questions I'll ask a product manager, a salesperson, I'll even talk to when I get the occasion to talk to potential personas. And for example, when I started exiting, I went to talk to the old CISO from Cloudera, and I said, Hey, I'm joining this security operations company. Tell me what you're going through, what are the things when it comes to a SIM, cyber security solution that you're interested in, and really getting to the base level, what is it that they care about? What could move the needle fastest for that company, and engaging with you, said persona, and building the messaging from there? Because I think, to your point, like we can make pretty things, and we can put words on the page, and ChatGPT can certainly help you put the words on the page, but is it going to resonate at a human level? Because it's a human who's, you know, who's considering buying your product, and especially when you're talking about inbound leads. I don't know about you, but I mean, what my process for doing vendor research right now is usually starts with ChatGPT giving me the top 10 XYZ widgets, boom. And then after that, maybe I'll, I'll say in North America or in the United States. But then from there, I'm going, I might be going to their websites, and I might be saying, okay, validating the thesis that's been given to me. And that's where the action happens, right? You the the vendor. We've all heard this as marketers, and this is an old data point. It was 70% of sales by before sales person talks to somebody, 70% of the research has always been done, and I think that's even higher now. I always like to say now it's over 70% because these tools just make it so easy. And I can reflect back even talking about Cloudera, since you planted it in my mind, I helped put era at you know, invest in LinkedIn, elevate for the social media, which is an employee advocacy tool which allows them to all the employees, to retweet, repost, and LinkedIn. And I did the vendor analysis. I looked at them and looked at some of the other leading employee advocacy tools, and have three columns and features, benefits, price and I can just go to chat, if you can do that in seconds. So it's wild if you're not showing up there. And this is how my thesis for what I'm trying to drive as a consultant right now is, if you're not showing up when I say, give me the top 10 vendors, you need to be there. This is in my mind, and you can debate me on this. In my mind. This is Seo 15 years ago. This is an opportunity, I guarantee that chat GPT a year from now, or less, two years from now, they're going to go to a paid model, similar to what we've seen with Google and Google Analytics, because US marketers don't want to see the analytics. We're going to want to be able to say, Oh, we got attribution because somebody found an article that positioned your company or product on ChatGPT, and we could say, Hey, look, we did it. And so I think things will go in that direction. But right now, it's such a hot opportunity to really use tools like frameworks like generative engine optimization, where you put the right content pieces out there in press and blogs, aligning your messaging on your website such that these things get picked up, and bringing that alignment back to what we just talked about, the messaging doc. This needs to be the core of how you're going to talk about it. How do you think your core audience is going to write a prompt saying, Give me the top 10 companies that do XYZ? If you're not saying we do XYZ on your product page or your solution page, or even your main homepage banner, you might not you might be missing. It not actually seen results where in those top 10 lists from ChatGPT, for a subset of vendors, there might be Wikipedia, Wall Street Journal article, and I've actually seen ones where the customers that vendors website was referenced and they were ranked in there, so that messaging alignment is so important right now to about to get you in there.

Kerry Guard 14:29

Oh my gosh, I don't know where to start. We have to show up in geo, right? And I think it's still a black box of how on earth we do that. What we are seeing is that the standard SEO best practices still work. So, to not change what you're doing from an SEO perspective, but to your point, really aligning your SEO strategy to not only how people search, but then that messaging piece of hitting at home, right? Those need to be in lockstep. And the way that I. I'm seeing AI sort of level the playing field, so to speak, is I'm a great example of this. And I'm sure you're feeling this too, of like being able to build the positioning, the messaging, the keyword research, jumping a ton of information into chat all in one window and now folders to really build that up into a place where you can just now, like when we roll out ad copy, it's like, okay, using the tone of voice and these messaging pillars, we're going after this keyword, you know, let's write 10 title tags, and then these meta and then we need just for description to make sure they're in this order, right? And then you're knocking out copy in less than 20 minutes. And the only reason why it takes that long is because we're still being thoughtful and methodical and poking the bear to make sure that the style did right. So I do think that taking the time to do the research and doing it in chat is like where this is all, where this is all headed. But let's talk about that for a second, because the way that we do the research, and what you know, I said this in a presentation I gave it to a few weeks ago is that chat is only as good the output from chat is only as good as the input you give it. Yeah, and so if you're just scraping the internet and having it regurgitate back to you what it already knows, then you're just going to show up, to your point, like you might not even show up, because it's going to rank you against what other people are already doing in your low manitota poll in that regard. So when you're talking about the research piece and that messaging and positioning, how are you using AI to support that, and how are you making sure that it isn't just an internet regurgitation of what's already out there?

Mike Moreno 16:44

So over the last few months, this is what I've been researching, specifically on Geo, and my conversations I've had with other marketers have kind of brought me to my thesis, which geo is a recipe currently, attribution is the weak spot, but the recipe is authoritative content on authoritative websites going to help you get ranked. Wikipedia could be one of them. Reddit can be another one of them, and then that alignment of message to what is on your website is also very important, like I just mentioned now to your early point those and I talked to his SEO expert last week, he's like, if you're rocking it on SEO right now, you're most likely you've been rocking it in SEO, you're probably going to come up in those top 10 lists, most likely. My biggest concern and kind of what I'm focused on, having been in the startup game for a while, or sub c, Series C companies, or Series C ish, is that if you're a series, let's say you're series A you're smaller, you're relatively new, getting that brand impact, even with SEO, is going to be a challenge. You don't have the content out there, you may not have built the authority or brand authority or product solution authority yet, and so how do I help somebody like that, in that situation, accelerate to be ranked and rated by chat? Right that that is kind of what I'm looking at.

Kerry Guard 18:17

Getting authority up and getting those keywords ranking and your landing pages is it does feel so much harder these days, like it feels like it takes more time and more effort making progress and really having it all work together, right? It's not just keywords. It's not just semantics on your website. It's not just internal link building, it's external link building. You can't do any one of these things. You have to do all of them.

Mike Moreno 18:49

Yeah, and I will answer this a bit further, because the conversation I had with somebody last week, I think it's a bit of a balance on SEO and GO. Is, my view, is that you need to check the SEO box well, but then if you want to get listed, you need to start on the geo recipe that I just talked about. And there is a bit of training in there. You need a trained chatbot. Do you need to change the platforms you want to be viewed on? Because I was about to interview for an identity access management company a couple of months ago, and I was doing my research, I said, Give me the top 10 identity access management companies. Boom, it wasn't on the list. And I go, why is it this company on the list? Oh, the way chat responded was hilarious. Oh, I'm sorry, yeah, they should be up there. Okay. And so I validated this thesis as well with other marketers. So I talked to a marketer by about two and a half months ago, and he was managing a bunch of e-commerce sites in India, and he noticed the SEO, his SEO, he's an SEO guy. And he noticed SEO was not working like it used to through probably about now we're probably about a year ago, but when I talked about nine months. And so he started researching what was going on, and he realized that obviously LLMs are taking this kind of note, no click situation and and so he built a kind of geo strategy to kind of combat that. But the one thing that I walked away with, and I've also validated this, is that he goes, LLMs recognize other LLM copy. So if you're thinking that you're going to just go use chat and just write a whole bunch of stuff and put it out there, that might, you know, that might not get you ranked and rated as well as you'd like. He said that they are looking for an original thought, a differentiation, something, and that's why reviews, reviews that could be in Reddit as well, but reviews like on g2 plays so well right now to get you ranked and rated on these platforms, because it's an original thought. It's some human being saying they are the best things that slash bread and that has a tremendous amount of weight versus chat wrote it, we're ranked number one out of 10, and in chat knows that it was written by itself or by another LLM, and you're just not going to get this in play.

Kerry Guard 21:26

Let's talk about this differentiation between a geo strategy and an SEO strategy. I don't know that they're I think they're converging where SEO is sort of catching up to Geo and it there was a huge update that just happened in March, actually, that disrupted a whole bunch of folks for this reason, where I to your point, the validation aspect of what you're saying is so important. And actually, when you do on-page recommendations, when we do on page recommendations, and we run it through SEMrush to give us on-page to tell us, like, what's wrong with the page? That is actually one of the things it's looking for is client testimonials or case studies, or that individual piece that validates what it's saying. If chat gives me content that ever says number one or trusted by I'm like, No, you've got to remove it. There's no There's no way for me to sit here and say we're number one or we're the most trusted, like that. That's unquantifiable. And unless I can have enough testimonials to literally say those words, there's no point. So stop saying this. And so I do think that everyone's moving in this direction, both search engines as well as LLMs, around that authenticity, of validation, of making sure that those case studies and those testimonials are relevant and popping. Let's talk about this for a second. You said there's this recipe for geo. You talked about relevant content. We're talking about the testimonial piece, where else does it differentiate in your mind? Where else do you see where you have to lean into what's different in leading into geo versus SEO?

Mike Moreno 23:15

Now, I'm not the SEO expert. I'm a, I can safely say I'm a well rounded marketer, but not deep dive into SEO, probably as you but my view would be, you're going from the keyword trying to own certain keywords and then trying to build content that integrates those keywords to a world where with generative engine optimization, it's not necessarily as keyword focused, it's a bit more authority focused, like, if I'm going to put you, if I'm chatting, I'm going to put you in the top 10, I need to be able to validate that the review saying that you're great on g2 correlate with the Wall Street Journal article you put up there, and the messaging correlates with what is on your website. And so I view it from a product marketing angle of and I talk a lot about this as well, is that a lot of the messaging we've built for websites and even marketing materials at times can be very forward-looking and less focused on what you do. And so, Case in point, two years ago at Exabeam, I needed to build and update a PDF that had all our partner integrations. And so I'm going through this list of 200 different partnerships, and how they're categorized. And then I ran into, I'm trying to, even though I know, because I've been in tech my whole career, what most all these companies do, I still wanted to validate it. And so like best example I could give is CrowdStrike. So CrowdStrike, the world knows them as endpoint protection. A company. You go to their website, we're the AI cybersecurity company, so there was no quick way to plus, years ago to, like, go into ChatGPT and say, validate this for me. And so I recognize that and but I also use ChatGPT to help that process. But fast forward to today in the kind of thesis I built back then was there was like a sit. What was it like? A two-year lag on training data? So I kind of came to the conclusion, as a marketer, as a product marketer, I'm like, there might be some value to communicating what you do as a brand or as a specific product more authentically. So I think we're moving to a world where we're relying on tools like chat, GPT, and I think it behooves us to try and talk more authentically about what we do, such that when somebody types in a prompt and says, I'm looking for the bat, the best Endpoint Protection company, give me the top 10 the wording on your website masses authoritative content, and you're guaranteed they're gonna show up. And that's particularly impactful for the startup that's trying to build that bran,d where it could be so easy to say, Oh, I got a 12-month roadmap and we're going to the moon, and I put we're going to the moon. Well, they're not searching in ChatGPT, I'm looking for the startup that's going to the moon. They're searching for what you can do.

Kerry Guard 26:27

I actually had a really great conversation with Teresa Roy about this a few weeks ago, where she was saying something similar, from a product marketing standpoint, not in the sense of AI and how we're talking about it, but in the sense of more product solutions, right? So we've been told for so long not to talk about our products and not talk about our features, and people don't care. And to your point, I think you're driving that home of actually they may not care, but the llms do so, being very clear and specific on the thing, the very specific feature thing you have and do, and the problem it solves is coming back in a big way, and the more specific we can be, the better chance we have at making sure we do show up from an authoritative perspective for that thing. So laddering up your homepage sure to be more emotional to hit home, but people aren't ending up on your homepage anymore. They're kind of coming in the back door and going deeper, I think, is where to your point, like, kind of where this is all this is all headed. And the other thing that you're saying is that I absolutely love the consistency that has to go beyond your website. And Google's always kind of said this, especially from a localization standpoint, where you had, you know, I did local SEO a little bit today and a long time ago, where your phone number, like even just the way your phone number showed up in Google, my business had to be exactly formatted as it showed up on the website. Like that. Continuity had to be crystal clear. And so that kind of on a bigger stage to what you're talking about, of like your continuity around your messaging, and the problems you solve based on the features you have, has to be everywhere. And that always felt kind of daunting, because everywhere now is like it's not just Google ads, website and a search engine, it's Google ads, it's YouTube, it's a search engine, it's your website, it's social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, I'm still calling It Twitter threads, right? It's got to be like TikTok, right? That continuity has to be spread out across so many more channels and teams. If you're looking more from an enterprise, I know we've been talking very startup, which I love, but just sort of dipping our toe in the enterprise world, like that poor Enterprise team now going across multiple teams, and that continuity needing to be so crystal clear, feels big. So where do you see what you sort of mentioned? It a little bit like the Wall Street Journal, Reddit. Are you saying PR has to play, has to come out to play, in a really big way to make this authoritative aspect for.

Mike Moreno 29:23

Big, big time. I think what my belief is that PR, brand, and product marketing all need greater alignment. And I say I'll start from the product market angle, because that's what I'm most comfortable with is what you just mentioned, start with the messaging doc. That messaging doc needs to be the core that we're communicating on a given product, or set of products, or whatever portfolio, this way. And this is the boilerplate. To your point, the boiler plates, and they go all over, even in practice. Us like and so the brand team and the PR team, what's the boiler play? Does that boiler play align to what we're messaging about our product or the company as a whole? And those all need to be better aligned than ever before, I think, in a world where people are defaulting to like chat. To give me the top 10 vendors, that's the AI talking to AI. That's the AI analyzing the world and giving you a response. But then, once you move beyond that, that's where the human part begins. And I almost view this kind of content right now in a certain way, is that, go with ChatGPT or whatever tool, Claude. Go build your sales enablement materials, PDFs, and even PowerPoints. Leverage that all day long. Don't worry that much about the copy. Just make sure that it aligns to that messaging but external content. Take your SMEs, take your CEO, your COO, your CPO, get those leaders and get their outlines, build their content, build that human aspect to it. Because I think once they click on your brand, that's where the brand alignment is so important, because then it becomes about customer experience, your tone, your visuals that all need to also align to the marketplace you're going after. Because I think that's what's going to humanize you. Because I think that even though we're in this world of AI and AI can do so much for us. I think there's you want that hand off to feel seamless between the 80% of the research they've done online to their first conversation with the salesperson, and that that needs to match, and then that is going then be kind of that virtuous cycle where I recognize the brand, I recognize the brand. I recognize the brand. I recognize the brand. I want to tell people about this brand. And then you start going.

Kerry Guard 32:05

I actually use the sales team as a first-stop research tool. Yeah. So I bring the sales. I always work with really small companies, so I always bring sales and the founder and whoever else I can, you know, reel in into the room multiple times over several weeks to unpack who they are, what they do, why they're better, what marketing they've tried or haven't tried, and really, just like, ask a plethora of questions and see what rabbit holes I find myself in. And even, actually, I just did a meeting recently where the CEO didn't show up because he wanted to give the room to his team to be able to speak from their perspective. Then, I had a separate meeting with him. And so while I got similar answers, they were, they were, they had different depth to them. And so I love what you're saying, I think in terms of positioning and messaging, and that first step is not just starting with chat or online research. It has to start with the people inside the company who are doing the thing and who are on the front lines of interacting with the customers, day in and day out, and what they're seeing as the pain and the solution and what's resonating and what's not and what's the language, and then you can build on top of that, but I agree that that authenticity has to start with the people inside the company, and the more the merrier. How? I also think that it has to come back to the customer, which I've sort of struggled with, in terms of getting in front of given the current client, current clients I'm kind of working with, but I know that from a product marketing standpoint, from a from a B to B Tech standpoint, and the work that you've been doing, that's also something that you rely heavily on. So when you're working with a startup and you're sort of marrying this stuff together, where does the customer voice lend itself for you?

Mike Moreno 34:12

I can reflect back on one situation at CloudFlare, where I was doing a bit of channel marketing at the time, and we were trying to push out this platform solution, and my lead account Channel account rep was like, Mike, I'm not pushing that. He goes that product in that solution, lost us a deal with a huge client last year, with my primary channel partner. And he's like, we'll focus on this, and then later on, we can try to cross them. And so those are the type of conversations that resonate, you know, because that gives you that perspective what is truly going to move the needle and then validate the strategy and then come back. And so that's. Where I usually start. But then, like the example I gave earlier, if I have a contact in my network who's somebody who's the end customer, I'm gonna reach out to him on LinkedIn and say, hey, could I get 15 minutes of your time I'm starting this new job, or I'm working with this client. And I wanna understand some of the things you look at. And then the other thing I feel like I do personally is reflect on myself as a customer. I think a lot of we're all human beings. We all get spam messages. We all get great, you know, yeah, we could all get great email sequences from inside reps. We all see social media. So I generally like to reflect also on myself as like, what is it that causes me to go investigate a product, to go research a product, to go buy a product. What were those things? And some of the darndest things that I can reflect on over the last year are just crazy, like I'll get some inside rep emailing me, very little copy on their sequence, very little, but enough to draw some interest. You know it, it was a topic that I as a marketer, aligned to kind of the goals and objectives I'm trying to achieve, and I want us curious about their solution. I'm a bit of a nerd. I guess I kind of do like martech stuff. So if it's something like, Oh, this is really cool. I want, I want to learn about it. Um, but even thing, I got the darndest email, and it was a, somehow got to my inbox, not the promotion was from Microsoft, and again, very little copy, colorful banner at the top, just the right words on the page to draw my interest. So I think it's, it's, you need to think of those three things, is me, what? What would I do if I were the customer? What would I do if I was the Chief, chief security officer, right, knowing what I know about the products or the market, what would I what would what channel would I go to to research a given product, knowing what I know, the other one is actually talking to the customer. The other one is really getting that sales vision of what's happening when they're talking to customers, what's working, what's not. And those three things help the most.

Kerry Guard 37:13

What does it mean to you, and where's that heart of what problem you saw that you wanted to solve, and then to validate whether that's still a thing and still relevant. But I again coming back to that. I had a great conversation with Joel Bench a few weeks ago. We were talking about messaging and the heart of messaging, and how it needs to speak from an emotional standpoint as much as the technical and tactical one. And so I always find founders are great for that, Intel. How are you seeing that? You know, we talked a lot about messaging from sort of that more actionable standpoint, right? Problem, solution, feature, function, when you are talking about brand, though, and bringing that continuity across all of these channels from a brand voice aspect, how does heart play into how emotion plays into that? Or are you seeing it go sort of swing the other way, where it's like people don't want that anymore, especially with way, the way geo is going, like it's got to be just very straightforward this to that, and it's not as an emotional decision as we all thought it was or used to be.

Mike Moreno 38:26

I kind of bring that mindset to when I do my marketing. So one of the things I learned over a decade ago was like, go for the jugular when you're talking to the customer, what's their core pain point? So I've kind of backed out like there's the jugular moment and then there's the the amazing, utopian vision, and kind of carrot stick, carrot stick, and I tend to approach things that way, is like, what is the narrative that me as the, let's say, I'll just pick on myself as a marketer. What is the narrative that me as a product marketing manager, needs to hear that would say, Oh man, I gotta go look at that solution. You know, oh man, if I don't do this now, and we can pick on AI, let's assume I'm, I'm a marketer. I've been older marketer, and I just don't want to change my ways. But you see, like you see the story that I'm just picking numbers, that's thinner, 50% of product marketers who don't adopt Chat, GPT or elementals are going to lose their job next year. Holy moly, I'm, I'm like on it, you know? So if I see that message, that narrative, I'm going to jump on. Then the other one is, you know, let's say I'm a CMO. 50% 50% of marketing organizations that adopt a platform that aligns the tone of ACE voice and branding through AI have you know, increased revenue by 20%. Oh, okay, I want to hear that story. So I think those are emotional. Really, you know, either from the bad angle or the good angle, you're trying to evoke that emotion. And your sales team certainly needs to be doing that. They certainly need to be equipped with, not only the customer case stories, where hopefully you have some of those narratives built in, but even just the macro level understanding of I understand CISOs or on a product, whatever the product is, I understand their challenges, and am I aligning my story of my products or benefits and features and solutions to those problem statements? And that's always in my product marketing, my messaging documents when I build it, and I think every product marketer needs to kind of view that lens, and a brand needs that. That's where that, like I was saying earlier, PMM and brand, they need that alignment, especially as brand becomes more important, important to stand out in the noise of LLM tools.

Kerry Guard 40:59

One thing that you did in both those examples that I find very interesting is that you used a data point, 50%, 55%, and you used it in a way that says it strikes emotional response that feels so tactical to me. I love this because I I've been finding in my own posts, from a LinkedIn perspective, that the LinkedIn posts that do best are the ones that I where I lead with data and a data point, I feel like you probably did that somewhat intuitively and kind of by accident, because you've been doing this for so long. But is that like, as we think through our messaging strategies and aligning to the messaging points in relation to validity, sounds like data could play a really important part there of doing both the tactical of the thing you do in relation to the emotion that it could bring to that audience. Is that something you lean into, or was today just an example at happier accident?

Mike Moreno 42:01

Every day, all the time. So it's funny, Cloudflare management actually requested us to keep track of metrics. So at a macro level, like, how many different sites, how many different server sites we had, globally, number of customers, you need a whole ton of metrics, and that, as marketers, we would leverage, but generally, when I think of product and communicating product value, it's all about the results of the customer. And so you could just go down a basic narrative without metrics, and have a story, and it might be a great story, but you might have all the right keywords, but at the end of the day, as a customer, I want to know how much time I'm saving, how much potential revenue I might create, how much pipeline I might create. Some of the core things, like pain, usually cost, because then it costs me more. Why do things? Why are things costing so much? How can I reduce my costs? And I can reflect back when I was at Intel and some of the dries, right? I know it was dry, but we kind of might be considered dry content. Today, we have a CPU launch. I am training a bunch of IBM customers on this IBM Intel hardware and a bunch of basic CIO types in the room, you know, and I'm talking to them about the benefits of this new processor. And so the new processor, with VMware, could virtualize four to 10x more than they could the year before. Huge thing, they can consolidate these data centers and save a ton of money. And so that was kind of the nut of the conversation, along with greater performance on database so database consolidation, and then, but what really got them engaged? And I love when you have that audience, because you can see the eyes light up, because I worked on high-performance computing. So the National Laboratoriesare super huge data centers. Now we have quantum computing, kind of analogous, and all these things. But I said, Look, you can consolidate, let's say 10, like 10x of your data center. And guess what you can do as a CIO, you can go invest in new hardware and software to go do more product development. You can drive a turn from being a cost center to a profit center. And they're like, oh yes, because here these are guys. Are ladies getting hammered, like, why? Why is it services? Why is the networking costing so much? And then I'm telling them about the utopian vision of, hey, you can cut costs. And guess what you could do. You say, take a little bit of that budget and say, Hey, Boss, why don't we? I support the product and engineering team with this great idea that they have. It could be a new product for our organization. Whoo, they just loved it. So I. I think using data and telling them, integrating that into the narrative is so important, and it moves you out of features and benefits. It moves you into true business solutions.

Kerry Guard 45:12

I go talk to you all day and dig around this stuff. I think where we are in terms of how people search in relation to starting with the LLMS and understanding the landscape of what's out there, and then, you know, going to websites and then looking at elsewhere to validate what they sell in chat. First of all, hats off to you for actually doing the homework of validation. I don't know that everybody does that, and it is definitely we all need to be doing that when we're doing our homework, absolutely don't just take chat at face value. Go validate it left, right, and center, and not just on their website. To Mike's point, make sure that you are looking at articles, Reddit, all those things to ensure that what chat is saying is actually correct. And then flip it on its head. And make sure that you are building your brand to do exactly that, where you can show up in chat, and then everything you say that shows up in chat is validated across the World Wide Web. Mike, any last pieces of advice for us, as we sort of wrap our heads around this beast of a problem and start tackling it little by little?

Mike Moreno 46:18

Well, I'm gonna bring it back to fundamentals. I think we can love and leverage AI tech all we want. Do not forget the fundamentals of understanding your customer, building messaging that's going to resonate with them, whether you use AI or not, but let that human piece come through as well. Don't just hang all your hats on Chat GPT, that do it all for you. Try and have a good balance between what you're using it as a strong tool to accelerate work, but also making sure that you have the anecdotes and narratives that are going to resonate with your audience.

Kerry Guard 46:53

100% just calculator, folks, yeah, still need to know how to do the math. Where can people find you? Mike, they want to learn more about what you're what you're offering, and how else to approach their positioning and messaging. Where, yeah,

Mike Moreno 47:06

Definitely find me on LinkedIn. And then if you want to learn more about what I'm doing on the consulting side, you can go to rev Gen AI dot biz, just like it's called r, u, D, G, E, N, A, I dot biz, and learn more, and feel free to reach out.

Kerry Guard 47:22

Before we go. Mike, you are more than a product marketer. You've been on quite a journey for your career. What a journey it's been. But outside of marketing and being and work in general, what is currently bringing you joy ?

Mike Moreno 47:35

My little girls growing up and playing with them is number one. Number two, I do, even though I don't eat right all the time, I do enjoy going to the gym three times a week and getting my walks in so trying to stay healthy and fit as long as I can so I can keep up with my little girls kind of, kind of the goals and objectives of my life right now.

Kerry Guard 47:56

Oh, I feel that. I feel that they are on the go, keeping up with them. It's definitely a full-time job, that is for sure. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you, Mike. If you liked this episode, please like, subscribe, and share. This episode was brought to you by MKG Marketing, the digital marketing agency that helps cybersecurity companies and other complex brands get found via SEO and digital ads. This episode is hosted by me, Kerry Guard, CEO and co-founder of MKG Marketing, music, mix, and mastering done by the amazing Elijah Drown, my podcast sidekick, and if you'd like to be a guest, I'd love to have you. Let's have a conversation like this. This is what it's all about. I'm here for it. I'd love to have you on. Thank you all so much. Have a great day.