Ardath Albee's Recent LinkedIn Posts

What I love about this list is that it’s not typical. The wonderful, talented women included span a range of expertise applied to the #SaaS industry. This is a celebration of the powerful impact of women as a collective. Here are a few examples of the diversity and range of the women on the list: Marketing > Pam Didner Ann Handley Ashley Faus Heike Young Kathleen Booth Sales > Alice Heiman Lori Richardson Amy Volas Laura Erdem RevOps > Tiffany Gonzalez Sara McNamara Courtney Sylvester AI > Heather Murray Liza Adams Product > Leah Tharin Tirrah Switzer Renan Gutman GTM > Jill Rowley Karthiga Ratnam 💡 Hang Black Execs > Therese Tucker Maria Pergolino Maryann Pagano Clara Shih This only scratches the surface. Roles also cover customer success, revenue, enablement, community development, channel, partnerships, and more. SaaS takes a village! And women bring a lot of the moxie that contributes to its growth and innovation. I’m inspired every day by what women make possible. I hope to see even more initiatives celebrating diverse leadership in the future. I’m honored to be included in the 300 Women Making an Impact in SaaS list for 2024! I know there are countless others whose work deserves recognition too! Check out the platform SalesIntel.io built to honor #300womeninsaas for 2024 https://hubs.ly/Q02_mMZb0

#B2B buying has changed. Marketers seem to be stuck spinning their wheels by using attribution models that devalue the strategic impact of buyer-driven, relevant marketing programs. Most B2B marketers work under a mandate to prove contribution to revenue. We thought we had this in the bag when marketing automation systems came along. And it felt that way — at first. However, what these platforms did was pull our focus away from our customers and apply it to the tools. And along came SaaS and a period of hyper-growth. It was a time when capital was cheap and growth at all costs was the mantra. That worked for a decade. Unfortunately, the cost was ignoring marketing fundamentals to focus on short-term wins. We cast aside brand investment in favor of performance/demand gen — the stuff we could attribute — to promotional marketing programs. Over the same period, content volume exploded, eliminating the scarcity of information and making it a commodity. Even though buyers declared most of it irrelevant and not useful. Even worse, this quest for growth at all costs pitted marketing against sales in the arms race for credit for revenue. Along the way, marketing became more of a sales function, ironically giving away its strategic value to prove its impact on quick wins. In this article for Customer Think I discuss: -           How we got here -           What caused marketing to be viewed as a cost center -           Why we need to move beyond shallow attribution -           The need for a focus on brand-to-demand programs -           Ideas for attribution that help prove marketing’s strategic value A single campaign isn’t likely to close a complex sale. But putting the #attribution in place that shows how all the programs you’re running work together to increase sales effectiveness will help B2B marketing regain the value we abandoned in favor of a short-sighted focus on the short term.

It's March and time for a spring marketing refresh! Build on your wins from Q1 and set up Q2 to bring even better results by attending MarTech's online conference. I'm speaking about the importance of buyer experience in winning deals. You'll also find great sessions on: AI and Data Maturity from Sav Khetan Influencer marketing in B2B with Mandy Dwight Braven Greenelsh & Shama Hyder Reimagining your ABM strategy with steve armenti Brittney Overstreet Hamer & Brianna Miller Real AI Success Stories with Kendall Davis Channan Sawhney & Sarah Caminker Weiss And more. That's just Day 1!! Register for free > https://lnkd.in/dXs_YQiZ

I’ve been around long enough to remember when thought leadership meant something special. People clamored for it because it sparked curiosity with original thinking. Thought leadership used to be about taking a stand, having a clear point of view, and persuasion. Thought leadership content not only drew engagement, it sparked conversations and debate. It got your ideas in the “room.” If this year’s Value of Thought Leadership report is any indication, B2B vendors have lost the plot. - 74% of executives want thought leadership to be more provocative and challenging. - 59% say they’ve seen almost identical content from at least two providers. - 57% say they can’t distinguish one provider’s thought leadership from another’s. And the kicker? In research from 2024, 72% of senior marketers feared generative AI would make all thought leadership the same. Nothing like a crystal ball… In my latest article for Customer Think, I lay out 4 keys to compelling thought leadership that helps you build trust, engagement, and momentum. It’s one thing your LLM of choice cannot create on its own. And I also share reasons why you should make thought leadership a priority – including: “65% of CEOs say establishing and maintaining customer trust will have a greater impact on their organization’s success than any specific product and service features.“ How are you incorporating True Thought Leadership into your B2B marketing strategy? https://lnkd.in/eX-8adVx

The more I think about B2B marketing being viewed as a cost center rather than a source of strategic value, the more I think we did it to ourselves. I’ve been around long enough to remember when data was scarce for B2B marketing. I watched as we got new systems that gave us our beloved data and became giddy about measuring every damn thing – even if it didn’t point to an outcome our business cares about. But now we’ve painted ourselves into a corner with our approach to ROI. We’ve lost the faith of our executive team by focusing on the pieces and parts of marketing rather than the overall impact. Then I read Dr. Debbie Qaqish (Gah-geesh) report, The Big Squeeze in Marketing, and saw how marketing leaders are consenting to the devaluation of marketing – not necessarily willingly, but still evidence of – what? Giving in? By doing so we’ve trained our companies to focus only on the short term. But at what cost? We find ourselves stuck trying to shift ROI thinking in our leadership back to the big picture of marketing impact. We need to revive respect for the fundamentals of marketing and effectiveness, which make for a worthwhile investment in future growth — both for the short and long term. In this article for MarTech, I present a couple of ideas about new ways to measure brand investment. https://lnkd.in/eqxjuMDZ

A lot changes when #B2B buyers use LLMs to research how to best solve their problems. They type in prompts that average 23 words, instead of a 4-word search phrase. We need to shift our thinking from information to conversations. Conversations are an exchange, a dialogue. There’s a back-and-forth that builds momentum and captures attention through curiosity. It requires a narrative approach, not a solution brief. Daniel Rodriguez, from Beewhisper AI, recently wrote a piece about the nature of conversational turns related to prompting an LLM. Same concept. Think about it. When you’re researching a topic, how many times do you enter a prompt and then just accept the answer at face value? For me, it’s never. I review the results, then ask for some tuning based on the angle I'm interested in exploring. Or I learn something that raises another related question and ask that. That's the definition of having a conversation with your LLM of choice. You’ve seen the research on the dozens of touchpoints or content assets needed to move a B2B buyer through their buying process from awareness to recall at trigger to shortlist to buying. It’s never just a simple exchange - like those 3-touches and a sales call campaigns of antiquated playbooks. What’s needed is a strategy to build narratives that connect the dots across these conversational inquiries to LLMs. The Continuum approach I first wrote about in my book, Digital Relevance, shows you how to create a throughline across the buying process. Doing so provides a path to create the semantic internal linking across the “story” that LLMs rely on to discern relevance and topical authority. So, think content hubs with a conversational arc. In this article for Customer Think, I show you how it works and the possibilities it reveals for continuously engaging both in-market and out-of-market customers. Without voluntary momentum, it’s harder than ever to get on the shortlist when the time comes… https://lnkd.in/e4_ukdkG #b2bmarketing #contentstrategy #AImarketing

This was a really fun conversation! Casey Cheshire 🎤asks the hard questions that help me voice my thoughts about what I see going on right now in B2B marketing and how marketers can gain advantage. The Hard Corps Marketing Show

This article explains a lot of what I feel about writing done by GenAI. Carolyn Shelby does a wonderful job of explaining just why AI content feels "off." She explains why the rhythm of AI content is exhausting because of sentence structure and punctuation, doing an excellent job of explaining where that came from. She's right. The lack of intentional writing leaves us unmoved. And, if you wondered why em dashes became a thing with AI, she's got that info, too. It makes sense now. But I still feel sorry for the em dash. There's nothing better when you need to make a point stick. Even better, she gives recommendations on how to overcome the shortcomings of AI writing. Her points are valid. Especially if you want your content to be remembered for something good, rather than passed over as AI slop. #Bravo

B2B marketing is in a wicked transformation. Buyer behavior exposes the fallacy of the obnoxious idea that B2B buying follows a funnel. Traffic to your website is down because buyers are asking LLMs for answers to their questions. Your email campaigns get anemic engagement. Your ads float past your buyers’ periphery vision, unclicked. Those landing pages that added contacts to your CRM for a guide or white paper see dwindling engagement. Posts on your company LinkedIn page still rack up impressions but earn fewer “likes” and comments. Yet marketers are under increasing pressure to do more and drive more—campaigns, leads, pipeline velocity, events, sales enablement…revenue. And to prove it. Buyers are in control. And they know better than to openly engage with your marketing and sales plays. Or do they? Zero-click buyers are forcing B2B marketing back to fundamentals. We need to increase our focus on relevance, consistency, credibility, and trust. When buyers were visible, performance marketing focused on activity gave us the dopamine hit we reflected on dashboards to help us “prove” impact. With buyers in “stealth mode,” that’s gone. It’s now critically important to build mental equity – even though you can’t easily “see” the activity. Because if you don’t, you won’t be on their short list when the time comes. Your potential buyers are reading your content, seeing your ads, watching your conference sessions on demand, scanning your emails… But are they remembering them? Are you stoking curiosity or fading to beige without impact? We need to shift our goal from generating contacts to acquiring mental real estate with our ICP accounts. This means generating engaged consideration. In this article, I talk about what I’ve heard from buyers recently and how two companies have managed to capitalize on Zero-Click B2B Buyers… #b2bmarketing #buyerenablement #contentmarketing

We bet on performance marketing as our ROI savior but what we got is marketing theatre more reminiscent of The Emperor with No Clothes... If we’re honest, we’d admit that much of B2B marketing today is performance. It’s shallow, lacks the nuance that comes with buyer context, and suffers from irrelevance. The B2B buyer research I’ve read recently confirms this is how buyers see vendor content; a blur of sameness where they wish they could find meaning that matters to them. We’ve perfected the optics, the campaign sequences, the metrics. But somewhere along the way, we lost the thread. We’ve mistaken activity for impact. Optimization for understanding. Pattern matching for progress. This is Marketing Theatre. It’s when we perform the motions of B2B marketing with the confidence of best practice, but not the clarity of understanding our buyers. It looks good on dashboards but leaves buyers cold because it does nothing to help them solve the real problems they face. There’s no trust building occurring, no forward momentum. It’s time to change our approach. It’s past time to activate Relevance Engineering for content marketing. In this article I talk about why we need to: - move from meaningless metrics to meaningful momentum - help buyers think, not just click - quit letting our tech stack lead us astray I vote for #B2B marketers making the move from Marketing Theatre to Relevance Engineering. It may not be the easy button, but the payoff is worth it!

Not missing out on THIS fun! 👇 My action hero version by Koka Sexton at Interrupt Media. I think he pretty much got me. Although I was kinda hoping for a buyer ventriloquist doll... 🤣

After reading Jacco van der Kooij paper, In 2025, AI won’t just assist salespeople – it will replace them, I started thinking about how his take on AI-led growth (AiLG) could apply to B2B marketing. This excerpt is the culprit: “The main thing to realize is that AI will create a new kind of buying experience, and that new experience will complement the existing experience, the same way we today have Airbnb and hotels side-by-side and use them for different approaches.” The more I thought about it, the more I questioned if the existing experiences we provide buyers are good enough to keep... But I also saw in Jacco's work a path to solving the frustration buyers have in their pre-sales experiences with vendors. Perhaps the focus should be on finding the right balance between AI and humans. In this article – my first contribution to MarTech, I discuss: Ø The AiLG conundrum Ø The criticality of humans in B2B marketing Ø Putting AI to work in support of humans As Carmen Simon stated recently after an experiment she conducted testing humans against AI: “While AI can enhance efficiency, human creativity and delivery leads to stronger memory, which can influence decision-making.” As marketers rush forward in the use of AI, we need to think carefully about where the true value plays out in supporting/enabling the creation and delivery of better buyer-driven experiences.

Forrester finds that 89% of #B2B buyers are using #AI in at least one area of their purchase process. More are looking forward to doing so. Here’s a thought: What if we help our buyers learn how to use AI to make better buying decisions? Stay with me… I know your first response may be, Why would we do that? What if the LLM suggests everyone but us? Or even thinking that’s like giving them the list of all our competitors…even if it includes us. What? You don’t think they have that already? Or, if not, that they’ll soon have that list provided by the GenAI of their choice? Here’s what I’m suggesting: Create a prompt guide to buying evaluation for [solution category]. But not just a list of questions. They can get that. What they may not know is what answers they should be looking for or why they’re important to the bigger-picture outcomes they’re trying to achieve in answer to their company’s business objectives. I’m still a strong believer that we need to validate what the LLMs tell us. Depending on how buyers write prompts, it’s very possible that the answers won’t speak directly to what your buyers need to know. B2B buyers want buying to be easier. Yet technology and markets are changing so quickly that—even if they’ve bought a solution in the category before—things have changed. Dramatically. Why not step up to be the mentor they need by helping them ace their use of AI? Create a prompt guide that provides questions, the rationale for asking them and insight for how to evaluate the answers or even additional prompts to help refine their answers. Yes, it’s a bold move. In this article, I take a look at why it could be valuable for both your marketing performance—and your buyers.

Research over the last few years confirms the B2B marketing funnel has collapsed. Buyers spend more time “out of market” than they do “in market.” This makes the idea of short-term campaigns irrelevant. With the ability to scale content volume, AI is testing the resolve of B2B marketers. It’s no longer sufficient to push out content for the sake of publishing. Content must be relevant, aligned to a buyer’s context in the moment, demonstrate empathy, and deliver value through that buyer’s perspective. This means it's imperative to get the foundations of B2B marketing right. We need to strengthen our knowledge about our buyers and customers. We also need to focus on using a continuum approach that guides us to create a narrative that "connects the dots" for both buyers and LLMs. I see AI bringing immense advantage to B2B marketers. We’re under the mandate to “do more, with less.” That’s not likely to change. The defining moment is in how we choose to use AI to help us prove that marketing is a catalyst for business and revenue, not just a nice-to-have function that the business views as a cost center. There’s no doubt that AI is changing marketing. It’s in how we choose to use it to our advantage. AI for workflows, orchestration, and predictive analytics are three areas I think will elevate B2B marketing. By offloading that work, human marketers will get to focus on what we do best... Read the article to learn what this means - for marketers, for buyers, and for our ability to gain visibility with and influence GenAI. What's your take? #B2Bmarketing #BuyerEngagement #AI #ContentMarketing

Here we are in another #B2B marketing hype cycle. You know, the “squirrel” reaction when a new technology or acronym hits the industry and all attention chases it. The hype cycle is alive and well with AI search. I saw a post recently that advocated for writing top of funnel content for AI and bottom funnel content for humans. (Don’t get me started) You’d think human buyers will vaporize tomorrow. But they won’t. They’re the ones typing the prompts into their #LLM of choice to find the information they need to solve their latest problems. So, I went exploring to figure out what we needed to do to engage both humans and #GenAI with one content asset. I didn’t have to look far. It’s been here all along… It’s fundamental to well-written content. Semantic Clarity: ✔️ To humans, it means content that’s clear, relevant, and meaningful. ✔️ To LLMs, it means content that’s precise, connected, and retrievable. It’s the difference between being ignored or discovered and trusted. To achieve it, we must focus on specificity and context. Those are the key ingredients that have content resonate to engage both audiences. In this article for Customer Think, I explain both context and specificity and then show you how a well-built buyer persona holds the keys to the precision, clarity, and relevance you need to create semantic clarity in your content to engage both buyers and bots. Engaging buyers and bots is not an either/or concept as many pundits here would have you believe. Like brand and demand, you need to activate both. Where does your content lack the semantic clarity needed to build trust and relevance at scale?

B2B marketers are investing in AI for content creation, but it might not be the magic easy button they’re hoping for. This morning, Kerry Cunningham released data that showed 55% are investing in AI capabilities for content creation but only 45% think it will help them achieve their goals this year. Without the right foundation, context, and data, getting the AI to produce content that’s anywhere close to compelling for your ICP needs more than hope. Data — to an LLM — includes content. Obviously, you may be thinking. But are you sure you have the right content to enable the AI you employ to create on-brand, compelling content? Are you sure you have set the right context for the AI to work with? We all want to jump straight to the end game. But, without setting the foundation, you’re putting the AI cart before the B2B content horse. B2B marketers need to ask themselves if they want more of what they have now… Is the content you have today working? Does it resonate with your ICP? Is it generating inquiries from in-market buyers? Do the “leads” you send sales reps engage with them in meaningful ways? Generic content lacks flair, creativity, or brand “personality.” Worse, it doesn’t share new ideas or insights that arouse curiosity or invite engagement. Before you throw all your content efforts into using AI and expect it to magically produce game-changing content, it’s important to assess what you will use to train AI. In this article for Customer Think, I discuss why it’s important to get the foundation right and provide some examples and ideas for you to consider… What else are you doing to give your LLM of choice an advantage with content creation?

Getting excited for this discussion! We're at a pivotal point in B2B marketing. We have a chance to take a step back, think seriously about our buyers' context, and create engagement that matters - to relevance, to revenue, to relationships, and to the real-world problems our customers need to solve that our products enable. Time to get the plot back! If we do this right, AI will be a bonus, not just a way to multiply mediocre. I can't think of two women I'd rather have this discussion with > Dr. Debbie Qaqish (Gah-geesh) and Alison Bukowski! Join us next Thursday! https://lnkd.in/epZu3yDY

If there ever was a time to move beyond surface-level buyer personas built on assumptions and demographics, it's now. B2B buyers have taken control and AI has irrevocably shifted the buying process... In this interview with C2 Media, I share my diagnostic framework for B2B buyer personas in a 2-part process, talk about why we miss engaging buyers because we start too late, how I use AI and a new tool I've been testing for building semantic connections. Some key points to think about as we move into 2026: 🔑 Build personas to expose buying group dynamics 🔑 Discover what questions each persona must answer to move forward 🔑 Create content for connection rather than consumption 🔑 Start engaging at status quo so you're the anchor when the trigger hits 🔑 Design Continuums, not standalone campaigns 🔑 Use AI strategically but do the work you're best at > writing with a strong, human POV and emotional resonance 🔑 Strive to create semantic connections that help AI gain the context to choose you as the answer...and its recommendation Consider that AI hasn't lowered the bar for buyer understanding. It's raised it. Thanks, Enricko Lukman, for a great way to wrap up 2025!

What are you going to do to create better #B2B buyer-driven experiences in 2025?

Alignment and collaboration between marketing and sales is so needed. It's the issue that won't resolve itself - until now. Great insights, ideas, and game play in A. Lee Judge's new book, CASH! The CASH framework walks you through how to shift this key relationship from conflicted to a source of ongoing growth momentum for your company. And you’ll benefit from the expert insights he’s included across the framework from folks including Pam Didner, Mark Schaefer, Joe Pulizzi, Aaron Hassen, Darrell Alfonso, and more… Pick up a copy today and get started on helping marketing and sales become the dynamic force that B2B companies need to grow – no matter the speed of change in your markets.

In case you missed it - Matt Heinz and I had a great chat this morning about - rescue dogs - the potential for brand investment to become "intangible capex" to reflect it's long-term value - status quo - addressing the length of the B2B buy cycle - and I ranted a "bit" about AI

It’s only a week until the MarTech Conference and your access to great ideas for a spring refresh to kick your marketing into high gear… In the video below, you’ll get a taste of why my session on buyer-driven experiences may be one you won’t want to miss on Day 1 (blatant self-promo) But take a look at what’s in store for you on Day 2, March 26th: Christopher Penn talking about Agentic AI A terrific panel discussing the GTM revolution The need for marketing to measure what matters – another stand-out panel Becoming a master of predictive modeling to transform ROI Scott Gillum on the 65/75 rule to build deep personalization And so much more… Register for free here > https://lnkd.in/dXs_YQiZ

Voluntary #B2B buyer momentum. Sounds good, right? And yes, it's possible. One of the detrimental shifts in B2B marketing brought on by marketing technology and the growth-at-all costs mentality over the last decade is that we adopted a feeling of control over buyers. We failed to see the lie and took the bait for the promise of a way to tangibly measure marketing results in the short term, focused on revenue. And it cost us. We can’t force buyers to buy. We can’t cut the corners on messy, complex buying processes, focusing only in the 5% of buyers in market at one time. Which we need to realize means we're already too late. What we need is to start earlier with brand and category entry point (CEP) content and then fuel the narrative across the entirety of the buying process to create voluntary momentum that builds pipeline. In my latest article for MarTech, I show you a continuum framework I first wrote about in my book Digital Relevance. It helps you focus on moving past outdated traditional campaigns that try to force buyers into action. Instead, it helps you manage multiple buyer goals throughout the process and refine your efforts as you go. The key is using content to build memory structures around CEPs and grow brand awareness. By engaging future buyers while they’re still in status quo, you’ve got a shot at that shortlist. With a continuous effort to connect the dots between CEPs, problems, triggers and your brand, you can build momentum with buyers who become in-market and set the stage for voluntary recall with future buyers. Here’s how it works…

Perhaps the "new" way to help your #B2B buyers write the RFQ/RFP HT to Eric Berggren