How 8am Rebuilt Its Go-To-Market For the AI Age with CMO, Nate Skinner

Everyone can buy the same AI tools now. That’s the problem and the opportunity. When technology stops being scarce, differentiation comes from how you show up, how well you understand the customer, and how consistently your go-to-market system reinforces that understanding.

Kevin Kerner sits down with Nate Skinner, CMO at 8am, to unpack a full-stack transformation: rebranding from AffiniPay (a name closely tied to payments) into 8am, a platform that supports legal and accounting professionals with payments, practice management software, timekeeping, reconciliation, and embedded fintech services. Nate explains how the team anchored the rebrand in research, then backed it up with real operational change so the brand isn’t just a new logo living inside an old motion.

We also get tactical on modern growth. Nate shares how 8am shifts to audience-based selling, restructures territories and partner relationships with bar associations, and rebuilds the website around customer context. Then we dig into answer engine optimization (AEO) and why showing up in Claude, ChatGPT, and other answer engines changes content strategy, technical SEO, and what “ungating” should look like. Finally, we talk about building AI agents, combining Gong call transcripts with Claude for sharper insights, and why leaders need to use the tools themselves to set the tone while still protecting the human voice that makes a brand feel real.

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