Kelly Hopping, CMO of 6sense: Why Being Agentic Isn't Enough

Kelly Hopping 0:00
People are adopting a lot of AI. They're using a lot of AI. They are adopting AI technology in place of SaaS. They're not actually seeing their pipelines grow. And so it I can't, I think it can't just be about internal operations. Um, it also needs to be about growth.

Kevin Kerner 0:18
Hey everyone, this is Kevin Kerner at Tech Marketing Rewired. I just got off the podcast with Kelly Hopping, who is the CMO of SixtSense. This is her fifth CMO job. And, you know, like me, I would agree. She says she's never seen anything move this fast. And she started back at the beginning of the first quarter, I guess. And since then, we know everything's just gone crazy. Um we talked a lot about AI governance. Um, she talked a lot about how she's staffing her team and even a really interesting way she's backfilling roles by asking uh manager to do the uh the person's job for 90 days, and when they come back with the job request, it's completely different. And a lot of it's done agentically now. Um she said she shared some real numbers about what works for them in terms of content creation and creative and how they're running those things. Um it's just a great conversation. I really appreciated her time because they are about to um do a complete relaunch and rebrand and new website, and they have their large uh event uh happening in uh a couple weeks. So pretty amazing. So uh let me just a quick note before we start. Um, tech marketing rewired is brought to you by my company, Mighty and True. And we're a growth advisory for tech brands, and we help marketing teams put AI to work. So if you want to see where to start, you can book a free blueprint session where we go through your current environment and talk to you about where your growth systems and plans can be improved. Uh, you can visit us at mightyandtrue.com slash blueprint. So that's it. Well, I'm excited for everyone to hear this. We're gonna get it out real quick. Uh, let's get to it. This is Tech Marketing Rewired. All right, Kelly, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being on.

Kelly Hopping 2:05
Yeah, of course. Excited to be here. Thanks, Kevin.

Kevin Kerner 2:07
Yeah, I know. I know you have a lot going on, uh, as we talked about in the pre-call. So I it's I'm always impressed when people join the thing, and I appreciate the time. Um, I I just wanted to kind of kick it right off if it's okay with you. Sure.

Kelly Hopping 2:21
Yeah, let's get into it.

Kevin Kerner 2:22
Cool, that's great. And uh, you're pretty new at Sixth Sense. I know you uh you joined probably two and a half quarters, but I don't know, does two and a half quarters uh qualify as new anymore for a CMO?

Kelly Hopping 2:35
I mean that's basically half the life of a CMO right there.

Kevin Kerner 2:39
So I guess I'm yeah, it's it's it's uh almost a lifetime. Yeah. Um, but I think when I think about when you joined, you joined right at what I was seeing as kind of like the model acceleration phase around, you know, between December and February last year, where everything just kind of like exploded in terms of capability, model capability. And now everyone's of course using all the AIs. I wonder how things have changed, even like when you join to since you took over to now, it's gotta be like mine, like you probably took the job and then everything just kind of changes pretty quickly.

Kelly Hopping 3:15
I mean, I've never seen anything like this in my career, how fast it's going, right? This is my fifth CMO stent, and my last role before I came here was in the same space. And just thinking about the way that I approached that job um just three years ago, as compared to the way that I approached this one, are night and day different because the market has flipped itself over. Um, you know, I mean, AI has changed so much, it changes the way we hire, it changes the way we lead, it changes the way we measure, it changes the way we backfill, it changes the way we um we, you know, create content. It changes everything about how we operate. And it's not just adopting the technology because we're all kind of like, you know, playing in that area, but it's also about how do we actually operationalize it in the way we go to market. Um, so it's a lot of uh of that.

Kevin Kerner 4:07
Yeah, there are things about the product too. Like since February, let's say, um I'm doing more access of tools through MCP and and thinking about the system actually being the context that I access versus a front-end interface. And then the other thing that's happening is, of course, vibe vibe coding, SaaSpocalypse, everyone's trying everyone's trying to build their own version of whatever. I think as a CMO, um, I'm hearing a lot of boards telling them, you know, why can't you do this in a different way? Why do we have to, you know, buy all this stuff? Do you think from a product perspective, as a as the CMO there, things have changed? And how do you how do you react to all that?

Kelly Hopping 4:46
Um building yourself. Yeah, I mean, so like when I got here to SixtSense, our product was a SaaS platform that you logged into and ran your account-based marketing programs, right? You you ran your advertising or you launched your email or you ran your um, you know, you built your account list and you built your outbound like workflows and all of that. And that's all still the case, but now you can access all of that same uh intelligence process workflows through Claude or through Chat GPT through a conversational interface because of the MCP in Sixth Sense. Um, you can run it, you can take all the intelligence and feed it into your data lake and access it via API to through Salesforce or Sales Loft or Gong or Qualified or anywhere else where you're working so that everybody's running on the same sales intelligence or the same um just shared intelligence, um, and they can operationalize it within the iframe of their other applications. They don't have to log into Sixth Sense. In other words, Six Sense is evolving from being an application that a marketer logs into to being almost an ingredient into your go-to-market, which is fairly headless and kind of DIY these days. And so, yeah, it's a totally different market. And the board pressure is real and uh and my worst nightmare. Um, but it is, you know, because they want AI adoption and they want it now, and they want you to sell that vision to customers. And so we're in the middle of trying to get that out the door while also trying to adopt it internally so that we can be our best, you know, we want to be our best customer. We run Six Sense on Six Sense. Um, and so we're trying to get like, how do we get our sellers to access Six Sense headlessly um through an MCP? How do we get them running through a Chrome extension? How do we get our marketing tech stack rebuilt um to where the intelligence is accessible everywhere? So it's not only what we're selling, but also how we're operationalizing it so that we can be um our most empathetic customer too.

Kevin Kerner 6:49
Yeah, talk about I mean, there's such a pressure for innovation, it's crazy. I've never seen anything like it. Um and the push for CMOs that are in your position um is both, I guess you have to brand the innovation and push that and you know, MCP access, headless, all that stuff. But at the same time, you gotta get your team to do it. So you're kind of trying to keep up with the product expectation, and you also have a team that needs to do it, and then you have your board and executive team. What would you tell a how how should a CMO react to, because I'm thinking of a specific example of this, a board or executive team that might be asking them to go ahead list, do all the things, build stuff, uh, move faster maybe than is uh safe on on some of these things. Because you have an enterprise level tool I'd put in the category of like a web flow or other you know tools that might be in the category that people might think they could rebuild. What would you tell what would you advise a CMO to do in that case?

Kelly Hopping 7:52
I mean, it's not it's not a bad idea. Um it is there are definitely some um some use the word safe, some governance, I think, around the way that that's done. I think what's what we're seeing in the market is one, we're seeing uh customers sort of go two different ways. We are um they kind of fall into two different categories. One are sort of these like AI forward boards are saying adopt all the things that we're talking about. That's the question you're asking about. There's still this big section of the market, mostly like in highly regulated industries. You think finserve, you think healthcare, you think any of those, maybe some industrials, um, that AI isn't like they're not they're not thinking AI at all right now. They're still operating in a SaaS platform, they're still putting like parameters around their data, they're still not letting their data sort of you know seep into the rest of the tech stack, they're keeping things very contained. And so so we have to recognize too that customers aren't all on like the far end of this agentic journey. Um and so kind of everywhere along that continuum. Um, for us, I think when the pressure comes on how we're gonna do it or how quickly we can do it, or when customers say, hey, my board is pushing me for this, I think the biggest thing that we want to make sure they understand is that being um agentic isn't enough if you don't have the right intelligence feeding that those agents. Because what happens is um, you know, I use the example I'm gonna talk about it at breakthrough next week or in two weeks, our big event. Um, but do you remember that show? Like um the movie, it was Fantasia from years ago. Um, it was like Mickey Mouse was like a wizard or whatever. Um, but he basically like gets annoyed like to carrying this like broom and bucket where he needs to go to fill up something. And so he basically like casts a spell to like automate it to get this like broom to carry the bucket to the water. And so he starts doing that. Um well he never puts any governance on the back end to say, hey, when the thing is full, stop port. And so it happens, sort of the water starts overflowing. And so then he starts saying, like, oh wait, no, stop. And then the the buckets or the uh brooms start multiplying, and then he tries to grab the broom and break it in half to make it stop. And when it does, it shatters into 20 more brooms, and then they take off. And it's basically this vision of like the scale and lack of control you have very, very quickly because what AI can do is scale. What it can't do is govern itself, and what it can't do is validate that the inputs that went into it are the right parameters with which to scale. And so when you put those all together, if you don't have the right front end of the right data feeding it, right, your your automation's only as good as the data you feed it, and if you don't have the right governance on the back end to tell it when to stop, for example, um, then you end up just exacerbating a problem. And I think that's the well-risk. And so as we've sort of go down this agentic journey, what we've realized, what customers need is sort of a partner to understand that full impact, that it's not just buying AI tech. It's not just building an agent. Um, but there's a whole kind of ecosystem play as you're thinking about that.

Kevin Kerner 11:11
Yeah, and I would say I was just talking to my team about this yesterday. There's a certain amount of grit you have to have to be able to both look at the back end data and make sure that's in the context is appropriate. But then there's the actual age agentic work that it just takes so much tuning to get exactly right. So it's not, you don't, you don't just build an agent and plug it into the back end and it just works magically. Even if it did work magically, something would break somewhere over time. And it needs to be like, it's just like a human worker, it just needs to be trained over time.

Kelly Hopping 11:40
Yeah. Oh, and they and then those agents train themselves. So as they do one thing, uh, then they start kind of re- they feed it's a feedback loop that continues to operate. That's how agents work, right? And so if there's one bad sort of thing that kind of like a tiny like redirect, like you do that a bunch of times, that tiny redirect becomes like far from what your original goal was. Um, and so that uh that training um can actually come back and bite you.

Kevin Kerner 12:07
Yeah, for sure. Especially autonomous stuff, yeah, loops and those things. I wonder what's working for your team. Like you're you're you know, that's about the platform, but you know, what's it's really interesting to peek under the covers of what you guys are doing that seems to be working for you, agentic or not, because you're in both spaces.

Kelly Hopping 12:25
Yeah, we're running a few. I mean, from an operational perspective, um, so organizationally, um we I feel slow to the party here, but we finally got a head count um to be to do good market engineering on the team, which is a huge one. Um doing it sort of more um, everybody sort of building their own agents a little bit. And so this will actually put some governance over there, put some consistency, put the parameters, all the things that we're talking about.

Kevin Kerner 12:50
Really smart.

Kelly Hopping 12:51
So that's that's one big move in the right direction. Second one is we're using um we're using kind of off-the-shelf AI in various capacities, like whether it's Nooks for auto-dialing or it's you know our own AI email product to automate sequences and follow-ups after events or after leads come in. Um we're using so we're using all that. Um, but we're also using um like Asana, for example. We use Asana for all of our project management in-house. Um, and so now we have automation of assignments and traffic um tracking to know like as we're assigning out asana tasks, like what are the capacity constraints of the person that got assigned to it, what's the forecasted completion date based on that, you know, all of those kind of things. So we're running that kind of automation. We're using um uh like uh content, of course, act uh agents to create some of our content, more of our content flywheels, right? Of like, how do you because again, there's a bunch of slopes there. And so you really want original thought, I think, going into your core assets. But then the the sort of uh snackable derivatives that come off of content can be much more automated, right? And so you can you can create that original research, you can create that original anchor piece. Um, and you can use AI, of course, like we use it for outlines, we use it for that kind of thing. But the the creation, the strategy, the editing all kind of really needs to be some human element to it. Um, but then the like I said, the spin-offs can be a little bit more automated. So those are some of the ways that we're kind of doing, but that's a little bit more of a grassroots. And then in terms of the way that we're going to market, one of the things we just stood up is we just moved, um I think I alluded to this a while ago, but we just moved our sellers over to accessing um SixSense through an MCP. So they use Claude or Copilot um to access uh their Sixth Sense intelligence. So and it's mostly because sellers just don't want to log out of their application. Like they don't have to switch from from you know Salesforce over to SixthSense or whatever else. And so if we can get them that six sense information right there in their Claude, um, then they can um work seamlessly inside Salesforce without having to move um applications. And so that's been um from a go-to-market perspective, a big part of what we're doing.

Kevin Kerner 15:06
Yeah, so smart. Yeah, I I find myself like asking Claude to do more and more. Like just I'll write an email, modify an email, but I haven't put it back into the source system now. I don't I don't even bother like going into the other things. It's just doing things for me. I'm your go-to-market engineer, um, and and sort of I guess AI innovation is happening through your team. I wonder how for us, we have a process where the team can uh vote or not necessarily vote. They can they we used to call it the friction list, but it's renamed it. But they basically say, hey, here's something I need to work on that needs to be automated. That goes up, we look at it as a leadership team, then it goes to be built. Is the go to market how what's your workflow for making sure the go-to market engineer is working on the right stuff? Because their their day could be immediately filled up.

Kelly Hopping 15:52
Just immediately, yeah. Yeah. Um, well, we haven't hired the person yet. Uh, we have an open rec. Um, so if you know everybody, send them my way. Um, we're hiring someone in our marketing ops team.

Kevin Kerner 16:02
Uh very popular, very popular role these days.

Kelly Hopping 16:05
Yeah, and it'll be a little bit of a people manager too that manages kind of our our tech stack um and how we put that together as well. Um so today it's a little bit um not I not optimized in terms of the way it's uh created and the way that we're running those things. Um we ran mostly kind of the the management of cloud licenses, who gets a dev license, who has uh more basic license capabilities, credits, like those kind of things are the only limitations right now. Um but yes, the ultimate plan is to do exactly what you're saying. It's to make sure we have, I love the idea of a friction list. Um, that's a great way to think about it. Um, but that we're able to kind of capture or centralize the automation needs or areas where we think an automated workflow or an automated um process could actually fix um the uh the output, that would be great. So uh that that's a plan. And then they could prioritize which ones would add the most bang for the buck. And then I think we also figure out we have to figure out how to uh measure impact um to actually be able to show as we kind of have this role um what it's actually improving. Is it shortening our um you know, our planning cycles? Is it shortening our campaign creation cycles? Is it shortening our um you know, our creative turnaround process? Like what is it, what's it doing there? So I think that's a big part of it too, is not only which agents are we building or which automation, which automated workflows are we building, but also um what's it doing for us? Um right now what we're seeing is people are um people are adopting a lot of AI, they're using a lot of AI, they are adopting AI technology in place of SaaS, they're not actually seeing their pipelines grow. And so it I can't I think it can't just be about internal operations. Um, it also needs to be about growth. Um how does it actually drive um you know meaningful revenue driving outcomes?

Kevin Kerner 18:04
Yeah. Our friction list we have in in Asana. We actually put it just literally in Asana. It's a board in Asana that people add to. It's been great. And we review it on our level 10 meeting every Monday. We look at it and try to pick it out. And on the other, one of the other hacks that we that we've used for um trying to figure out where to put agents for our build team is we'll pull up job descriptions or position agreements, we call them, and we'll look through them and we'll put them into Claude and we'll try to look for those things that it are literally in the position agreement that a person is supposed to be doing that uh the LLM will tell us this could be an agent. And so what it's it's easily pulls out through job descriptions. Like marketing ops is a great example. It's like there's so many things a marketing ops person does that they need a digital worker to do, like they shouldn't be using it.

Kelly Hopping 18:52
Yeah.

Kevin Kerner 18:53
And uh it's a really easy way to like pick out those things that you can automate that that that make things more efficient. And our bet is that if they become more efficient, then we're growing, then we have time to grow, you know, do other things. It's the opportunity to do other things.

Kelly Hopping 19:08
I love that. So you load the job description into Claude and ask like which what which of these like job responsibilities can be automated.

Kevin Kerner 19:15
Yeah.

Kelly Hopping 19:16
Oh, I love it.

Kevin Kerner 19:17
And it is amazing. Do it, load that um, load your great engineer in and see what it gives you. It will literally like point out. And the thing that um is interesting to me is because I prompt it this way, is I'll tell it to don't give me a bunch of agents that I need to, you know, that I need to create. Give me a digital worker job description. So it's like data analyst, content specialist, um, you know, corrupt content writer. But these are digital workers now that support whoever that that role is. It's really interesting. I can't remember where I got that recommendation from. I think it was from uh Lauren Esposito at Assemble. She does a great job managing a team of marketing agents. It's really cool. You mentioned on our pre-call though, this I thought this was but I've stolen this idea that you lost a writer and uh and then you asked the manager to do the job for 90 days before you backfilled it. And you know, I I just think that is the smartest idea. Is that changing the shape of your team or how fast those managers are now trying to get the jobs done in different ways?

Kelly Hopping 20:23
Yeah, I mean, a hundred percent. So um we ended up never backfilling that role, by the way. Um uh we brought on a couple external contractors um to help with uh with writing as we need it. Um, but yeah, I mean, what happened was we had a senior writer, um, and and he was great. But it's 2026. And so when um when he resigned um and then there was an immediate ask for a backfill, I was like, no, no, no. I was like, you like do the job for 90 days and then tell me what you really need. And so what happened was he came back and said, actually, what I need is I need an editor, I need, and this all in one person, but I need an editor, I need an SEO or content strategist. Like that's what I need. I don't actually need a writer. Like, because somebody who can drive the strategy, drive the outline from an SEO perspective, um, can align it to the channel or the use case, which kind of comes in the content strategy form, then you can get the right, like especially if you get really, really in like really tight messaging that comes in or really tight drafts, then you can get the messaging automated and then the editor can come in and sort of clean that up. And I think that's where the power comes. And so it took it's like that's one example of just shifting how we're hiring. Like, I don't need people who are like like building campaigns now. Like now you you create a campaign strategy, and Claude can kind of create a go to market plan for that campaign strategy. And so there's so many things of like my organization, which you know, I've I've always kind of um you know, I Talk a lot about this. I think I just posted on this like a few days ago on LinkedIn, but uh I've always kind of had this like very traditional kind of like spans and layers recommendation, right? Like, like we should be sort of short fat trees in the way our org is set up, right? Like, like I manage four to seven direct reports, and each of them manage four to seven direct reports, and each of them, you know, like kind of ideal ratios and all of that. Um I like control. Yeah, I didn't want like these tall, skinny trees of like one person managing one, managing one. But what I've realized here in this AI world is like I kind of need studs at the top more than anywhere because I need people who can own the strategy because that's what that's some of that governance you talk about on your automation, right? It's if you have the proper inputs and the proper governance, then you need less people kind of building. So I always think about those trees, like my flip of the tree analogy, those trees at the beach, they have like the big hardy overhangs, and then they have these little skinny um trunks. And that's kind of what I feel like. Like now I need like now, I have eight director ports and they're all very strategic and they're awesome. And they have kind of, you know, two or three folks who are very, very strategic. But then the layers underneath that very, very thin or are digital. Um, and so with that, you kind of say, oh wow, I'm looking at an org structure that's like flipped on its head. Um, you know, it's like an inverted triangle compared to what it used to be.

Kevin Kerner 23:24
I just think like staffing plan organizational plans are so difficult to like lock into now because it's just you just don't know. It's hard. It everyone's kind of flat footed on hiring because you just don't know what like what is the next hire that I should make.

Kelly Hopping 23:38
Well, there's that. And also I think people have to have like you almost have to have a uh a comfort with change, I think now in the way that you hire. That's almost like a quality I have to look for when I hire, because whatever I tell you today will most likely look different in a week. And you have to be kind of fluid. I mean, there's some grounding, of course, kind of like kelp, you know, kind of grounded in the sea floor, but you're kind of fluid in how it works because um because it's just moving so fast. And so looking for really smart people who can think, who can strategize, um, who understand um context. And then you kind of have to um flex the functions a little bit because it's not as black and white as it used to be.

Kevin Kerner 24:20
Yeah. And they need to think about like what's their companion digital worker and how's that? So it's not just you thinking that me or me as a business leader. I need to get that down to the rest of the team, and then they need to take that forward. So it's a lot of training and change management and um hiring the right team. I think if you hire people that are that are sort of creative and uh imaginative, that's the best hire. Not creative in terms of art creative, although that helps too, but creative thinkers uh and a little bit of fearlessness and craziness, you know. I'll do I think I can do this, and then they just go off and do it.

Kelly Hopping 24:53
I like the fearlessness. I think it's um it's impacted the way like I have a freshman in college. Um, and so we talk a lot about what he like should major in in this era, because like who knows what jobs are you know gonna look like. Um and those skinny little trunks don't bode well for those college kids. Um and so trying to figure that out and what you know, like when I grew up, it was all about STEM. Like I was an engineer coming out of out of college, um, very tangible. It's like job security forever. Like you can do engineering, you can do kind of anything. And uh, and that was great. But now I'm like, so much of that is getting now automated. Um, and I feel like I never quite learned how to think in college because I was like engineer, you just execute the assignment. Whereas like my son is at a liberal arts school, um, and I'm like, and I never understood liberal arts schools. Now that he's there, I'm like, actually, that might be the best place to be in this environment because he's learning to think, he's learning to solve problems, he's learning to approach solutions like in different creative ways. Um, he's learning to love learning, like all things I think are gonna be really, really important um in this next uh generation. So we'll see.

Kevin Kerner 26:01
Yeah, I that's really interesting because I've always been an anti-liberal arts. Like, what are you gonna do with liberal arts? But I hadn't actually thought of it is like creative thinking or seeing things sideways, you know, different ways, like looking at something. Maybe a philosophy major is like the best major.

Kelly Hopping 26:16
Yeah, or like psychology, I think there's a important thing. Anthropology, understanding people and humans and how they sort of interact with this stuff. There's a whole bunch. So he's um he's learning some of that uh as compared to like like I said, I didn't understand liberal arts, and now I have a whole new appreciation for it.

Kevin Kerner 26:33
I was a marketing major in the 80s, so that was useless. I don't know how I learned what I learned.

Kelly Hopping 26:39
It's a whole different world compared to now's marketing.

Kevin Kerner 26:41
Yeah, no, no, no. Typewriters. Um, okay, so I ask uh three questions to every guest. So I want to ask those to you, and I'm putting a little benchmark together of how people are answering this. I think you might be like the seventh or eighth person. So there's some really good uh data coming out of this. So first question is what give me one AI workflow you put into production this year that actually moved a real number, and then one that you killed. Like it's like this didn't work.

Kelly Hopping 27:07
Um, so we brought in a new product marketing leader. Um, product marketing is a classic case of greet create really awesome foundation and then use automation to scale it, right? Because there's so many different cuts. And so even just this morning, I was going through like the the message house, which you know used to be maybe like a value prop and kind of like year two from our message house now has everything. It's got competitive comparisons, it's got um, it's got, you know, objection handling, it's got battle card, like or battle card type um insights, it's got um how to pitch, how to pitch to a customer like this. It's got verticalized messaging, persona-based messaging, it's got all the different cuts, executive messaging versus um practitioner messaging, um, board level, IT, like you name it. It's kind of all those. That one document run through um our sort of product marketing like agent, if you will, um can create like 15 different documents that our sellers need in order to um to do their jobs, right? It creates the entire enablement toolkit. And so what it means is that it it kind of like is a reflection of everything you've seen. And so what's been happening is we've been um we've been slow on this messaging. So a big challenge with AI right now is that everybody's trying to figure out how to tell an AI first but somewhat um ownable, unique story, right? You don't want this kind of AI whitewashing, but you want the market to know that you're AI forward, um, but you still need to get to like what does the thing actually do? And so everybody's sort of dancing. So our messaging has taken longer to lock because we're in the middle of this repositioning. And so that messaging becomes uh it's a moving target. And if the downstream post-messaging is a long, laborious process, then you have to lock your messaging six months before a launch. We launched our messaging like Friday for a launch in two weeks. Um it's because uh, not because that's because we have a lot of opinions and it's a complicated exercise. But now that it's locked, the production to enablement is ours. Like we're able to get all the content up and then run it through certifications. So I would say I wish, I don't know what the measurable, I'll have to come back on what the actual data is, but that's been the part where it's allowed us to spend the time on the part that matters, which is getting your story straight versus spending time on producing documents.

Kevin Kerner 29:37
Um great, man. I mean, do you remember battle cards? Like you'd have to literally sit down and write a battle card. Oh, and then get a spreadsheet, like write it out.

Kelly Hopping 29:47
Yes, and then you'd send it to the design team to put it in layout and all kinds, like all that's now like a click of a button, um, which is pretty incredible.

Kevin Kerner 29:56
Yeah, one of the um one of the things I'm sort of geeking out on from another customer is they're putting a bigger system of context together for the whole company. And so this this let's say brain of the context, they're using Glean, which is a you know, a context uh engine with agents on top of it. But they're putting all this stuff, include marketing, sales, product, finance, all the things in there. So imagine that the the your positioning and battle cards and all the output that needs to come out of it, it also has the context of all the other things, business strategy, everything else. It's just yeah, it's just it's just mind-blowing how much context that even messaging will have in the future when you start to like think of entire business context. But I'm a fan of that.

Kelly Hopping 30:53
All impact versus just the standalone messaging. Absolutely.

Kevin Kerner 30:56
Yeah, it's crazy. Um, okay, so let me give you the next one. Uh what's still stuck in pilot? Something that you would have expected to be running by now, but isn't.

Kelly Hopping 31:08
I think I would have expected our sort of content flywheel to have accelerated faster. Um, and I think what that shines a light on is um, and this is nothing specific about my team, it's just the reality of like the content, like content strategists are different, and content strategy is it's not complex, but it is uh it's a different skill set than a writer. And so um trying to figure out that motion because it's so like on PowerPoint, I can build slides about content automation and content flywheels and content derivatives and snackable content, like till I'm blue in the face. But automating, which seems very simple, has been complicated because of I think the skill set needed to craft that original content strategy, like the in literally the individual like topics for the content and the anchor research that needs to be done. And sort of because there's like a there's a long upfront to get the the um the theme or the proprietary point of view sort of established. And then it's and then the automation is very is very quick. But I think that's the part that it's it's harder to get to that because we're still trying to align on sort of the core. I think there's like, I don't know, I think we just we're trying to use agents or a lot of people you see it in the market, um, based on the slap on LinkedIn. Um people are sort of using agents or automation to just bypass the thinking process. Yeah. I think the thinking is the part that takes longer. And so it feels frustrating that we're not scaling quick enough, but it's because there's still some raw like headwork that has to get done.

Kevin Kerner 32:51
Yeah, and you're you're I mean, obviously, you're thinking about it the right way. So many people will bypass that original research part of it and just go straight to the the AI, and you guys are doing it right. That's that's the right way to think about it.

Kelly Hopping 33:02
You can see it um in the content, right? You can tell when it's been like that. Yeah, I think like especially.

Kevin Kerner 33:07
But I'm guessing you have you have a ton of data. Um, just the data that you have from usability, what customers use inside of Sixth Sense and channels and signals. Just amazing the data. And you have got a big user base, so it's such a rich like core intelligence set.

Kelly Hopping 33:24
We have a rich uh subarm called Science of B2B, um, and uh Carrie Cunningham runs that, and that's got like years and depth of tons of proprietary data as well that he's run. That's not connected to Sixens, it's more just market research, buyer research, um, intelligence, qual and quant. And I think it's um it's just a treasure trove.

Kevin Kerner 33:46
Yeah, it really is. So I mean I don't I don't think a lot of brands don't, a lot of tech brands don't use the exhaust off their systems very well. Like there's so much exhaust you get just from how customers interact, what they say, what they're doing, what works, what doesn't work. And I just I mean it almost surprises me that companies don't use the exhaust that they currently have to create stuff.

Kelly Hopping 34:05
Yeah, yeah. I mean, both from like what customers are saying and doing, but also to your point, like how customers are using the platform, right? We have visibility into how they're using it. Obviously, there's there's you know, data authorization and being able to use it anonymously and all of that. But in general, yeah, there's so much data in there that we can use um that tells us what use cases, like where they're seeing the value, where they're seeing um, you know, where they're spending most of their time, all that kind of thing.

Kevin Kerner 34:31
Yeah, for sure. Okay, last question. What uh what's well the one thing that your team won't hand to AI and why?

Kelly Hopping 34:48
So I am probably, and and I won't say won't hand to AI, but I use AI very intentionally. Um and I might be in the minority here. I love human BDRs. I love them. I think they are my like they are the lifeblood of our pipeline. They are the connection between marketing and sales, they are the the critical component in getting things from marketing activities into pipelines so that sales can then go close it. Um we have a pretty hefty BDR team. Um, and they crush it. And yes, there's high turnover because you know, not everybody's cut out to be a BDR and that kind of thing. But the ones who come in and do it well, like it's such an important function. And yes, we surround them with AI. So we we give them like auto-dialing, we'll get them contact enrichment um using AI. We'll do um, you know, we'll automate the inbound leads that come in off the website. We'll automate follow-up, you know, after an event lead list load or whatever. So we're doing all that kind of around them. But the actual sort of outbound marketing that a BDR does is something that I think that human touch and human experience is so important. And yes, maybe people get annoyed by the phone call ringing, they get annoyed by the cold call emails. Um, but if you do that right and if you have the right context, which I feel like our guys do because they're using sixth sense intelligence and sixth sense context on the way that they're reaching out to to prospects. But I just feel like it is such a different experience than some automated bot coming through or, you know, a paid ad that's driving you to the website and you're kind of having to self-serve from there. Um, so that's a function that, like I said, I want to make them as productive as possible. So I will surround them with AI, but I don't have any interest in replacing them with AI.

Kevin Kerner 36:35
Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, um I think there is a time where there will be agent-to-agent communication. Like I think the pay a place for an agent to talk to someone is probably not a human, it's probably a another agent. And that we can on the Mighty and Truth site, we did a um experiment where we built a page specifically for agents. Like it's like literally, it's written talking to an agent, and it has the um uh the robots follow set up a certain way and the meta set up a certain way. And it's really interesting to see what uh comes of that page, it gets traffic, and you can't really see where there's you can you can see in Google Analytics that it cut, you know, it gets traffic and what it gets, but but it ranks too. And it's just so interesting to me that you can see, you can sort of detect that that page is being interacted with by the the LLM, the big LLMs, more so than the just the general bite and true pages.

Kelly Hopping 37:28
Yeah.

Kevin Kerner 37:29
I think that that day those days are coming, but I agree with you. I don't, I can't, I can't stand the the automated email.

Kelly Hopping 37:36
Yeah.

Kevin Kerner 37:36
Well, everyone, I'm preaching to the choir of everyone listening to this. No one lets no one wants this.

Kelly Hopping 37:41
Yeah, well, we know that people are, you know, they like buyers are haven't changed all that much. They're slower to raise their hand. We know that buyers are, you know, like 94% of them come to the table with a short list already. Um, 80% end up choosing number one on that short list at the end. So the role of sort of the actual sales conversion is much smaller than it used to be, right? Because they can do so much in um before they ever engage. And so um, so I think and the LLMs are affecting that in a big way. They're actually not researching that much on um the LLMs, like they're not finding a vendor list from the LLMs, like 70% don't use the LLMs for that, um, but they use the LLMs for comparing. And so they will say, hey, tell me about the you know, the differences in you know, in capabilities or features in this particular area between sixth cents and demand base or whatever it is. Um, so they'll do that in a s in uh in the LLMs. But and so, but all of those triggers are providing things so that the BDRs can can now outbound against folks who have not actually raised their hands before, which they couldn't do before, but now you can see so much in that because of the addition of contextual intelligence that allows uh someone to see that. So I just think, you know, we used to kind of stick BDRs on like the 5% of hand raisers that have actually said, I'm in market to buy. And now what we know is that customers are always in a buying cycle, like they're always researching whether they're in a buying cycle or not. And so that outbound motion just becomes so much more important.

Kevin Kerner 39:15
Um, so yeah, completely agree. Okay, great, good, really good answer to that. So I'm gonna um go on to the AI roulette question. So I'm gonna put this, I've got that uh whisper flow going with the with the tracking our conversation, and then I'm gonna put uh question into whisper flow now and give it uh what question it wants to ask. The AI wants to ask you.

Kelly Hopping 39:34
Okay.

Kevin Kerner 39:35
So and I uh let me just press send here and then I will look at this. Just give it a sec. This will be the oddest best question of this.

Kelly Hopping 39:46
I think you warned me about this without any detail about what I should expect.

Kevin Kerner 39:51
No, it's you never know. Okay, here we go. Uh interesting. Okay. Uh it picked up our pre-call that we did too. So it it knew the conversation we had. So you you talked on your pre-call with Kevin about how his kids can spot AI content on site. You know, that's AI, that's AI. I find this rude, but they are also correct. How much of your team's output would survive their review? My kids' review. So, how much your team's output was well, my kids wouldn't know anything about it, but how much would survive their review of your content, six cents content?

Kelly Hopping 40:27
You know, it's such a fine line. I feel like I I kind of dance this like when I do a board deck, for example, um, I'm like, the output that it has come out is very clearly AI, right? This is a clawed PowerPoint template. I can tell this. And that's good because I want the board to know that I am AI first, but I also need the board to not think that I am using AI to create my content. And so everybody's kind of on this balance of like, I want to look AI first without looking like AI did the work. And so I think that's that's some of the challenge. And so when I look at it, um, there's definitely like telltales, right? Like you can always tell, like, like I'm a like I'm a writer with an M-dash, for example. Um, and but now people will say if it has an M-dash, obviously AI wrote it. And I'm like, oh, you're just a good writer, because I was raised by an English teacher. Um, and so that's one of those that I have to kind of like stop and be like, that sounds like AI wrote it because there's an M-dash, even though I actually wrote it with an M-dash. Um, so I would say, and then there's certain words it'll use, and I'm like, no one talks like that. Um, that I I notice pull through. So I would say probably I mean, the outputs, there's probably 70% of things that AI, I would say of content that's probably AI touched. I won't say that it wasn't highly influenced by the messaging behind it, but AI maybe did the external product. Our creative is probably more like 10%. I wish it was more because I want a more self-serve kind of um like templatized way that we can run creative so that my organic social person can just grab a template and create social ads and doesn't have to like submit something to the design queue to get created. Um, but right now there is still such an integrity in protecting the brand equity. So I think on the creative side it'd be much less, on the content side, it'd be much higher. So I'll say 70% content, 10% brand.

Kevin Kerner 42:26
I think it's so interesting that you that you're I I hadn't thought of this either, that you your board deck, you want you kind of want it to look a little AI-y because you want the board to know you're I would not have thought of that, but uh knowing all the CMOs that I talk to and being involved in some board decks with them, yeah. You kind of want them to know you're use you're leveraging it, but the thought is original.

Kelly Hopping 42:47
Yeah.

Kevin Kerner 42:48
But actually it's a it's an advantage. It's an advantage to show them something that's like, wow, this looks really cool. It looks a little AI, but it's original thought.

Kelly Hopping 42:56
Well, and I just learned, and this I might be late to the party, but I just learned claude design. Um and it's such a gift on creating slides, like just to be able to like conversationally, like I wanted to say this, I want a slide that has this, I want a slide that has this, and I'm like, ooh, move that to the left and change this header, like just typing, and it just does it because the amount of time I used to spend, like I'm OCD on on PowerPoint, and so like just like aligning top on my boxes and making sure they're both the same size and making sure the spacing is right and making sure they're both centered and like the amount of time I did that, and now Claude just does that for me. And all I have to do is say change these words and it sort of readjusts, and I'm like, I think I'm spending my time in the right area, which is like getting the content right and letting Claude help me with the structure and the layout of it. Um but sometimes it can be misunderstood as looking like Claude created it.

Kevin Kerner 43:47
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, yeah. The design thing, moving that into I think it's in dispatch now too, so you can easily get to it. And then being able to actually change the things is like a game changer. I worry about uh Google Slides or well, I'm sure. Microsoft's probably worrying about uh PowerPoint because I don't know how you compete with that. I don't know. People are still creating PowerPoints. Probably the vast majority of people. It's like the word uh I heard that uh WordPress got hacked or something this past week, and I was I posted something to a friend about like who's using WordPress anymore? But we got to realize, like you mentioned, a vast majority of people aren't like doing the things that maybe we're doing. Like the business community, there's a giant portion that are that are not new, even the the five percenters or ten percenters. It's probably 90%. And so there's a long way to go before it gets to the point where everyone's using this stuff.

Kelly Hopping 44:39
We're in the middle of repositioning more around the side of agenda go to market, kind of the evolution of ABM being account-based marketing to really being agent-based marketing, um, and making that pivot. And as part of that, we're realizing like, how do we make sure we don't leave behind the the more traditional account-based marketing? Because it's probably still 50% of our portfolio and uh and and customer-based is what they're thinking. So yeah, it's uh it's understanding that dynamic PowerPoint still very alive and well. We actually are on WordPress. Um we moved to Webflow uh on the 29th. So in Oh, wow, okay. So big flow. It's been a while, it's been a long stretch. Um, but we are finally moving to the uh, you know, to to 2026.

Kevin Kerner 45:25
Yeah, I love the the uh Figma to uh uh Webflow uh MCP, all the MCP stuff that Webflow is doing, it's really cool.

Kelly Hopping 45:34
It's incredible, yeah. We're super excited to get it. We just need to get the site ported over so we can start to do all the fun stuff.

Kevin Kerner 45:39
Well done. There's nothing that web web transistors are so easy. I mean, that must not have been that hard at all.

Kelly Hopping 45:45
I mean, you know, thousands of pages. And then as you're doing it, of course, we have me involved who's like, oh, by the way, can you change the whole new brand and look and feel? And can you change all the messaging into new copy? Can you rewrite all these pages? Oh, and can you restructure the portfolio while you're doing a lift and shift of thousands of pages? That would be great.

Kevin Kerner 46:02
Sounds like about six weeks of work, I'd guess. Maybe not.

Kelly Hopping 46:05
Sure.

Kevin Kerner 46:07
Said the board and every executive in exactly right. Well, Kylie, this has been awesome. It's great to talk to another Austinite too. Yeah. And uh I know you got a lot of good stuff coming over. How do people get a hold of you and then tell tell me about the event events in the next week or so? All right.

Kelly Hopping 46:24
Yes, yeah. So um I am in Austin, so I'll just do a quick shout out. Um, if you want to find me tonight or tomorrow night, I'll be at the Lake Travis Westlake football game because it's the biggest event in town. Um after that, uh, you can find me on LinkedIn. Um, I'm out there often. Uh, engage, reach out. Uh, I would love to chat. And then yes, our big uh user or not our user conference, our big industry event, um, which is uh agenda go to market summit, which is uh called Breakthrough, Breakthrough 2026, is uh week after next, November 2nd through 5th in Las Vegas. Um registration is still open if anybody wants to come. Um the content's incredible. You can expense it as an LD expense because we're gonna do an agenda go to market certification track where you can actually get certified on Agenda Go to Market.

Kevin Kerner 47:09
Oh, that's cool.

Kelly Hopping 47:10
Yeah, but then there's also just incredible speakers outside, inside, uh, all of them you'll hear about our roadmap, but you also hear what's happening in the market. You'll see the latest buyer experience um stuff. And then if they're C level execs, uh, we have uh an exec experience track on the first day to just sit with other uh CMOs, CROs, um, heads of marketing and sales um to talk about like what all is going on in this agentic world.

Kevin Kerner 47:35
Amazing. What an amazing place, man. Being at that uh it's at the forefront of a lot of stuff that's going on out there. And that event, like I've I haven't been in a number of years, but um the virtual side of what you do even after the event, all the content that comes after, it's really good. Like put that in your LM and it's a lot of good resources that come out of that.

Kelly Hopping 47:55
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Kevin Kerner 47:57
So, Kelly, thank you so much. Uh, hopefully I'll see you around here in Austin someday. And uh I really appreciate I really appreciate you being on with, especially with all the craziness of the next couple weeks.

Kelly Hopping 48:06
Absolutely.

Kevin Kerner 48:08
Get some rest, will you? After this, just get some rest. Take a it's okay to take the month off next month.

Kelly Hopping 48:13
I already gave my team uh at least Friday, November 6th off because we've been pushing against this deadline for everything. I'm like, finally, take that day off, breathe, we'll come back after and and clean up. But for now, like let's let's get through this event.

Kevin Kerner 48:26
Crazy. Okay, great seeing you, Kelly.

Kelly Hopping 48:28
Thanks so much, Kevin. Appreciate it.

Kevin Kerner 48:30
Thanks. Bye.