This episode of The Agentic Marketer features a conversation with Lucas Welch, who leads Global Corporate Marketing at Highspot, an agent-first go-to-market performance platform.

Lucas shares a refreshingly honest take on agentic AI in marketing: don’t expect it to save you time. Instead, he explains how AI has shifted his role as a marketing leader away from execution and toward deeper strategic, analytical, and connective work that delivers better outcomes (even if it takes longer).

The conversation explores how Highspot is applying agentic AI across its go-to-market motion, from buyer engagement on the website to internal decision-making and pipeline generation. Lucas breaks down what it really takes to move beyond experimentation, why strong foundations matter more than ever, and how leaders must personally invest the time upfront to unlock long-term value from AI.

Key Takeaways

• AI doesn’t always save time, but it improves outcomes. For marketing leaders, AI often enables deeper strategic work rather than eliminating effort.
  
  
• Strong foundations matter more than tools. Agentic AI amplifies what’s already working; it can’t fix broken demand or misaligned go-to-market teams.
  
  
• Agentic AI shines in buyer engagement. Highspot’s use of Piper enables scalable, educational website conversations that drive meaningful pipeline.
  
  
• Leadership adoption is non-negotiable. Teams move faster when leaders actively use AI themselves, not just mandate it.

TRANSCRIPT

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

All right, welcome everyone to another episode of the Agentic Marketer. I'm so excited to have Lucas joining us from Highspot today. So Lucas, before we get going, I would love for you just to introduce yourself and tell us about what you're doing over at Highspot.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Delighted to be here, Sarah. Thank you so much. I run global corporate marketing at Highspot. I'm one of two of the marketing leaders here at the business. And my part of it is brand comms content acquisition and growth marketing worldwide. That includes all of our demand and communication channels. Of course, our website on which, yes, we do use Qualified's Piper and our big fans and agentic AI is coming increasingly, not just in our workflows, but really as a thought partner.

Some I'm particularly passionate about, I'm grateful for the opportunity to be a part of this podcast.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Amazing. So first I'd love to hear what does Highspot do? Like what are you guys focused on as a business? What's important to you? Just to give us a little bit of background on HighSpot as a company and organization.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Highspot is an agent first go-to-market performance platform. Say that five times fast. What that boils down to is across all of the content, the training, the meeting recordings, the coaching, the buyer engagements that you have through the HighSpot platform integrated with all of the data on those accounts and those contacts from your CRM. We're able to pull

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Amazing. No thanks, I won't embarrass myself too early.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yeah.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

a significant amount of insight about what's working and what's not. And then through AI, feed that into multiple agents that can both make recommendations and take actions on your behalf. So whether you're a salesperson preparing for a call, you're a customer success manager trying to show the value of your system or even expand that account, you have what you need in the moment at your fingertips and able to be your best when it matters most.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Now you kind of mentioned you guys are using Piper before we dig into all of the nitty gritty, let's say. I always like to use some level setting at the beginning of the podcast episode. And the first one being agentic marketer and agentic marketing as a term. I will be the first one to say as someone who hosts an agentic marketing podcast that agentic is a bloated term. So I love to hear from guests, like how do you define agentic marketing? Like what does that mean to you? And what does it look like within your organization?

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Well, I think for the benefit of trying to eliminate as much jargon from our conversation as we can, let's first start just an agent. And I think agency is an important concept to agree on, or maybe we can debate that for the next 20 minutes. That's what we'll disagree on is it's one thing to have an LLM. That's great. That's a large language model that can use language to give you back information.

it's another thing to have AI that can do analysis and even automate certain tasks. An agent in my view is one that combines those previous categories and then actually has the agency, the independence to be able to within a specific scope, go do things on the behalf of the human being that orchestrates it.

can interact with other agents to form an ecosystem of various discipline and scope specific automated actions. And that those actions can be at any time controlled, adjusted, measured, and feed back into its operation to continuously improve its agency on the behalf of the humans that orchestrate it. So how does that for an agent definition?

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

That's full.

gonna say, I won't debate you on it. I will say I agree as much as I think all the listeners were wanting to hear a 20 minute debate on what agents are. I won't take you up on it, because I do agree with that definition. I do think we've, you would've always said here, we have like co-pilots and autopilots, which I think to your point is like, we have the LLMs and they're there to assist you. They can help you with like brainstorming and you can ask questions and things like that. But there is a requirement for a human to be involved. You've heard human in the loop. We again, like that co-pilot terminology, but we agree with you that it's like,

Lucas Welch – Highspot

I know they were like, yes.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

agentic means there is autonomy there. There is agency, there is autonomy. It can do tasks. It does not necessarily need a human in the loop. Now we can also debate like, yes, you should have humans checking things and making sure it's working and who's owning the agents, like who is managing them. That is all, I think, things we can discuss. But I agree with that terminology. Now I'm curious, how do you apply it into marketing? Like, what does that look like within your own marketing organization right now?

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Yeah. So, you know, and I love that because I think some of the coloring book has yet to be filled out when it comes to all of this, right? Like we really don't know. Some of us are probably coloring outside the lines of what maybe ultimately the technology can do. I think other of us will create the picture that ultimately becomes what it can be down the road. So for marketing specifically, I, I see it in kind of three areas at least. And there's probably more that, you know, I'm not smart enough to think of.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Mm-hmm.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

You know, one is to your very point, what are the agents that you can deploy within specific controlled scopes that you feel comfortable autonomously operating like Piper does on our website to a certain level and a certain threshold in which you believe it can offer the customer or buyer experience or interaction with whichever audience you care about that's going to lead to a desirable outcome for both parties. Then there are the, I believe, internal agents that

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Hmm.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

start to take components of processes and workflows that often were both time consuming for the individuals and expensive for the business because highly trained, you know, well paid individuals are doing work that you wanted to figure out a way to automate. You want to figure out a way to make smarter and more efficient, but there's only so many integrations and connection points before the system kind of is what the system is. And then the third, which

I think can kind of go back into the LLM world, but we're starting to try to, with various technologies, figure out internally, what are the right kind of almost agentic level thought partners that can go beyond the kind of core LLM of research or create a document, et cetera. And because of the way you've trained it and scoped it, it can actually push the human being to think differently.

and push how we strategize, how we plan into places that it wouldn't go otherwise. That includes what it can do with data. That includes what it can do with obviously strategic confidential information and how that's housed and governed and secured. I don't have all the answers there, but it's definitely a realm in which my team has started to think about how can we get that.

autonomous thought partner that on its own can think through things, come back with ideas and participate in how we push ourselves to be better.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yeah, I really love that. Now I'm curious, you mentioned it there, like it's something you're pushing your team to do. You oversee a lot of different arms within the marketing organization at Highspot. I'm always so curious to hear from leaders like yourself where AI is getting adopted pretty heavily within the organizations. How are you making that leap from experimentation into leading with it? Or do you feel like you're not leading with it yet and you're still in that experimentation phase? I feel like everyone we've had on the podcast has been a little bit different.

But what does that process look like for you? How did you make that leap where you finally felt comfortable pushing your team to adopt this into their day-to-day?

Lucas Welch – Highspot

was a cynic a year ago. we'll start with part of the journey literally was me believing that both internally and externally, the technology could actually advance and elevate us versus be a science project that we spent too much time on. So I'd say everyone is going to be on their own journey here. My personal belief is that AI is not going to take most jobs in the near term.

but those that can orchestrate and use AI to amplify and elevate the, not just themselves, but the teams around them will take the jobs of those that do not learn and dive into it. So I've, I've at least jumped that threshold myself. Some of my teams certainly made the leap earlier than I did. So I think one is we leadership, particularly, but teams in general have to embrace the idea that this is not your training, your replacement.

it is a mutually beneficial, arguably one of the most interesting mutually beneficial employee development opportunities of at least my career. Because if you think about like the transition from a BlackBerry to an iPhone, right? Did that make me better at my career, even though it was a better phone? No, but I did move from a BlackBerry at one company to an iPhone at the next company. And, you know, that was the mobile transition. But with AI, you can both

build to a degree intellectual property models and capabilities yourself at your business that your business pays for that helps your business. And then that will take your career in higher and better trajectory over time, which means you'll leave that business. I think that's a really unique benefit of this period of time where you are at a company that's investing in your ability to use AI externally and internally, how you can take advantage of that for yourself.

And of course it has the mutual benefit for the business. So that was a key point for me with my team over the past kind of six to eight months is there's, there's a dual benefit and embracing it versus being reticent, which is you yourself will progress your career, your skills, your capabilities, your impact. Yes. High spot benefits from the great work my team is doing. They are also benefiting from that work and their growth and development. And of course they're hiring prospects wherever they may take their careers.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yeah, I really like both of those. And in all of the recordings we've done for this particular podcast, I think one of the most common themes that you touched on is the adoption by leadership. And I keep going back to, I did an interview with Sangram from GTM Partners and Matt Hines of Hines Marketing. Their whole job is to talk to other marketing leaders. And Sangram had like an interesting statistic. He said he was talking to, was like three or four CEOs from like Zoom Info, G2 and HubSpot, I believe. And he asked them, he was like, how much time are you?

as a CEO spending on AI in your day to day. And it was upwards of 40 % that they were like, in my day to day, that's the time that I'm spending on it. And for the first time, this feels like something we can't just ask our team to know. Like before it was like, you hire people that are smarter than you in certain areas and you let them be really, really good at their jobs. And I still think that rings true. But because this is also new to everyone, you as a leader have to be willing to get in and be using it. And to your point, Lucas, is there like, if I don't...

If I'm Bredesen, if I'm not believing in this yet, how can I expect my team to? So I think leading from the front and using it first has never been more important. So it's great to hear you say that, because I feel like that has been a common theme we've heard from leaders.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

And to your point, if 40%, I believe was the percentage of my time spent interacting with AI in some way, you had a question which I'm just gonna leap to because it's a fun one, which is like, what's your hot take that people might disagree with? I don't know if people will disagree with this now. I think they would have disagreed with it a year ago, which is like, don't expect it to save you time.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yeah.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Hmm

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Are there certain things, particularly when it is automating tasks? Sure. Was there, were there a lot of like tasks and processes that I personally, as the leader of the team were involved in that were sucking my time and now AI has taken that off of my plate? No. So for certain roles, absolutely. For me, not so much. And I'm not sending a hundred outbound prospect emails either. So it's really what it has done for me is I may spend more time on certain key.

strategic, analytical, kind of connectivity type projects for how I help the team elevate. And they may take more time, but I'm getting a much better result using things like the deal agent that HighSpot uses that I use to prepare for all of the customer calls I have the opportunity to take. The GPTs we've built in-house for various strategic projects and things that we'll do. Plus the way we'll use tools like Piper.

which then also gives me back what's working and what's not so that we can think about how do we change the flow on the website to best optimize it for the educational learning experience they're looking for and also drive them towards the places we believe have the highest likelihood to.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yep. And I do think that is a hot take and it was something I even struggled with as a leader as we adopted AI. And obviously with Piper, our AISDR, we get to dog food everything first and I'm our demand gen leader. So I'm getting to use our product, which is amazing. But one of the things we learned through trial of Piper before we released her to other customers, before we even did trusted testers and GA was the amount of time upfront it was going to take you to train an AI agent.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Mm-hmm.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

it's not gonna be fast. Like you are going to have to put in the time. And I think that was something even as a leader that I was hesitant to do because it isn't quick. Like you need to go through the time. need to aggregate a bunch of, like I find myself going and aggregating a bunch of data from a lot of different sources on product marketing and positioning and competitive intelligence and our data and making sure that I'm training agents and LLMs and et cetera on that first. And that is a...

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Yep. Yep.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

time consuming and a little bit cumbersome of a process, knowing that the output later, you we always said like, oh, AI will help you be more strategic in the early days. I don't think we knew what that was. And now we are starting to see that come to fruition and you gave some great examples, but the willingness to put in that time commitment upfront and knowing that it's not going to be fast, but we'll pay off in the long, it took me a long time to wrap my head around that and commit to it and be like, okay, I'm just gonna have to set aside 40 % of my time and make sure that.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Yeah, truly. Hours and hours.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

why it's not fast and it took me a while to like finally like leap across that and say like, okay, I have to do this. Like it is time.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Yeah, you have to, I think, to stay competitive, if not ahead of the curve. And, you know, we do employee engagement surveys as you likely do, and, know, what's the pulse of how people are feeling? And often you'd see if there was a disconnect in any form between leadership and, you know, the kind of more frontline employee base, it was often the context around strategic decisions.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

and

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Mm-hmm.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

And AI doesn't get rid of the need of context. In fact, in some instances, AI needs more context, more prescriptively delivered than a human being does to understand what you need from it to get the highest quality result. But if you're willing to your point to put in that time and embrace the idea that in the long run, you were going to get higher quality and greater amplification of your best through that process.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

You

Lucas Welch – Highspot

I had to embrace that idea just like you did. And I've now seen the power of it in instances that before you'd get a plan from this team, right? And a plan from that team. And they say they've talked to each other and I'm sure they did their best, but then they kind of went and entrenched in what they know and they've come up with plans that are supposed to connect, but they don't quite connect. And then you have a third team that's depending on those two teams, right? To then go use that material in whatever channels they own.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Totally.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

And you as the leader asked, you know, in rapid succession, of course it's Friday afternoon when everyone's getting their stuff off their desk to say, Hey, I need you to review this. And, and then you've got to make sure such and such as, and such and such as plans all connect. And it's a really, in my opinion, it's a really important part of what the leader's role is, is to look in and around the corners and make sure that the gaps that exist by no fault of anyone's other than they're just doing their job. Don't then trip us up. I've got AI.

with the right context to be a fantastic partner in pulling together that information, helping me devise a deeper and more thoughtful perspective on what to do, not just where gaps are or where hiccups could be, but what to do about them and make that actionable for the team. It took a heck of a lot of time to get it to the point it could do that. And now it does it quite well and it's helping my whole team. Cause now I'm encouraging them to do the same. So

A very long answer to your, what is the agentic marketer? I think it is the marketing team that has certainly identified the internal processes and the external engagement touch points that we can trust a well-designed agent to handle for us. And then it is the, think more, gray, but potentially higher yield opportunity to look at where agents or agentic like autonomy and opinion.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Mm-hmm.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

from well contextualized AI can come back and make you a stronger team in where you prioritize and what you do.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Absolutely. Now, speaking of your team, I don't normally share people's numbers, but you put these on LinkedIn. So I feel like you are comfortable with me sharing these, but you're an alpha, which is great. You posted your team achieved 140 % of Pike Gen goals last fiscal year and improved ROI by 50%. Those are not numbers you typically hear, especially in this day and age. So that's, that's an incredible feat. Now we obviously have spent the whole podcast talking about AI and agentic.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Might have been an open book.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

So I'm curious of those results. How typical are those results and how has AI contributed to results like that and a driven impact for your marketing team?

Lucas Welch – Highspot

First, thank you for the compliment. I appreciate it. And I want to, of course, give a huge shout out to not just the global corporate marketing team who does own the pipeline target, but it really is the breadth of our entire marketing team and our partnership with sales, is AI aside. If you as a marketing team, agendic or otherwise, are not putting sales first and not treating them like your primary customer,

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

You

Lucas Welch – Highspot

in parallel to the buyer themselves, then you are missing the, in my opinion, the most fundamental opportunity to be great at what you do. It is easy to talk about how marketing or sales doesn't use our content. Yes, that's a true stereotype. It's easy to judge from one side of the aisle or the other, but ultimately it will be the interlock of those. And whatever sales structure, whatever marketing structure you have that will create the greatest efficiency. And that's where then AI can come in

And unlock more. Once you have that strong foundation, it can't fix the foundation. So I want to give props to everybody across our account development sales and marketing teams for some really great pipeline performance over the past, really two fiscal years as we've. Rited ourselves out of kind of what do we do after COVID and how do you find the right field versus digital mix, et cetera? So AI has played an increasing role, but I want to be clear that at the fundamental layer, it's the interlock with sales is the partnership.

It's the prioritization of the right accounts and it's the using the signals we can attain to understand who's in market and how to go after them in a prescriptive way. Then you take AI and to your wonderful product Piper, you bring something in that really has the depth and the discipline to be able to handle the casual educational peruser of your site who doesn't want to talk to a salesperson yet.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Hmm.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

So you're not taking away an experience that they're looking for. then like, stop making me talk to this bot. I want to talk to a salesperson. That's not where today's buyer is, right? They do, you know, by given stats, I have one number of 70 % of the, of their kind of buying decision-making will be done before they ever talk to sales. So Piper is advantageous and plays into that trend and helps them have a better experience on your site because they can very easily interact.

get what they want, schedule a meeting and do a wide range of other things that allow them to advance their decision making. But we don't lose total influence over that because we have that Piper agent able to have that impact. So, you I can use percentages. Obviously I'm not going to be able to use hard numbers. Just know that, you know, we're in, we're not in the law of small numbers anymore at Highspot. We've been around for almost 14 years now. you know, we've gone through our series F folks can do the contextual math on.

You know what they think we are in the ballpark of, but the numbers are significant and Piper is an increasing percentage of the pipeline that we're able to generate so much so that this year and how we track our pipeline sources, we carved out a specific type. called it a web conversation or Piper that is different from our primary website conversion touch point, which is a web demo request. In fact, the team did this.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Mm-mm.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

This is maybe going to not reflect super positively on me, but the team did this. didn't know. And after the first quarter, I see a relatively large amount of pipeline was generated by this web conversation. And so I go to a fellow named Patrick, phenomenal leader of acquisition and growth for us. And I say, what, what's this conversations on the website that's creating pipeline. He's like, I told you that's

Qualified's Piper, that's the new agent we deployed at the beginning of the year. That's what it's doing, but it's different than WDR. So we need to track it differently. And I was like, okay. Well, it's doing well for us. And it continued to do well throughout the course of the rest of the year. So that has been one primary way where AI again has taken a strong foundation and amplified it to give us a new stream of conversion that otherwise didn't exist before.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yep. There are two things I want to touch on there that I really liked. I want to go all the way back to when you spoke very highly of your team, which I think is amazing. And you specifically said the foundations are there. And I think that's so important because yes, AI is helping us with a lot of things, but the more I talk to leaders in the space, the more I've been collecting data around agent tech marketing and inbound pipeline. I think what we're seeing more of is that if the demand isn't there, like you have to have the foundations in place to drive demand for your organization. People have to be coming to your website. They have to be expressing.

some level of interest in your business for AI to be effective. Like it's not a silver bullet for all of a sudden just making pipeline out of thin air if you haven't drove that. You can't just AI that. we, there was one sense of particular that showed it said it's not a demand problem, it's an engagement problem that you're doing the right things. You have to be doing those foundational things as a marketing team. You have to fix that first and be confident in that motion to then layer.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

You can't just AI that thing. That's not how it works.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

agentic AI on top of that to fix that engagement problem or like it's usually like a headcount and a scalability problem. Those tend to be where the leaks in the bucket are versus the demand problem. So I really love that you touched on that because I think that's something that often isn't thought about and we'll get people that come into the sales cycle. our AEs are very honest and they'll look and say like, hey, you got to start there first. You have to be driving the demand and the interest from people first for this to be impactful.

So I love that that's what your team did first in the last two years is you really have that foundation there and then have reaped the benefits by layering on something like Piper who is now having those website conversations. So that's amazing. Totally.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

And it doesn't always work. we, you know, I don't want to disparage any, anyone else's technology. So a vendor not to be named, but we, we trialed the broader set of outbound AI demand generation capabilities. And it just wasn't quite there yet when we tried it. And what I told my team, you know, who really wanted this to work, obviously our account development team was looking for some support for scale and.

we tried very hard as did the Bender and for various reasons, which, you know, are part kind of technology maturity part, where does it fit in the buyer journey and other aspects that we don't have enough time to get into, but it just didn't quite work. And that's not a failure because you learn from it and you can't learn if all you do is win, despite what DJ Khaled says. Cause he had to learn before he was winning.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Hmm

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

That's good.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

for T pain and, and by learning, then you can hone in on where do we see it really legitimately ready to make an impact and where will we continue to trial, where will we continue to growth test, where will we continue to do POCs, et cetera. And that can be equally, if not more valuable than the out of the box success because

since we're, go back to my coloring book analogy, since there's no way it's all colored in, we don't even necessarily know what all the pictures are yet, to believe that you get a success right out of the box, cool. Then the next one and the next one, just keep layering it on to your point. But if your foundation between your sales tech stack all the way to your partnerships across the go-to-market aren't strong, then it's not only not gonna help, it may make things worse.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yes. And then the other thing that you touched on was one, I love that you said Patrick just made added a new conversion point because I've been there. We actually went through and we were like, how do we report on this? Do we need to break out different ways with which people were interacting with a qualified product? We have meeting bookers, we have Piper. That's all now kind of become one thing with Piper. We used to have like chat and meeting bookers and now it's like one autonomous AISDR. But one of the big things that made a difference on our team

from an accountability standpoint to know if this is or isn't working is we made it its own conversion point. And we actually, do every Friday, we do, we call it pipeline council. So inbound and outbound, SDR teams, the demand gen team, AEs, and even some of our C-suite will show up to that meeting. And we talk about pipeline generation for the week. We look at the different channels that came from, what's working, what isn't working. And with Piper, we had a lot of debate on where, how do we report on this? And what we've found is like, we're actually,

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Yeah, what is it and where does it fit?

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

is it and like, is it like, you know, just inbound like demo requests, like we just weren't really sure how, because I think defining it is impactful and the way that you talk about it and the way that you put it within your reporting structure does impact how the team will adopt it and take it seriously. What we ended up doing for both Piper and we have an outbound BDR agent is we put them in the rank with our SDRs and BDRs. So when we were looking at inbound pipeline generated, we said if

if we're going to hold this to the standard at which we want to hold it to, and we're going to go out and pitch it and say like, this can operate like a human SDR, we have to drink our own champagne. She better walk that walk and we better put her on that leaderboard. And we found it made a huge difference. Now there's always nuances with like, is it working the same traffic? Is it working the same type of leads? But it was the like forcing function for us to look at this and say like, okay, is...

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Yeah, then you got to put it in that bucket. Yeah.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

it actually producing the meetings that we wanted to at the volume at which we are expecting it to. And that informed a lot of product decisions and things that we did and strategy around it. So I love that Patrick did that for you.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Yeah, I love that Patrick did that too, because I certainly wasn't bright enough to think of it. And I like the pipeline council. So every Friday, you, your SDR BDR team, maybe some execs who want to fly by and get into the details, all get together and talk about what's coming in, what's working, what's not.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Every Friday at noon Pacific.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yep. Then we look at a leaderboard, we say like, how are reps performing? And the reps are on those calls. But actually another plug for pipeline council, one of my favorite parts of it that, you know, I've been here six years now. I think we've done pipeline council for five of those six years. It's evolved a lot, as you can imagine, and the team has grown and pipeline has grown. We have, we used to play of the weeks and we still do this. And now we'd have like piper plays of the week and we like showcase like specific interactions that were really good and you know, drove a big, a big deal.

But for the BDRs in particular that are outbounding is we do these plays of the week and we have them present like, you know, it's a big logo, a big ACV, what we're projecting out of it. And they get to present like how, how did they get it? And one, it just inspires the team. Two, I learn a lot from it. Like I learn what's working for them in the messaging and we put in there like, who was the persona that you went after? Like, who did you book the meeting with? And it creates a lot of camaraderie with the team, which I really enjoy. But two, I think it gives a chance to showcase the humans that are working really, really hard.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

How they got it.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

And there's some cool stuff that they're doing. Like there's some really cool outbound messaging. They're really creative. And that is something that no matter what we've evolved for pipeline council, we've kept the plays of the week. And it's one of my favorite sections. So if you do a pipeline council and you're not doing that, it in.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Yeah, being a, I really like that concept. We do something similar, but not as frequent. I do like the weekly frequency from both an enter, but there's an energy to that. That is positive and yet serious in that this is how much this matters. And you know, things can happen quickly and you're to have at least one story of success, regardless of where it came from each week. And that, and that.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

It's a lot.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Mm-hmm.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

celebrate something else that's really important to me and for any of the marketers listening, whatever you, whatever, whatever consonant you put in front of development representative at your business, that is one of the hardest jobs in a given go-to-market organization. You are told no more than the worst actor auditioning for the most roles. And so I just encourage people to.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

yes.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

have a little bit of empathy when you're on the other end of that email. And what I like to do is I don't do it every day, but I'll pick at least one, if not two outbound emails I get a week and I will reply and try to be helpful in what worked or what didn't with their pitch. And if I'm turning them down, I'm saying why specifically I am. And often I am because I don't need what they're selling me, but it is a very difficult job whether AI is augmenting and helping you or not.

And it is still, I believe, regardless of AI, it is one of those areas that does keep the heart of pipe gen. And I think people forget the awareness impact. Like what we'll see relatively frequently is they may have done an outbound sequence. They didn't get a reply. Then high spots at an event. And someone will come by and say, Hey, you know, Macy's tried to get ahold of me three times. I've been putting it off because I knew I would be here.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Hmm

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Metro booth, I'm ready for the demo. Tell me what's up. That's still a win. Now it might not have felt as a win when you're ghosted for three straight emails, no Macy didn't feel like she was winning, but then Macy feels like it really mattered because her work built the awareness that brought them to the booth. So just a small plug for my friends in account development and the idea that, you know, for all of us in marketing and otherwise, you know, it doesn't mean you have to take the cold calls, but there can be opportunities to offer a little bit of, you know,

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Poor Macy, yeah, she didn't feel like it was a win.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

guidance and support because you never know how paying it forward can make an impact.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Absolutely. Now I want to shift gears just a little bit and talk sort of big picture, agentic. And earlier you mentioned something about career development with your team, which I think is huge. I think it takes a really good leader to realize that the skills that their team is working on now that they can help their team develop are skills that they're going to take beyond this job and are going to make them great employees somewhere else.

And I think that is especially true in the age of AI, that those that are willing to take that risk and fail, because you will fail a lot of times experimenting with AI, it's just the nature of the beast, but will come out ahead in the long run and what they are marketable and what they can market in their skills and other roles. So with that being said, looking at your team now, what are some skills that the most successful team members that have adopted AI, what are...

Are there any particular skills or is there anything that they've like really doubled down on that you think is helping them thrive right now in this like AI boom?

Lucas Welch – Highspot

I spoke to one, which I won't take all the credit for, but was one that I think is as vital as using AI as a thought partner to bring disparate plans, information, data sources, et cetera, together and deliver a higher quality, more actual point of view of what to do about it so that execution is as tight as it possibly can be. And that can be at every level because they always say, well,

They're not strategic enough yet for leadership. And I'm like, what in God's name does that mean? I do think one of the things it means is are they able to look at different things, which they do not own, connectivity, touch points and opportunities for more, one plus one equals three, and gaps that could lead to friction and or lack of efficiency. Now, if you're willing to put in the time,

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Mm-hmm.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Hmm.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Most people can do that because a good high functioning team is sharing plans with each other. They're collaborating actively. They're reporting out on information on a weekly, if not daily basis. So most good high functioning marketing team should have access to most of the information you need to take your own initiative and proactively look at that and come back with strategic recommendations about how the teams can improve. And that's to me, a very new.

and strong way to level up your own. Strategery learn rapidly for no other reason than to just get better and build your own knowledge base about a broader set of, marketing and ultimately make the impact that whether it's promotion or more responsibility or both or a new job is going to take you places you want to go. I think a second is the contextual.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Mm-hmm.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

structure you put into training something like Piper all the way through to we've created a GPT for messaging. We have a GPT for SEO and AEO. We have a GPT for PR. How are you creating the context behind whether they're agents or the layer on top of an LLM? Because what we've, I think, all seen, and Piper is a great example of this, you give it everything and ask it to do everything. It's not going to do anything well.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yes.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Just like a person really you've got to scope it and contextualize it and give it depth not breadth You we see this with high spot, you know We have a deal agent that deal agent is able to look at the deal and across all deals and give you everything from the barriers to the opportunities to then automate I'm gonna create the digital room I'm gonna give you the role play to practice for that next meeting Then I'm gonna analyze what worked and what didn't and I'm make my recommendations and my actions on behalf of other sellers better going forward

But if you try to point the deal agent at everything across Highspot, it would just be too much. Same as if Piper was not only doing the website in some outbound, but you also were asking it to then do the demos. And then after the demos, it was going to do contract negotiations. It's going to be too much for any given thing to take in. So I think that's the next one is those that I see, not just in marketing, but across Highspot and other peers I know in various roles are doing is they're both taking the time to give

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yeah, it's a lot.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

AI in whatever form they use it deep context. And they're recognizing that it is not a one size fits all solve for anything that you might want to do. Because if you just throw in ambiguous questions in open AI, you're going to get ambiguous answers, often that aren't accurate to what you're ultimately looking to achieve. And I think the third that is just kind of starting for us early, asked, you know, are we leading with AI? I think we've moved beyond experimentation, but we are, we still have a long way to go before I feel like.

We are probably most businesses are on the forward front edge of how to really push it to the max, but the thinking about where it can fit internally and externally, kind of your team's conversation about, do we put it with the SDRs? Do we, where do we put it? I think that's the type of thinking people should be pushing themselves on is where does it fit? And then what do we learn?

from that fit as rapidly as possible to either justify that is where it belongs in a given process, workflow or task, or nope, we got that wrong to your point about failure. Great, we learned from it and we're ready to pivot.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Absolutely. Now, Lucas, I always like to end our episodes with what I call the lightning round, which are not marketing. There are some marketing specific questions, but they're more fun questions because I think it just brings some levity to each episode. first question for you, besides chat GPT, because that tends to be everyone's first answer. What was the first AI tool that you experimented with, whether it was business or personal life?

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Does Siri count?

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yeah, actually, I think it does.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Cause talk about disappointing. Love you, Apple. You know, I, I mean, I would, like I said, I was late to GPT and all this AI. I'm a year into my journey. So I, I, I not to be obviously self-promotional, but the first AI I started using was Highspots. Obviously, Highspot is at the crux of our own go-to-market.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yeah, did not start us off on the right foot.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yeah.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yeah.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

is instrumental in us being able to, you know, beat those pipeline goals. And as we brought in AI and early agenda capabilities in a high spot, being a quote unquote executive, which always sounds kind of pretentious to say, but I get the opportunity to join, you know, customer and prospect calls, try to bring some additional value from, from my in the business. And even before we had the deal agent, we were working on how do you use AI to consolidate all this information and give the right level.

preparation, the right recommendation, et cetera. So I'm to go with high spot, which I know is not a particularly surprising answer, but it is the truth.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

actually really liked that answer. And I think you're the first guest that has said their own product, which as you said that I was like, you know what? actually think that would be mine. It was qualified because I'm a power user. So it makes sense that that'd be the first one. I was on the front and I'm still, it actually, feels like it's a lifetime ago when it really wasn't that long ago. And we came out with our like co-pilot. And I remember that launch and you could like.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

And you were talking about how you tested it. You know, you, you folks are kind on the front lines of it.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

do a forward slash and ask it for a recommendation. If you were in SDR live chatting on how to respond and that just blew my mind. I'm like, I don't have to type this out. I'm terrible with typos. It'll just suggest your response for me. And then less than a year later, we're like, just kidding. It could just do this autonomously now. Like you have better things to do than to be chatting with people on the website. So it's funny. was also our product was my first product. It's come a long way.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Yep.

Dark Ages.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Yep.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Yeah. And that's good. But if you can, right, not, I've been in a lot of deep tech where, know, we're building products for developers. So, but if as a marketer, I think that's just a general marketing best practices. If you can use your product and even if you won't use it day to day, but you can at least learn the basics of it, you know, I'm, a big believer in the more you can use your own product or service, whatever you may be marketing, obviously the better at it.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yes.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

in terms of the marketing you deliver, you will ultimately become.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yeah, before this I was in cybersecurity doing pen testing. They wouldn't let me experiment with that. And nor should I. Yeah. No, no, no, that would be detrimental for everyone. Okay, most overrated buzzword that you hear in MarTech right now.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Yeah, yeah, probably for the best. That's probably for the best. No one lets me near the command line.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Agents in marketing.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

I was gonna say, it can be agentic and it can be AI, because he wouldn't be wrong. Ooh, I like that one. Yes. Okay.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

narrative.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

AI loves narratives. It loves a good narrative and a good end dash. Yeah. I loved the end dash and now I'm conflicted about it.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

AI loves a narrative and an emmage.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Our director of content also does, and she takes it very personally. She was like, I was doing this well before I GPT, you will pride out of my cold dead hands.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Yeah. I yeah, you, you bit my style chat, GBT, and now you've just put it everywhere. but I do think narrative is, is an overused buzzword in part because AI uses it very frequently as a look at the smart word I can use instead of story and no shots at AI. It's, it's a computer. get it. And I just,

I struggle. It's like thought leadership. That would have been my answer. Like two years ago, thought leadership would have been because it's like the princess bride. You keep using that word, but I don't think that word means what I think it means. Like, what do you mean by thought leadership specifically? And now I think that's narrative is like when you say we need a fresh narrative, what specifically are you saying? So that that would be my answer. And if you haven't seen the princess bride out there, please watch it. It's classic. It aged well.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

What do mean?

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

What do you mean? Yeah.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

You should. Absolutely. Okay, one marketer to follow who's head of the curve on AI that you would appreciate following on LinkedIn.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

That was the only question on your sheet that really stumped me.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

And it's okay to say like, I'm not on there that often, I don't know.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

well, I'm, mean, I'm on LinkedIn frequently enough and there's many marketers I've worked with and, and, and follow and respect, know, Gerard Green, who used to be our vice president of product marketing is now the CMO at a company called Viven, they make an AI, essentially agents for the solution and sales consulting team. you know, he, he has a really sharp perspective on AI and marketing in general. I think what tripped me up on your question is.

is the AI marketing kind of lens on it. I think there are many people, yourself included, and Gerard, who you can learn a lot from in terms of marketing foundational all the way through to what the bleeding edge is. But I don't personally see someone who that's just their deal is I'm just going to talk about AI marketing, which I think is maybe a good thing in that like there is more to it than that.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Totally.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

That's all they.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

And you you made the great point of, Hey, you've got to get the foundation in place. Then you layer on the AI and we're all going to be in a learning mode and have some failures as we figure out exactly what it is. but you know, I'll go with Gerard as a starting point and, think that I'd also encourage people to remember that there's still more to marketing than just AI.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

than just AI. I love that. Okay, last question. If you could automate one part of your life outside of work using AI, what would it be or have you already done it and what is it?

Lucas Welch – Highspot

have not done it. Calendaring is difficult for me. and, and, and I make it more difficult because I'm relatively, I'm, I try to be pretty free flowing about most stuff. Hopefully I come across as not taking anything too seriously. It just is marketing after all. I'm not a brain surgeon. but.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yes.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

We love the self-awareness.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

But man, if I could just figure out a way to train AI to understand how I want my calendar done and have it do that for me, that would be down to the color coding. That would be amazing, but I'm not there today. I'm getting better at not being so obsessive about how it's organized. So maybe someday AI can help me, but that would be the world. I spend both too much time calendaring, trying to calendar, reviewing the calendar, and it is vital to my life. If it's not on the calendar, it's not happening.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yep, not there yet.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

I'll look at it.

See, I agree with you. If it's not on the calendar, it's not happening, it doesn't exist. I have found as a new mother, getting things on the calendar is becoming increasingly difficult, but even more so important that if it's not on the calendar, it doesn't happen. But the amount of times I've double scheduled myself, put it on the wrong day, booked it on the wrong day. So yeah, if AI could help me get my life together in that sense, that would be very much appreciated. And I could definitely benefit from it.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

You have that family schedule sink and you know, your partner's like, yeah, on Tuesday we're going over to the Jones's and you're like, no, that's next Tuesday. And they're like, no, no, it's this Tuesday. Yup. I know, I know the feeling well.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Yeah No.

Yeah, we have a lot of that. it's a learning curve. So AI, if anyone listening finds an AI to help me with that, please send it to me on LinkedIn. very much appreciate it. Perfect. Well, Lucas, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It was super great to have you. I love hearing what you and the team are doing over at HighSpot.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Yeah, we'll both take it and we'll be beta testers.

Lucas Welch – Highspot

Yeah, 100%. Thank you for having me. I love these conversations. Hopefully for any and all who listen, we gave you something valuable and interesting to think about. And I look forward to all you folks are going to do with Piper and as part of the Salesforce family. And I've loved what you've done so far. So thank you once again for having me.

Sarah McConnell – Qualified

Thank you.

Awesome.