Conversations with MarTech

Malinda Sandman, global VP of Marketing at Typeform, discusses how AI is reshaping the landscape for B2B and B2C marketers. Malinda dives into why AI might actually be making marketing harder in the short term due to the shift toward a "clickless" environment, how marketing teams can avoid the "garbage in, garbage out" trap of AI tools, and why having more data doesn't necessarily mean you know your customer. 

She also shares how Typeform uses AI to conduct scalable customer interviews and bridge the gap between B2B and B2C insights. 

Key topics covered:

Is AI in paid ad platforms net positive or net negative? 
Human-centric creative vs. AI scaling: Avoiding homogeneous outputs

Why 97% of marketers use AI, but lead follow-up is still lagging 
Does your marketing team actually have "enough" data? 
"Always On" research: Gathering customer feedback in 24 hours 
Bridging B2B & B2C marketing mindsets using video feedback 
The Biggest Lie in Marketing: Why more data ≠ knowing your customer

Episode guide

00:00 Introduction
00:40 Meet Malinda Sandman
01:27 Has the explosion of AI tools been a positive or negative for marketing?
05:03 Where should marketers be using their energy in the AI era?
07:11 “Marketers don't necessarily have a data problem, they have an action problem.”
08:34 The “million dollar next thing to solve.”
09:37 Fundamental marketing problems AI hasn’t addressed.
13:25 What’s working for the marketing team at Typeform?
16:59 What’s the biggest lie the marketing industry tells itself?

Connect with Us: 🔔 Subscribe to the MarTech Channel: Don't miss an episode of Season 4! Hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications to stay ahead of the latest trends, tools, and strategies shaping the marketing technology landscape. For more expert insights, articles, and marketing technology resources, visit our website at www.martech.org.
This podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

Are customer surveys officially dead? 

In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, host Mike Pastore sits down with Mark Treschl, general manager, voice of customer at Quantum Metric and co-founder of OpinionLab. 

They dive deep into why traditional long-form surveys, endless feedback requests, and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are failing both consumers and brands — and what modern companies must do instead to truly understand customer behavior. 

📌 Episode highlights 

The Death of Traditional Surveys: Why more than 50% of consumers stop responding to direct surveys and silently walk away from brands that ignore them. 

Behavior vs. Sentiment: How pairing session-based user behavior with attitudinal data creates predictive feedback, rather than retrospective scores. 

The "NPS Lie": Why treating Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a business strategy or compensation plan leads companies to manage numbers instead of helping customers. 

Unlocking the "Silent Majority": Leveraging AI and lookalike modeling to quantify the silent middle curve of customers who never fill out a survey. 

The Thermometer vs. Thermostat Analogy: Moving from programs that merely report the news to real-time systems that trigger actions while the customer is still engaged. 

Closing the CX Loop: Shifting focus from collecting a higher volume of feedback to capturing targeted, higher-quality insights to improve retention and lifetime value.

 Episode guide

00:00 Introduction
00:36 Meet Mark Treschl
01:14 What were the traditional voice of the customer tactics?
04:02 The consumer has changed. Has voice of the customer?
09:44 “Brands have created silos.”
11:00 What does the future of voice of the customer look like?
15:35 What are the outcomes possible with a modern voice of the customer strategy?
18:54 How much does organizational culture impact how feedback is acted on?
20:46 What’s the biggest lie marketers tell themselves?

Connect with Us: 🔔 Subscribe to the MarTech Channel: Don't miss an episode of Season 4! Hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications to stay ahead of the latest trends, tools, and strategies shaping the marketing technology landscape. For more expert insights, articles, and marketing technology resources, visit our website at www.martech.org.
This podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

Is the CMO role truly dying, or are modern marketers just setting themselves up for failure? 
In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, host Mike Pastore sits down with Kyle Lacy, CMO at Docebo, to break down the real reasons major brands are eliminating executive marketing positions.
Kyle exposes the biggest traps holding modern marketers back — from over-indexing on pipeline numbers to letting AI replace human connection — and outlines what it actually takes to build a brand that is impossible to ignore.
Key Takeaways
The Production House Trap: Why viewing marketing strictly as a content assembly line makes your role easily replaceable by AI tools. 
The Risk of Short-Term Thinking: What really happens to pipeline 12 months after a company absorbs marketing under sales. 
Human-Centric Storytelling: Why brand story is your only true competitive edge in an AI-driven market. 
The Flaw of Attribution: Why using attribution models as "absolute truth" kills creative team innovation.

Episode guide
00:00 Introduction
00:31 Meet Kyle Lacy
01:47 A high-level take on what’s happened to the CMO role
03:18 Are B2B or tech companies more likely to eliminate the CMO role?
04:52 “We did this to ourselves.”
07:27 What is the risk you face when you eliminate the CMO?
10:26 Are more technical-minded CMOs better prepared for the future?
14:17 What’s the difference between product and brand for today’s B2B orgs?
16:20 What’s the biggest lie marketing tells itself?
18:30 “If you want to kill creatives, tell them they have a pipeline goal to hit.”

Connect with Us: 🔔 Subscribe to the MarTech Channel: Don't miss an episode of Season 4! Hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications to stay ahead of the latest trends, tools, and strategies shaping the marketing technology landscape. For more expert insights, articles, and marketing technology resources, visit our website at www.martech.org. 

This podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

Are the days of classic marketing automation officially over?

In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we dive deep into the massive paradigm shift happening across the marketing industry as basic, rule-based automation gives way to truly autonomous marketing.

We explore why a superficial "thin layer" of AI is no longer enough for modern marketers and look at how the next generation of tools must leverage deep customer context to remain relevant.

If you've ever wondered whether AI content creation is actually saving you time — or just creating more clutter to clean up — this discussion tackles the reality of human-in-the-loop design and driving true business outcomes.

Among the key topics we cover:

The Evolution of the MarTech Stack: Where does marketing automation sit today? We discuss the shifting center of gravity between CRMs, CDPs, data warehouses, and autonomous execution platforms.

The Context Challenge: Why LLMs can’t just be pointed at billions of data points, and the technical hurdles of solving "context rot" to ensure data quality and relevance.

Proactive Intelligence: How future marketing platforms will move beyond internal data to monitor external signals, competitor shifts, and website changes to recommend real-time strategies.

The Personalization Paradox: Why integrating AI doesn't automatically mean you’ve achieved true personalization, and what the "holy grail" of seamless, magical customer experiences actually looks like at scale.

What do you think is the biggest lie the marketing industry tells itself about AI? Let us know in the comments below! #MarTech #MarketingAutomation

#ArtificialIntelligence #AIinMarketing #DigitalMarketing #PredictiveAI #MarketingStrategy

 Episode guide

00:00 Introduction
00:23 Meet Chai Atreya
02:06 What’s happened since the days of classic marketing automation ended
05:37 Where does marketing automation sit in the martech stack today?
09:38 Data quality and context in AI-powered marketing automation
11:54 How do marketers feel about the AI capabilities added to their martech tools?
19:44 Are we in an AI Arms Race? How can vendors differentiate their tools?
21:24 What’s the biggest lie the marketing industry tells itself?
22:56 What’s the Holy Grail of personalization?

Connect with Us: 🔔 Subscribe to the MarTech Channel: Don't miss an episode of Season 4! Hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications to stay ahead of the latest trends, tools, and strategies shaping the marketing technology landscape. 

For more expert insights, articles, and marketing technology resources, visit our website at www.martech.org.
This podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.

In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we’re joined by Mehul Nagrani, CEO of Integrate, to break down the complexities of modern B2B marketing, the reality of attribution, and where demand generation is heading over the next five years.

Mehul shares his perspective on why B2B marketing will always be a mix of art and science, how humans naturally complicate technology and measurement, and why Integrate recently acquired multi-touch attraibution platform CaliberMind. 

He also touches on why chasing a single "silver bullet" metric can ruin your strategy, how marketers can balance intent creation versus intent capture, and why the future of marketing relies on human connection and systems-level thinking.

Episode highlights
The Philosophy of B2B Marketing: Why B2B marketing is equal parts science and art.

Integrate Acquires CaliberMind: Addressing the missing links in the B2B marketing-to-revenue loop.

B2B vs. B2C Attribution: Why tracking enterprise buying committees isn't as simple as buying a pair of shoes online.

Why M&A Visions Fail: How Integrate plans to unify top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel data without falling into common acquisition traps.

The "Human Factor" in Data: Unmeasurable touchpoints, dark social, and the street light effect in marketing metrics.

Manufacturing vs. Capturing Intent: Why marketers need to focus on creating demand rather than just chasing existing intent signals.

The Long Time-Horizon Dilemma: Navigating directional measurements when long sales cycles make direct ROI hard to prove immediately.

Shifting Market Categories: How AI is disrupting traditional consideration sets and brand awareness.

Goodhart's Law & Single Metrics: Why optimizing for a single metric like MQLs or pipeline leads to bad outcomes.

Where B2B Demand Gen Is Headed in Five Years: The return of the pendulum toward systems thinking, creative strategy, and human-to-human connection.

The Biggest Lie Marketers Tell Themselves: Why "more is not always more" when it comes to tools, channels, and leads.

Episode guide

00:00 Introduction
00:20 Meet Mehul Nagrani
02:50 “The math behind attribution is hard.”
05:48 Acquisitions don’t fail because of lack of vision.”
07:41 “Half the job of marketing is to manufacture intent.”
09:48 The challenge of measurement in B2B marketing
12:13 AI is creating upheaval for B2B consideration sets
13:29 What’s the most important metric in B2B marketing today?
14:37 What does B2B marketing look like in five years?
17:31 What’s the biggest lie the marketing industry tells itself?

Connect with Us: 🔔 Subscribe to the MarTech Channel: Don't miss an episode of Season 4! Hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications to stay ahead of the latest trends, tools, and strategies shaping the marketing technology landscape. For more expert insights, articles, and marketing technology resources, visit our website at www.martech.org.
This podcast is produced by MarTech, a Third Door Media property.