Karen Steele, Founder of Steele-Alloy and Fractional CMO, explains why clean, well-integrated data is essential for effective AI, and how buying groups and data-driven insights are reshaping modern B2B marketing.
Karen Steele, Founder of Steele-Alloy and seasoned Fractional CMO, joins the show to talk about the future of B2B marketing and why data quality is more important than ever.
Karen and Sara explore how account-based marketing (ABM) has evolved into more sophisticated strategies centered on buying groups and behavioral signals. They also dive into the challenges of data integration, the critical role of marketing ops in maintaining data hygiene, and how AI can elevate human creativity when fed with the right data.
Karen:
“You can only do smart AI and get great content and results if you have good data that you're using with the AI… You’ve got to get the data right, and somebody has to be the shepherd of that data. Marketing ops, sales ops, revenue ops—they hold the keys to the kingdom.”
Links & Resources:
Connect with Sara: linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Connect with Karen: linkedin.com/in/karenmsteele
Learn more about Progress: www.progress.com
Learn more about Steele-Alloy: www.steele-alloy.com
Timestamps:
00:20 - Current MarTech Trends: Data and AI
01:35 - SEO and AI: The Future of Search
04:00 - Marketing Metrics and Data Quality
06:10 - AI Tools and Sales Enablement
07:30 - Evolution of Buyer Journeys
0:00:00.1 Sara Faatz: I'm Sara Faatz and I lead community and awareness at Progress. This is 10 Minute MarTech.
0:00:04.6 Karen Steele: You gotta get the data right and somebody has to be the shepherd of that data, which is where I think, marketing ops, sales ops, revenue ops, they hold the keys to the kingdom.
0:00:13.0 Sara Faatz: That's Karen Steele, founder of Steele-Alloy and Fractional CMO. Let's get started. Well, Karen, I would love to understand from you what is your burning Martech topic right now? What keeps you up at night?
0:00:32.6 Karen Steele: Well, Sara, I'd be remiss if I didn't say AI. I think everybody's talking about data and I think everybody's experimenting with AI and is looking for, you know, is there a silver bullet? Is there a best practice? Is, are there examples or templates or, you know, so people are studying and learning, not just in Martech. I just got off a big sales group at LinkedIn call where they're talking about, of course they're talking about using Sales Navigator and some of their tools, but AI was very central in the discussion. So I think it's central in sales tech and I think it's certainly central in Martech.
0:01:06.5 Sara Faatz: Is there a practical use of AI today that you're super excited about?
0:01:10.7 Karen Steele: I think we've only scratched the surface with content creation, and I think the bigger opportunity is content distribution with AI. I myself haven't done enough of that yet. So taking the raw content that's been generated through AI and turning it into videos or podcasts or just extending it from distribution, again, sort of testing and playing around with tools like, I know a lot of other people, but there's some people that are pushing the envelope and it's pretty impressive.
0:01:41.2 Sara Faatz: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. What do you think from an SEO perspective, how do you think that changes as AI becomes more prevalent? As we look at things like Agentic AI and things like that, do you see the way we think about SEO changing?
0:01:54.9 Karen Steele: I do. I mean, there's a school of thought that I've heard several people assert that SEO is going to go away. I don't think that is ever going to be the case. But I think just like AI, I think SEO is going to get smarter. Because if you're prompting questions out there around your buyer persona and your ICP and your value proposition to have better techniques to find those keywords that will resonate, I think that SEO is just going to get smarter in the same way AI is going to get smarter.
0:02:25.6 Sara Faatz: Yeah, absolutely. Within that, I mean, the one kind of red thread through all of that is that humans are still part of that conversation and part of that equation. How do you think about keeping the human in the loop when it comes to your Martech stack and martech technology just in general?
0:02:40.5 Karen Steele: Yeah, I think AI is an enabler and I think the human has to be empowered. So I think it's up to the human to take advantage of the tools to learn as much as they can and be empowered to do more creative thinking and output for greater outcomes with AI. So the human doesn't go away, the human gets more productive. But the human also deploys smarter techniques because of the AI. So I'm really excited. I think that there's a lot of young people coming up in the marketing ranks right now that are, they're growing up with this proliferation of AI that some of us that have been around for a long time, we've seen other, what you call them, innovation trends or technology shifts. We've seen a lot of those over the years and we've adapted. And I think these young people are learning like we've never learned because they're right in the middle of all of it. And I think it's exciting for a whole new skill set in marketing in particular and certainly Martech.
0:03:42.8 Sara Faatz: Taking that topic of going back to the way things were 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Playbooks have changed, right? You know, there have been some conversations around when we think about metrics from a content perspective, people are talking about getting away from visitors to a website and starting to talk about impressions again. Are you seeing that? And are there things, you know, if you think about the 2025 marketing playbook, how do you think it differs from the one even 12 months ago?
0:04:07.9 Karen Steele: I just hosted a panel with some experts in revenue ops and some of the KPIs we talked about and they apply across everything. But it's very, very data centric. Because I think the fundamental problem, and this applies to AI as well as it's sort of bad data in, bad data out.
0:04:23.5 Sara Faatz: Right.
0:04:23.9 Karen Steele: And so I think data quality, data hygiene, overall data integration because we're dealing with so many sources remains a big challenge for companies. So you can only do, you know, smart AI and get great content and great results if you have good data that you're using with, with the AI. Similarly, I think that the KPIs we talked about on that panel, assuming you have some good data coming in, we're looking at, people are still measuring ROI. It matters how much you are spending and how that compares to your customer acquisition costs, for example, people are still looking at pipeline velocity. That's still really, really important. And good old conversion rates. You know, I think there's been a lot of talk about our MQLs going away. Is there a new metric we're measuring? But the simple fact is, you know, even at the board level, we're all still looking at pipeline velocity and conversion. And so whether that' campaign conversion or just channel conversion, which channels are working for me at a given point in time so I can double down. That's all still very central in the mind of revenue ops leaders and they have a big job and that big job is harnessing all that data, making sure that the tools to the extent that they can govern them and put some guardrails around them, which I think is sort of the next chapter for AI. So I think it's a super interesting time for those mavericks in revenue ops teams that are leading that charge on that front.
0:05:53.8 Sara Faatz: So if I am in marketing ops today and I'm trying to figure out how do I leverage AI for my data, whether it's data cleanliness or data hygiene or just how to better understand my data with you, obviously the caveat that the human still has to be in the loop. Are there tools right now that you would recommend or products that you're super excited about from an AI and data perspective?
0:06:15.6 Karen Steele: I think there's some new entrants in the market in sales enablement, for example. You know, I've been looking at a lot of the tools just to help reps kind of manage through this change, the change of ties that that's happening in the selling process. There are tools like Amplify10, who I've done some work with that's 100% AI based sales enablement built on Salesforce. There's tools like SalesHood. Obviously there's a lot of excitement around ChatGPT and now Microsoft's Copilot. I'm hearing a lot of really interesting use cases around Clay. I haven't dabbled enough with that particular AI technology. But what's fun is seeing a whole bunch of different AI workshops and lots of learning forms where you can do more. I just signed up for one in the advertising space. And you think about people that are spending millions of dollars on online advertising and how AI is changing the media plan in a huge way. And so it could, that kind of aligns with the SEO conversation you were having, which is how can you be smarter about how you're deploying those precious SEO, precious advertising dollars? You got to get the data right and somebody has to be the shepherd of that data. Which is where I think marketing ops, sales ops, revenue ops, they hold the keys to the kingdom.
0:07:34.8 Sara Faatz: You know, I think kind of tying all of that back together is that buyer's journey, right? So when you think about all of the things that you just mentioned, one of the things, what we're actually trying to do is be hyper focused, hyper personalized in reaching the buyer where they are as they choose their own adventure, being on that journey with them. Are you seeing changes with the people that you're working with? Are they, is anybody doing anything like really revolutionary in your opinion or even evolutionary that you don't think that maybe other people are thinking about right now?
0:08:03.6 Sara Faatz: Companies like Demandbase, 6sense, LeanData. Obviously I have a history with LeanData. What they're sort of talking about now is the concept of buying groups, which I think ABM took us so far, right? Account based marketing, understanding your accounts, the context within those accounts took us so far. And again, the same philosophy applies bad data in, bad data out. If you didn't have the right data to set up those target accounts, you're not going to have a great ABM program. But now I think with the concept around buying groups and intent data, which there's a whole debate now, should we have ever called it intent data or is it really interest data? And I think that's really interesting. There's some great reports. 6sense is putting out a lot of great reports from Demandbase on this very topic. But buying groups and having, whether you're tracking anonymized contacts coming into your website and then taking interest or intent data, combining those and really building out prospect profiles and trying to map those to buyer groups, I think that's going to be the next sort of frontier of certainly commercial and enterprise selling.
0:09:16.7 Sara Faatz: Yeah. Awesome. That's great. Tell me, you've talked a lot about classes that you're taking and things like that. Where do you normally go for inspiration or information?
0:09:24.8 Karen Steele: I know not everybody has time to invest on LinkedIn, but as a consultant and fractional marker, I've been able to spend more time on LinkedIn and I find that network invaluable. I mean, you really have to spend the time to get to know people and figure out who's really sharing interesting stuff or what communities do you want to be a part of there's things like Pavilion and other marketing communities out there. Exit Five, which is a group that Dave Gerhardt, who's a very well known marketer in this space, he's just looking at, how do I improve everything for marketers? And that's what Exit Five is all about. And Pavilion does... They're looking at the whole GTM practice as does GTM partners. Sangram Vajre. His whole team is doing some great stuff there. So I partner with those folks. I read a lot of their studies. I try and be as well versed as possible on topics that matter to me and then I keep building my network on LinkedIn because I think LinkedIn has got so much good Runway for us to continue to learn in network.
0:10:34.4 Sara Faatz: If you were to have a crystal ball and say you and I are going to have the same conversation a year from now, what do you think we'll be talking about in 12 months?
0:10:41.9 Karen Steele: I think we're going to be talking about the new organizational structure from marketing teams. We haven't seen that shift yet. Yes, there's been in tech, there's been downsizing, but in other vertical markets there's been growth in marketing organizations in [0:10:55.8] ____. But I think as we build our skill with the newer entrants coming into the market from a people perspective, we're going to have, we're going to have different roles. I think we're going to have decidedly different roles in content, in SEO, in demand generation, in media, in kind of all of those channels. So I think the org chart in marketing is going to be different and I think that's one big sort of to do for the the innovative next gen CMO is to look at that, how do I create more value around the CMO function and my team and you're really going to have to look at how you get more value cross functionally to drive revenue because at the end of the day most of us aren't nonprofit organizations. We're in business to, to generate revenue and fulfill our shareholder obligations and make customers happy. So how do we do that and have the right team in place to execute?
0:11:51.9 Sara Faatz: That's fantastic. Really great insight. One last question. What is your marketing hot take right now?
0:11:57.0 Karen Steele: It's the people aspect and kind of changing the game for our people and sort of transforming the role of marketing. I think that's one and the flip side of that is the customer advocacy, customer loyalty, getting closer to the customer, loving the customer, creating the best relationship you can with the customer. And I don't think they're disconnected. I think the people and the team to do that and the investment in customer strategies is. That's my hot take because I don't think we survive in a very competitive landscape without putting the customers in the driver's seat. Everything is about the customer. Technology is secondary.
0:12:36.7 Sara Faatz: Great insight. Thank you so much, Karen. This has been wonderful. I really enjoyed talking to you today.
0:12:41.1 Karen Steele: Likewise, Sara. Thanks for the opportunity.
0:12:44.0 Sara Faatz: Listeners, thanks for tuning in. Make sure you like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I'm Sara Faatz and this is 10 Minute MarTech.