Disney+ to AI Marketing Powerhouse: B2C Storytelling Lessons That Will Disrupt B2B ft. Swati Paliwal
Swati Paliwal
Swati Paliwal's transition from the highly structured, massive-scale world of B2C streaming (Disney+ Hotstar) to B2B SaaS (Sprout AI) reveals that B2B marketing has a lot to learn from consumer brands. While B2B focuses heavily on strict playbooks and acronyms like ACV and ARR, B2C prioritizes deep product engagement metrics like DAU and MAU, emphasizing that active users are the true indicators of product viability. A major shift happening in Go-To-Market is the transition to "inbound-led outbound." Instead of cold calling with zero brand awareness, marketing warms up the ecosystem by capturing engagement signals—website visits, LinkedIn interactions, and content downloads—creating a primed audience for sales. This drastically improves demo conversion rates and bridges the classic divide between marketing and sales by shifting the focus from "fighting over lead attribution" to "starting meaningful conversations." Furthermore, the rise of AI is completely changing how buyers search. With "zero-click marketing" becoming the norm, brands no longer just compete for Google page one; they must compete to be cited by LLMs like Perplexity and ChatGPT. Swati recommends deploying a "team of LLMs"—using Perplexity for search, Claude for analysis, and GPT for creation—to validate insights and capture mindshare in an era where AI offers abundance but attention remains scarce.
Discussed in this episode
- How tracking B2C product engagement metrics like MAU and DAU can help B2B SaaS companies identify and fix early churn.
- Why the pace of executing marketing campaigns in an AI-native startup drastically differs from a corporate giant like Disney.
- How the shift to zero-click AI search means marketers must optimize content to capture the attention of LLMs, not just users.
- The strategy of using a team of LLMs where Perplexity handles search, Claude analyzes data, and ChatGPT writes the content.
- Why most viral branded content isn't organic but actually backed by significant strategic planning and monetary investment.
- The mechanics of inbound-led outbound, where sales reps prioritize outreach to accounts that marketing has already warmed up.
- How changing internal terminology from tracking leads to measuring conversations improves alignment between sales and marketing.
- Why relying too heavily on rigid, gated content playbooks limits B2B marketers when selling to diverse SMB and mid-market buyers.
Episode highlights
- — Welcome and introduction to Swati Paliwal
- — Transitioning from B2C media to B2B SaaS
- — Why B2B needs to care about MAU and DAU
- — The difference in marketing pace at startups vs Disney
- — Adapting to zero-click marketing and AI search
- — Using a team of LLMs to prevent AI hallucinations
- — The reality behind viral branded content
- — Executing inbound-led outbound sales motions
- — Redefining KPIs to align sales and marketing
- — Rapid fire: career advice and trends to kill
Key takeaways
- Borrow B2C metrics like MAU to truly understand product viability and reduce churn.
- Optimize content for LLMs to win the new era of zero-click search.
- Use multiple AI models to cross-check outputs and avoid AI confirmation bias.
- Adopt inbound-led outbound to ensure sales reps call warmed-up, engaged accounts.
- Stop clinging to rigid playbooks and focus on generating actual human conversations.
Transcript
Welcome back to another episode of The Bridge the Gap podcast powered by none other than Revenue Reimagined. Today's guest is Swati Paliwal, who is the head of marketing at Sprout AI and a force in the intersection of media, tech, and modern go-to market. She's led campaigns for Disney Plus Hotstar, scaled digital growth at MX Player and Flipkart. And now, she's helping AI native startups rethink how they tell stories, build demand, and win attention in a world of infinite content.
Hint, we're going to talk about what works in B2C that likely will work even better in B2B. So if you're trying to blend art and science, logic and emotion, brand and behavior, she's done it across all industries, and now she's going to show us what GTM storytelling actually should look like. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Adam.
I'm I'm feeling kind of a slight pressure there. I mean, you gave such an amazing introduction. I don't know if I can do justice to the to what you ask me, but I'll try my best. Listen, the the bar on the show when you have Dale and I as the host is really low.
So if if you can level up Dale, which is not hard, you've already won. I totally agree. I totally agree. So, let's jump right into it.
From streaming to sprouts AI and doing this with marketing without a script. So, um, you didn't come up through traditional SAS. You came up through media, content, storytelling, which, by the way, I believe is way underrated and is the next evolution that we're coming, not even from marketing, but also from sales. So, what pulled you into go to market from your storytelling world?
Right. I think I think it was the people. So, working with Karan, Karan is the founder for sprouts and I have worked with Karan in the past and I was heading marketing for a TVF, which again, Karan was the CEO of, and we built a product there. Then during my Disney stint also, I happened to interact with Karan, and when he built this company, he wanted me to head marketing.
So it was pretty simple. It is, it wasn't about what I'm doing, more so about the people that I'm building this with, and that's what it boiled down to, and the team that we built together at sprouts was absolutely wonderful, people that we'd worked in the past with and who could understand that vision. So, and I think Karan's thought, my thought also here was this, that anybody who can, who's thinking of GTM is thinking of GTM in a very B2B SAS structured way, which is thinking emails, thinking data, thinking ABM. And, uh, here we are, uh, he said that, I want you to bring in that storytelling, video, experience, that, the way you're structuring for product, because it's any way's product.
It's content, but it's product at the end of the day that we are working on. So I was heading, uh, the P&L for three geographies per se for Disney Hotstar, which was, um, Canada, Singapore, and UK. And, uh, so the entire P&L responsibility was there. So the product was definitely a part of the marketing piece.
So, hence, the rift happened. Like I said, it was more people-driven rather than thinking what I'm going to do. I was lost in the starting honestly with all the abbreviations. It took me some time to get used to the abbreviations because, uh, you know, there we are like, uh, MAU and DAU, which is DAU and MAU, monthly active users.
And here suddenly AR, and MR. So, it's it's a, it's a shift. Uh, we do have similar terminologies, but there were certain different ones as well. And, uh, yeah, it took some time.
That that is very interesting. You know, like monthly active users, um, I think it's lost in B2B. So, if you are have, like, even if you're in the B2B space, monthly active users are very important for the viability of your product or service. So, I think bringing that in cross-functionally from a B2C world makes a lot of sense.
And and if you have like a cheat sheet of like all those terminologies for Adam, he'd really appreciate it. Yes. I mean I did, I did start that with Adam. that's not nice.
I, I know what MAU and DAU is. I think a lot of B2B SAS companies, um, get it wrong by not looking at that. It's like, oh, we build this product, we sign up this customer. That's great.
Do they use it? Are they logging into it? What are they using? Maybe you look at that and you can fix some of your churn problem.
Yes. I think product engagement is a big thing in B2C and it's very, very important for us. And it's, product engagement is is tagged to the extent of days of usage and how many times a day you're using the product. I mean that's how deep we go into it.
But when it, I don't think B2B is missing the beat there, but the GTM motion, if it's PLG or if it's sales led, that's how you structure it. So if it's more PLG, I think you do look at these matrix. Otherwise, it's just not viable. However, when the motion is more sales led, uh, the ACVs are higher.
Now, that was a new one, ACV, because we have very fixed pricing when it comes to B2C product. So, yeah, if the ACVs are bigger, if if you're targeting mid-market enterprise clients, the sales cycles are different. So hence, the matrix are very spread across the board because of a varying ACV and that's the, that was the difference. But yeah, now I'm kind of comfortable with the with the whole abbreviations, but that was a big change for me, the metrics, the KPIs.
They measure the similar things, but we are looking at it in a in a different way. But in B2C, you guys are probably gathering data a lot more precisely. I think in B2B, one of the biggest challenges that they have is not not being able to gather that data precisely enough, especially in the startup world. So, um, one of the things that I'm curious about was what was the most unexpected part for you stepping into an early-stage tech company from a marketing perspective?
Yeah, I think, um, coming from the Hotstar marketing ecosystem, wherein everything is very structured and the the pace, I think the pace was the most important thing. Uh, the pace at which we were doing things in in Disney was was very long. I mean, I used to plan for months and then the final thing used to happen after six months. But the pace here is Yeah, and the pace here was really fast, and I think with AI, the pace is getting crazier.
Uh, because you can just And I think that was your post, that's what you wrote about Adam the other day. And when you talked about that, how quickly you can deploy solutions, you don't have to wait for, uh, you know, to activate your certain accounts. I mean, you can you can at least test theories. And pace was one of the most, uh, different things.
Uh, another thing was, while building the product, when you're building a product, a startup product, you're you're more concerned about how users are like, user experience. And the metrics that matter is that whether we are able to give the end result to the user. However, working with Disney Hotstar, we were, we were like you said, we were tracking a lot of engagement metrics within the product, which is not a product priority when you're building, uh, in a startup ecosystem. So that was very difficult for me to get used to because for me, marketing meant data, it meant oh, how many people came in.
Not just sign ups, why are we stopping at sign ups? What activity have they done? Uh, how what how how deeply are they using the product. So I think it took us some time to get there.
And, uh, but these are the kind of insights if we pump into the data, we'll be able to better understand our users and target better with with more insights, uh, around our users. So I think the insights thing is super interesting, right? And I think that ties into, you know, in order to get those insights, you have to be able to capture attention. Um, and, and, and I want to call this kind of like, AI isn't the threat, it's the test, right?
So you've written that AI is making everything abundant except attention. What does that actually mean in practice? Um, so actually, the thing is that see, volume is, it's easier to get volume out of AI, but how do you really get So, when if we talk about content, this statement is absolutely correct that this is abundance of content, but human behavior itself is changing. So, I don't know if I'm answering your question correctly, but the way we are doing So just to give you an example of change in human behavior is the way we are doing search.
Now, just a year or two years like from today, like two years back, or a year back, when we searched, we scan through links. We opened links a new tabs. We scan through those pages. We build up an answer in our heads, and then we felt good or bad about that answer.
I don't know if we searched again, or we went to the next page of Google. That's how we searched. Now, marketing or GTM has to evolve with consumer behavior, and that's how I look at it inherently. Now, just taking this example, now, the way we are searching is completely different.
Now, we put in a question, we have the answer. All of that exercise and activity that went into getting that answer is zero because of AI, right? Now, looking at it from a marketer's perspective, brand becomes important. We are already seeing a seeing this shift to zero-click marketing happening, and a lot of brands are seeing their traffic go down because earlier the blog used to answer that question.
Now, the answer is given by AI. The question is, was your blog answering cited for that answer or not, so that eventually when the user is ready, okay, now I want to look at the products, or I want to test them out, then your name comes up. So, the game has completely it's changed. You don't get the you you need to catch LLM's attention, rather than the user attention when it comes to content, and that's how I look at it.
So I I think go ahead. I was going to say, but are we going into a place where the AI is giving false-positive reinforcement to people? So, what I mean by that is, they're giving you what you think you want to hear, and people are taking that as like gospel versus like thinking what's the next question? Did I really ask the right question?
Because you're only getting the answer to maybe a shitty question. Maybe you ask a bad question and you're getting a bad answer. So, I'm curious your perspective on that, um, is there AI bias happening in the answers that are being received? 100%.
I completely and 100% agree with that. And there was a recent research which said that the answer that you get from AI today, uh, say, for example, you you get AI to write a blog post for you. And maybe you wrote a blog post two years back without AI, right? And this one that you got from AI is 10 times shittier than what you did without AI, you are as a human being more happy with the result that you receive from AI.
And that answers your question, Dale, that it's basically the human it's magical. It's like I feel I have something I I I'm saying something and it's happening. It feels magical. But when you check into it, when you when you check yourself, and that's how we need to train ourselves to use AI better.
Because when you when you get into asking it next set of questions, next set of questions, reprompt, um, keep ask AI itself to validate its results, you get better results. And the solution that I have for the same is, I do not depend upon a single LLM. So, what I teach also, when I what I teach also, when you when I talk to students or or anyone who wants to learn how to like do AI and marketing, perplexity, GPT, and Claude. Like a combination of the three of them, running each their answers, getting the one LLM to check the other LLM's answer so that it's like a team of LLMs keeping a check on each other's answers.
That's what solves for that problem that you talked about. And that's what I would tell all marketers to do. Yeah, I I there's so many who rely on one source and then the hallucinations come through, and you're not validating, and like, it's it's taken me time even to realize like certain LLMs, certain models are just better at other things than others, right? Like, know what model is great for what.
What, um, in the AI world now, what signals tell you that a content play is working versus something just happened to go viral? Um, so virality, virality has too many angles to it. I mean, uh, the just it just needs to connect with people, and plus, it's it's a very algorithm algorithm play is also very, very important. How much of story-driven it is?
And the thing is, the kind of content also that picks up and goes viral is is not something which, how how frequently have we seen, uh, branded content really get picked up and go viral? There's a lot of push that happens behind it. So, media content definitely goes viral, uh, entertainment content. But there's there's a there's a huge amount of money that goes into it.
Like I was telling someone that, you know, you see these songs come up top of the charts. Most of these songs have, um, I mean, hundreds and thousands of, uh, dollars pumped into it and activations happening across meme pages, across Insta handles, across TikTok handles. And the amount of effort is is actually insanely crazy. So, it's not what we see might just not be viral if it's branded, there's a lot of thought structure and money spent there as well, so it's not purely organic.
Uh, however, when I say content, now when I look at content and if I talk in B2B context, when I talk about textual content particularly, I have started analyzing what content is getting cited by perplexity, uh, by ChatGPT, when it's pulling together that answer. And then I run a deep analysis in Claude, because, okay, that's how I structure my LLMs. Perplexity great for search, it's it's like kind of like hitting directly at Google and crazy amazing results, which perplexity labs have really done a way better job. And Claude is simply amazing at analysis, GPT doesn't even match the analysis that I can run at Claude.
So, Claude then I utilize for analyzing those those links and telling me why this link is different and why this one is not. But GPT again is great at content writing and creation. So, all of this research when it flows into GPT then, so we have a whole playbook, uh, that that we utilize to get content out. And then that content getting distributed is important.
So, once you've written a great piece of content, it's not okay to just sit there with with hosting it on your website, making sure if you can get the correct back links from sources which are getting cited today in LLMs, in Google AI mode, that's equally important. And that might again is is not completely organic, there's an inorganic element of pumping in money there and buying those uh links. But the content needs to be relevant if you need to be cited in the right sources. Yeah, that's I love it.
it'll be it'll be it's a whole different mindset, sorry, Dale. Well, and it'll be very interesting because it's it's similar to what's happening with all SEO, right? Because it's not about being found on the web, it is for certain people, but there's a whole new world about being found in an LLM. Like you were saying earlier, you ask a question, you go to get an answer.
If you're asking a question about a certain product or feature or whatever, you want to be found as part of that LLM. So it'll be interesting to see how Google plays into this space with Gemini because they do have the advertising background in the back of it, where some of the other LLMs don't. However, not a lot of people use Gemini as opposed to, like you're talking about, perplexity and and Claude and and GPT. Um, let's let's move a little bit into GTM strategy.
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Marketing would basically take care of all the different channels. I mean, like I think channel ownership is what something that uh we started looking at. There's obviously email as a channel. And why I said, I'm saying channel, because in B that's what I brought with me, that's the baggage that I brought with me from B2C as well, because channels are very important.
How much are you investing into a particular channel? So, email, it's demand-gen email, outbound. Uh, that was one big channel for us, but we started developing inbound as well. Now, within inbound, again, there were different channels.
There were social, there was this this this LinkedIn uh, LinkedIn Live ecosystem that we created. Um, then we wanted to do community as well, wherein we started uh getting active, uh, in existing B2B SAS community like Pavilion is there, Rep Genius is there. There are quite a few good ones. So, uh, there were different channels and within those channels, then we had certain plays that we kind of activated.
We experimented with some, some worked for us. Like LinkedIn thought leadership was also another one that we experimented with. So, yeah, I mean, I brought in the channel piece. LinkedIn Live is something we we do LinkedIn Live at sprouts.
That is a great inbound channel for us. And outbound remains one of the best channels that it works for us in demand-gen because inherently we are a product, uh, which basically gives you insights on your data. And over time we realized that data is super dirty, super unclean in terms of, uh, how you're saving it. Like, you know, when we plugged in CRMs, when we started plugging in Salesforce for a particular client, and to enrich the data, the amount of data overlap was insane in terms of what they had saved in Salesforce and what the new data said, uh, in terms of the updated email ID, whether the person's still in the company or not, and even other signals.
So, signals, so this is this is what we built into our product, wherein account level and contact level you get, um, signals enriched on accounts as well as contacts, and then you can do your outbound in a very structured way, uh, in in a way that it's inbound led outbound. I think that's the word that's that's the term that, uh, our B2B's founder, he coined inbound led outbound. So I would quote him on that, but that's precisely what we are we are we've solved for, uh, in sprouts. And that channel works best for us.
So when you I I love inbound led outbound. I think Adam Robinson was spot on with that. Um, we talk about that all the time. I think in today's market, and Dale, you were saying this just the other day, I think with one of our new clients, like we could hire all the great sales reps in the world, build the best emails, the best call scripts, put them on the phone and tell them to go dial.
If you have no brand awareness, no signals, no one knows who you are, it's literally like me calling you out of it is, it's me calling you out of the blue to sell you something that may or may not be relevant, and you who the heck are you? Um, so if you could shift that and build that awareness and create this inbound led, then you outbound, um, that is where I think go to market and and marketing is going now. So we went a step ahead. I mean, I just would like to add something there.
What we realized Yes. So we were doing we we started with pure outbound, and I said that I do feel that there is a certain overlap. So now attribution is something that I feel is is instead of like solving for for a problem in, and that that I realized while talking to a lot of our customers as well, it becomes an inherent thing between marketing, sales, and demand-gen team, wherein you're you're all fighting for that attribution to of that particular lead going to one particular person. So instead of that, we kind of, uh, put in a system wherein, uh, we were doing a lot of marketing led outbound also.
As in, uh, there was this inbound we we could uh we could scrape website visitors to our website, and we could actually see who's visiting our website, and to them we were sending out playbooks, content, we were sending out, uh, invites to our LinkedIn Lives, we were even inviting a couple of folks we felt who had a great fit and who could come onto our Lives. And then then when the outbound was happening, we saw a direct overlap. So, we saw that at least 60% of our leads have had or the accounts have had some engagement with the marketing ecosystem. Now, this is the ones that we we could really tap into and target.
I mean, these are the folks who probably at least filled up a form, or interacted engaged with us on LinkedIn. We were regularly scraping our LinkedIn engagement. We were scraping the LinkedIn engagement of our leadership team, founders. So, hence, we were doing all of that to just to understand the overlap, and the overlap was huge.
And that's when we started working on playbooks wherein we were not selling in the in that first email, we were doing a warm-up to our ecosystem, and then picking up We had any way's had the data. We could we could pick up the phone anytime. But when we saw warm-up happening, uh, and a lead somebody opening the email at least, coming to our website and seeing that kind of traction, and then the outbound happening on them, like the outbound team hitting them with with the calling, outbound calling, the results were were better with them coming on to the demo calls. They had done their research and now they were comfortable with sprout's ecosystem kind of, you know, talking to them essentially.
Yeah, it's it's very interesting. What's um, I I'm very curious because you come from the B2C world. Um, how how would how do you build alignment with sales and marketing without falling into like all the clichés like, oh, we just have to collaborate together. Like what's what's like the the the tie-in, especially from a B2C perspective?
Um, all right. I think, uh, how the leadership is looking at KPIs, that's what it eventually does boil down to. So, I think a difference, a difference in KPIs, if we are all chasing the same KPI of how many demo calls happened, how many how much revenue did we book, then it gets really difficult because then there is that fight for whether I get, uh, you know, like a say in this lead. And in B2C, the attribution was never one.
So, it was always percentage attribution to any lead. And that's that was what B2C cracked down on. I mean, uh, I could we could like there was first touch, there was last touch, there was there was how many touches that had happened, and there were platforms. We used, uh, Tableau, we used Looker.
We had multiple analytics, heavy analytics ecosystems telling us everything that happened around this one particular individual and the journey they went through. So, essentially, every time they came to the website directly, that was given to brand. And there was a huge heavy brand spend that happens in B2C. Uh, B2B also does brand spend, but it's more event led, it's it's more it's very differently structured, the brand spend.
Whereas for B2C, it's it's very common for B2C brands to go like pick up a billboard, uh, do TV ads, right? It's it's it's So there has to be some attribution there as well. So, any direct traffic, even online, used to go to brand. Then there was ads, then there was different kinds of ads.
So, the journey was mapped to an extent that the percentage allocation was pretty much to the T or 10% this much, 20% this much. And then we used to decide on a model. So, you had to as a company decide on whether it's first touch which gets 50% attribution, or last touch which gets, uh, 50%. So one major attribution was given to either first touch or last touch, and then the attribution was divided across the different channels the individual has interacted with.
And that's how detailed it was. Now, when we do that here, uh, I think it's it we can still build it for bigger companies when you have that money to spend on to analytics, and even have to build events within the product, because then the product, PLG, it it has to be PLG. If it's sales led, it again gets difficult because there's manual intervention there. However, if if we give like an equal amount of weightage to what, uh, I mean, uh, which lead has come in through which channel, if there's been some interaction, and that's how we started seeing it.
So, we started giving the top of the funnel metric, like impressions, at least inbound. Impressions, website traffic, uh, leads coming in, downloads happening, engagement happening across the ecosystem, because it became it it is a lot about conversations that we are doing and less about leads. So, we started changing the internal terminology from leads to conversations. How many conversations are we doing?
And these conversations can be around the LinkedIn Lives that we are doing, around the events that we are attending, all of those things. So, these conversations marketing, there was a lot of manual effort honestly that went into it initially to making sure that we are scraping these conversations digitally from LinkedIn, and recording them as much as we can if we are going in attending events. And then these conversations then turning into actual demos. And when it came to demos, together there was a combined this thing between sales and marketing, which kind of led that piece.
And at the end of the day, I think it boils down to people, going back to my very first thing, why I joined the sprouts ecosystem. It's not about let's collaborate. I do you believe in each other enough that both of you are all three of you are all the five of you are doing everything that it takes to kind of get that lead to convert. If that belief and faith is there, I feel that it doesn't really matter.
Because then there is that trust, and you have your different core KPIs, and you have shared KPIs as well. So, like, yeah. That that is something I think people don't understand enough. There are shared KPIs, and you have your own core KPIs.
It's not just these are the four KPIs. So, let me let me ask you something. So, there's a lot of GTM teams that are in what we'll gently call transition. Um, you've seen all sorts of different organizations throughout your marketing, you know, experience.
What's the very first conversation marketing should have with the CEO? Not with sales, but with the CEO. Where does it start? What's the CEO's core vision?
I mean, and delve deeper from it like you're talking to an LLM, keep asking more questions. What's your core vision? The core vision is, oh, I want $100 million ARR. How do we reach there?
What do we do? Okay. If it's if it's I want the best product, which which kind of gets wins the product of the year award in this case, or changing the way the thing that are happening, Yeah. And and you know, like I I think that's that's what marketing needs to, and that's what we miss.
I mean, everyone says, hey, I can do this, I can do that, but no, it doesn't matter because you want what's best for the company. The KPIs remain the same. But how do you structure the KPIs? How do you prioritize resources?
Because resources are not limitless. Is once you understand the founder's and the CEO's vision, and how he is thinking about it, and they'll come a point wherein he will tell you that, that's what I have hired you for. And that's when you stop. You're like, oh, I can take it up from there.
I could have taken it up from the from the very first question that what should be the objective be. But I would want the answers as much as I can and get him to a point wherein he tells me that now I now I am the I'm the driver. So go go what's the vision, going deep, tell me more. And then what signals tell you whether it's it's B2C or B2B, what signals tell you that a brand is trying to fake strategy just by throwing money at it?
If the product doesn't match up to the promise. I love that. Yeah. We've all been there and done that, haven't we, Dale?
Yes. More than I've like to admit. Yeah, a little a little bit of vaporware. Swati, when when as you switched over to B2B, like, what's what would you say is like the most common mistake you see B2B marketers making that would never fly in the B2C world?
Um, I feel Okay. I mean, mistake that B2B marketers make. Uh, I think it's in the in the in the whole gamut of scripts and, uh, you know, like pain points. It's it's become too playbooky structured.
I feel that B2B is so, marketers as such are so used to the concept of playbooks. And by and we were doing playbooks, I realized when I when I started talking with a lot of markets in B2B. Playbooks, playbooks, we do, this playbook, download the playbook. And it's like, you're so married to that one playbook.
It's great you've created a process and a playbook around it. But I feel sometimes we are too married to that process, and we are not changing it on the go. Because B2C, you're dealing with such volume of people, and people are unique and different, and the ICP is not that, uh, targeted. It is targeted, but it's not insanely targeted like having an account list and only these are the companies that I can sell to.
Which also and in that case playbook can be structured in a great way because it's a targeted, dedicated account list you're targeting. And that comes to an enterprise sales play. And that's very different. But in general, a similar enterprise sales play where you have this whole account list and only these many accounts can I target, it doesn't work that that way when you're targeting SMB, uh, mid-market, and startup segments as your end customers.
Then you play the people game. Then the playbooks need to change. Then the playbooks need to be more free and be able to breathe. So, uh, I think that was because I I myself probably tried to change a lot of bringing a lot of change to the playbooks that we had initially.
And, uh, yeah, that breathing space really helps. And now with AI, adding on to what you said initially, we can do so much more, so much more experimentation. So, I think that's that's what is needed. Love that.
That's really good. Okay, Swati. How about we wrap this up a little bit? So much there are so many differences.
How about we do some rapid fire as we uh, as we wrap up here, come into the the final stretch. Ten words or less for each of these. Um, what's one piece of advice, what's one piece of career advice you wish more women heard in tech today? Don't get be afraid to ask questions.
No question is stupid. I love that. Swati, what's one marketing trend that you're just over? Like it just needs to go away.
Download this playbook. Comment. Download. Sorry.
Comment below and I'll send you this free playbook that's going to get you $15 million in revenue. You just have to comment hello and I'm going to give it away for free. Yes. Just just drop me a like.
fake engagement, fake engagement. Tell me about it. Yeah. Uh, who's a marketer or GTM thinker more people should be learning from?
Hmm. Um, I think I would say, uh, Jason Lemkin, I follow his content. He's really good. And, uh, recently, uh, I've also started, uh, I mean, there are quite quite a few people out there.
Like I I quoted Adam Robinson. I mean, he talked about inbound led outbound. But then he he also went, I mean, I had to take a smaller answer. But yeah, if I have to take one, Jason Lemkin, uh, his his posts I really like.
But there there are quite a few out there. And everyone who's doing built in public on LinkedIn, I I like to follow their content, uh, because sometimes, uh, they give real good insights on to how they cracked something on their product. So, Yeah. Yeah.
That's that's become a trend I'm shocked and never thought I would see. The whole building in public. What's uh, what's one mistake you made early in your career that still stings? That when you look back at it, you're like, oh, that one still hurts.
Uh, leaving, um, so when so Flipkart in India was was the exact replica of Amazon when Amazon wasn't there in the country. And I was building an app building the Flipkart app. So, I was in the app ecosystem, uh, when we were launching apps way back in 2014, and that's when I did a career switch. And I think that was that was something that had I stayed there, my my career journey and track would have been very different.
That's yeah. Okay. Let's wrap this up a little bit. What's your dream vacation destination?
Dream vacation destination, Bora Bora. Bora Bora. Nice. Have you been?
No, of course not. That's like that's like dream. No, listen, there there are places that you could have been that were so good that that's where you always want to go back to. Adam says he'll send you.
Yeah, I would also go to I would also love to visit New Zealand again. But I think I have I I need to tick off Bora Bora first before I visit any other country again. Yeah. That's that's a dream destination that I'm I will definitely go to one day.
I I love it. Swati, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for sharing your knowledge for chatting about the differences in B2C and B2B and how if you really want to level up your B2B marketing, maybe you just take a play out of the B2C playbook. Why not?
A lot of stuff there. Thank you for the show. We appreciate it.