Explore every episode of the podcast Demand Decoded: Demand Generation & Business Growth

When private equity buys your business, everything about your go-to-market has to change, and most marketing and sales leaders aren't ready for it. In this episode, Dan is joined by Josh, who brings hands-on experience from both sides of PE deals, to break down what a private equity-backed GTM transformation actually looks like once the deal closes.

They explain why recurring revenue suddenly becomes the only metric that matters, how CAC payback period reveals whether your go-to-market model is capital efficient, and why marketing needs to hold the line when finance tries to force attribution into a simple formula. They also cover why disconnected marketing and sales systems put your job at risk during due diligence, and why over-investing in Google Ads because it's "measurable" often leads to bad decisions.

If you work in marketing or sales at a PE-backed B2B company, or think you might be acquired soon, this is a practical look at the mandate you'll be operating under, the metrics your board will actually care about, and how to prepare before the pressure hits. 

Essential listening for anyone navigating go-to-market under private equity ownership.

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Most B2B marketers are still guessing when it comes to AI search. Some are pouring effort into listicles that never get cited. Others don't realise that promoting bigger competitors in "best of" lists can push their own brand out of the answer entirely.

In this episode, Dan and Phil unpack how large language models actually retrieve information, including the "fan out" process that determines what gets cited and what gets ignored. They break down real examples from Blend and its clients, covering listicles, pillar pages, PPC landing pages, and product-led blog content, showing exactly which structures are earning citations right now and why saturation levels change the right approach for different markets. They also cover how to measure AEO properly, and why YouTube is fast becoming a critical citation source.

Essential listening for any B2B marketer trying to move beyond guesswork and build an AEO strategy backed by evidence, not assumption.

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Pipeline not moving? Most marketers reach straight for the campaign, blaming channels, budgets, or creative. Dan argues that's almost never where the real problem sits.

In this solo episode, Dan runs through a five point diagnostic for working out why demand generation isn't converting into pipeline, checking each stage in the order a buyer actually experiences it rather than jumping to tactics. The five checks cover product market fit, the inseparable trio of positioning, messaging and audience, mental availability and multi channel distribution, website conversion, and the handoff from marketing to sales. Along the way, he shares a real example from Blend's own LinkedIn ads strategy and a case study showing how fixing the sales handoff lifted lead to conversation rates by 50%.

Essential listening for any B2B marketer staring at underwhelming pipeline numbers and instinctively blaming the wrong thing.

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We're resharing this episode of Demand Decoded because we think it's worth watching again.

Looking to improve demand generation in your business, but not sure where to start? 

In this episode of Demand Decoded, we strip things back to basics and explore a comprehensive approach to enhancing demand generation across all stages of the buyer journey.

From initial demand creation to final conversion, tune in for practical, actionable advice on improving demand gen.  

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Positioning is the most overlooked fundamental in B2B marketing, and it's the one thing everything else depends on. Get it wrong and no channel, campaign or piece of content can compensate. Get it right and the rest of your marketing engine runs far more efficiently.

Dan and Phil sit down with Anthony Pierri, co-founder of Fletch, the positioning and messaging consultancy that's worked with close to 600 B2B companies, to unpack why positioning is so hard to get right and so easy to overlook. Anthony shares the simple test he uses to spot weak messaging (would a competitor claim the same thing?), the three legitimate strategies for category positioning, and why having six "ideal" customer profiles defeats the point of the word ideal. He also explains how large language models now read and rank your messaging, and why clarity matters more than ever in an AI-first search world.

Essential listening for any marketing leader who suspects positioning is the thing holding everything else back.

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Most B2B marketing teams pour their budget into new logo acquisition while ignoring the growth channel already sitting inside their business: their existing customers. Sentiment gets reduced to a single NPS score sent to the wrong person, and by the time an account looks at risk, it's often too late.

In this episode, Dan and Josh unpack why customer sentiment needs to be measured continuously, across every stakeholder, not just the day to day contact. They explore how first party signals (usage, tickets, engagement) and third party intent data (hierarchy changes, layoffs, competitor research) combine to reveal churn risk and expansion opportunities long before they surface in a renewal call. They also get into why unnamed case studies do nothing for credibility, and how building authentic, mutually valuable advocacy programmes turns happy customers into your most powerful marketing asset.

Essential listening for anyone building a customer marketing or customer success strategy that's about more than ticking a box.

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At the start of the year we made three bold predictions about the channels that would define B2B marketing in 2026. Now it's time to mark our own homework.

Dan and Phil react to their 2026 predictions on events, YouTube and AI search, checking what actually played out against what they called back then. They discuss why small, curated dinners are outperforming big exhibitions, why YouTube is driving volume but not always the right buyers, and why AI search looks set to overtake Google for high intent leads within the month. They also share the tactical shift needed as listicle content becomes saturated, plus how they're using HubSpot and Claude together to prove which content is genuinely influencing buyers.

Essential listening for any B2B marketer who wants an honest gut check on which predictions are holding up, and which need rethinking.

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Traffic is collapsing across B2B. Some brands are down 50 to 60% year on year, yet pipeline and revenue keep climbing regardless. If your dashboard still treats traffic as the leading indicator of success, you're tracking the wrong thing, and you're far from the only one getting this wrong.

In part one of this mini-series, Dan and Josh tear through the chaos list: why answer engine optimisation has gone from nice-to-have to non-negotiable, why the old lead waterfall no longer holds up, and why long-form video and podcasts are now doing the discovery work blogs used to. They also tackle the conversation most CMOs are avoiding: disconnected systems between marketing, sales and customer success that leave leadership flying blind on revenue, and why net new logos can't be the only number that matters anymore.

Essential listening for anyone in B2B marketing leadership trying to work out what's actually broken in their go-to-market, and what to fix first.

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Every B2B marketer is being told ChatGPT ads are the next big channel, but almost nobody's actually run them. There are no keywords, no search volume data, and no way to see what buyers are typing into the chat that triggers your ad. So how do you target, and how do you know it's working?

In this solo episode, Dan shares Blend's real testing data from months of running ChatGPT ads, covering the campaign structure, the shift from keywords to context hints, and why the simplest, most literal ad copy is consistently outperforming anything clever. He breaks down real cost-per-click figures against Google Ads, the platform's biggest current weakness, and why conversions are still lagging behind other channels despite promising click-through rates.

Essential listening for any B2B marketer with test budget to spend and a reason to get ahead of a channel that's about to become unavoidable.

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Your sales team could be pitching your competitor's narrative right now, and they wouldn't even know it. That's the risk hiding inside AI adoption. As more of your business relies on ChatGPT and Claude to write proposals, RFPs and content, without any shared context or governance, the gap between what's true about your brand and what's actually being published grows wider every day.

In this episode, recorded live on LinkedIn, Dan and Josh break down exactly how to fix this. They unpack the data behind the problem (63% of B2B marketers say AI is increasing noise, not differentiation) and explain why cloud projects and custom GPTs only patch the issue rather than solve it. Then they demo Blend Core, a governed knowledge base that plugs your ICPs, tone of voice, case studies and convictions straight into any AI tool, so every output stays consistent, on-brand and actually sounds like you.

Essential listening for any marketing or sales leader scaling AI usage without a governance plan in place.

Want to see how BlendCore keeps your brand's voice consistent everywhere your team uses AI? Find out more: blendb2b.com/blendcore

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Most B2B marketers think persuasion is instinct. It isn't. It's psychology, and most brands are getting it wrong without realising why their messaging falls flat while competitors' sticks.

In this episode, Dan sits down with Phill Agnew, host of Nudge, to unpack the behavioural science principles hiding behind some of the biggest marketing wins in history. They cover why Zoom beat GoToMeeting by saying less, not more (the goal dilution effect), why Apple never mentioned megabytes and instead sold "1,000 songs in your pocket" (concrete phrases), and why anchoring a scary price before the real one makes buyers say yes. They also dig into the human-to-human connection principle: why Banksy hides behind anonymity, why Lush sticks employee names on products, and what that means for faceless B2B brands trying to build trust.

Essential listening for any B2B marketer who wants their messaging to actually stick, not just sound clever.

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Most B2B businesses are unknowingly marketing for their competitors. They invest in content that educates the market, builds awareness of a problem, and creates real demand, then watch the majority of that demand flow straight to the category leaders already occupying the most mindshare. This is the duplication of purchase law in action, and it's costing businesses far more budget than they realise. 

In this episode, Dan and Amanda break down why this happens and what to do about it. They explore the trap of leading with the problem rather than your answer to it, how to define a value proposition that is genuinely yours rather than the sum of your parts, and why partner marketing amplifies this risk more than almost any other channel. They also dig into category-aware versus category-unaware audiences, the role of authentic personal brand in cutting through, and why clarity of positioning is the single biggest unlock for most B2B teams. 

Essential listening for any marketer or business leader who suspects their campaigns are doing more for the competition than for their own pipeline. 

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Most B2B teams buying intent data are either over-trusting it or barely using it at all. They're treating weak signals as buying intent, spamming entire lists off the back of a topic search, and wondering why response rates look like cold outbound. The tool isn't the problem, the way it's being operationalised is. 

In this episode, Dan and Phil cut through the vendor hype and get into what intent data can and can't actually tell you. They cover first party versus third party intent, the right way to build LinkedIn audiences from intent signals, using company news triggers that map to real buying moments, intent-triggered account reactivation, and how AI prospecting agents are changing the outbound motion, without removing the need for a decent offer. 

Essential listening for any B2B marketer or revenue team trying to get real return from their intent data investment, not just a more expensive cold list. 

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Most B2B businesses are still hiring and structuring their teams the way they did a decade ago, more headcount to hit more targets, more layers between marketing, sales, and customer success. That model is already breaking. 

In this episode, Dan and Josh map out what the GTM organisation actually looks like in the AI era: fewer people, more senior, with entirely new roles emerging, the Growth Architect, the Brand Knowledge Steward, the Agentic Operations Lead. They get into how every function changes, from content and demand gen through to BDRs, AEs, and customer success, why human-to-AI ratios are shifting fast, and what governance has to do with whether any of it works. 

Essential listening for revenue leaders, heads of marketing, and anyone trying to figure out whether their current team structure will still make sense in two years' time. 

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Most B2B content operations don't fail because of a lack of effort, they fail because they were never built on the right foundations. Jumping straight to "let's start a podcast" or "we should post more on LinkedIn" before answering the harder questions about point of view, ICP, and channel strategy is where most teams go wrong. 

In this episode, Dan and Phil break down what it actually takes to build a content engine that scales. They cover how to extract genuine insight from subject matter experts (without asking them to write newsletters), why video has become the non-negotiable starting point for a modern content strategy, how to repurpose long-form content into a connected multi-channel system, and why consistency at scale now depends on having a single source of truth for your AI outputs. 

Essential listening for B2B marketers who know content should be driving pipeline, but are stuck figuring out how to make the engine run. 

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89% of B2B buyers are using generative AI to research vendors. 60% of searches now end without a click. And most shortlists are formed before anyone picks up the phone. If your marketing still treats every buyer the same way, you're not just losing deals. You're being cut from the list before the race has even started. 

In this episode, Dan is joined by Josh Bouk to break down why procurement-led and economic buyer-led journeys demand completely different playbooks. They cover how to engineer your presence into the day-one shortlist, why marketing and sales teams need to stop lobbing leads over the wall and start building a genuinely connected buyer experience, and the specific tactics that make you easier to buy from at every stage. 

Essential listening for B2B marketing and sales leaders who want to build a revenue process that maps to how buyers actually buy today. 

89% of B2B buyers now use generative AI in research: https://www.forrester.com/report/b2b-buyer-adoption-of-generative-ai/RES181769  

60% of searches end without a click: https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2026/03/02/the-zero-click-economy-why-60-of-searches-end-without-a-click-and-what-ceos-should-do-about-it/ 

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Website traffic is down, traditional SEO metrics are losing their meaning, and most teams are either not measuring their AEO performance at all or drowning in data they don't know what to do with.

In this solo episode, Dan breaks down how to build an AEO measurement framework that goes beyond vanity metrics. From choosing the right prompts to track, to analysing your citation data for strategic insight, to tying AI visibility to pipeline and revenue, this episode gives you a practical system you can actually use.

Essential listening for B2B marketers trying to make sense of AI search and prove its impact on the business.

HubSpot State of AEO report: https://hubspot-state-of-aeo-report-web-view.lovable.app/ 

How to build an AEO strategy: https://youtu.be/kSM8TvmFAwo

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Your PPC dashboards are all red, but your campaigns aren't the problem. In this episode, Dan and Phil unpack why paid search performance is declining across the board, and why the real culprit is a fundamental shift in buyer behaviour, not campaign quality.

They cover why AI overviews are tanking click-through rates even on commercial queries, how to reframe your PPC optimisation strategy around conversions not clicks, the truth about Performance Max, and why the real opportunity now is being present in research, not just search.

Seer Interactive CTR study mentioned in this episode: https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/aio-impact-on-google-ctr-2026-update

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Most B2B companies still grow the same way they always have. More headcount, more tools, more effort. Dan and Josh make the case that this model is fundamentally broken.

In this episode, they introduce the eight-stage B2B growth cycle and explore what it means to engineer each stage. From product market fit and messaging through to customer expansion, as a connected, scalable system rather than a collection of manual processes.

They also discuss the risks of ungoverned AI across the revenue life cycle, and why Blend Core was built to solve exactly that problem.

Essential listening for B2B leaders who want predictable, scalable revenue without simply throwing more resource at the problem.

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Most B2B companies running paid media are doing it wrong, not because the channels don't work, but because they're measuring them the wrong way. 

In this episode, Dan is joined by Adam Holmgren, founder of Fibbler, to cut through the noise on paid media in B2B. They cover why chasing leads from LinkedIn is killing your results, how to use retargeting and thought leader ads effectively, and what it really takes to build the kind of brand presence that stays front of mind when buyers are ready to move. 

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Most B2B website projects fail because of one critical misconception: they're approached as design projects when they should be treated as strategic growth infrastructure. 

In this episode, Phil explains why focusing on visuals, animation and aesthetics before strategy leads to missed timelines, blown budgets and websites that fail to generate pipeline. He breaks down the infrastructure approach that successful website projects follow, covering everything from understanding buyer journeys to building for continuous optimisation. 

You'll learn how to set proper success metrics, prioritise requirements correctly and ensure your website project delivers measurable business impact rather than just a pretty new design. 

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Your buyers aren't ignoring you, they're forgetting you. And there's 140 years of psychology that explains exactly why. 

In this solo episode, Dan breaks down the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve: what it is, why it hits B2B harder than any other discipline, and what it means for the way you run campaigns, manage ad frequency, and show up in the market. 

From LinkedIn ads to long sales cycles to multi-stakeholder buying committees, this episode connects the science of human memory to the real decisions B2B marketers make every day. 

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Phil explores information scent, a critical UX concept that determines whether buyers can find what they need on your website. He explains why clear navigation beats clever branding, how to avoid common mistakes like using internal jargon in key areas, and why buyers abandon websites even when the right information exists. 

You'll learn practical ways to improve information scent across navigation, page titles and form fields, plus how AI is changing what buyers expect from B2B websites. Phil also shares how to use AI tools to test whether your terminology makes sense to your ideal customers. 

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When marketing numbers drop, most teams either panic or bury their heads. In this solo episode, Dan tackles the conversation that happens behind closed doors every quarter, what do you actually do when things go wrong?

He walks through a practical framework: how to tell a blip from a real trend, which data layers to dig into when diagnosing the drop, and how to factor in external forces like competitor activity, AI search, and macroeconomics.

From recovering short-term pipeline to protecting long-term brand investment, this is the diagnostic playbook every marketing leader needs.

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AI is dramatically changing how buyers find and use B2B websites. In this episode, Phil explores how AI overviews and tools like ChatGPT are reducing website traffic whilst simultaneously increasing visitor quality and intent.  

You'll learn the three core strategies for optimising your website in this new era: technical answer engine optimisation, increasing AI citations and mentions, and maximising conversion rates for high-intent visitors. Discover why abandoning your website isn't the answer, and how to adapt your strategy to turn fewer visits into more pipeline. 

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Most businesses are using AI, but only at surface level. Prompting, asking questions, getting answers. In this episode, Dan and Phil go beyond the basics to show what AI orchestration actually looks like in practice. 

Walking through real workflows built and used at Blend, they demonstrate how AI can feed insights across your entire business, fuelling pipeline, improving conversion, and reducing churn across marketing, sales, and customer success. 

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Phil challenges the conventional wisdom around conversion rate optimisation. He explains why optimising for lead volume often damages business results rather than improving them, and reveals the metric you should actually be measuring. 

You'll learn why fewer, higher-quality conversions typically outperform high-volume lead generation, and how to align your website strategy with genuine business outcomes like pipeline and revenue. 

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Everyone's using AI. But without the right context, you're just generating inconsistent, off-brand output at scale. 

In this episode, Dan and Josh introduce the concept of a digital twin, a curated, controlled knowledge base that gives every AI agent and team member accurate, consistent company context. They cover why off-the-shelf tools like ChatGPT and Claude fall short, how digital twins are built, and why mid-market businesses are uniquely positioned to get ahead with this strategy. 

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Interactive demos feel modern and buyer-friendly, but do they actually outperform traditional "book a demo" CTAs? In this episode, Phil examines the real conversion data behind both approaches and reveals why interactive trials often underperform despite their appeal.

You'll learn when interactive demos genuinely add value versus when they simply cannibalise higher-quality pipeline. Phil explains how to deploy these tools strategically to increase demo quality and quantity rather than replacing what already works. Essential listening before you swap out your commercial CTAs.

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Most B2B marketing teams are laser-focused on net new logos, but what about the revenue already sitting in your existing customer base? 

In this episode, Dan is joined by Josh to unpack why so many marketing teams overlook expansion and retention, how to calculate wallet share and total whitespace, and what marketing can actually do to drive cross-sell and upsell growth. From account planning and CRM strategy to customer events and mental availability, this one's packed with practical ways to unlock revenue you didn't know you had. 

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New marketing leaders often inherit websites that hold back business growth. Your instinct to redesign immediately is understandable, but rushing into a full redesign without the right groundwork guarantees expensive failure. In this episode, Phil reveals the critical work that must happen before you touch design or development.  

Learn why data analysis, positioning clarity, and go-to-market strategy alignment aren't optional extras; they're the foundation everything else builds on. Discover the specific inputs you need from your organisation, how to brief your website partners effectively, and why getting strategy right transforms your results. 

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Most marketing teams have more reports than they know what to do with, and yet, very few of those reports actually drive decisions.

In this episode, Dan and Phil break down why so many B2B marketers fall into the trap of reporting for reporting's sake, and what a smarter approach looks like. From starting with the "why" behind every report to building a top-down view of revenue and pipeline, this episode gives you a practical framework for turning your data into something that genuinely moves the needle.

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Phil explores why the demo request is the single most valuable conversion your B2B website can generate, and why so few businesses are optimising for it.

Phil reveals the staggering difference in pipeline performance between high-intent and low-intent leads, and what that means for your website strategy. You'll learn how to optimise the full demo request journey, from demand creation and discoverability, through to on-site experience and post-conversion follow-up.

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Most marketing leaders are smart, hard-working, and still failing to get CEO buy-in. Not because their ideas are bad, but because they're speaking the wrong language.

In this episode, Dan is joined by Josh Bouk to unpack what CEOs actually care about and how marketing leaders can better communicate with the C-suite. They cover how to frame marketing in business terms, the metrics that actually matter, and why transparency builds more credibility than claiming success.

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Most marketers are promoted into leadership because of what they know, but leading marketing demands a completely different set of skills that nobody is teaching.

In this episode, Dan and Phil break down the core skill gaps holding marketing leaders back right now: AI literacy and prompt engineering, commercial and financial acumen, and technology and data fluency. They cover practical ways to build each one, from filling potholes before building bridges with AI, to learning how to read a P&L and speak the language of the board.

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AI search is changing how buyers find vendors, and most businesses still don't have a strategy for it. 

In this special live session episode of Demand Decoded, Dan and Phil walk through a complete, step-by-step AEO framework: from building your knowledge base and simulating ICP prompts, to analysing cited content types, creating scalable content engines, and measuring impact all the way to pipeline. 

Using Rippling as a live example, they share exactly how Blend approaches AIO for itself and its customers, including the real results they're seeing. 

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Most B2B buyers don't start from scratch when they come to market, they already have a shortlist. And if you're not on it, you're fighting for just 10% of available deals.

In this episode, Dan and Phil unpack the growing reality of silent shortlisting: how buyers form vendor preferences long before they're ready to buy, why demand capture alone won't cut it, and what marketers need to do to build the brand presence that gets them on that day one shortlist.

From LinkedIn ads and trade show strategy to intent data and buyer intelligence, this episode gives you a practical framework for rethinking where your budget and resource should really go.

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In this episode, Dan and Phil break down why data abundance is actually crippling B2B marketing, from bloated CRMs packed with duplicates and stale records to attribution platforms that misdirect your budget.  

They explore why your integrations fail to deliver on their promises, how misaligned systems create internal confusion, and crucially, why your sales conversations are often more valuable than any software metric. Learn which data you can actually trust, how to operationalise insights effectively, and the strategic thinking that AI can't replace. 

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Your buyers have already moved. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are where research happens now – and it's fundamentally changing discovery, shortlisting, and vendor evaluation. Dan and Phil break down why this matters right now: 80% of tech buyers are using AI for research, the entire buyer journey is condensing into a single conversation window, and your strategy needs to adapt today, not tomorrow. 

Learn why traditional SEO still plays a role, how to get cited (not just mentioned) in AI responses, and why hiding content from AI is sabotaging your growth. This episode covers the frameworks you need to win in AI search, why gated content makes no sense anymore, and how to build a content strategy that actually shows up when your buyers are researching. 

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Most marketing leaders walk into board meetings armed with lead numbers and campaign updates. But boards operating in PE-backed and VC-backed companies don't care about your tactics; they care about three specific things that most CMOs completely miss. 

In this episode, Dan and Josh break down exactly what boards need to see from marketing: how revenue actually flows through your business, the macro market threats and opportunities you're navigating, and the one unexpected resource your board members have that could fill your pipeline with executive-level deals.  

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B2B buyers have embraced AI search in their millions, yet many marketers are still treating it as an emerging channel rather than a critical investment. In this episode, Dan and Phil explore why delaying your AEO strategy could be as costly as those who regret not prioritising SEO a decade ago. 

We cover how to build the business case for AEO investment, the differences between Google AI Mode and ChatGPT visibility, and why understanding buyer behaviour shifts is essential for marketing leaders. With ChatGPT now reaching 800 million monthly users, the window for early-mover advantage is closing fast. 

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On January 16th, ChatGPT officially announced they're rolling out advertising across the US. This isn't just another platform update, it's potentially the biggest opportunity in B2B marketing since the early days of Google Ads.

Dan and Phil break down why this matters for B2B marketers: 800 million monthly users with incredibly high intent, early mover advantages, and the chance to reach buyers during their actual research and evaluation process. But there are unknowns too, targeting mechanisms, ad formats, and how the paid/free tier split will affect performance.

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Most B2B marketers are wasting a fortune on PPC without realising it. Dan and Phil expose the critical mistakes driving up costs and hiding bigger problems in your marketing strategy.

Discover why attribution data can trap you into over-investing, how poor landing page experiences are killing conversions, and why dependence on PPC blinds you to better opportunities. Plus, learn how AI search is about to disrupt everything you thought you knew about Google Ads.

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You've closed the funding round. The budget's landed. Now what? Most marketing leaders celebrate the win, then realise they've got no clue how to prove they're spending it wisely. In this episode, Dan and Josh tackle what happens after you raise investment, from seed rounds to private equity buyouts. 

They explore why your new investors will demand visibility you don't have, how to build the infrastructure to track what actually matters, and why "it feels like we need more people" is the worst justification you can give. Learn how to present your baseline, test incrementally, and create predictable outcomes that keep you out of the boardroom firing line.

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For episode 100, Dan and Phil reflect on marketing's unique position to drive business growth beyond traditional communications. They explore why marketing has been pigeonholed into just the 'comms' function, when it should influence product, sales, customer success, and the entire buying cycle.

They discuss how accessible AI and orchestration tools now let marketers extract insights from sales calls, customer feedback, and cross-functional data in ways that were previously cost-prohibitive. This creates an opportunity for marketing to operate as growth engineers, not just communicating with the market, but shaping product development, accelerating sales, reducing churn, and ultimately driving revenue across every business function.

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In this episode, Dan and Josh sit down with Woody Klemetson, CEO of AskElephant, to explore how the tool is transforming business operations through AI-powered orchestration. Woody shares his journey from sales to creating a solution that breaks down silos between departments by turning unstructured data from calls and emails into actionable workflows. 

We discuss practical use cases that span marketing, sales, and customer success, from automatically capturing customer quotes and pain points to updating CRMs without manual input. Woody explains how AskElephant differs from typical AI tools by creating real-time orchestration rather than just analysis, and why the future of revenue operations lies in growth engineering. 

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In this episode, Dan and Phil tackle one of marketing's most frustrating challenges: measuring ROI. As year-end budget planning approaches, many marketers find themselves stuck trying to calculate channel-by-channel returns that simply don't reflect reality.

The problem? Buyers don't purchase based on a single channel, yet most marketers default to last-touch attribution and isolated channel metrics. Dan and Phil explain why this approach is fundamentally flawed and what to do instead. They advocate for blended ROI across all marketing activity, using efficiency signals rather than impossible-to-calculate channel returns, and combining quantitative data with qualitative buyer insights.

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In this episode, Dan sits down with Kevin White, Head of Marketing at Scrunch, to unpack how AEO measurement actually works and why it's now essential for B2B brands. 

They explore what Scrunch does, how it tracks AI visibility at the topic level rather than individual prompts, and why features like AXP (Agent Experience Platform) matter for technical optimisation. Kevin explains the critical difference between measuring SEO and AEO, why large language models favour certain content structures, and how brands can systematically improve their performance in AI search results before the space becomes saturated. 

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Most marketers are investing in answer engine optimisation, but few know how to measure if their efforts are working. In this solo episode, Dan breaks down why traditional SEO measurement doesn't work for AEO and introduces a four-layer framework for tracking AI visibility. 

You'll learn why prompt behaviour differs from keyword searches, how to create meaningful prompt variations based on your ICP, and what tools can help you track directional improvement across AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Dan also shares real examples from Blend's own AEO measurement approach using Scrunch. 

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In this episode, Dan and Amanda explore why your marketing and sales budgets shouldn't be separate conversations, they should be part of one unified growth budget. They discuss how to work backwards from business goals, make the case to stakeholders, and avoid common pitfalls like over-investing in saturated channels. 

You'll learn how to align your budget with strategic priorities, whether that's expanding into new markets or increasing customer lifetime value, and why staying flexible throughout the year is just as important as the initial plan. 

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