Beyond Demand Gen: Why Growth Marketing is a Mindset, Not a Title | Rob Freedman

Growth marketing isn’t a buzzword here; it’s a practical operating system that replaces vanity metrics with revenue clarity. 

I sit down with Rob Freedman, the former VP of Marketing and Partnerships at EZO (now at Surecam), to unpack a full-funnel approach that starts at first touch and keeps going through renewal and expansion. Rob lays out four non-negotiable pillars for 2026: high-velocity experimentation, clean business-grade data, radical cross-functional alignment, and ecosystem leverage through partnerships.

We dig into how to set up a true Skunkworks for testing, protect budget for bold ideas, and rank experiments with ICE so you act fast on real signals. Rob explains why growth leaders think like general managers, tracking CAC, LTV, payback, activation, pipeline, retention, and expansion by cohort, then aligning marketing, sales, product, and CS around shared outcomes. 

Expect actionable tactics to fix the leaks at handoffs, run win-loss to inform product roadmaps, and ship targeted improvements that accelerate sales cycles.

Partnerships get the spotlight as force multipliers. From technical integrations to co-marketing with platforms like Zendesk, we walk through how to tap external audiences with lower CAC and stronger intent. 

We also get hands-on with Answer Engine Optimization: adding structured FAQs, an “Hey AI, learn about us” resource, and using LLMs to reveal content gaps so your brand gets cited more often. Rob shares early results—steady LLM traffic growth and SQL lift rivaling referrals—and an honest take on AI’s role beyond copy: competitive monitoring, workflow automation, and personalization at scale.

You’ll leave with three fast starts: launch one meaningful experiment, replace one vanity metric with a business metric, and call churned or lost prospects for insights you can ship against next quarter. 

We also talk about Rob's charitable organization, the Rainshine Foundation, an amazing mission to improve living conditions for people in remote rural communities of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

If you’re ready to turn marketing from a department into a revenue engine, this conversation will give you the map. If you enjoyed this, follow the show, share with a teammate, and leave a quick review to help others find us.

🎧 Tech Marketing Rewired is hosted by Kevin Kerner, founder of Mighty & True.

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Transcript

Why Growth Beats Demand Gen Silos

Rob Freedman 0:00

Yeah, first I say your your growth people need to have a mindset that they think more like a general manager and an operator when they're looking at the business and thinking about the whole business health, not just the marketing, you know, MQL, SQL conversion stuff. You need to look what is the CAC, what is your LTV, what's your payback period, what's your activation rate for e trial to paid if you're in that model? You know, you got to move past impressions and just MQLs. You know, how much pipeline, sales accepted pipeline or sales qualified pipeline are you producing? And then what's that translating into closed one revenue? And then looking at the retention. Are there's renewals? Is this the cohort that you brought in six months ago still with the business? And if they're with the business, are they expanding? Are they contracting at renewal time? You know, what's that behavior like? Those are the metrics of the business data you need to be able to see what channels and what verticals are leading to the best outcomes.

Meet Rob And Set The Agenda

Kevin Kerner 1:03

Hey everyone, this is Kevin Kerner with Tech Marketing Rewired. Hope you guys are doing well today. Today I had the opportunity to talk to Rob Friedman of Easy O. I wanted to reach out to him because we've heard so much about growth marketing roles and just growth marketing in general over the last year. And it seems kind of to me like a buzzword that I just had to figure out. But I know there's value in it, and I needed to talk with someone who's in the role, who was in the role, who could set me straight. So I had a great conversation with Rob. In addition to sort, sort of helping me define growth marketing, he talked about four critical areas: experimentation, data, cross-functional alignment, and tying into an eco ecosystem as ways that he has found success in the growth in a growth marketing role. It really helped me a lot and clarified what growth marketing is, what a growth role is, and I think people will get a lot out of it as they're thinking about expanding marketing beyond just traditional demand generation. So it was a really great conversation. But before we get started, I wanted to mention that this podcast is sponsored by my company, Mighty and True. Mighty and True helps CMOs and senior marketing leaders take strategies that may be stuck because of lack of resources or lack of core expertise and move them forward quickly using my our Mighty and True team of technology marketing experts and our systems-driven agency approach that we call flow. Who doesn't like a good system? If you want more information about Mighty and True, you can find us at www.mightyandtrue.com. So that's it. I can't wait for you to hear this one. Let's get to it. This is Tech Marketing Rewired. Rob, welcome to the show. I'm happy to have you here. I'm excited. Thanks, Kevin, for inviting me on. Yeah, thanks so much. Um, as we jump into things, can you give me a quick the uh I did a quick intro right before this, but could you can you give your own quick intro to your role and what you do you do at Easo?

Rob Freedman 2:56

Yeah, so EZO. I'm the uh VP of marketing and partnerships. So I oversee the global marketing team and our partnerships for uh EZO and all four of our of our asset management solutions.

Kevin Kerner 3:12

Yeah, it's great to have you on. As I mentioned in the warm-up here, I I kind of sought you out cold for the show to help us deconstruct what is a super buzzwordy term, which is this growth marketing. It seems to be everywhere right now. And um, I think the what I was hoping you could do is help us sort of move away from the theory given your background, because you have such a strong growth background. Now you're a VP of marketing. Get more into the tactical sort of playbook around growth. What does it actually look like, especially towards going into 2026? There's so much there to unpack. So I'd like to kind of start at the tops. There's a term growth marketing. As I mentioned, it's everywhere. What do you think growth marketing is? What's your definition of growth marketing?

Defining Growth Marketing End To End

Rob Freedman 3:54

Yeah, and I think a lot of people think it's synonymous with traditional demand gen. And I think there are some technical differences between traditional demand gen roles and growth roles. And I think traditional demand gen can be often kind of siloed and more focused on just top of the funnel. I think its uh goals are very much just uh, you know, pound in those MQLs. And um, yeah, I think this is where you see a lot of wasteful demand gen spending. You know, you hit your MQL target, sales team complains, leads are junk, churn is high, it creates friction, no one likes this. And that's where growth marketing kind of steps in. It's it's much more full funnel from the first touch of acquisition and activation of them all the way through retention and then making them be your evangelist, helping them refer business to you. And you become like they become like you're an evangelist for your business. So, you know, a growth marketer is just as obsessed with customer churn as they are with customer acquisition.

Kevin Kerner 5:08

Yeah, 100%. Like when I hear the term growth, I immediately think the sales organization. I immediately think just demand gen sales. But what you're saying is it goes beyond that, right? Goes beyond that.

Rob Freedman 5:20

Absolutely. It has to be that full, full experience from the moment they learn of your brand to the point where they're renewing and you get your land and expand opportunities and stuff like that.

Kevin Kerner 5:31

And you were in a growth role before, uh, your current role. Now you're in a VP, a marketing role. I guess that function has expanded somewhat, but Yeah, it has. How do you look at the growth role in a VP of marketing or let's say CMO type role versus if you're actually assigned the growth role as the person running growth? Is there a difference?

Rob Freedman 5:55

There there is a there is a difference. There is a difference. Um, but uh, you know, I look at the role of a growth person as being more mindset. So you can be a VP of marketing, I like to think I am one, who also is a growth person. It may not be in my title, but titles are kind of meaningless in a sense, especially in in B2B SaaS and startup worlds. Yeah. Yeah. It's really a mindset, you know, and so you may have head of growth uh in your title, um, but your job isn't to do all things growth, just like the VP of marketing doesn't do all things marketing. It's to build an engine, to build a machine, to run experimentation across process that allows the product, the marketing, the sales, the customer success to all grow together. And and that's how I kind of look at the at the difference. It's really more of a mindset. You can have one title or the other. It's just how you approach things. And and maybe it's how a company approaches things from the beginning, from the outset, when they're looking for a new leader, is they're thinking they want a VP of marketing, but you start talking to them and start finding out what the goals of the organization are, and it might actually be that that growth leader that they need.

Kevin Kerner 7:19

Yeah, it's growth. I mean, growth is a very attractive word. Like, you do you want growth? Do you want marketing? Yeah, do you want growth? Yes. We definitely want growth. And there's a big difference.

Titles Versus Mindset In Growth Roles

Rob Freedman 7:28

Like you can do marketing without wanting to drive massive growth. So, so there are companies and I've worked with some where multi, you know, you know, 4x, 8x, whatever, 10x growth was not the goal. The goal was something else. And maybe it's to, you know, much more, you know, steady 20% growth. They want customer retention. They want it to maybe just focus on a specific vertical or a feature launch, and and they just, or maybe it's a rebranding and they really wanted to just reimagine their. So, yes, yeah. Growth mode is something you shift into and out of.

Kevin Kerner 8:13

Yeah, that's super interesting. One more question that I want to get in a little bit of your playbook. You mentioned growth mindset, which I think is right, you know, getting into growth mindset. Why do you think that is, why do you think the thing's trending? The word growth is trending right now. Is it more has something happened in the industry that's made it more compelling? Or is it just a new term, sort of new branding of something?

Rob Freedman 8:38

Yeah, I think part of it is um there's a lot of pressure, there's a lot of margin compression in B2B SaaS. So I think you have uh people in the VC and PE world who are looking for better returns. And I think there's also this more modern mindset happening where it's like, hey, what how are we going to grow, but not just in this one very narrow space? What does partnerships look like? Which is why my role is expanded from marketing to marketing and partnerships. It's like, how are we gonna build an ecosystem around our solution, not just Google ads, not just paid social or whatever, is like these very narrow things and looking at things like full funnel and how are we gonna surround our ACP and from multiple, multiple vantage points.

Kevin Kerner 9:31

Yeah, the best curve people I know, and you probably want to, you know, do this, you probably already know this, but they're very scrappy. They're very creative and scrappy. Like they're they're finding these paths to market or these paths to growth that you just wouldn't think of as a demand gen marketer. They're just creative in the ways that they find pockets of revenue or pockets of growth.

Rob Freedman 9:51

Yeah, it it's really, really about building a system and it's re-scoping of marketing from a department to a full funnel revenue engine.

Kevin Kerner 10:01

Yeah. Okay, that's great. That's a good segue because like what this is one of the core things that I wanted to deconstruct with you. If you if you move away from just the theory that a lot of people talk about, you're building this growth engine every day, I'm sure, in your is in your current role and certainly in your previous roles. If you had to identify just a few, I want to dig into the three or four non-negotiable pillars that you need for a modern growth engine, particularly in the upcoming year. What would let's let's dig into those. What would they be?

Rob Freedman 10:29

Yeah, I think 2026 needs to be the year of experimentation. So my number one pillar is high velocity experimentation. Follow that up with uh radical cross-functional alignment. The third pillar, the ro you gotta have the right data, clean data, and for ecosystem and lifecycle leverage. And that's uh, you know, kind of building this community or this this ecosystem around your solutions.

Kevin Kerner 10:56

Yeah, I love it. Yeah. Let's dig into the first one, experimentation. How do you practice there's so many ways now with AI and data, and it's incredible. How do you practically implement it? What is this what does it look like in 2026?

When Companies Truly Want Growth

Rob Freedman 11:11

I think growth should be like uh a lab model instead of a campaign model. And I I kind of hearken back to uh Lockheed Martin Skunkworks. Your marketing team needs to have a Skunkworks, you need to have this this uh radical experimentation, try something that's out of the box, do something that your competitors aren't doing, harness a little bit of the energy and budget to to try something really cool. So you need to and you need a system to do that. You need to ideate, you need to gather ideas from all teams. Like uh currently at EZO, we open up the floor for product CS, sales, uh the dev team, accounting, bring us content, bring us ideas, bring us you know things. Uh one of one of our uh best performing blogs of the year came from one of our uh someone on our in-house legal team wrote a blog on compliance for for our target audience. And it's getting picked up by the LLMs, it's ranking well. It's like I was like, big shout out to who knew that one of our best pieces was gonna come out of legal, right? Uh and then you need to prioritize, you need to use a framework like Ice Impact, confidence and ease to uh to really uh prioritize what you're gonna do, what's gonna have the biggest uh impact, what do you have high confidence in, and what's actually easy to execute on, what's doable that's not gonna uh or a tax, your already probably highly taxed uh team. And then tests. Run the test with the smallest possible scope that still could give meaningful results. And then did it work? I don't know. Probably not, maybe. If yes, scale it, if no, scrap it and share that learning with others and document it. That's the other thing. Please document document experiment experiments. I know I've been at places where I was like, I've lived this conversation before because we never documented it properly.

Kevin Kerner 13:28

I had uh Udi Lettergoer from Gong on the podcast, you know, a few podcasts ago. And of course, they do a great job at like really creative experimental content, which is incredible. Their stuff is so good. He was talking about um two things. One, he was saying hit the experiments would usually outperform just the blocking and tackling stuff. So I'm curious whether you see the same thing. And then the second thing he said was that they he would budget, literally budget for experimentation, like 15% of the budget he knew he was gonna use for experiments. So do you have any of the similar experience in your past that similar to that?

The Four Pillars For 2026

Rob Freedman 14:05

Yeah, we we definitely keep a chunk of our budget for experiments known right off the bat. That's what we're gonna do for the quarter of uh spend expend expenditure-wise. And then sometimes they do, sometimes they hit home run, sometimes you try things and you're like, wow, that that actually worked, and that becomes something new, whether it be an event or a campaign or uh a new piece of content or gate uh new like lead gen uh gateway for people, but then sometimes you know, sometimes they don't all win.

Kevin Kerner 14:37

Yeah. Yeah, of course. The other thing that I think is important, excuse me, it's a little scary to do experiments in certain organizations because if you mess up, you're you know, you're toast. I'm wondering how do you build a culture that accepts failure like that or mistakes? Do you have to purposely try to build that into your marketing culture?

Rob Freedman 15:01

You do. And in fact, your whole company culture has to support this because if other people, other parts of the org see experiments that fail, they might see that as wasted time, wasted money, wasted effort. And if they're not in their verticals, in their uh departments, safe to try experiments and fail, they're not gonna give you the same, same leeway. And I so I think it needs to be a company-wide culture. And I've been very fortunate to work at ones that not only support experimentation, but they they reward it too. It this is you bring us an idea, and good ideas can come from anywhere. I want to try them, and if they work, you get rewarded for that. If they work, you get a bonus, you get something like extra as well. So both personally, so you win, the company wins, the customer wins. This is like the great when you you do have to bake it into your culture.

Kevin Kerner 16:00

Yeah, so that's really important. And it's the gong example I used before, same thing there. They had a leadership team that was very supportive of experimentation and mistakes.

Building A Skunkworks For Experiments

Rob Freedman 16:11

Well when you budget for it, I think that means you got your CFO, your CEO, you've got everybody's you know in on it, and everyone is agreed that yes, this is a known risk. There may be a zero ROI on this spend. Now, my experience shows there's usually very good ROI and very good learnings that can be applied in other places.

Kevin Kerner 16:35

So but yeah, 100%.

Rob Freedman 16:36

Yeah.

Kevin Kerner 16:37

Okay, let's talk about the another pillar you mentioned, which is data. That's been a term for decades now. Um, I imagine that's changing for 2026. What are the what are the how do you think about data signals metrics that you're monitoring most obsessively as you're in this growth mindset?

Rob Freedman 16:55

Yeah, first I I say your your growth people need to have a mindset that they think more like a general manager or an operator when they're looking at the business and thinking about the whole business health, not just the marketing, you know, MQL, SQL conversion stuff. You need to look what is the CAC, what is your LTV, what's your payback period, what's your activation rate free trial to paid if you're in that model? Um, you know, you got to move past impressions and just MQLs, you know, how much pipeline, sales accepted pipeline or sales qualified pipeline are you producing? And then what's that translating into closed one revenue? And then looking at the retention, are there's renewals? Is this the cohort that you brought in six months ago still with the business? And if they're with the business, are they expanding? Are they contracting at renewal time? You know, what what's that behavior like? Those are the metrics of the business data you need to be able to see what channels and what verticals are leading to the best outcomes.

Kevin Kerner 18:05

Yeah, that's cool. But that there again, it's kind of a cultural thing too, isn't it? Because you're I love the term, I hadn't heard it before, but general manager. But think of like a person in your organization who thinks like a general manager, an owner of a business in their department. There's so much silo when you're in marketing or potentially even a growth role that you're only worried about these things. There again, culturally, how do you get past people just wanting to hit the metrics of their thing?

Rob Freedman 18:35

Part of it is with shared, shared pain, pain, and reward. So with me and and the sales team, we share the SQL growth targets. We share those. So we have to work together if we want to be mutually successful. And then also talking to, you know, what's the customer-facing metrics that you're looking at? Those, you're working with your product team on those and making sure that those are aligned with what the marketing team is doing and supporting and talking about in its content, and that the sales team is using in their demos. And onboarding is not upset that we're all making false promises. You know, so it really you have to be aligned, and and part of it is with shared metrics, you know, that and that that's one way.

Kevin Kerner 19:22

Yeah, that's a perfect segue into the one of the I think it was the third one you mentioned with this alignment. It's growth, seems what you're saying is growth sits at the intersection of marketing and product, and say it's just ever it's interconnected to everything, which I which again I think is a different mindset for marketers to sometimes think, you know, that way. Oh. From the VP seat that you're in, what are the specific tactics for building and maintaining alignment? Um, is it a meeting or dashboard? OKR. You mentioned OKR sort of measurement. How do you make it stick?

Budgeting And Culture For Failure

Rob Freedman 20:00

That that is a very good question. I I think there's a l yeah. When you need to work, you know, growth doesn't happen in a marketing silo. Okay. And is it clean? Definitely not. I think it can be very messy, especially in uh high growth companies and startups. Is sales working the leads? Is the feedback loop instant? And I think a lot of marketers know this, that most of the leaks in your funnel happen at the handoff points. And working with and one of the I feel a lot of people talk about the sales and marketing handoff and that uh relationship, the relationship I don't see ta uh spoken about enough, and I'd love to hear your standpoint on this, is the marketing and product relationship. And growth marketing or growth positions should be a key input for the product roadmap and collecting that feedback from the customers from uh doing win loss analysis, especially on the loss analysis, like where were those gaps? And I've done those at uh almost every role that I've been at, where even I'm calling up customers or prospects who you know didn't choose us and have asked them to open up and and talk about why. And if it's a product gap and something and making sure that the team hears that feedback, and if it's something that we can build or address quickly, maybe rescue a deal, or at the very least have it ready for the next next one that comes down the line.

Kevin Kerner 21:49

Yeah, I I love that. Um, I love the product side of things. If you play that forward a little bit more, so you if you are close to product, and you're yeah, and I think the other thing about product is, especially now in the AI age, is product is changing so fast and competitors are entering so fast, it's just crazy. So staying close to product is important. But play that next the next step. What do you take from product that you can use in the growth in your growth strategy?

Rob Freedman 22:17

Yeah, there's a few um things. You know, I think I turn, I think I talk about three you know gaps by you know, the by segment, by you know, the deal impact and the effort to build. And if we ship one quick fix per quarter that's tied to that, you know, we should see faster sales cycles, we might see higher win rates. And I always ask, would that be useful? And I go back, what I take from the product team is you know, a healthy respect for how hard it is to build sometimes. I understand, you know, there's only so many complexity points that are available to build something, and just because like, hey, this feature would be great, or this integration would be wonderful. I understand there's realities that sometimes make that difficult and understanding those timelines and when we can go to market with something.

Kevin Kerner 23:15

Yeah, for sure. Okay, cool. Yeah, that's very super helpful. So I got through the three three of them experiment experimentation data, cross-functional functional alignment. The fourth was remind me what the fourth one was. Fourth one, um building that ecosystem and the life. That's man, how did I miss that? That's a biggie. Okay, talk about that a little more tactically. What do you mean by ecosystem?

Data That Actually Runs The Business

Rob Freedman 23:43

I mean, so this is uh the kind of the partnership side of my brain working. It's like growth isn't just what you do, but it's also how you leverage others. How do you tap into other people's audiences and finding those partnerships? And partnerships, I look at them as you have your tech technical partnerships. So those are the ones that you know, what integrations do you build? How can you both jointly go to market? Uh I'll give you an example right now, both at Zuper and at EZO, we have relationships with Zendesk. And it's like, how can like asset sonar, our IT asset management solution, how can that plus Zendesk ticketing solution be more powerful than some of the solutions that Zendesk is running up against, who have ITAM and ticketing together and bundled into one thing, and how actually ours together gives you a more robust solution, a more powerful solution with better reporting, et cetera. So thinking about those types of relationships, how we tap into Zendesk's ecosystem and they tap into ours. So we run into people who are like, hey, this is great, but we need ticketing. Well, we don't offer that. Let us introduce you to Zendesk. And it just works really well that way.

Kevin Kerner 25:03

Um Yeah, I love that. Um, I was talking to the VP of marketing at Moengage and he he calls it built-in virality. Every piece of content they create has to have some built-in connection to someone in the ecosystem because they get twice the amount of effect. It's just super smart. It's like, why not, why not do that, especially if you have willing partners. Nice. Yeah, yeah, totally agree with that. Absolutely. Um, okay, so let's let's talk about growth in the AI era, because I know there's there's so many um there's so many uh ways that AI can fuel this. So much of it is human that you've just mentioned. It's cultural, it's building relationships, it's those type of things. But have you seen AI deliver anything specifically beyond like let's say just writing copy in the in this growth system that you put together?

Rob Freedman 25:55

Yeah, definitely more. Well, I it comes up in the the marketing product relationship, you know, given the pace of AI. I uh I like monthly monthly, you know, product marketing syncs where we review competitor launches and map them to our roadmap and update our messaging and and and and AI helps with that. Yeah, you know, their AI helps us monitor the new releases and stuff and and watches for those different triggers and bubbles that up for us to talk about. So where you know, I see you know, AI content is just like the entryway. You know, the real transformation is in process workflows, helping with uh CEO and AEO and uh promotional stuff, and then also again, in that uh building out product features and and helping us, you know, do that competitive analysis and and keeping an eye on the marketplace for us at scale.

Kevin Kerner 27:00

Yeah, that's cool. Given that you given that um all of the four things you mentioned have both you know soft skills and then there's some hard skills in them too, and now you have AI on top of that. Yeah. Looking forward to the future year, how does it change? Does it change the skills you hire for? Or does it inform them? So tell me about that. What do you mean for?

Shared Metrics And Breaking Silos

Rob Freedman 27:24

Yeah, I mean, because I think right now, you know, AI is definitely beyond first straps of content. Yeah. And this is where instead of just writing copy, AI is becoming really the central nervous system of the entire marketing or GTM org, not just marketing. You know, this is you know, how are we using? So we use uh HubSpot, uh HubSpot's breeze for stuff, we use uh you know several other AI tools, and all of it is plugged into helping the sales team prep for calls, helping the CS prep for calls, helping us review uh you know more accurate insights and look for signals within the noise that maybe a human would have missed or didn't have time to dig that deep because of just it being more manual. Like now, this completely uh automates things and it helps us with you know deep personalization of our messaging and and helping doing that at scale, which that you know, these are tasks that could take hours to do, to do it well, to do it right, and this is leveling us up to be able to do it in in almost like real time.

Kevin Kerner 28:43

Yeah, I've been blown away by some of the personalization, particularly email personalization. There's so much schlocky email, you probably get them. It's like, oh gosh, this is terrible. And but there are some of the AI I've seen has just been so good. Conversational AI in email, it's just been so good. It's so human-like.

Rob Freedman 29:04

Oh, there's this one hard to discern. Yeah, no, but it's true. There's this one tool where I was engaging with, and it was an AI, and it was having a conversation, an email conversation with it.

Kevin Kerner 29:15

Yeah, it was really accurate. Yeah, but then there's ones that are like, oh, this is this is no good. I'm really impressed with too with uh uh SDR. Some of the SDR AI like qualified does a really good job at the conversation back and forth on a website, and you can't really tell that it's not a human. So that's only going to carry forward. And it's just for a growth-oriented-oriented person, it's just taking the mundane stuff and it's just like making it happen at scale. Things you just couldn't notice, like you mentioned. It's really pretty exciting times. Okay, this has been fantastic. I wanted to kind of bring all this home for the audience. If there's a marketing leader, CMO that wants to implement some of these things for a growth mindset, and they wanted to start like today, what are two or three things that they can do immediately to get started with some of these concepts?

Product As A Growth Force Multiplier

Rob Freedman 30:08

Yeah, I mean, first is stop just doing growth and start building a growth system. You know, back to that. It's a mindset of experimentation, getting the right data, and then cross cross uh alignment across the org. And you know, so the very first thing is is start thinking about what experiment do you want to do? What's the one thing you've been always dreaming of trying, just make it happen. Make budget, get people aligned and and and okay with it and comfortable with it, and then execute that. Um the second thing uh takeaway, go fix your data. And you know, find like that one vanity metric your team loves, like say MQLs, replace it with a business metric, SQLs, or seven-day pipeline velocity, or or something like that. Just find some business metric that measure that's better than one of these vanity metrics that we talk that we often talk about. And then the third one I'd say is go talk to your customers, go listen, go talk to the customers who churned or the ones who said no to to sales, but looked like they were getting down to that, you know, they're you knew you were down into like the final two. What was the thing that broke one way or the other? And those insights are worth more than any new ad campaign you could put together. It's a great uh use of your time as a leader, I feel. That's that's stuff I like to do myself, you know. And then start thinking about answer engine optimization. You can ask LLMs, you know, why did you not cite my brand? You know, this brand, you know, make sure you're in anonymous mode so they don't know you work for the company because they're eager to please, but you know, find out why they're not citing you and then find out where the gap is. And I'll give you an example. We asked it, hey, why did you not cite asset sonar, easy o's asset sonar, for um enterprise as an enterprise ITAM solution? And it said, This is why it showed us our own blog. Wow, it said, well, here, because in your blog you talk about mid-market companies and you talk about this, and these are all mid-sized companies, and it also referred to our customer stories and goes, Yeah, these are all mid-market companies. And you're like, Yeah, it's great solution for mid-market.

Kevin Kerner 32:46

I'm like, Oh my gosh. Own stuff. I'm dying to try that, Rob. I'm dying to go immediately check that about mighty and true or my own company.

Rob Freedman 32:56

Exactly. So you ask it some questions, and then you'll be like, oh. So then we were like, talk to our partnered with CS, like, hey, let's get some customer stories from our enterprise customers that we can get published. Let's and it we are shifting our priorities and our energies in those directions.

Kevin Kerner 33:12

Like, we learned something from that. Have you seen any uh have you done anything? I I love I love that idea. Have you done anything that you've seen work with AEO about any of the content, the way you structure it or schema markup, or are you doing anything that's working?

Ecosystems And Partnership Leverage

Rob Freedman 33:27

Um I we think a couple things are working well. One is that content gap, uh, you know, asking the LLMs why it suggests us in one light versus another light. But then also uh we actually put a hey LLM, hey AI learn about us link in our footer and created a nice structured document that answers a lot of questions in a very nice clean way. And we've added more FAQs to all of our all of our pages, including some of our money pages, adding FAQs uh about like pricing, FAQs around this and things, some pages that may not traditionally have pricing, but answer the question you know, how is our pricing structured? What is it, you know, what's fair usage policies, blah, blah, blah, and just really being out there and and and trying to structure the information away that uh we we see the LLMs looking at, and then finally Reddit being more active on Reddit. Yeah, when we see people talking about our brand, engaging with them and uh either correcting them when they have a misnomer about what it can or cannot do, and then also offering up uh our our solution as a potential solution if someone has a hey, what do you recommend making sure that we're we're getting in mentioned more often than not?

Kevin Kerner 34:57

That's interesting. Have your um has your traffic from AI gone up? Have you back to your site? Can you see any of your traffic actually increasing?

Rob Freedman 35:07

Is it driving any leads? It is driving leads, it's actually driving SQLs and it's starting to drive earlier this year. Uh we were seeing a nice steady 25% month-over-month improvement in LLM traffic, and now we're starting to see not just NQLs, but SQLs. Yeah, congratulations. That's awesome. I mean, that's that's an awesome question. We need more. We need more. We need to scale it up, but we're starting to learn over the last say six months what works and what's starting to move the needle.

Kevin Kerner 35:37

So yeah, way to go. Yeah, the um we're seeing quite a bit of traffic too. The I haven't done some of those things, but what I have what we have done is we've added uh H2s as questions. Yeah. And then uh dates. So we put update dates in the H1 or the like uh updated on updated October 2025, and then we updated, you know, we updated it into September and like changed. That's a good idea. I've not tried that. Yeah, try that. That that is good. I'm gonna write that down, actually. Like, actually, that's a good one. We have one, we have one um of our blog posts, which is which is a really good one. It's it's uh 20 2025, Q4 2025, and all of 2026 marketing events you must attend. And it's got every you know big marketing event. Uber optimized it for AI. So it's a little AI, and it's a table on it of all the events, then it talks about the event. Yeah, the date in it, has the H2s as questions, and that thing is just it's just blowing up. It's the best thing we've ever done. And I think it's mostly AI traffic. Um, so it's really, it's really kind of fun. It's sort of like the the days when uh social media launched and you weren't quite sure what was going to happen with anything, you didn't know how to do it. It's really pretty crazy. Do you uh the other thing I'll ask you is we the stuff that comes through an AI search, like if we get a lead and someone said and we find out, hey, yeah, we found ETHGBT, it seems like for us in our category that we're almost like pre-vetted. Like the company, um, they're more almost more biased towards selecting us because the AI had told them that we were, you know, the top whatever. Are you seeing that AI, there's any better qualification where they move forward along the funnel or funnel velocity? Is any of that happening with AI leads?

Rob Freedman 37:33

Absolutely. The few that we are we are starting to see come through the funnel, the percentage of the conversion rates from uh lead to MQL, MQL to SQL are much higher than any other channel, except for maybe direct referral. Well, that's cool. From a partner or something. But yeah, it it's it's much more efficient than say like paid social or Google ads, even.

Kevin Kerner 37:57

Golly, man, that gives us a lot of hope, doesn't it? Like if we can figure it out. I think they will add an ad function to certainly OpenAI will, because they need to find a way to make money.

Rob Freedman 38:07

They need to find a way to make money. Google needs to recover money that they're losing from their own AI mode and own gem Gemini stuff. So yeah, it's coming.

Kevin Kerner 38:16

There's some they're not gonna lose money forever. They want to make money. Okay, cool. Uh, there's one more thing I do on the show, which is uh AI roulette question. So I put your name a little bit about what we're gonna talk about here, and then I hit send and it gives me a question from perplexity. So let me go ahead and send it, hit send on this, and I haven't seen what this question's gonna be. Okay. There you go. I'm excited and nervous. Okay, this is interesting because it wow. Uh most it must have looked at your LinkedIn and found your four like experimentation and cross-functional alignment because it mentions them here. Most growth models are built on human-led experimentation and deep cross-functional alignment, which you've mentioned. But as AI becomes more powerful, it can run thousands of micro experiments and analyze data far better than a human. Does the growth marketer role eventually get automated by a growth AI that reports directly to the CRO?

AI Beyond Copy: Competitive Ops

Rob Freedman 39:17

That is a good question. Does it eventually get AI? You know, I I I could actually see that happening. No, but I mean, not in the near future. Um, I think a lot can be done by AI and automated, but um there is still that need to have a human in the loop. You need to have that. I don't see a future where I am overseeing a team of AI agents. I do see a future where uh, you know, I see AI running microtests and surface. Signals uh to the team. I see it maybe doing some more of the experimentation stuff and seeing what what's going on. Uh and I can see it helping us deciding what parts of the roadmap align best to our ICP, uh, what uh helping us stay true to our brand. I can see that really I think the future of AI and marketing in terms of marketing teams is really you'll have uh smaller marketing teams of really intelligent people who know how to leverage AI to do some of these things. Um, but there's still gonna be a marketing leader in whether or not they they roll up to a CRO is is that's possible. Yeah, but it's not gonna just be a CRO and a bunch of AI marketing. Automated bots doing all the markets. Yeah.

Kevin Kerner 40:57

Oh well I think I think you've sort of made the case through the discussion, too, is there's so much creativity involved in the growth thing, especially the um the routes to market stuff, like how you can get I don't think that human creativity can be replaced. It can be accelerated, perhaps, or added to from AI, but like what you've what you've told me here makes me think even more that you're gonna have to have a lot of human ingenuity and craftiness to to really do this thing right. I'll you know, certainly sped up by all the AI stuff that can go on.

Rob Freedman 41:31

I mean, yeah, and the more the more I've been kind of thinking about it uh since you said it's like I, you know, I'd I'd pilot a a growth co-pilot KPI stack, you know, with some AI-owned metrics. Let's see how the AI likes it. And then uh can it test you know heel velocity and variant coverage and stuff like that versus some of the human-owned metrics and see who wins.

Kevin Kerner 41:53

Yeah, or at least yeah, check to see which one does better. Exactly. Okay, cool. I wanted to mention one thing that I saw on your LinkedIn profile, this Rainshine Foundation, which sounded very interesting to me. I wanted to put a give you a little bit of time here to explain what it is, the charity itself, and then I'll definitely link to it. It sounds like a really good mission.

Rob Freedman 42:12

Oh, well, thank you, Kevin, for bringing that up. It's uh truly a uh a passion project that's uh you're the founder, right?

Kevin Kerner 42:19

You founded it.

Rob Freedman 42:19

I I'm yeah, I'm the founder, current president, founder, and uh it's really it's an all-volunteer, very small organization. We founded it uh, well, geez, I think it was 2011 when we finally got our 501c3. We started a little bit before that. What we do is we sub the Rainshine Foundation supports um some rural schools in the Northern Democratic Republic of the Congo. So if you're looking on a map, if you see Garamba National Park, which kind of sticks out on that northern hump of uh of the Congo, look to the left of that along the Ulele River. There's some small river communities, and we help support schools there. Uh, we help support uh medical um medical facility. I uh uh it's kind of a clinic, and uh some other small like uh freshwater and other projects. Wow, amazing. Have you been there? I've yes, I've made a couple of trips myself and always a member of our board, other than the years of COVID when travel was restricted. Uh, we've had at least one member of our board go here every year to visit our projects, and we have an on-the-ground uh director and administrator, and and they work we work very tightly on WhatsApp uh with them.

Hiring For An AI-Enabled GTM

Kevin Kerner 43:36

So wow. God bless you for doing that. That's some amazing work. I mean, growth marketing is important, but uh that's a pretty that's a pretty important mission too. So good, really, really good stuff. Well, this has been uh great, Rob. I've really um enjoyed talking to you. I think I've learned a lot through this conversation. I love the items you mentioned. I love the uh the ice model that you mentioned. So I'll get all that. I will get everything uh documented and out there to the world. Um, if people want to get a hold of you to talk through some of this stuff more, how do they find you? And and how do we find the rainshine foundation as well?

Rob Freedman 44:10

Yeah, so uh, well, let's start with rainshine, they're more important. Uh so rainshinefound uh.com.org, both of them. Uh and uh so you can find us there. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty easy to find, uh Rob Friedman. And uh yeah, I look forward to talking marketing or rainshine with anybody.

Kevin Kerner 44:31

Well, thank you so much, and uh best of luck to you. And I hope to meet up with you live someday in. Hopefully, it's that Marcus, maybe. That'd be fun.

Rob Freedman 44:38

Yeah, come on down.

Kevin Kerner 44:39

All right, sounds good. Thanks, Kevin.