Signals, AEO, and the New Buyer Journey with Sydney Sloan, CMO of G2

In this episode of AI’ve Got Questions, I sit down with Sydney Sloan, CMO of G2 and one of the most thoughtful and dynamic marketing leaders I know.

Sydney has spent her career shaping categories, scaling powerhouse SaaS companies, and building marketing teams that know how to spot the signal through the noise. Now she’s at the center of one of the biggest shifts we’ve seen in years: the rise of AI-driven buyer behavior, agentic workflows, and AEO.

We get into all of it, from how CMOs should rethink signals, to why “weed and speed” is the new growth mindset, to the exploding world of AEO tools (67 and counting - 67!). Sydney shares what she’s seen on her global AI tour, the data G2 is surfacing on how buyers actually research today, and the simple steps every marketer should take right now to keep up.

If you’re a marketing leader trying to build smarter, faster workflows in an agentic world, this one is full of practical insight.

Tune in.

Transcript

Stacey Epstein (00:29)
Today on the show, we have my good friend and an all-around fantastic person, really stellar marketer that I have looked up to for a long time, Sydney Sloan, who is currently the CMO at G2 and has had lots of really interesting marketing experience at some really great SaaS companies.

So tell us a little bit about you and your journey and how you got to where you are today. And then we're going to talk AI. I've got some questions.

Sydney Sloan (01:00)
 Yeah, it's crazy. I can see you've got some questions.

So, you know, it's really interesting to look back and be like, this is decades in the making. And yet there's still something new I learn every day. I grew up at Adobe. I did about 16 years there, mostly in product marketing roles in the document side, like the digital team.

Stacey Epstein (01:13)
 Yep.

Sydney Sloan (01:25)
 But I did very enterprisey work, lots of vertical. And so that was a great place to have the first half of my career.

And then I moved to Silicon Valley and worked at a company called Jive, which had some awesome people. And then my first CMO gig was at a document management company called Alfresco.

I had such good advice. This is an advice piece for your up-and-coming CMO listeners. The first job, you get the role. And I was really lucky at Alfresco that my CEO, Doug Dennerline – you know Doug – was so supportive of me. I really felt like I had the CEO that allowed me to be me and take risks.

And then I got this advice.

Stacey Epstein (01:50)
 Yeah. Yeah.

Sydney Sloan (02:13)
 A friend said, “The second CMO job you pick really matters. What company you pick, that’s what you'll be judged on.” And so I took a while for that one and saw what was happening in 2018 with sales tech and sales engagement.

I interviewed at Clari, Outreach, and Salesloft. All three were taking their C round at the same time. Sorry, long-winded, but fun stories.

I ended up at Salesloft. I just aligned with their leadership and culture, and it literally was the best job I ever had. I loved it. And then I was burnt out.

It was just the culture. The reason it was great – and you don't really hear this – but we were an employee-first company. You hear product led, sales led, customer led. We were employee led.

And the idea was that if you loved on your employees and created the next generation of great leaders, they, in turn, would take that love and appreciation and pay it forward to the customers. And our customers were us, right? And it just worked.

Gives me goosebumps. It was just, gosh, so great and a great place. I knew I was going to learn too. They were so committed to learning together and growing together. They were voracious learners and readers, the two co-founders.

And then, yeah, I took some time, went to Scale Venture Partners, got to work with our friend Craig Rosenberg, which was a hoot.

Stacey Epstein (03:36)
 Yes, I just filmed a session on his podcast, The Transaction, a few days ago. Super fun, super fun.

Sydney Sloan (03:42)
 The Transaction, yeah, with Matt – so fun.

Yeah. If you don't follow The Transaction, follow it. It's tactical, good stuff.

And then I dipped my toe in security because it's a hot market, validated that for me, and then ended up at G2. I was an advisor. We were on the EAB together, Stacey. G2 had been such a successful part of my equation in defining how to create category leadership in emerging categories.

And so I love this idea that you get to work with founders on category definition and helping them build their brand and just watching that. Like I'm watching it in the AEO category right now and having flashbacks to sales engagement.

And then also just being able to integrate the signals into our demand gen. Like, I only ever work P1 leads. That's all I ever care about – hand raisers.

Stacey Epstein (04:21)
 Totally. Yes.

Sydney Sloan (04:37)
 And so to find really warm, ready-to-go leads is what I want to feed the sales teams and SDRs. And G2 was always that.

I was like, let's come back to martech, which is what I love doing. I love being with my people. And little did I know the world would change in this year and a half that I've been here. I feel like I'm at the forefront once again of helping an industry form, reform.

And so, that's my very long-winded introduction.

Stacey Epstein (05:05)
 No, it's not. I mean, you're like me. I feel like our lives and paths have gone in and out of each other. I remember looking at Jive back at SuccessFactors. Of course, then Doug Dennerline went to SuccessFactors, serving on the advisory board at G2 together.

And I've been so excited to have you on the show for a lot of reasons. One, because I love just chatting with you and I know the audience will love to hear from you.

But G2 is at such an interesting place during this big AI revolution. Obviously, you've got to look at how to use AI internally for your team, for your marketing. Also, we all know at the core of AI is data. And G2 has some of the most interesting data out there. I've always said – and I used to say this in our advisory board meetings – G2 is the one company that can tell us what's going to be hot next, because you can see where ratings are taking off and what categories are starting to form.

So there's a lot of insight. But I think also – maybe you're still on your tour – but you just finished your AI tour sitting at G2.

You did? You look very fresh. You must have had a stout of tea.

Sydney Sloan (05:58)
 Mm-hmm. I got back from London last night. I am done. Thanks.

Stacey Epstein (06:20)
 But I think also, just sitting in your seat, you're seeing AI in so many different categories across marketing, across all functions of the business. So again, I've been excited to hear from you.

And I don't know, maybe we can start with AEO because it's on everybody's mind. I saw Carrie Lou just put a piece out today and everybody's talking about it. It's obviously an area of huge impact.

But let's just leave it wide open. You just got home from London. You've been talking about AI for the last few months on your tour. What is the thing that jumps out at you most about AI?

Sydney Sloan (06:56)
 Boy, that's a big one. I'll say it from two perspectives, and I'll just kind of think through the way that we crafted the workshop itself.

Because the first section of the workshop, our evangelist Tim Sanders – who people should follow, insanely smart – talked about the “why.” What is happening in the industry as it relates to the introduction of AI?

And the key takeaway from that session is really that AI is a prediction machine. It is trained on the past and it takes all that data and it helps predict, which is what humans used to be able to do based on our intuition and experiences.

And so the way to think about the difference between what AI can do and what humans can do is: AI is the prediction and humans are the judgment. And AI can't replicate that.

My favorite part of his spiel is where he talks about Rick Rubin and the Rick Rubin economy. I didn't know who Rick Rubin was until then, and now I do. He was a producer and he advised some of the best bands in the world from the Beastie Boys to… tons. And he has all these Grammys and doesn't actually know how to play an instrument.

But he's like, “My taste seems to be valuable to those who hire me.” And so, he has great judgment about what's going to be successful and what's not, or how to craft one song one way or produce one song one way versus another.

And so that's the difference. Really, we as humans have to use our judgment to direct the AI as to what to do, what not to do, which is why you hear these comments like, “A young person can do it, they can just use AI and build an agent.” And it's like, well, you still have to know what you're doing to ask the right question.

And so that, to me, is where AI is the difference between before and now – the era that we're living in – and what roles humans will play and what roles agents will play.

Stacey Epstein (08:34)
 Right. Yep.

Sydney Sloan (08:54)
 The process that I think we're all on, or the journey that we're all on, is: as leaders, the first thing that we have to do is get our teams very comfortable with using AI.

So that's kind of step one – the familiarity, the data you use, and realizing how to write a great prompt and what it can do for you.

And then the next phase is starting to orchestrate, which was the whole point of the road show. We had a blank slate.

What are your goals? What are your outcomes? And if you could start fresh, which is what I recommend, what would a new workflow look like? What would be the signals that you would want to identify? How would you connect agents to signals? What roles do humans play?

We can go deeper into that, but that's kind of where we teed it up. It's like, okay, that's a whole new world. Marketing automation, just put it to the side; it's gone. And now we have to talk about signals and segments and AI orchestration. That is the future.

Stacey Epstein (09:39)
 Yeah, totally.

Sydney Sloan (09:41)
 So let's dig in a little bit because part of the reason that I evolved this podcast from talking to founders of AI-for-marketing companies to talking to actual CMOs is that the feedback I kept getting was, “It's great to learn about all this technology, but I'm still struggling with how to really start.”

Stacey Epstein (09:53)
 Yeah.

Stacey Epstein (10:09)
 And I think by now, I hope most CMOs have started by building agentic processes or figuring out how to leverage custom ChatGPT so that you can do specific things. I've been having fun digging into the use cases that marketers are doing.

And let's talk about signals. We've talked a lot about more outbound flows on the show. We haven't done a lot of talk about – I mean, maybe it's not even going to be called ABM anymore – but understanding signals. I would love to dive into that if that's a use case you came across.

Sydney Sloan (10:40)
 Yeah, it is.

Use cases for marketing in general, just because we're such a diverse function – you definitely hear “AI for content” and “AI for personas.” But when it comes to the role that it plays in this orchestrated workflow, the first thing that I think, when I go back and I was talking about only wanting to work hot leads, is that now we have this ability to go out and find signals.

Clay was the partner that we selected to talk about signals and the new signal economy and why we need to think differently about that, because there are so many ways now that we can go and find them.

Before, we would create our ICP, which you still have to do today, and then we would say, “Okay, for that ICP, it made it more efficient that we could then target our advertising dollars to our target accounts,” but we didn't know which ones were actually in market.

So we spent a lot of time and energy trying to find those companies. Well, now there are new ways. And so you have to understand the signal, which is why I was like “signal to agentic.”

I still think you have to create the types of signals that go into certain segments. You could have competitive signals. You could have behavioral signals. There are lots of different behavioral signals.

I think more of the signals are in the behavior category when you think about ICP than the technographic and firmographic signals.

A good example they gave was back in the security space. It was like, if someone has just hired their first engineer or their first DevOps or tech ops person, is that the right time for them to consider getting their SOC 2?

Stacey Epstein (12:11)
 Mm-hmm.

Sydney Sloan (12:15)
 So how do you…

Stacey Epstein (12:20)
 And you know that from LinkedIn? Okay. Yep.

Sydney Sloan (12:23)
 Yes. There are certain things that you can do on LinkedIn and certain things you can't do.

Another one would be a compete signal. So Vanta was one of their customers, and that was my competitor. And I was like, “Now I know how they were doing it,” because you can mine LinkedIn in the comments in your areas.

But there are other ways too – audit Reddit threads is another good one. It has mentions, and then that is a signal.

The cool thing about Clay is they run it through their data waterfall to actually plop out a confirmed customer, and their data has been validated. And so you just have a higher-quality lead with that as well.

I mean, I'll prop G2: G2 signals are very strong account signals. You have an account researching in your category, you versus your competitor – Drata versus Vanta. Well, those leads, every single time, I would put directly into our compete nurture campaign.

What's different now is I would plug them into the outbound agent that I built that was an expert in Drata versus Vanta.

Stacey Epstein (13:10)
 100%. 100%.

Sydney Sloan (13:33)
 What's interesting here is you can pick companies that have built AI, agentic capabilities into their platform. 6sense has their intelligent workflows. You could build it in there – that's what we use, so that's what we would have done.

Or you can custom-build an agent and say, “I want that signal to be worked by this agent.” And that agent is specifically trained on how to respond to a competitive signal. Here are the three things. This is the research step I want you to do. This is the personalization I want you to do. And send it.

So that was the second session: Qualified and 6sense, and also Infuse over in the UK, talking about how to think about AI orchestration to signals.

And it was like, “I don't know, do we want agents sending emails?”

Stacey Epstein (14:16)
 Yeah.

Sydney Sloan (14:21)
 And you can imagine Latane going, “Have you looked at the emails coming from SDRs lately?” And she's like, “If you have a question, I think we're going to be better here.”

And so every signal gets worked in a timely manner, because that's what really matters. I feel like our job is to give the highest-quality signal and respond in the fastest time.

Stacey Epstein (14:25)
 100%. I know.

Yeah. And in the smartest way too, right? Yeah.

Sydney Sloan (14:46)
 And personalized, right?

It was funny. I was in our San Francisco stop – not intentionally, it just came out of my mouth – I was like, “All I care about is weed and speed.”

You want to weed out the bad stuff, right? You want to make sure that you're passing over high-quality accounts that are in a buying cycle. And then you want to book that meeting as fast as you possibly can.

And if you just focus on that, which is the inbound motion – you're kind of connecting inbound and outbound – so you put a “book a meeting” on your site, fill out a form, never “do not fill out a form.”

If they're giving signals, you can start running your outbound plays to them. If they're on your website, they should be conversing with an AI agent that can actually book the meeting. That's it. That is now. That's not the future. That is the now.

Stacey Epstein (15:29)
 Yep.

Yeah, I mean, throw in something like OneMind and the conversing even feels more like a human.

But I think if I can summarize the use case, and this is one of the things that I really love about AI, it used to be we were trying to automate one part of our marketing process or flow, and there was a tool that helped us do that.

I think what AI does is it makes us smarter and faster on everything we do. So we're finding the signals better because of AI. We're finding the signals faster. This isn't someone that posted “Vanta versus Drata” a month ago. It's someone that posted it today and we're able to read it.

Sydney Sloan (16:14)
 Right. In a Reddit thread. Right. Yeah.

Stacey Epstein (16:20)
 And we're able to get that. And it used to be like, okay, now we have it, it's a lead, send it over to the SDR and hopefully the SDR remembers their training on competitive Vanta versus Drata and has the wherewithal to write a good email and doesn't send our whole competitive deck that was actually never meant to be external.

Sydney Sloan (16:27)
 Someone uploaded it. Yeah, exactly.

Stacey Epstein (16:46)
 I love your comment about Latane and I feel the same way. I'm a writer, I have a degree in English, and I still think AI makes my writing better.

Now think of your recent college grad. So it's making that better. And I may even have AI doing some of the process for me to add some human feel to it.

And at the end of the day, I might be having a real sales conversation with that person that posted on Reddit within hours. And that's different – AI all the way through the process.

Sydney Sloan (17:18)
 And that is the one that will win the deal. That is the one that will win the deal because the customer will be like, “My gosh.” If the content is good, you're educating them, you're answering their question, and you connect with them first.

The people who get to the buyer first as they're doing their research – I think the data says it's like 75 to 80% – that first connection is the one that actually ends up winning the opportunity.

I think there are two other parts to this equation, though, as we're being honest with the world as it sits today.

Them going to a Reddit thread is likely the second place they're going. Or if they're even coming to G2, it's the second place they're going.

We're just updating our data on buyer behavior. We did it in April and we decided to do it again because we know things are changing so fast.

Stacey Epstein (17:53)
 Right.

Sydney Sloan (18:05)
 So in April, 29% of people said that they were starting their research process by going to an LLM. That just went to 50% in four months. A 70% change.

So 50% of buyers are first starting their research on LLMs. And so if you don't have your AEO strategy in place yet, get on it now.

I was just talking to a CMO today and he was like, “We were the first to SEO, we won, and now we have to do this big shift.” And I'm like, “Yep, you sure do.”

So understanding what questions are being asked, how to reorient your content not for search but for answers. And the recommendation we make is: think about the persona jobs to be done. That'll give you the right questions as they think about their roles.

Answer them all, not just for the part you do. We know the good thing to build brand is you want to have the content for all their questions, not just your question.

And then you start to monitor through an AEO tool. In April, there were seven on G2 and now there are 67 in four months. So talk about a category just exploding.

So you go to the AEO tools and they will tell you what questions people are asking, what citations the LLMs are referencing so you can go see. Thankfully, G2 is one of those top references. Like I mentioned, Reddit is another reference.

And you build your content strategy for them. Then the second click is those citations. So if the citation was a Reddit thread, then that's where they're going to go. If the citation was G2, that's where they're going to go do their research. And so that's that second layer of peer validation.

And then the third one is they're going to come to your website. So they're still coming. But the question is, can you get to them first off of that signal?

So that is the new buyer process. And we have to reorient our work to meet the buyer where they are. Simple as that.

Stacey Epstein (19:50)
 Yeah. Yeah.

I am going to keep true to my promise to the audience to try to keep these around 20 minutes. And I feel like we're just scratching the surface.

But I think it's a good point to wrap up on: AEO. If you are not figuring it out today, if you don't have a plan for it today, I don't care what size company you are – it's where everyone's going.

Paid search used to be only for certain companies. AEO is for everyone. If you're a marketer and you're not going on G2 and looking at those 67 providers, that's step one in my book.

Sydney Sloan (20:34)
 Yep. And they'll pick the leaders. That's why people build their brands on G2.

Yes, it's: start with AEO, start where buyers are, and then signals to action in minutes. Those are my two takeaways.

Stacey Epstein (20:43)
 Yep.

Awesome. Well, it's been so great having you on the show, as I knew it would. I looked at the time and I was like, no, no, no, we're only like five minutes in.

But I'll have you back on. This changes so fast. So let's check in again in six months. We'll see what's hot and interesting.

And thanks for being on the show. OK, bye-bye.