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Gen AI Activation in Marketing & Sales

Funnel Reboot podcast

Release Date: 07/01/2025

The Classical Marketing book, with Anthony The Classical Marketing book, with Anthony "Tas" Tasgal

Funnel Reboot podcast

The world we inhabit today is, in countless ways, an extended echo of breakthroughs made by two extraordinary cultures that came from a compact corner of the mediterranean between the 4th century BCE to the 2nd century of the current era. I’m talking about Greece and Rome, whose influence on contemporary language, thought, and culture is so deeply woven into the modern world that we navigate it every day without noticing.  Taking just language, be it English, French, Spanish or Italian, they all use words with origins that tie back to ancient law, institutions, arts and sciences. The...

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Keeping the Revenue Engine Running, with Karl Ortmanns show art Keeping the Revenue Engine Running, with Karl Ortmanns

Funnel Reboot podcast

We often hear marketers talk about how vital their work is to sales. What we don’t hear nearly as often is the reverse: how essential sales is to a well-functioning marketing team. If marketing creates the content, sales provides the context. And that context is what makes campaigns relevant, credible, and grounded in the real world. Sales teams feed marketing the on-the-ground truth—what prospects are actually saying, how they react to new pricing, and how they interpret a company's positioning in different segments. That’s especially clear when a business serving the SMB market tries...

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Brandjitsu, with Michael Dargie show art Brandjitsu, with Michael Dargie

Funnel Reboot podcast

Is your Brand truly memorable? Would a person who bought from you a year ago be able to recall your name or say what they found compelling about you? The reality is that a lot of brands are instantly forgettable.  You don’t have to wallow in a world of Meh - you can turn your brand into something memorable - we’re going to hear a process that’s been codified in a book that came out in 2025 called BrandJitsu. .  Listen in as we delve into the book’s process, which begins not with a funnel but with a Loop we’ve got to Embrace. We’ll hear how to plumb the depths of our brand...

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Human Centered Marketing, with Ashley Faus show art Human Centered Marketing, with Ashley Faus

Funnel Reboot podcast

Here’s a question a lot of us are asking ourselves today. How do marketers build genuine, durable trust when the cost of generating massive volumes of AI content is basically zero? How can you argue for making humanly-crafted content in small quantities  When it’s so easy to have AI pump it out in big quantities? The hard truth is that humans are wired to notice what other humans do. Meaningful communication with buyers contains elements that just don't scale - this takes more than a trivial amount of work. But that is precisely why you need to do them.   A new book came out...

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Analytics that's Metrics Centred, with Allan Wille show art Analytics that's Metrics Centred, with Allan Wille

Funnel Reboot podcast

Up to the 18th century, making and trading things was harder than it needed to be. You had to deal with a bewildering patchwork of local constants and norms. It was actually the French Revolution & administrators who came out of it that started to codify how we measure things. The standards they adopted were ultimately formalized in 1875 at a Convention  whose name you may recognize, the Metre - or should I say Meter -  Convention.  The Standard set at the convention spread beyond France to most of Europe, removing friction in commerce and everyday life. Engineers could spec...

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Just Evil Enough, with Alistair Croll show art Just Evil Enough, with Alistair Croll

Funnel Reboot podcast

In 1985,  Robert Fulgham published a book that has gone on to sell 7 million copies. That puts it in league with nonfiction books like the biographies of Princess Diana, Nelson Mandela & the Diary of Anne Frank. In "All I Really Need to Know I Learned In Kindergarten," Fulgham lays out a handful of rules we all internalized on our way to adulthood. They include… Share everything. Play fair. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.   You’ve probably noticed the...

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Scar Tissue, with Danny Covey show art Scar Tissue, with Danny Covey

Funnel Reboot podcast

For any professional, life often presents unexpected challenges that test our resilience and strength. The Ottawa-based marketer we’ll hear from today, has had an extraordinary journey,  For those born with congenital heart defects like Danny Covey’s, surgery isn’t an if, it’s not even a when, it a HOW MANY. Without undergoing them, they have no hope of living to adulthood, Danny has had eight of these life-threatening operations.  But throughout all that, he’s displayed unwavering courage.  His emotional and physical scars have shaped him, but they have also given him...

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Website Wealth, with Philippa Gamse show art Website Wealth, with Philippa Gamse

Funnel Reboot podcast

One of the best known events in the modern Olympics is the High jump. Since its dawn in 1896 all jumpers used the same technique. They would run towards the bar, then begin their vault by putting one leg over, or trying to go head-first over the bar. But someone came to the 1968 Mexico City games, who couldn’t win on physicality, but who did have a hack no one had thought of.    That person was 21 year old American Dick Fosbury, who you wouldn’t find anything notable looking back at his track career.  Back in high school he’d struggled to master  all the motions used...

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The Path to AGI with John Thompson show art The Path to AGI with John Thompson

Funnel Reboot podcast

Artificial General Intelligence is a term that most of us have heard, a good number of us know how its defined, and some claim to know what it will mean for the average marketer. Here’s what OpenAI’s Sam Altman said “It will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI.”   What nobody knows for sure is when it will be here. Some said that GPT5 would herald the dawn of artificial general intelligence.    This episode is airing In mid-2025, and GPT5...

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Books for the Summer Break show art Books for the Summer Break

Funnel Reboot podcast

Hey, Glenn here. It’s the middle of summer when I’m recording this; a time we don a pair of shades, a beach towel and a good book. Funnel Reboot usually shares talks with marketing book authors, but for this show I’m going to share some reads that go a little farther afield.  Come along with me through six books that are all amazing. The subjects range between business, humanities, technology and science fiction.    Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00 Intro 00:01:44 The Discoverers 00:12:43 Blindsight 00:19:05 How Big Things Get Done 00:24:12 Private Truths, Public Lies 00:27:41...

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Most of the leading AI companies tell us how wonderful their technology will make our lives.  In a recent post put out by OpenAI’s head, Sam Altman called The Gentle Singularity, he says “We will figure out new things to do and new things to want...Expectations will go up, but capabilities will go up equally quickly, and we’ll all get better stuff. We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other.” 

 

Of course, these new things need to be marketed and sold. Sam has good news there too, saying: “Generally speaking, the ability for one person to get much more done in 2030 than they could in 2020 will be a striking change”

 

This all sounds wonderful; it’s used so heavily by Silicon Valley, it’s been given the title of Effective Accelerationism. It’s essential thesis is that AI will cause progress all by itself. So we should just let it take over? Are we willing to bet our livelihoods on that?

 

Where we are here in 2025, it’s a challenge to do sales and marketing work using AI. Very few know how to run entire functions with Generative AI, which is why Sam qualified his 2030 prediction by saying that “many people will figure out how to benefit from [AI]” by then. How do we unlock AI’s activation in customer acquisition? How do we get out of the starters blocks?

 

I had the chance to moderate a panel discussion on “Gen AI Activation in Marketing & Sales” at an amazing event hosted by UC Labs and TCC Canada - please get the links to each of them in the shownotes. 

 

The panel featured myself, Lubabah Bakht, Gary Amaral, Jim Cain, Peter MacKinnon, and Brett Serjeantson, zig zagging through everything from day-to-day challenges to legal and privacy concerns to the lack of skills barring our progress.

 

I count myself fortunate to not only share a panel with these experts, but for being able to call them friends. 

 

And now, please listen to these experts on Activating generative AI in marketing and sales.

 

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.