Webinar
High-Impact Investments B2B Decision-Makers Are Planning For 2024.
Discover where the fastest growing companies are planning to invest their resources in 2024.
Marketers are finding themselves in a constant state of flux, requiring strategies that can swiftly pivot in response to economic shifts and rapid technological advancement. Iron Horse CEO, Uzair Dada, and Chief Growth Officer, Monica Behncke, discuss best practices for engaging prospects and customers effectively in today’s unpredictable business environment.
Adapting to change.
Perpetual change is the new normal. Marketers must learn to develop adaptive strategies, operate efficiently, and embrace technology for innovation.
Leveraging AI.
AI can automate content creation, translate communication between different organizational roles, facilitate deep data analysis, and improve productivity and efficiency. It’s time to put it to use.
Balancing technology with a human touch.
Driving personalized, cross-channel conversations requires a unified marketing and sales approach to balance automated processes with authentic human interactions.
I’m optimistic about sales and marketing. For years, I’ve preached the value of and have tried to get sales and marketing alignment across companies, and I feel like we’re getting a lot closer. I’m seeing more examples of true unification. I think there are a lot of factors in the marketplace and in technology that are coming together to allow that.
Uzair Dada is Founder and CEO of Iron Horse. Over the last 25 years, Uzair has built Iron Horse from a startup to an award-winning growth marketing agency helping global brands build scalable integrated marketing programs. His areas of expertise include building and executing B2B and Developer Marketing programs focused on emerging technology areas like AI, Big Data, IoT, game development and developer tools.
As Chief Growth Officer, Monica is responsible for Iron Horse clients’ growth and alignment strategies. Most recently, Monica was the Vice President and Global Group Director of B2B Services at Forrester where she led over 100 advisors and analysts serving B2B sales, marketing, and product executives. Prior to Forrester, Monica led the Marketing Executive practice for SiriusDecisions, where she developed and applied best practice methodologies serving executives across a variety of industries. Before her advisory service roles, Monica held executive positions in AMD, Cisco, and IBM.
Alex Jonathan Brown: [00:00:00] It's 2 p.m. on the East coast, 11 a.m. in the Bay area, and wherever you are, turn off your slack notifications and grab your favorite caffeinated beverage of choice. It's time for a coffee break. I'm your host, Alex Jonathan Brown, Senior Content Strategist here at Iron Horse. And today we're looking forward to what's coming in 2024. Joining us and playing the role of our powerful prognosticators, it's Iron Horse CEO, Uzair Dada and Iron Horse Chief Growth Officer Monica Behncke. Hey, y'all.
Monica Behncke: [00:00:29] Hi, Alex.
Uzair Dada: [00:00:30] Hello. How are you?
Alex Jonathan Brown: [00:00:31] I'm great. Uh, and happy to be talking about this, but obviously saying that we're just talking about all of 2024 is more than we can cover in 20 minutes. So we have a bit of a framing device. It's the three things that will change the way you market this year. And the year we're coming out of 2023 was definitely a year of change in many aspects, both marketing based and otherwise. So let's start with this. Are we leaving that change behind in 2023, or is it something we need to be prepared for in 2024?
Uzair Dada: [00:01:05] Yes, I'd say I'd start out by saying that I think 2023 was an extension of a pattern now we've seen for three plus years, so I'd say it's a pattern. And what do we as marketers know? And we see things repeat multiple times. We call that a trend. And the trend is that this is not going away, and that we have gotten used to the different types of changes. And, you know, we have sort of economic changes. North America, Western Europe seems to be getting better, more stable. There's still some rough patches in different places where from an economic growth perspective. And then there's the global stuff. You know, we had the Ukraine war from a couple of years ago. Now we have the conflict going on in Israel. We had Covid started in 2021. Now we are on the 18th. Different version of Covid that's happening. You have RSV, we have flu. We've got it just seems like it keeps coming and and evolving. And I think the kind of the interesting thing is it's becoming the new normal. It's not that Covid became a new normal or the war became the new normal, but the global complexity has become the new normal. And so as a result, us marketers and leaders have sort of in the old days, in the 2021 days, we all froze, didn't know what to do. We'd never seen that pattern before. It took a while to sort of get over it, understand it, and start mobilizing. And then 2022 was one of the best years that most people ever had from a technology perspective, growth perspective, despite this. And then there is some other things that happen in 2223, and it seems that we're building that momentum again. So I think we've learned to adapt to that change and work despite of that stuff going on.
Monica Behncke: [00:02:53] Yeah, it's I'm going to pick up on two things. Um, one is I wouldn't say it's an increase in complexity as much as an increase in unpredictability, because I think that's been complexity for a while. But things used to be we used to be able to anticipate and predict things a lot better than we can now. It's we keep being surprised and surprised that we're surprised and we have to stop that. Um, the other the other word I'll pick up on is the word frozen. Um, and the reason why I, I think about that is I'm Canadian. And when you grow up in Canada and you learn to drive, one of the things you learn is how to drive on black ice, because you can't predict where it is and when you've never done it before, the first time you do it, you immediately you take this reaction. You jam on the brakes and you, you know, try and correct. And that's the wrong thing to do. You know, when you learn to drive on and hit black ice, you decelerate, you go into the curve. Um, and you don't know because it is black ice when it's going to happen. But you've been build the muscle of how to actually react to that. And I think that's what's happening now is we don't know where the black ice is.
Monica Behncke: [00:04:10] We don't know what's coming. But we've gotten a lot better at building up our muscles on on how to deal with it when it does come in front of us. And I think that that's that those muscles that we're building are a couple of things. There's, there's cultural muscle, um, you know, just people kind of just not not having the expectation that we can sit there in January and go, this is exactly what the year is going to look like. You know, people don't even do that anymore. It's like we this is what our plan is, but we don't know what's coming. And people are being less thrown off. To your point, when the change does happen, because we've got the muscles, we know, we know how to decelerate and lean into the skid that we're going into and correct for. Worit. Um, and I think that that's, that's kind of where I think it's going, and I think it's going to continue, um, on a whole bunch of different fronts. Um, economically, politically, um, you know, geopolitically, a lot of things are going to change. Technology is going to take a whole lot of changes in the next year or so. Um, and there's going to be goods and there's going to be shake ups as a part of all of those things.
Alex Jonathan Brown: [00:05:26] And speaking about technology changes, we did a version of this at the start of 2023, and one of the things that you both identified as something, understandably, to keep an eye on for that year was AI. And we've seen a lot of stuff happen over the course of the last year in in that field. So looking forward to 2024. I'm super interested in where you all think we are in regards to AI and what might be coming down the pipeline.
Uzair Dada: [00:05:54] I mean, it's to me it's like being a kid in the candy store, right? There's just new candy every week, every month, every quarter. It's like just crazy. The base, the the speed and velocity of innovation as a result of this is just absolutely incredible. And I think we talked about a bunch of use cases when we had this conversation last year around content and creative and sales and marketing, sort of leading the charge very much the case content, creative design nine leading the charge. There's a lot of really, really interesting automation use cases coming out from artificial intelligence that you'll see a lot more of, um, you're seeing I think there's an amazing opportunity because it's, it's it's an amazing tool to consume data in a non-linear manner and be able to connect it in a vectorized manner. Uh, the ability to for analytics, to be able to glean insights and derive insights, which something was very linear and took a long time, I think is going to be amazing. So what it means for highly data driven areas, whether it's healthcare or disease management or drug discovery, I think is going to be absolutely amazing, amazing, amazing. Um, you know, another use case that I think I may have mentioned last time or not, but like that I love, is it that some of the tools like ChatGPT act as a translator for me? And by that I mean I'm a marketing person or a sales person.
Uzair Dada: [00:07:34] And sometimes when I'm trying to talk to an engineer or a design resource, my conversation style doesn't translate into what I need them to do or how I want them to understand. But by by being able to go in and saying, here's what I'm trying to say. How do I say that in a way that a senior designer, or would able to interpret it, or as a web developer, can use this to actually go create a web page or whatever else. It's amazing. It's amazing to play that that sort of translator piece. Uh, to me, I think that's a phenomenal, phenomenal use case. Um, a couple of other things that we've heard from some of our partners and customers. One of our partners acquired a company and they had tons of blogs. Like hundreds of logs. And so they were like, okay, well, they're great. The school company, they've got some good stuff, but our persona is different and our writing style is different. So how do we adopt this? They were able to convert those 100 blogs in 100 minutes or less, I think was or I don't know what the number was somewhere, something really, really small into something that fit their persona and their style and publish it through their platform. What an amazing merger integration use case, right? But I would have never thought about, but kind of a cool example of innovation. I'm sure Monica has other cool things she's thinking about.
Monica Behncke: [00:08:59] There's yeah, there's a few of them. Um, it's interesting because, you know, you started Alex with the idea of how marketing is going to change in 2024. And if you kind of frame these two things together and say, you know, AI is going to change how marketing does it, and I start thinking about, well, what are all the departments in marketing and how would they all change? So let's start with portfolio marketing. Portfolio marketing wants to understand audiences, understand research. Um, what a great way to synthesize research. I used to, you know, when I did research, I always hated the writing answers because then you'd, like, have to read them all and try and figure them out. What a great use case for that, to synthesize all of that and gather that information, um, more broadly and be able to then bring it down to more specificity. So that's really cool. You think about, um, building in, you know, creating demand or creating ABM programs and all of the content pieces of it. We talked about that last year, and that's certainly an opportunity, um, you think about and I'm going to is there I'm going to ask you, it's kind of like marketing operations and the use of repetitive tasks and technology. How do you think ChatGPT or not? Chatgpt. But AI in general is going to, um, impact marketing ops as a, as a function within marketing. Yeah.
Uzair Dada: [00:10:26] And I even say marketing ops broadly, right? I mean, you've seen certain companies go out and saying, we're going to automate your entire go to market function. That's a bold statement. That means that I'm able to identify who you want to go after, discovery of segment, identifying it, identify how you should talk to them, where you should talk to them, syndicated. Analyze it. Optimize it. Wow. Like that's crazy, right? It's like, it's a it's an amazing vision. It's nowhere close to being there. But if you start thinking about what goes into it, historically it's been a pretty linear function that has inputs, outputs and optimization and workflows. You could see it if the structure was there and the connections were there, that a large part of it could at least be configured.
Monica Behncke: [00:11:16] Mhm.
Uzair Dada: [00:11:17] Using artificial intelligence, automation, other and data sets in a better way. And that takes away from a lot of manual connects and recreates and optimization that we go through. I don't think it's that far. You know.
Monica Behncke: [00:11:31] No. But I think that's what's interesting is I made the mistake myself, kind of doing the linearity between AI and ChatGPT because that's the, the, you know, the as a marketer, what I use most frequently, what I see, what I, what I touch. Yeah. But if you think about what you just said and you know, if you're we're in January right now and CES is, is it over? It's just gone on. Um, you know, the, the embeddedness of AI. And when we stop talking about it and what it is and what it can do, and it's just we're talking more about the new functionality, the new automation, the new kind of trigger based productivity inside of the marketing tools that we already are used to. It's it's funny when when it goes away, it's becomes more important in a way it is.
Uzair Dada: [00:12:25] And to me, it reminds me a lot of the early days of web services in late 90s and 2000. Uh, you know, probably a lot of our listeners are probably like, what, 90s and 2000? I was wearing diapers at that time. But, you know, there's like web services came in and made data more democratic. It made it available, and as a result, I could connect things and see things I couldn't see before. This to me is at a crazier scale the ability for us to connect the data, synthesize the data, and act on it. And so as a result, that made some transformational changes. And we used to talk about web services. And what are we going to do with web services. No one talks about web services because web services are part of everything. I think we're going through the same thing. We're talking about AI as something novel. It's AI is novel as to what it's doing, but I will become core part of the engine, the brain to everything we do. And so for us, I think it's the ability for us to adapt it. And I think last year we talked about this is the year of experimentation, which is very true, especially on certain use cases like sales and marketing. I think in certain areas where there's product innovation that's happened, which is sales and marketing tools a lot, you'll move from a experimentation stage to a proof of concept of minimized or some level of adoption. In other cases, I think that Monica, I think alluded to, you'll see a much more wider adoption of experimentation across other departments within the company, like there are if you look at sort of what's on top CEO and leaders, strategy and agendas, almost every single person, every single, uh, strategy consulting firm, whether it's McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Booz, Deloitte is talking about how should CEOs and CFOs and other leaders think about transforming their organization with AI? What are the use cases? How should they think about it? That's on everyone's brain, like, what do I do with it? It's a topic of every board meeting, right? If I don't do this, I may be left behind. So I think you'll see a wider degree of experimentation in a faster acceleration and adoption and proof of concepts.
Monica Behncke: [00:14:41] So here's here's an interesting kind of question, because I always take over Alex's questioning. I'm curious. Mind, uh, makes my job easy. When you think about Alex, you can answer as well. When you think about AI, um, and the fact that everybody's talking about it, everybody has wants to use it, but there's still a lot of fear around it. And then you project into the future where AI is so embedded, it just becomes a a feature within things. Do people feel more comfortable at that time? Because we're not talking about AI anymore. We're just talking about our new great feature associated with it. Should we as marketers, should we not talk about it and talk about the benefit or the output of what it is, as opposed to kind of the the sausage behind which is AI? Or are people still so interested and fascinated that that they are in such a learning mode?
Uzair Dada: [00:15:36] I think there is a I think there's two camps. Majority of the people are using this as an amazing marketing thing, like every company has AI because it's the dotcom of today. If I talk about AI, I'm just cooler. So there is that AI is cool factor that I think is have its shelf life. Whatever the shelf life is, I think there is a adoption fear that exists in certain places where people feel their jobs may be at risk or their jobs may change dramatically. I think it was, um, um, the CEO of Google's 60 minute interview where he said 70% of the jobs in the next five years will have transformed. That's a crazy statement, right? That doesn't mean they're gone. They're transformed. Right? I think that's.
Monica Behncke: [00:16:22] That's the thing that people are missing is is transformed. And gone are two entirely different things.
Uzair Dada: [00:16:28] Exactly. And so the notion is what is gone is if if it's taken away the stuff I hate doing anyway or something that's highly repetitive, which a lot of it is, it's taking away repetitive tasks. It's not taking away the thinking tasks. Then that's a good thing because I'm accelerating what I do and how I do things. That's how I see it. It's made me more productive. It's not really taking away from stuff I do. It's taken away from certain amount of keystrokes that I used to go to that used to frustrate me. So my starting point is further along, right? So whether am I content person or a copy person or interpretation, like I'm talking to an engineer and I'm pulling my hair like I don't know how to tell them this. And now that it's helping me sort of translate that, it makes me feel better. So I think there is a just like we talked about the earlier stuff, we've gotten used to it. We're getting used to it. And the more we get hands on and try things and learn things, the fear dissipates and the help. Evolves, and I think that's the balance. And I think we have to have more conversations and get people to be hands on. I think the partner we were talking about that acquired the company. They told their marketers because they were like people were just not doing it. And so they said, hey, I'm going to we don't have the luxury of hiring more people, but we need to increase our productivity. So I need you to produce 50% more content with the same resources. And that was a force function. That's one strategy, right? To say you will learn how to use it. It may not be perfect, but it's sort of like if you are afraid of trying it, you're going to be left behind. So we have to figure out quickly how to embrace and how to fit it in, knowing for sure that it may take away from certain things that I do, but be confident that likely it's the stuff that you don't want to do.
Alex Jonathan Brown: [00:18:17] I think one thing that's going to really that'll be interesting to watch is how the the rollout of Microsoft Copilot goes. Yes. Um, because we may be very quickly like there's a, there's a world in which AI integrates as well as spell check has you cannot process a word processor that doesn't do inline spell checking at this point. When 15 years ago you had to go into a menu and yes, however many years before that it didn't exist. Yeah, like if they nailed this rollout the way that I think a lot of us who care about this are sort of hoping they are. Yes. It becomes cost of doing business for any of the programs that you're working with on, on a daily basis. The best thing about that, like that doesn't get to any of the the higher level conversations that you guys have been talking about. But Monica, hopefully that is the thing that removes that. I'm afraid to have an Alexa in my house because I think Amazon's listening to me version of this, right? It gets that fear over it because we're using it every day and it's always there. So it's going to be cool.
Uzair Dada: [00:19:26] Because Walmart is going to deliver knowing what what, what groceries you run out to your house in your refrigerator and go out. So it's going to be all cool. You know, we're going to be it's going to be awesome. That's the latest CES. That's the latest CES announcement.
Alex Jonathan Brown: [00:19:42] I have a I have a smart washer dryer in my house, and I've never used the smart stuff, but I guess I'm glad it's there. Um, I'm just old fashioned when it comes to laundry. There is, I think, an overarching concern, especially when we talk about some of that bigger, um. Like when we start talking about, I may be getting into strategy a little bit more, or doing the base work for that than a human gets to to come across. Um, over the top of is really how do we make sure that as we're doing all this stuff, it doesn't have a negative effect on the end product of what we're doing, the actual marketing, the hopefully connecting with people who want to buy what we're trying to do. I think it's a constant struggle, whether that's AI driven or not, to just kind of keep in mind that, like, we've got people on the other end of these emails that we're sending out or the other end of any of the tactics or.
Monica Behncke: [00:20:37] Any of it. The other end of the website and the other end of the event.
Uzair Dada: [00:20:41] Yeah, I think I think there is a, I think the that and the other thing to me, that is when you have such a rapid pace of innovation. You have cool experiments and you have terrible experiments, and there's more terrible experiments than cool experiments. And my fear is people see their terrible experiments and get turned off and say, it's not ready. It's not for me. But there is. It's just a it's just a price of a rapid pace of innovation that you need to, as we said earlier, have the agility and the plan to. Try, discard and keep moving because it's not stopping. But if some people are like, oh, I tried this thing, it was terrible. I'm not going to use it. I would never publish it. Then you're going to get stuck behind. So I think there needs you need to sort of understand how to consume this innovation and have the, the adaptability and the plan and the structure and the organization to embrace it. But you will see a lot of noise in the system. As you go through and find those gems.
Monica Behncke: [00:21:47] I think he also I think it's, it's looking at it from, from both ends. So if you look historically, you know, there's a little bit of a, a shiny object and a keeping up and a fear of missing out where people just implement stuff. Um, and it's, you know, it happened with chatbots, AI, even even social media. You know, a long time ago, B2B, social media and people just said, everybody's doing it. I have to do it. Let's just get it out there. It's implemented not thoughtfully, and it's not implemented with how the experience on the other end, like how people are experiencing it. Because the goal inside a company, inside a marketing department or inside a company is we need to get something out the door. We need to be one of the cool kids. We have to have the checkbox. We have to be able to tell the board that we did it, or tell the CEO that we did it, and the getting it done becomes more important than how it's experienced by the customer, or the buyer or the stakeholder. Whoever it is. So there there is a an encouragement to experiment and do proof of concepts, but be intentful and be thoughtful about it, and then stop and turn around and look at it from the outside, back in again to say, did we actually do what it is that we wanted to do? Or do we just, you know, check a box?
Alex Jonathan Brown: [00:23:13] It's that I think there's something so important, uh, in that idea of all of this stuff that we're doing, like, regardless of whether we want to feel cool kids or Bleeding Edge or all that stuff, like if it doesn't communicate with our customers in a way that works for them, like we're really just wasting time and money, and there's some of that that you go through as you figure it out. But especially now as we record this, you know, early 2024, like, thankfully, we've mostly stopped talking about the way that companies were trying to use NFTs a year and a half ago, but like that clearly just didn't connect with customers on a way that was valuable to them. Like we've moved on. And so I think as we're really creating news here, please talk more about this, but really creating that kind of unified cross channel communication that's valuable with our customers and creates those sort of human connections, even as we're using all this technology that, like the three of us love and many other people love as well, like the focus needs to stay, I think on that, that human aspect of that.
Uzair Dada: [00:24:22] Yeah, 100%. You know, you know, the thing that scares me about all technology and connecting everything is we truly are taking the taking the human out of our outreach processes, connecting processes and engagement processes with other humans and replacing a robotic structure to enable that. And I think that's terrible. And we saw that from all the, uh, adoption of sales sequences that came in. Right. Um, that that you had the advent of outreach, outreach, and Salesloft and Salesforce has their own stuff and revenue. I do where you have the marketing nurture stuff, where we were spamming the hell out of everybody and giving it to the bigger the database, the better. I'm going to send 26 million people this generic email to sales people now, sending it to downloading these lists from zoom and just sending them crazy amount of emails. And now suddenly Yahoo and Gmail are saying, we're not going to let you do that. We're going to call you spammers. If you do that, salespeople, that's good, because we, we, we sort of went to the path of least least resistance of saying, let's automate, let's automate, let's automate, and Covid and everything else. When we became remote didn't help because everyone's like, I can't call you, I can't meet you. So let me just send you more stuff, more crap, right? We have to stop on the other side as a human. Right? We all get these robotic emails and you can read through them in a second. Right. And so how do you invest that investment of researching that investment? You use tools to research better, but understanding the human, understanding the company understanding their business, being thoughtful about how to reach out to them, understanding based on all the cool content that you have in your technology, you have what they've done. So when you're reaching out to them, you're furthering the conversation rather than being generic. That's the part I hope we all embrace and not miss out. And I think there is a there's a big gap between marketing does their stuff and sales stuff. Sales does this stuff. And we've been talking about sales and marketing alignment. And yeah, at the handshake level it's there. Yes, we all want to grow together. We're connected. I don't know if we're doing enough. I don't know if we're bridging enough, because marketing still creates a bunch of stuff, and sales does a lot of stuff. The stuff doesn't always talk to each other. So to me that bridging part is really, really important. Monica.
Monica Behncke: [00:26:55] Yeah. What more is there to say? Um, I think that if you think about again, you know, I, I like the outside in. I like when companies do mystery shopping on themselves to go in and be your own client or or even better yet, have somebody else be your client because you know too much about your own company. It's amazing. You know the things that you think are really, really clear are not clear. And you'll start to see those disconnects. You'll start to see the robotic ness coming. When that happens, you'll start to see bad experiences on the website, and you'll start to see the disconnect between sales and marketing. Marketing. Saying it one way sales is saying it another way. Marketing has gotten you down a path. Sales takes you all the way back to the beginning. All of these kinds of things just miss the fact that there's there's a human absorbing it on the other end. So find, find human, find a human, um, to be that and give you that feedback in, in a really, um, you know, complete and and honest way about this is the way that it was experienced for them. And that will help you get more sensitized to the humanness that has to happen. It doesn't say don't automate, but automate in a way that recognizes what's on the other end of it.
Uzair Dada: [00:28:12] Yeah, and I think we use the word unified. That's a very important firm, you know, sales and marketing do stuff, but not in a non unified manner. So how do we unify to ensure that you truly are at the account level, which is made up of a bunch of people within a company, you're having a cohesive conversation and not the Zappos experience of, I bought a pair of Adidas or I was looking for a pair of Adidas and Zappos. I looked at it, I moved on, and now that Zappos Adidas ad is following me everywhere, even though I ended up buying a pair of sneakers from Nordstrom and they have no clue I did that. And so, you know, we have the technology today guys on the B2B side for sure that connects the dots. Use it to that advantage. But then also when you are doing follow up, especially when it comes to post things that are marketing qualified and sales follow up, the human touch and context awareness is so mission critical more than ever. You can't you can't kind of overemphasize that part.
Alex Jonathan Brown: [00:29:19] And I think maybe we've come to we've come to a really good kind of three buckets of this conversation. So we know that staying human is going to be important in 2024 and making those connections, that probably means your sales and marketing need to communicate a little better. Sorry for both of those groups. I know sometimes it's hard. Um, we also know that AI is going to play a big part in a lot of what a lot of companies are doing. Um, and then because of those two ideas on surface level do seem maybe a little at odds. Ai is going to be important and you have to keep it human. Um, change is going to be such a huge thing in this next year as we figure out how to make those two ideas play super nicely with each other. Um, we're we're coming up on time. Um, any closing thoughts? Anything you're especially excited for? Any sports predictions for 2024? You want to go on record now? So we can all say you look really smart when we do this again next year.
Uzair Dada: [00:30:20] I think this is the year of 49ers. It's the that's the way it's going to be. It's going to be awesome. And hopefully my Warriors are going to rebound and and get stabilized. But I think this is the year of 49ers. And and frankly I just say that I the candy store just got bigger and I'm going shopping every day. And and it's just amazing and exciting. And I don't think we've seen a pace of innovation like this or a event, a moment in timeline in decades that is even close to it. There is just the things that are coming out. You know, ChatGPT is going to soon have an app store. I think it's going to put the Apple App Store and give it a run for its money, because, again, the ability with Apple did by making their ecosystem open is drove innovation for decades and decades. I think you're seeing that next level happening. So for personally for me, I'm I'm super excited.
Alex Jonathan Brown: [00:31:19] And Monica, I will let you hop in. One thing I do want to say, especially as we're thinking about workflows now, we still haven't seen the thing where these new tools in the candy shop was there, where they stop working or those companies close. We're still early enough that that hasn't happened yet. So everybody do exactly what you said. Go to that candy store, but don't become the child who's so attached to the stuffed animal that you're going to leave on a plane and and have a meltdown over like we we don't know which one of these will be here in five years yet. So stay open, try everything, and be super flexible with what you're working with because they may not always exist forever. Okay, I'm flexible with you. I'm glad you're flexible with your analogy. And you got a teddy bear and a candy store. Um, is that. It's an airport candy store. It's an airport candy store. Um, I think you're right. There is going to be a lot of consolidation. But, you know, like you said, I'm I'm really optimistic about the year. I'm not going to make sports predictions. That's my thing. But I do think that innovation sparks energy. I think there is you know, I think it's going to become an energetic year. I'm I'm optimistic for sales and marketing. I have for years and years and years preached the value of and try to get sales and marketing alignment across companies. And I feel like we're I feel like we're we're getting a lot closer. I'm seeing more and more real examples of of a true unification between sales and marketing. A lot of the technology, the AI, all of these things are kind of the scaffolding that lives underneath that. And that's my, you know, that's my panacea is is getting there. And so I think there's a lot of factors in the marketplace and in the technology marketplace that are coming together to allow that. So I'm very excited and optimistic about 2024.
Alex Jonathan Brown: [00:33:15] I think we all are. Um, and I'm very excited to see how it all plays out. Um, like I said, we're up on time. Uh, thanks, everybody for joining us. Uzair and Monica, thank you again so much. I love when we can get both of you, especially together on these chats. Uh, if you want to learn more about what Uzair, Monica or myself do, all of our websites the same, it's ironhorse.io. Um, you can also track them down on LinkedIn. It's always, always good content. And Uzair gives great comments when other people have success. It's one of my favorite things to read on the internet. Um, and we do this once a month. So come back, uh, next month and we'll do this again. But until then, uh, coffee break's over. Let's get back to work. Thanks, everybody.
Uzair Dada: [00:33:57] Cheers. Thanks.
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