Drafting the Ultimate B2B Martech Stack.

Alex Jonathan Brown
00:07 - 00:42
It's 11AM on the West Coast, 2PM in New York City. And wherever you are, it's draft day.
We're doing it a little differently for this coffee break, and we've asked two of our favorite people in the marketing space to join us and draft their ideal martech stack. It's also the middle of the NBA draft. It's like a tie in. You get it. You're marketing people. 
Playing the roles of GM today from Channel99, the CEO and cofounder over there, it's Chris Golic. And the VP of demand gen at Invoca, Nani Schafer. Hi, everybody.

Nani Shaffer
00:42 - 00:44
Hello. 

Alex Jonathan Brown
00:44 - 00:53
And our expert analyst for this draft, Iron Horse CEO, the Charles Barkley to my Ernie Johnson, Uzair Dada. Hi, Uzair.

Uzair Dada
00:53 - 00:58
Hello. Hello. This is gonna be awesome.

Alex Jonathan Brown
00:58 - 03:00
Let's, we we, it's not we're not in the Madison Square Garden, but we're we're doing our best. And, unfortunately, we're not gonna pay any of you millions of dollars when this is done. So, our bad. 
Before we get started, we wanna set some ground rules for the draft. So again, if you're if you're just joining us, we're gonna pick some martech elements. We're gonna have a list at the end. In the chat, let us know how they're doing. We'll have you vote at the end.
But the very first ground rule, you already have your own company. Right? So, Chris, you don't need to draft Channel99. We're not gonna put you in that position, and it would be boring if you just both picked your own companies first. So you've already got your own company.
The second rule, you're starting from scratch. The whole concept of this is built out of the idea that that's something we almost never do, is really start from scratch unless you're launching a new startup and saying, how do I build every part of this exactly the way I want? We're letting you do that a little bit today.
And the third rule is really more of a note. It's not your entire stack. We're gonna do the first five picks live on on the webinar today, but then you would go off and do some undrafted free agent signings. We're not expecting you to build an entire functioning stack out of just five companies.
So with all of that, and as people are trying chiming in from South Carolina and Chicago in the chat, we have to figure out how we're gonna start things. And that means we're gonna do a coin toss. I'll, executive decision. Yeah, Nani will let you call it, and we'll have you try to call it in the air. So 321, go.

Nani Shaffer
03:00 - 03:03
I'm switching the tails. Oh.

Alex Jonathan Brown
03:03 - 03:06
Heads, unfortunately, last second.

Nani Shaffer
03:08 - 03:11
Trust my gut. They'll teach me.

Alex Jonathan Brown
03:11 - 03:30
We're gonna snake this draft, which means, Chris, you'll get the first pick, and then, Nani, you'll get the second pick of the first round and the first pick of the second. I'll explain it.
It's complicated. But, Chris, one one pick. The the commissioner comes out on stage, opens a little card you've given him. What's the name he's reading?

Chris Golec
03:30 - 03:49
Alright. My first pick is my playmaker. So think Steph Curry. Think San Francisco. I'm going with Salesforce.com. We all know what they do, but they're also in position to buy other companies. So I kinda consider Salesforce a twofer.

Uzair Dada
03:49 - 03:51
Very nice. Very nice.

Alex Jonathan Brown
03:51 - 04:11
Salesforce coming out of the Bay Area, like you said, obviously, it's Salesforce. We're familiar, but an integral part. Uzair, we'll go to you for some quick commentary. Like, a bit of chalk for a one one, but I think I think a solid pick.

Uzair Dada
04:11 - 04:31
I think it's a solid pick, especially with all the stuff that they're making and doing on the agentic side and AI investments. I think it's an interesting one. If, say, if we were doing this draft maybe a year ago, then Chris picked it, I would have gone, “Interesting.” But I'd say it's a pretty good pick.

Alex Jonathan Brown
04:31 - 04:41
Nani. This stage shuffles a little bit. Everybody claps that somebody's off interviewing Salesforce right now. Pick number two.

Nani Shaffer
04:41 - 05:32
Alright. And I will just mention before I do, Salesforce was also on my list. I actually had to double check whether it was necessary because it might have been an assumption. It's so foundational, so totally agree. Solid pick. Hopefully, I can also get it. 
My number one pick is gonna be a tool that I'm super excited about. They've also been making a ton of investment into their AI functionality. I'm gonna go with Qualified.
We have recently, just to keep talking for a little bit longer, with Qualified, we leveraged them initially for sort of an inbound use case, chat on the site.
They've been really solid in that sense. I'm super excited about their outbound functionality as well and being able to leverage them for things like driving folks to, to events and also, you know, booking meetings directly. So we've been really happy with them as well.

Alex Jonathan Brown
05:32 - 05:51
If you go to the we added it to the slide because it's all over the place. If you go to Qualified's website now, they're very heavily in, it's nice to have a company that has a face for this because it works out really well. But the person walking on stage to shake the commissioner's hand is Piper, the AISDR that's all over everything that Qualified is doing right now.

Nani Shaffer
05:51 - 05:55
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Alex Jonathan Brown
05:55 - 05:58
UZair? Any hot takes?

Uzair Dada
05:58 - 06:38
You know, I'd say this was a surprising one for me. I would say it's a interesting one in the stack.
I was surprised that that is your first pick. Although, sort of thinking about you guys are both thinking sort of more revops-y, it makes sense in some ways, that that's there.
I think the whole AISDR space is just ripe and getting riper and everyone's experimenting. So I don't know who's gonna win it, but I think as a category, it's a super interesting category. And I would definitely have it in my stack to optimize the critical function, which is the marketing to sales bridge. Interesting where you picked it though. I like it. 

Alex Jonathan Brown
06:38 - 06:54
So moving into round two of the draft, Nani, we're gonna stay with you for the third overall. Chris, it's the tax you pay for the first round, the one one. But, Nani, who's your first pick of the second round?

Nani Shaffer
06:54 - 07:09
Alright. This was another one that occurred to me this morning as I was thinking about what I truly could not live without and also wish I could live without, which is Slack, something we're all used to, just invading our dreams. It does enable us, like, I was thinking about, especially with working remotely now, how just different our, work is and the way that we communicate and the way we interact.
And, so, yeah, that would that's certainly something I don't think I could live without. In fact, we've been knocked out of, like, our whole G Suite and been able been just fine for several hours knowing that we still had Slack. So, so that would be my next pick. And I don't think I, yeah.

Alex Jonathan Brown
07:40 - 07:51
Yeah. This was so, to peek behind the curtain a little bit, we asked the GMs to send their picks over so we could put those amazing little graphics together that clearly- Slack was not on them. It's a late it's a late call. I'll be the Shams also. Breaking news. They were planning on doing that pick two days ago. Who's there? I know Slack may seem straightforward. I have a take on choosing Slack. If you don’t have one. 
Choosing Slack really says a lot about how Nani's building the culture of her organization. What we see a lot is that you're either a Slack team or you're a team's team, frankly.
And I think Nani is really setting her organization up well long term to not be a Teams team. And, I think that's a great call.

Uzair Dada
08:30 - 09:18
I also think it's pretty interesting because Slack is sort of becoming an abstraction layer for everything. Mhmm.
So even though you have all the different tools, the connect happens largely through Slack. And notifications happen through Slack. The collaboration happens through Slack. So I think that's a really interesting piece.
Again, Nani’s throwing me off in her order, but I think those are all pretty awesome ingredients. Right? I would say, for sure, those are must haves, both those, in terms of what I would have in the mix.
But I and and and and thinking about where she picked it, that's kinda where I would go. So to me, it's sort of like, just because I have certain tools, they're there, but I interface them using Slack. That's my interface. So that makes total sense.

Alex Jonathan Brown
09:18 - 09:25
That brings us back to Chris for the last pick of the second round. Chris, who's up next?

Chris Golec
09:25 - 09:48
So I think I have licensing rights to Slack because I have Salesforce. I'm just kidding. Not not if you have Slack. I also like Qualified. We're big fans, and so I think that was a good choice. But my second round, I'm going with an up and comer that some of you may or may not have heard of.
I think Caitlin Clark kinda best represents this player, and that company is 1Mind. So also in the AI SDR space, I really love what they're doing and how they're training their agents around SDR versus AE versus SE, and, super engaging, super impressed with what Amanda is building there.
And as you all know, she was my nemesis while I was building ABM technology for years. So really excited about what they're doing.

Uzair Dada
10:19 - 10:22
Chris, what do you like about-

Alex Jonathan Brown
10:22 - 10:40
I was just gonna do my little table setting. I found it in 2024 in Mill Valley. If you Google it, it's new enough that you still get results from a dating app from 2013. So I did just wanna clarify on the slide. There was a dating app called 1Mind. Chris did not draft that. He drafted the other thing. Uzair, sorry for interrupting.

Uzair Dada
10:40 - 10:44
And Chris lives in Mill Valley. So the dating app in Mill Valley, got you back there.

Alex Jonathan Brown
10:44 - 10:47
We just wanna, we just wanna set the record straight.

Uzair Dada
10:47 - 10:51
Yeah. That's, yeah. That's good. That's good.

Chris Golec
10:51 - 11:21
So what I like about it, is there it's it's the engagement. It's not a chatbot.
It's an interactive, you get out what you put into it, so you have to train it really well. But it it's it's changing the game because, you know, all these solutions work off the premise that people don't want to schedule a time in the future for a demo.
They just want to engage now. And, so I think whether it's Qualified or 1Mind, that whole idea just creates so much more efficiency.

Uzair Dada
11:21 - 11:51
I I think they they also the evolution I think you, I'm glad you said it. All the AISDR stuff that we've experimented, needs a lot of TLC.
And you get it right and it gets better, but you have to iterate on it. And I think the voice based AISDR stuff, and maybe in some days, your digital twin, SDR or AE or SE, are interesting instantiations of where this will evolve to. But, yeah, I think that category is just awesome.

Nani Shaffer
11:51 - 11:52
Mhmm.

Alex Jonathan Brown
11:52 - 11:58
So, Chris, we stay with you then for the first pick of the third round.

Chris Golec
11:58 - 12:29
Okay. Let's see.
I am picking for my third pick, kind of a workhorse. So, I think the joker behind me, Jokic, is my third pick, and I think LinkedIn Sales Navigator is super critical for our operations here. And, I think my team would shoot me if I, if I didn't get that one in place. So LinkedIn Sales Navigator is my third round choice.

Alex Jonathan Brown
12:30 - 13:20
One of the things I like about so many of these picks, like, we're seeing with Slack and I think again with, with sales navigator now, is y'all really did approach this as coming from scratch, like, from absolute zero. And a lot of this Uzair, I think this is to your point about, like, are are some of these picks a little expensive? These are fundamental parts of the way that we work and the way that we do marketing and especially when we get over to the rev, rev ops side of things.
And I love seeing them get called out this way. So that's LinkedIn Sales Navigator for the first pick of your third round. That kicks it back over to Nani, for your third pick here in round three.

Nani Shaffer
13:20 - 13:44
Sure. Yeah. So this one, I wish I could have just put grouping because we've been testing out so many of these different ones, as have we all. But, obviously, generative AI is absolutely critical to everything that we're doing these days.
And so I put chat GPT, which is a little bit of a cop out. Again, it could be any any of the custom GPTs. It could be Claude. It could be, Gemini, like, all of them. I'm glad yeah. Like.

Alex Jonathan Brown
13:44 - 13:46
We got you all the logos. Don't worry about it. Pick one.

Nani Shaffer
13:46 - 14:54
Thank you. Appreciate it. I didn't even ask for that, everyone. So, but you've got the spirit of what I was going for here.
We've actually interestingly, on our marketing team, we recently ran a campaign that we challenged ourselves in an almost ridiculous way to use AI for every single step of the journey from how we communicated and met about it to the content asset that we were building, obviously, sort of built through AI to the way we're distributing it to the audience that we went after. And, and so we as a team have been, you know, investigating lots of different options for every, again, sort of step on that journey.
It's been really, really interesting and a fun exercise to go through. But so as we've gone through it, it's just amazing every day the the new use cases and the new ways that we think about using these tools that just hadn't occurred to us, right? Like, I think back to the days where it was like, oh, it's cool, it can come up with a recipe for you. Right? And now it's like, no. This truly I've just never been in a time where things have been so quickly transforming for how we get things done.

Alex Jonathan Brown
14:54 - 14:59
Uzair, I think we were all kinda waiting for this pick, a version of this pick to come off the board.

Uzair Dada
14:59 - 16:01
100%. I would have thought one of you would have had this as you move on. 100%. And, to me, this is foundational. I think the way you guys are thinking about it, Nani, is awesome. Kinda we internally had a kind of a interesting challenge.
We started almost over a year ago, where I call the challenge was 10 to 10. So challenging yourself to say, it's something that is to take you ten weeks, takes you ten hours. What you see take you ten hours, takes you ten minutes. And like looking at that across the entire, not just the marketing workflows, but just organizational workflows and what those are.
And every day you are absolutely astounded at how many of those things you can do, how much more thorough you are, how much more comprehensive, and then the velocity, and and and the presentation layers are just incredible. So yeah, pretty awesome. Glad you have it at your round three. I would have thought this would have been higher up, but this is pretty cool.

Alex Jonathan Brown
16:01 - 16:09
Yeah. Before we get to this round, oh, go ahead, Nani. Sorry.

Nani Shaffer
16:05 - 16:09
Oh, no. I was just saying I'm getting a steal, you know. That's gonna be my.

Alex Jonathan Brown
16:11 - 16:26
Absolutely, that fact, also, the families of these folks have been on a rough ride. We've been watching them sit there at the table, seeing all these other picks come off the board. They're like, oh, no. Are we, is it ruined? Don't worry. We got you. 
Before we move on, this was not a thing that we planned to do though. But let's just go down the list. If you have to pick one, whether that's ChatGPT or Claude or any other things. If you if you're only getting one, everyone, which one are you picking? And you can pick the same one. This is just me wondering.

Chris Golec
16:45 - 16:48
I would probably go with ChatGPT, but.

Nani Shaffer
16:51 - 17:13
Yeah. I think I'd agree with Chris on that one. I think I would go with Chat GPT. That being said, I think my IT team technically says Gemini because that's what we've got, sort of, that's the safer place for putting our internal data, which is, like, frequently comes up. So I use I enter I I I move between the two, but I do think ChatGPT is really strong.

Alex Jonathan Brown
17:13 - 17:15
Uzair, what about you?

Uzair Dada
17:15 - 17:30
I think it's very use case driven, but I think Gemini recently has been outperforming from a rating ranking perspective all the platforms that they've just got. From an enterprise readiness perspective, I think they're further ahead. Structurally, and what they are building in terms of a full functional stack that your IT team will be happy with and has the governance and rigor.
And they also are the first platform that now indemnifies both the training model and the output model. So from a usability and scalability and enterprise readiness, I'd say Gemini. From a innovation perspective and pace of innovation perspective, I'd probably say ChatGPT.

Alex Jonathan Brown
18:01 - 18:18
Interesting. Interesting. I'm I'm a Claude, Claude guy myself, but I mostly do copywriting. So it works for me.
So Gen AI off the board in the the second pick of the third round. For the first pick of the fourth round, Nani, it stays with you.

Nani Shaffer
18:18 - 19:07
Alright. So this one, maybe a little bit less sexy, but keeping, keeping the trains on track, super important for us, especially in sort of my world of demand gen, lots of moving pieces.
So I went with Asana, which also, unsurprisingly, has a lot of new AI functionality that they're building in, which is a part of what we discovered in this, this project that we were running. But super helpful.
I will admit, I myself am less of a power user than I wish I was, but folks on my team, really rely heavily on Asana, for, again, sort of keeping their projects on track. We also use it for things like task management and, requests of other teams outside of marketing. So it's been a really helpful tool for us for sure. Less less sexy, I'll admit, but it's there.

Alex Jonathan Brown
19:07 - 19:57
I mean, I just this has not been this is not the most sexiest headline making draft. We’ve drafted both Slack and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
So right in line, this is a fundamentals based draft. My grandfather is so excited about all of the picks that we've made in this draft. They know how to pass. They're gonna drop, so many dimes to a good shooter like Chris drafted earlier.
This is like we're playing James Naso's basketball here. We're, at Iron Horse, we're an Asana shop. We live and breathe, buy it, and, yeah, fundamentals. Like, this is, Nani, you're getting work done over there, and it's getting done on time or as the slide said, two weeks overdue. It's fine.

Uzair Dada
19:58 - 20:07
I think Nani focused on working and Chris is focused on shmoozing. That's kinda where the draft is sort of falling, I'd say.

Alex Jonathan Brown
20:07 - 20:18
Well, I mean, it's it's Lakers versus let's it's the the Lakers of the eighties versus, oh, maybe Boston. Maybe that's a good-

Chris Golec
20:18 - 20:21
I gotta have an expansion team, I think.

Uzair Dada
20:21 - 20:24
Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Jonathan Brown
20:24 - 20:33
Speaking of expanding teams, I'm a professional host. Chris, you're gonna expand your team with your fourth round pick. Who do you got?

Chris Golec
20:34 - 20:53
So I'm gonna pick a technology that everybody likes, just like Giannis from Milwaukee, human specimen. But every time I go to an online meeting and it's not Zoom, I kinda cringe. So Zoom video is my fourth pick.

Alex Jonathan Brown
20:53 - 20:58
This is another culture pick. Like, Nani, you had with Slack.

Nani Shaffer
20:58 - 21:07
I would agree with this one though. I'm a bit I get confused when I'm not on Zoom. I don't love it. It's not not my happy place.

Alex Jonathan Brown
21:07 - 21:09
Microsoft Teams is having a rough draft over there. Yeah.

Nani Shaffer
21:12 - 21:13
I didn't say it. I didn't say it.

Chris Golec
21:15 - 21:18
I gave them some love with LinkedIn.

Alex Jonathan Brown
21:20 - 22:18
Technically. Yes.
But another solid fundamental pick. Do, so Zoom, obviously, I think is the one one in this category.
If we're if we're saying that this is our big or, you know, six man off the bench, whatever. I think Google Meets would have been the other option in in the Google Suite.
And then Teams, is, do we think that this is a space, this is not on our prep list, but is this a space that is just settled now? Is this just like, no one's going to come try to disrupt this and we kinda have the key players, and this is just the infrastructure moving forward? Or, as we're seeing more of this AI stuff, do we think there's any room in there for somebody to be like, I'm gonna make a run at Zoom, or is that just settled now?

Chris Golec
22:18 - 22:33
There's so much infrastructure that goes into these things to do them right. I just can't imagine somebody displacing, like, a Zoom or a Google or Cisco Webex because the amount of infrastructure investment to get it right is just so high.

Alex Jonathan Brown
22:34 - 22:38
So we're building a Zoom statue outside of your arena in thirty years, Chris, with this, with this pick. 

Nani Shaffer
22:40 - 23:30
Well, I think that's such an interesting question, though, because, obviously, with more and more people working remotely, you would think that we'd wanna really make that experience as good as it could possibly be. And certainly, there are overlays on top of it in terms of, like, what you're getting out of the meetings and the AI summaries and things like that.
But I actually like the, I get excited about the idea of potentially someone coming in and really disrupting it. And maybe kind of being similar, I picked Slack earlier.
Right? But, like, there were chat capabilities before that. Right. But somehow Slack just made it work, like, truly made it replace a lot of meetings and truly changed the way that we communicated with each other. And I sort of, I could imagine there being a way to do that with these. Because no one, I mean, we put Zoom and that's fine. But no one, I don't think, feels all that strongly about their, you know, meeting platform.

Uzair Dada
23:30 - 24:07
But I know it's a really interesting point. Like, all these are now mature technologies that are ripe for disrupt, even Slack.
I mean, like, if you look at it, you know, they're good. They're good because we've gotten used to it, and those are the only choices available. But, you know, they're still annoying. There's a lot of annoyances for all these things that exist.
I think you'll see much more integrated collaborative technologies emerge, over time. I don't know if they'll be, you know, displacing a single feature, but I think the disruption won't happen in these categories just because they're so ginormous.

Alex Jonathan Brown
24:09 - 24:55
So, we got the fifth round coming up, but before I I do need to let chat weigh in. This, I knew we would have one that got the chat going. Turns out, Chris, it was Zoom. You got booed by people who are going, who are riding for Google Meet.
I know if they're Google Meet people, their opinion probably irrelevant to you. But then, Todd brought up what I think is a really good point of, if we were doing this ten years ago, this would be a Skype logo.
It's just, like, the amount with which that like, I would've I would've asked the same question about Skype. They're the only ones who are doing video. Like, they're, they had probably at that point just been bought by Microsoft. Like, how is anybody ever gonna. Like, this this does change so often. Also, remember after the pandemic when everybody bought the wrong Zoom stock, because we didn't know what was happening because they had the Zoom ticker.
Humans are wild. Alright, Chris. Your final pick of draft oh, and Amanda also made a really good point about how this is all based around human communication as we move to more of this AI and agent based stuff. How that could fundamentally change how, the, what we need for the just human to human talk. So, Amanda, I love that point of chat. But, Chris, fifth round, your last pick of the draft.

Chris Golec
25:39 - 26:55
Yeah. So this is an up and comer.
I literally just met this company a few weeks ago, and it's just like Anthony Edwards, Ant Man. I wasn't familiar with them until the playoffs. And, so I kind of assimilate this this pick with with him. And the company's name is Bluebirds.ai.
And they've automated and done something as mundane as list building for SDRs, but the team is out of LinkedIn. And so it's not ranking companies just on intent.
They really mine deeply into LinkedIn to understand organizational issues, challenges, interests, and automate this whole list building for SDRs to generate a lot of efficiency, and that's just kinda step one. It's it's really amazing what they've put together.
And, so if you think about Bluebirds is all about kind of an outbound motion and using AI to do that. And my 1mind pick is all about the inbound coming in and engaging and capturing. So that is my fifth and final pick.

Alex Jonathan Brown
26:55 - 27:31
My only note on this as I put on the slide, currently a tough Google. It's bluebirds.ai to get there. If you Google “bluebirds”, you're gonna see a great pictures of Bluebirds.
You gotta dig a little deeper. As you said, Chris, new on the block at the moment. But, also, really, one of the more interesting, like, little dives I got to do in prepping this. I think that's a a great pick.
Nani, it's your your fifth round pick, your last pick of this of the the prime time version of the draft, we'll say.

Nani Shaffer
27:31 - 28:15
Exactly. I was gonna say mister irrelevant, but there's obviously so many different technology.
It would be a weird tech stack if it ended here. So with this with this one, I'm gonna go back to something sort of near and dear to my heart, probably near and dear to Chris's heart as well and go with Demandbase.
We are, I am of a mind that good B2B marketing is all account based marketing, and so it's necessary to have an ABM platform in your tech stack. So definitely wanted to highlight this one. This is something that we rely on every day, for the way that we help our sales team prioritize who they're going after and, obviously, who we are also, doing our marketing towards. So, shout out to Demandbase.

Chris Golec
28:15 - 28:20
Alright. I'll I'll thank you, Nani. I'll release those licensing rights for Slack.

Nani Shaffer
28:20 - 28:24
Thank you.
Alex Jonathan Brown
28:24 - 29:04
Huge news. Play the little, duh duh duh sound. So those are our first five picks.
We'll go ahead. We'll get the poll going. We're gonna chat a little bit longer. But just to recap, Chris, you've taken Salesforce, 1Mind, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Zoom, and Bluebirds.
Noni, you're on Qualified, Slack, Pick your Gen AI of choice, it sounds like maybe we settle on ChatGPT for that, Asana, and Demandbase.
Now, Uzair, gonna kick over to you. We've got these picks. What are some holes that are gonna need to be filled in in the further rounds of this draft?

Uzair Dada
29:04 - 30:17
Yeah. I I you know, I'd say I I they were both very unexpected for me completely, in a lot of ways. The, I was surprised I mean, Chris came in extremely sales heavy. So he sort of went all in on the sales side.
Nani, I think, was a good blend of rev ops and sort of demand. The the two particular areas that I would have thought Nani would have gone for that she didn't was actually both. To me, the fundamental is your website. Don't have your content, your engagement, your experience. I don't care what you are doing. It's irrelevant.
So I'm surprised that no one started with that as one. Right? So I would have potentially gone to something like a Webflow to that is all AI optimized sort of focused on.
So that was kind of the one that I thought was interesting no one because and that's the bane of every market of existence because it all sucks. It's all super cool. Right? And so it's sort of like, okay, I need to fix it and there's a lot of cool stuff happening to fix it. I'm glad you brought on Demandbase which is pretty awesome.
But one of the things that no one else talked about was personalization. If you're a demand person and you're not doing personalization. There's so much waste in the in the pipes and the plumbing. Right? So to me, that was another interesting one sort of there.
So those are the two that probably stumped me that no one touched on categorically. And then the last one that sort of you you you talked about, but to me and I think it it was a little bit baked into one of the I think Chris's outbound ones perhaps, was something like a Clay, where I'm able to take unstructured data and structure it to refine my audiences better. Because that empowers both my inbound and outbound motions.

Nani Shaffer
30:54 - 30:55
Yeah.

Uzair Dada
30:55 - 31:16
And so to me, I was sort of looking at sort of more foundational things in my head of building blocks that I would have everything these guys have in there too. But if I was to say those like, if there were three things that kinda stuck out to me that was kind of I would add, and maybe those are lower round draft picks to to you all, that I think are pretty critical.

Nani Shaffer
31:16 - 31:51
We had essentially, I I sent out, like, a note to my team asking about this, and Webflow is the one that popped up first. Right? That was, like, going on on Webflow.
The other thing that I think was interesting, and Clay Clay as well, although we so we are Clay customers, and we really like it. My team specifically uses it less, so it didn't pop up as, like, one of my first ones to go after, but it is one that our rev ops and and sales teams have been, like, super dependent on.
We have that one as well. What I think is fascinating that we didn't pick and that you didn't mention is no amount of marketing automation, which I think.

Chris Golec
31:51 - 31:53
I was gonna say that. Yeah.

Nani Shaffer
31:53 - 32:12
Like, to me, I think that's fascinating and heartening in a way. I'm excited about the future and I think moving in a different direction.
But I I am starting to think in that way about how necessary is that. Right? I mean, we still have Salesforce, we still need CRM, but marketing automation feels less absolutely critical.

Uzair Dada
32:12 - 33:23
And and I and I think the interesting part is, do I really need Salesforce as a CRM? I need a CRM function. Do I really need the CRM in terms of structured data? And I think that is a norm that will be challenged.
There's a bunch of interesting startups that are coming in that are doing exactly that. Because the notion is when you ask someone to fill a form, they just put garbage in. Right? But all the knowledge and insight is an unstructured data. It's in your Zoom calls.
It's in your email. It's in your Slack conversations. So if I can infer CRM intelligence from that, one of the interesting early stage startups that's doing it is the ex HubSpot person who started a CRM called Data.ai. So I think those are some interesting unconventional ways of doing the core that I think will make the function better.
So I love, I agree on the function part. And I think it would be very different. Right? If you're looking at an enterprise stack, you still will have some of the core guys. You're looking at sort of commercial stack or early stage stack, it'll be very different.

Nani Shaffer
33:23 - 33:26
Mhmm. Mhmm.

Alex Jonathan Brown
33:26 - 34:50
Couple other things from the chat. We, there's the measurement, attribution discussion, channel ninety nine. You've got you got to draft that. Yeah. So that's fine. We think you've got that in there.
Matt from the UK did mention WhatsApp for Business, which is a thing that I think, as Americans, we think about less, but is, like, mission critical in so many other parts of the world. We have a couple a couple Iron Horse WhatsApp little side chats that happen as well.
Ellen throws coffee.ai in there. Generally, I think a successful draft, it seems to be from the chat. No one's really losing their minds, which is great. Amanda did come clap real hard at Salesforce in the chat.
I would say maybe the most controversial one we've seen in a while, Chris, but I nobody's gonna be mad that you picked Salesforce. Like, you've got ads with Matthew McConaughey now. That's fine. I will say, I've been watching part of the reason why I did that little, that little preamble there, I was watching the poll pretty closely. It is a dead heat, an actual tie for which one of you had the better draft. Wow. Nani-

Chris Golec
34:50 - 34:51
We’ll have to do it again.

Nani Shaffer
34:51 - 34:52
Yep, run it back.

Alex Jonathan Brown
34:52 - 35:50
Nani, your voter showed up early and you had an early lead and then Chris, came back in at the end, to tie it up. But a fifty-fifty split, don't yell at me in the chat now and say you wanna vote. I, oh, I can share. There you go. Fifty-fifty. Dead heat. Yes. So, I mean, I think this went as well as it could have gone. 
Thank you both so much. This was a delightful conversation. We covered a lot of ground. Chris, like you said, we could absolutely do another one of these sometime soon. Let us know in the chat if you'd like to see another one of these. I did just sound like a streamer right there. My apologies, but it's the world we live in.
Don't forget to like and subscribe. But thank you everyone so much for doing this. Chris, we'll let we'll let everybody do a round of plugs. If people wanna learn more about you and what you're doing, obviously, you're at Channel99, but where can they go to learn more?

Chris Golec
35:50 - 35:57
Channel99.com, the website, as Uzair noted.

Alex Jonathan Brown
35:57 - 36:00
Nani, what about you over at Invoca?

Nani Shaffer
36:00 - 36:04
Same thing. Invoca.com has all your answers. Awesome.

Alex Jonathan Brown
36:04 - 36:12
Also, can people can people track you down on LinkedIn as well, both of you? Is that okay? Great. A hard no there would have been incredible. No. Don't talk to me. Not interested in learning more.

Chris Golec
36:15 - 36:16
Talk to my agent.

Alex Jonathan Brown
36:16 - 36:39
Exactly. Get, Rich Paul. Is that that guy's name? Who's the superpower agent guy that, anyway, basketball talk. Uzair Dada, I know you're plugged pretty well. It's ironhorse.io.
That's where you can find more about what we're doing. Get signed up for future coffee breaks, and go check out all the past ones. They're all really good. Anything else you wanna plug though, Uzair, while we got you here?

Uzair Dada
36:39 - 36:56
No. I think this is super exciting and I think what is cool is I I bet you if we have this conversation six months from now that this that the stack would change. So I think that's what's absolutely awesome in the time of day that we're living in right now with all the innovation going on as Nani alluded to. So, exciting times.

Alex Jonathan Brown
36:56 - 37:21
There's gonna be a time where we look back on this and it's like, oh, we were all pretty convinced that Zoom was gonna be around for a while. And then we'll be, like, talking about Quirp or something weird. Until we do this again, hopefully, all our all this tech is still around. Thank you all so much. This was delightful. And until next time, coffee breaks over, everybody. Let's get back to work.