The Marketing Playbook is Being Rewritten: Key Insights from G2’s CMO Sydney Sloan
Liz Carter
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Sydney Sloan, the CMO of G2, live from Dreamforce recently. It’s a truly fascinating, and frankly, a bit crazy time to be in marketing. Every playbook we’ve relied on for the last two decades is fundamentally changing, and our conversation really drove home what an inflection point we’re at.
For my fellow marketers and leaders, here are a few key takeaways from our chat that I believe are essential for navigating this new landscape.
From SEO to AEO: The LLM Revolution is Here
Sydney shared a startling statistic from a recent G2 report: 50% of buyers now start their research on an LLM (Large Language Model), an incredible 71% jump in just four months. This isn’t just a minor shift; it’s a “complete re-architecture of the top of the funnel”.
- The Big Change: The days of building our entire strategy around optimizing for clicks and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) are moving aside. We are quickly moving from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).
- The First Step: The new path forward requires understanding what questions are being asked, how your brand is being cited by these answer engines, and how you are showing up in the response.
Brand and Consensus are the New Currency
With buyers heading straight to answer engines, the purchase shortlist is shrinking—fast. Sydney noted that people are trusting the answers they get from LLMs, reducing their shortlist from 4-5 vendors down to 2-3, sometimes even just one. This changes what marketers must prioritize:
- Brand Awareness is Back: Old-school brand tactics—being bold and making sure your brand is represented where buyers are—are vital to ensure you make it to that smaller shortlist. This isn’t about MQLs; it’s about building foundational belief.
- The Power of Consensus: The answer engines seek consensus to validate their responses. This means that what your website says, what is on your G2 page, and what is on partner networks must be consistent. If the answers are different, the LLM may not surface your content. It’s time to go clean up your content and ensure a unified story across all channels.
Customer Validation is More Relevant Than Ever
This shift doesn’t diminish the role of customer feedback; it makes it more critical. As Sydney pointed out, “listening to the voice of your customer is the most important voice in the room”.
- LLMs Love UGC: LLMs are naturally drawn to user-generated content (UGC), which is the core of reviews. Proactively seeking out real customer feedback and getting it into this landscape is more important than ever.
- Trust and Recency: Recency in reviews is highly relevant as that’s what answer engines are looking for. Customer validation has always been part of the mix—we’re more likely to trust a strong review or a referral.
Orchestrating the Ideal Customer Experience
Sydney’s advice for CMOs doing annual planning was so insightful: Imagine the ideal customer experience a year from now and build that.
- Speed Matters: Buyers have done their research on an LLM, so by the time you get a signal that they’re in a buying process, speed is everything. They don’t want to navigate; they want an exact answer.
- Agentic Response: The new ideal is an agentic response (using AI) followed by a human response, which requires a complete re-architecture of our processes. We must orchestrate the customer experience to give them higher quality, faster insights.
It’s a race, and as Sydney wisely put it, “we’re all at the starting line together”. This is the time to take a leap of faith, rethink our approach, and focus on those unique signals that show a buyer is interested.
