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Everyone’s racing to bolt AI onto their revenue team. Loreal Lynch thinks most of them are about to be disappointed. The CMO of Nooks (and former CMO of Jasper) joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to explain why buying more agents won’t grow revenue unless you rebuild the process underneath, and what the human-plus-agent revenue team actually looks like.

Loreal has had a front-row seat to two AI waves: first at Jasper, where AI reshaped marketing content, and now at Nooks, building toward what she calls the revenue agents category. She breaks down why the tools in today’s GTM stack were built for humans to click through, not for agents to execute; why the org chart and the process both have to be rethought from the ground up; and why the real shift isn’t reps prompting AI, but AI prompting reps. She also gets into the misconception that agents are easy to build, the CMO-CRO alignment model she runs with her counterpart Hannah, and why the marketing pendulum is swinging back from pure performance to brand.

What you’ll learn:

  • Why bolting AI tools onto pre-AI processes fails, and what a real revenue operating system requires
  • The iceberg model of human vs. agent work, and why the waterline keeps rising
  • Why the future flips: AI stops waiting for prompts and starts prompting the rep
  • Augmentation over replacement: if an agent makes a rep 10x, you hire more reps, not fewer
  • The results some teams see: ~3x meetings booked and ~2x pipeline on the same headcount
  • Why “agents are easy to build” is a trap once you need shared data, governance, and calling/email infrastructure at scale
  • What stays human: judgment, narrative, and reading the room (the surf-small-talk story)
  • The CMO-CRO alignment model: shared pipeline goals instead of fighting over sourced-lead credit
  • Why marketing’s pendulum is swinging back from performance to brand in the AI era
  • Why starting with a wedge (the dialer) and its conversational data beats selling a broad platform

Episode highlights

01:14 Welcome, and why she left Jasper’s AI wave for Nooks

03:26 Seeing AI from every side: customer, board, now operator

04:27 The iceberg: human work above the water, agent work below

05:13 What humans do best vs. what agents do best

07:14 The real question isn’t how many agents, it’s who prompts whom

07:31 Augmentation over replacement: make a rep 10x, hire more

08:37 The results some teams see, and what’s next

09:56 Why bolting AI onto old processes fails

12:06 The misconception that agents are easy to build

13:58 Going AI-native inside her own marketing org

15:10 The framework for what goes to headcount vs. agents

16:19 What stays human: judgment, context, and the naming story

17:32 CMO-CRO alignment: shared systems and shared metrics

19:43 How she and her CRO run pipeline without sourced-lead targets

21:40 What’s changed, and what still works: the pendulum back to brand

23:42 What she’s excited to build at Nooks

25:10 Who’s winning with Nooks: the AI-native early adopters

27:06 Rapid fire: leadership, impact over activity, no time for bad wine

28:25 Who Nooks is hiring, and where to find Loreal

Key takeaways

1. AI won’t grow your revenue unless you rebuild the process underneath it.
Loreal’s central argument is that most of today’s GTM stack (marketing automation, sales sequencing) was built for humans to click through, not for agents to execute. You can’t drop an AI-native tool onto a pre-AI process and expect a lift; the harder and more important work is rethinking the process itself from the ground up. Individuals can vibe-code their own productivity wins, but meaningful organizational gains require changing the underlying rails: the data foundation, context, governance, and the execution layer beneath the agents.

2. The real shift isn’t reps prompting AI, it’s AI prompting reps.
Sophie went in expecting the human-vs-agent question to be about volume (how many of each). Loreal reframed it: the more powerful variable is who does the prompting. Today reps prompt the AI; as Nooks’ agents learn to persuade through a feedback loop with the humans they work alongside, the direction flips, and the agent starts telling the rep what to do next (”call this person, do this after the meeting to accelerate the deal”). She expects the scales to tip in the next year or two. This is the freshest idea in the episode.

3. Augmentation, not replacement, and the coding parallel proves it.
The market hears “agents” and thinks job cuts, but Loreal’s strong view is that this is labor augmentation. If an agent makes a rep 10x more productive, the logical move isn’t to fire reps, it’s to hire more and grow faster, exactly what happened with engineers: AI coding tools didn’t shrink eng teams, they let them ship more. She says the 10x salesperson is already visible in some customers, citing roughly 3x meetings booked and 2x pipeline on existing headcount, with autonomous rep-prompting agents as the next unlock.

4. “Agents are easy to build” is the big misconception, and what stays human matters more.
Self-serve tooling makes spinning up a single agent feel trivial (write a prompt, save it, done), but scaling agents across an entire GTM org is genuinely hard: it demands shared infrastructure, data, context, governance, plus the unglamorous execution layer (email deliverability, dialing/calling infrastructure) that agents need to act on your behalf. Rev-ops leaders feel this pain immediately. On the flip side, the org chart is collapsing (specialist execution roles get automated), so the human skills that appreciate in value are judgment, creativity, and narrative/storytelling, the things AI still can’t do. Her proof point: a team beat every AI naming suggestion with four minutes of human brainstorming, because AI lacked the context and connection to make the creative leap.

5. Shared goals beat sourced-lead credit, and brand is making a comeback.
As the stack converges into agents that execute across the whole revenue lifecycle, the CMO-CRO relationship has to run on shared systems and shared metrics. Loreal and her CRO counterpart Hannah deliberately don’t use sourced-pipeline targets for enterprise (attribution is messy and long-cycle); they hold a single shared pipeline number and ask collectively how to close the gap. And on what actually works in marketing: after two decades of the pendulum swinging toward performance and attribution, AI can now automate much of that, so the edge swings back to brand: trust, resonance, memorability. In a category where every vendor pitches the same “our agents automate your process,” a distinctive brand is how you cut through.

Loreal Lynch

Sophie Buonassisi (Host)

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Episode 205 Full Episode Transcript

00:00 – 00:22

Sophie Buonassisi: Loreal. Welcome to GTM now. Thank you. It’s awesome to have you here. I’m so excited to talk because you kind of had this really cool front row seat to AI almost in the first AI wave. You were the CMO of Jasper, chief Marketing officer, and now you recently joined as the Chief Marketing Officer of Nux. Huge congrats. Take us back to that decision. Like, why did you join nux? Yes.

00:22 – 02:12

Loreal Lynch: Thank you. I’m really excited to be at Nook’s and I’m happy to talk to you about my decision making process. So what was interesting, and you kind of alluded to this at Jasper, when you think about the surface area that AI was able to sort of transform first in a lot of enterprises that started with content, and Jasper had a front row seat to that. Like you said, Jasper was one of the first players in the space, is still a market leader when it comes to AI for marketing. You know, I think then you saw the way products get built and developed, really get transformed with the likes of cursor. You’ve got cloud code. When you think about sales and the opportunity that exists with AI being able to be applied to sales processes and transforming the way a sales gets done. We’re really barely scratching the surface. We’re getting incremental gains here and there from sort of agents and automation. But I think when I talk to Dan, the founder of Nook’s, and heard the vision for the ways, I think over the next two years, sales is really going to be completely transformed with AI got me excited. And so that was the start of my considering going to Nook’s. I think a couple of the other things that I found once I started getting deeper into the process was just the incredible momentum that the company is saying you love as a marketer, to see low hanging fruit like a really powerful customer community that loves the product. You know, as a marketer, when you have customers coming to you saying, can I do a case study? That’s never, never happens and is happening at nook. So that’s another cool thing. And then I think, I think also the the rigor and around the product velocity. The founders of nooks are three Stanford engineers. And so they care very deeply about the technical, you know, ambition. The technical team, we have a world class engineering team. So overall, I had a lot of trust, not only in the vision, but in the ability for the company to be able to execute. And that’s the kind of company that I wanted to be a part of.

02:12 – 02:34

Sophie Buonassisi: That completely makes sense. And I mean, we’re big fans and this has been pretty transformative. Portfolio companies at GTM fund and our broader network, I was actually talking to a series B like very hot AI company this morning, and they just became Nook’s customers and said wonderful things. So it’s this funny thing where like, you hear kind of mixed feedback from people and you only hear good things. Yeah. So I could see that advocacy and how that makes sense.

02:34 – 02:58

Loreal Lynch: Yeah, definitely. That was a part of my process as like talk, you know, talking to customers. I was a customer myself at Jasper. I actually oversaw the SDR team and we had onboarded Nook’s, you know, about a year before I left. And we’re seeing tremendous results with the platform and also just the love that the team had for Nook’s internally. It was also good, just a testament for the kind of company that you want to join. Again, as a marketer, you want to be able to go amplify and tell that story.

02:58 – 03:00

Sophie Buonassisi: That’s super cool. So you’ve seen it from multiple sides now for sure.

03:00 – 03:01

Loreal Lynch: Yeah.

03:01 – 03:12

Sophie Buonassisi: I actually interviewed Dan, the CEO of yes. He came on GTM now earlier this year. Phenomenal. But he said a really interesting analogy. It was kind of picture that classic iceberg analogy.

03:12 – 03:12

Loreal Lynch: Aha.

03:12 – 03:59

Sophie Buonassisi: Where part of it’s above the water, part of it’s below the water. And he’s referring to AI and humans and the composition of work around them. So above the iceberg, above the water is human work. And then below is all the agent work. Aha! But that threshold of where the water sits is constantly changing as we have transformed AI transformations and further developments. You’ve always kind of been a couple steps ahead of everyone with AI, with your background and just being immersed in the space, what do you think of that kind of analogy and where we fall? Like if you take a revenue organization now and you look at the human agent composition and then you look at 2028, let’s say what’s going to change? Like, where are we now? And what do you see for that composition mix between humans and agents?

03:59 – 06:00

Loreal Lynch: I like that analogy a lot. I hadn’t heard it, but I think that that makes a lot of sense. Humans are really good at some things, and agents are really good at some things. And so I do think a hybrid organization in which you have humans and agents working alongside each other is very powerful. For example, humans are very good at reading the room, and that’s really important in sales, maybe even more important than, you know, than people realize. I sat in on a meeting the other day, a sales meeting as I’m onboarding with an enterprise AI, and it was with a head of rev ops at an enterprise company. And you can just tell right when we got on the call, this guy was not interested. He was he was busy. He was like, I’m on the call, I’ll take the call. But like, this is not what I, you know, I have lots of things to be doing. So he was like maybe a little grumpy. And this enterprise AI could just tell right off the bat and started asking a little bit of small talk, like, I see you’re in Florida. I used to live in Florida. Do you surf? I surf, and immediately you could see them make that connection. And the guy on the other end totally softened in his tone. Changed. That’s something that an agent could never do. On the other hand, agents are really good at reasoning. They’re very good at processing information, distributing information, scaling that information. And so again, when you apply the ability of a salesperson to read the room, to build those connections, really to persuade, and then you combine that with an agent that’s very good at reasoning and information processing. It’s kind of a beautiful combination. I think back to your question on where is this going in the future? I think where we’re headed and what again, what I’m excited about with the technical ambition of books is that agents can learn more and more from the humans that they’re working alongside, and the agents that we’re building at Nook’s are learning to persuade. They’re kind of getting this feedback loop, so it’ll get to the point where it’s no longer that the the sales rep is prompting the AI, but it’s going to get to the point where the AI is actually prompting the rep. Do this. Go call this person. We recommend that you do this after the meeting in order for you to help accelerate this deal. And I think that’s very powerful. And we’re going to see the scales start to tip here in the next year or two.

06:00 – 06:16

Sophie Buonassisi: Oh, that’s super interesting because when I first asked that, I was almost thinking about a volume equation of how many agents, how many humans, and that is so much more powerful of the equation of who’s actually doing the prompting. Yes. And that kind of skews. So that’s fascinating.

06:16 – 07:07

Loreal Lynch: Yeah, I do think volume is a big piece of it too. And I think there’s this sort of misconception in the market that it’s that agents are about automation. And when you talk about automation, it scares people a little bit because they think job replacement and our strong perspective is that it’s not about labor replacement, it’s really about labor augmentation. Because if you have an agent that is able to make a rep ten x more productive, why would you get rid of reps? Why would you not just double the amount or triple the amount of reps, you know, and then they’re all you can grow that much faster. And I think again, to go back to what we’re seeing in product development and what we’ve seen over the last several years as AI has taken hold in the world of code and writing code, that’s what you see with these, like ten engineers, is that you’re not going to cut back on a hiring engineers, you’re just going to hire more and be able to build and ship faster. And I think with sales it’s closing faster, closing more. Mhm.

07:08 – 07:22

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. And I mean the the impact of AI on coding specifically and engineers workflows has just been absolutely night and day. And now we see the ten x engineer. Where do you think we are with sales. Like are we at a ten x sales. Will we get there.

07:22 – 08:10

Loreal Lynch: We see it with some customers. Yeah we do. Yeah we absolutely do. And I think kind of where we started at Nook’s was we made the the specific strategic decision to start with outbound. And so we really started with SDR and we started with, you know, our dialer was our first product. And so call outreach. But then we extended into multichannel with our sales engagement platform, which launched earlier this year. And we are absolutely seeing that, you know. I think among our customers, the the metric that we see is like three x meetings booked, two X pipeline, and that’s the existing headcount. That’s without scaling additional reps. And so we absolutely are seeing some of the impact of that. I think we’re barely scratching the surface though when it comes to sort of what I mentioned on autopilot, autonomous agents that are really prompting the reps. And that’s what I’m excited about. That’s going to come next.

08:10 – 08:42

Sophie Buonassisi: Oh, that’s super, super exciting. And the reality is, I mean, a lot of this world, our world in general, but our revenue world too was built pre AI and it wasn’t really built for this composition of having humans and agents working together. So it kind of calls for a lot of shifts, a lot of foundational shifts like revenue, operating system shifts and so forth. Give us a little like inside scoop on why that is, like, why can’t we use the same rails we once built? Yeah. And then what is the rails that we need? What’s the revenue operating system now?

08:42 – 10:36

Loreal Lynch: I’ve talked a lot about this from the marketing perspective, but I think it’s actually the same sort of concept holds true for revenue, which is if you think of a lot of the tools that exist today in the stack and the overall GTM stack, including, you know, take, for example, marketing automation system. These tools were built for humans to be the users of them. And so they are basically SaaS tools with interfaces that are made for humans to go and use them to, you know, in the case of marketing automation, build a journey or in go to market, like in sequencing, for example, it’s for human reps to go and build sequences. When you think about agents using this software and doing the actual execution, which is what we have in nooks. You no longer need that same interface because the agents aren’t going to use it in the same way. You know, it’s much more intuitive the way that an agent works. And so what that means is not only do the tools need to change, but I think the more important and actually more challenging thing for enterprises is that the processes themselves need to change, because you can’t just take a new AI native tool and apply it to your old process. You’ve got to rethink your process from the ground up. And I do think, you know, to go back to where we started, which is stress. Even now, we’ve kind of extended it into the full revenue lifecycle with says the powerful thing. And I think the reason SDRs love Nick so much is that we’ve really transformed the way that they work, and they needed it to be transformed because it wasn’t great. You know, it’s like it’s a it’s a hard job. And a lot of the manual work that was being done is just a grind. And so this enables them to work in a much more beautiful and fun way with AI at the center of that. And so kind of architecting their process around AI. Now at the center has been fun to watch and powerful just to see how that’s just one surface area. But again, it just points the broader opportunity.

10:36 – 10:52

Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely, definitely. Yeah, I mean, we talked about this SDR. The sales rep. Like if you look at sales as a whole, is there any kind of beliefs right now that you aren’t in alignment with? Like, what do you think people believe about AI in sales? That isn’t necessarily.

10:52 – 12:12

Loreal Lynch: True. Well, it’s a good question. I think one of the things that people believe right now is that agents are easy to build. Mhm. Um, I think there’s a lot of tools out there that make it, you know, self-serve tooling that make it easy to be able to build an agent. And, and I saw this, you know, in my last company to like it’s very intuitive I think with a lot of the self-serve tooling to be able to go in and build an agent and you think like you build a prompt, you save it, you have a new agent. This agent can now do account research for me. I think the challenging thing is it might be easy to build an individual agent, but scaling that across an entire go to market organization is much more challenging. And especially when you think about the fact that these agents need to have shared infrastructure in order to. So it’s not just the data, which is an important foundation and the context and of course the governance of that, but also this execution system underneath. For example, if we’re building agents that are calling on your behalf, that are sending emails on your behalf, that are reaching out on LinkedIn on your behalf, that underlying infrastructure, the email deliverability, calling infrastructure and dialing infrastructure that’s really hard to build. And so I do think that’s one of the common misconceptions today is like, oh, I can just build my own agents. And once we start talking to customers, particularly DevOps leaders, they understand that it’s much more complex than that.

12:12 – 12:43

Sophie Buonassisi: Yes, they appreciate the pain of it. Yes, exactly. Yeah, certainly. Certainly. And when we think about actually operationalizing it in an organization, because that’s really when you get the uplift, I mean, people can vibe code their own solutions and that’s great for individual productivity, but actually see meaningful gains in an organization really does take making adjustments to the underlying infrastructure of the organization. How are you doing that at Nook’s yourself? What are you doing to actually enable the team to go fully AI native.

12:43 – 13:50

Loreal Lynch: In our marketing organization? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it’s, um, it’s something that starts with, you know, like if I take, for example, launching a campaign, I think there’s a historical way that campaigns have always been launched where, you know, you create the brief, then you come up with all of the different channel strategy and assets, and then you create all of the different pieces of content. And I do think, and this was something that we encountered at Jasper and that we also talked to people about when I was at Jasper, is that if you think about that in an AI native way, it might be like, okay, the first thing I need to do is go write a blog post. But when you have AI, it might be that you just kick off this work stream where that’s all automated agents can kind of automate the whole thing. And so it is something that we are thinking about, you know, as we scale our marketing team and we’re still small, but mighty. How can we leverage AI? And instead of going straight to headcount, I need to, you know, build this empire. I do think there are a lot of areas that we can think about where to apply AI first for certain things, and then where do we need to hire? Um.

13:50 – 13:55

Sophie Buonassisi: Do you have a decision making framework or anything when you’re assessing? Does this go to headcount? Does this go to agents?

13:56 – 15:04

Loreal Lynch: I do I think that there are some skills. And I do think this speaks to the nature of. We talked about the collapse of the stack. And I do think the org chart is collapsing a little bit too. Not not in terms of shrinking, but just I think there are certain roles particularly like in marketing, it’s always been comprised of a lot of specialist roles. You’ve had someone who is a specialist specifically on paid search or on, you know, paid LinkedIn only. And now that agents can sort of automate away a lot of that execution. What are the skills that you need in a human to actually do those jobs? And so I think it comes down to, you know, judgment is one that we talk about a lot. I also think in marketing in particular, and this probably applies to sales too. I think narrative and storytelling is really important, and that is still something that AI has not nailed. AI can go and take a narrative architecture and flesh out content and a bill of materials. Even on the sales side, it can help you build a deck. It can help you build a brief, anything that you need in the deal cycle. But coming up with that story, that specific narrative is something that I think still needs to come from a human that has those skills. Mhm.

15:05 – 15:39

Sophie Buonassisi: 100%. That makes me think of this situation where we were brainstorming a new naming convention for a specific kind of tier of our investors or LPs, and we ran through so many different cloud prompts and different AI ideas, and they were all of the similar vein. And then we sat together and brainstormed for probably four minutes as a team, and the human brain connection came up with just such a brilliant idea in comparison that AI could have never exactly, because it didn’t make those connections. Like, the creativity is just.

15:39 – 15:49

Loreal Lynch: Yeah, it doesn’t make those connections, and it just doesn’t completely have the context that you have, you know, and kind of going back to like, what do humans have? Like that judgment, the creativity. Yeah. Exactly.

15:49 – 16:17

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, we’ve been talking about marketing for that for a little bit here, but we actually started off talking about the revenue organization as a whole in sales. Before that you have the title chief marketing officer. Yes. But we started off with that topic. Now, this new era here with humans and agents and the AI era in general, like, what does it really require alignment wise, between a chief marketing officer and a chief revenue officer like Hannah, for example, in your organization?

16:17 – 18:11

Loreal Lynch: So it’s interesting because I talked about, you know, on the technology side, the collapse of the stock, and it’s converging into these authentic systems that can execute across all of go to market and all of go to market is everything from marketing from lead gen to, you know, inbound leads coming in, figuring out how to market to those leads to bring them into the system and then pass them along to sales and ultimately get them across the line to become a closed one deal. And then even after that. Expansion and customer success. So the entire revenue lifecycle historically has been managed across multiple different teams. And we still do have different teams. But I do think that as the stack gets more converged into one, it’s super critical that the teams also have these shared operating models and really shared success metrics. And so for me, as I think about the future of the go to market organization, overall, it was very important when I was evaluating my next move, who my CRO partner was going to be. And that’s where I had a lot of great conversations with Hannah, and Hannah was hired, I think about a year before me. She runs a tight ship. She’s built a really Strong sales team. Sales execution is phenomenal. They’re all meeting and exceeding their quota. They’re beating and raising every quarter. It’s one of the things that got me excited about joining as a marketing leader is thinking about how I would partner with Hannah. And, you know, one of the things that you don’t want and I think we’ve all seen this is where you battle back and forth on who gets the credit for the lead. You’re not meeting your number. Well, you’re not closing. I’m sending you all these leads and you’re not following up on them. And that, I think, is just so counterproductive. And so thinking about this new organization that’s being built where rather than having separate targets, you have this shared target, you have shared systems, you have shared agents that are executing across, you know, across the lifecycle. And it makes that partnership, I think, all the more important.

18:11 – 18:28

Sophie Buonassisi: Very cool. And so how you mentioned shared systems. I’m curious. Like there’s the system side almost the technology side, if you will. And then there’s probably the non-technical side, which is your meetings and how you foster that alignment. Like what are some tangible ways that you and Hana do that together?

18:28 – 20:05

Loreal Lynch: Yeah. So for example, we have I mean, I think some of the same calls, but it’s more of like how they’re run. Um, like everybody, I think probably every company has a forecast call. Um, and so we are I’m part of that forecast call. And then we have a pipeline call as well once a week. And so we have a pipeline call. But one of the interesting things with the way that we come up with our pipeline target is rather than having targets on sourced, we have this conversation where we’re like, it might actually be counterproductive to have if someone comes in via a certain source. But, you know, cycles are long and it might be that then they go to a dinner and then maybe one of our executives engages with them or becomes friendly with their executive, and they connect on LinkedIn, and then it leads to eventually a deal. And then along the way, someone’s looked at a case study. It doesn’t really matter who sourced it. And so rather than having sourced targets for our enterprise business, we just have a shared pipeline goal that we’re both held accountable to. And so when we run those pipeline meetings, we look at the top line number of like where what is our number? How are we tracking to this number? How is it across different segments and regions. Are there certain, you know, industries or verticals that are doing better than others? And then as a collective group, what can we be doing to close that gap? And sometimes it might be there’s nothing marketing can do. It’s like sales right now needs to, you know, it’s like deep into the cycle and they need to engage a certain executive. But sometimes it can be like, oh, well, this can require some marketing programs or some marketing love. So let’s think about standing up this new campaign or standing up this new outreach program or something like that. So that’s a little bit about the way tactically that we’ve kind of employed this philosophy internally.

20:05 – 20:26

Sophie Buonassisi: Very cool, very exciting. And now putting you back in kind of the crystal ball holding seat that you were in previously or earlier in this conversation. If you look at marketing as a whole, it’s transformed tremendously around what works over time. Now we’re seeing a ton of shifts with AI era. What do you think is going to work here moving forward in general? What type of marketing?

20:26 – 22:06

Loreal Lynch: Yeah, I think there are some things that I think have changed with the way the work gets done. I think in terms of what works in marketing, kind of the same tried and true things that have always worked. I talk about how in the old days, like the days of Mad Men, if you ever watched that, like the the old ad industry brands, well, companies used to win or lose based on the strength of their brand. So you think like Pepsi, Coke, you know, there could be some great ad campaign, and that’s why you would swing one way or the other if you’re looking at a competitor. So it was really about great marketing and great brand building. I think over the last decade, even 20 years, we’ve moved in a direction where it’s all based on performance, it’s clicks, it’s, you know, the cost per acquisition and a lot of digital marketing. And I think now with AI, AI can automate away a lot of that. And so it comes back to not can you win based on the strength of your digital program or your demand, or how much, you know, leads or pipeline you’re generating? I think the pendulum has swung back to building a strong brand, one that creates trust, one that resonates with your audience, and a brand that you can remember. And it’s interesting because even in the tech space, that is critically important. I mean, Nook’s is playing in a very competitive space. Revenue agents. There’s a lot of go to market software out there today. And even if there aren’t direct competitors for a decision maker like a CRO or a DevOps leader, they’re getting pitched so many different tools and all of them are saying the same thing. We have agents that can automate your processes, you know. So how do you cut through the noise? And I think that’s for me, the job to be done. And what I’m excited to to crack at nooks and to start to work on.

22:06 – 22:12

Sophie Buonassisi: Very, very exciting. And it’s so funny how the pendulum always thinks that everything is cyclical. Once we know.

22:12 – 22:14

Loreal Lynch: What’s old is new, always.

22:14 – 22:24

Sophie Buonassisi: Always like, we’ll see what we swing to next. But it’s like once we got attribution at our fingertips. Everything went into that. Yeah. And now we’re kind of coming back to fundamentally, how do you build a great.

22:24 – 22:25

Loreal Lynch: Place, totally.

22:25 – 22:27

Sophie Buonassisi: Serve your customers, which is great.

22:27 – 22:27

Loreal Lynch: Yeah.

22:27 – 22:37

Sophie Buonassisi: Brilliant. And now you are leading marketing at Nook’s. Very exciting. What are you excited to particularly build out at Nook’s on the marketing front?

22:37 – 23:50

Loreal Lynch: Yeah, well I do I like to build and I think the opportunity to build is great at Nook’s in particular, because the category doesn’t really even exist yet. It’s still very nascent in terms of being formed, and I think the category that we see evolving is in revenue agents. And so the opportunity to not just lead the category, but really shape and define what the category looks like is an exciting opportunity. And that, I think can be done through a lot of thought leadership, working with our customers, translating this into, you know what, what we’re seeing in the market. I have been lucky to work at companies that did the same. You know, I spent many years at Salesforce, which was obviously the category leader at first in CRM, but actually we acquired Tableau and once we acquired Tableau, I went to go lead a global product marketing at Tableau. Tableau was also the category leader in BI and analytics. And so being able to see firsthand how they Tableau created the category of modern by Salesforce, created this new CRM category. And then I got to go to Stripe and Stripe also, you know, sort of built and led this modern payments category. And so I think the opportunity at Nook’s is to get in and really do the same as kind of build and lead this new revenue agents category. And I made a bet that Nook’s is the one that’s going to be able to do it.

23:50 – 23:55

Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. Well, you’ve done it many times before. Yeah. So very, very excited.

23:55 – 23:56

Loreal Lynch: Yes. Thank you.

23:56 – 24:01

Sophie Buonassisi: So what are the types of companies organizations that are seeing success with Nook’s?

24:01 – 24:53

Loreal Lynch: Yeah. It’s so our customer base really is a lot of forward looking, almost early adopters of AI tech. So we have a lot of technology companies, the likes of cursor, replicate, deal. HubSpot is a big customer. And so these are customers that are ahead of the curve when it comes to adopting AI and driving successful outcomes. And again, I think that’s because it goes back to transforming your processes. And so it’s not surprising that an AI native company would be the first to adopt something like a Nook’s in order to, to transform their own sales organizations. I think we also see a lot of growth that’s starting to happen among more traditional, larger enterprises. So financial services and companies like those. But certainly right now it’s a lot of these high tech, high growth companies, which I think is cool because it’s a lot of like the fastest growing sales organizations in the world that are running on Nook’s.

24:53 – 25:20

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, that is super cool. Yeah. I think one of the coolest parts that makes an extra so well positioned is how you started with the wedge of the dialer. Yes, because that gives you so much rich data. Conversational data is one of the most rich things that you can then build sequencing and other products and revenue agents on top of. Whereas if you go the other way, you don’t have that rotisserie. Yeah. So it’s like more of an uphill battle where I think you guys have a huge advantage because of that data.

25:20 – 25:52

Loreal Lynch: I think so. And even just strategically from a go to market perspective, it’s easier to have a wedge like that than sometimes to go in and sell this broad platform for transformation, where sometimes you just have to meet customers where they are, and they might not be ready for that yet. And I think especially with AI, a lot of customers start with pilots. And so it’s easy to pilot something for a specific use case that’s very confined. That’s ring fenced. And I think the dialer and again, outbound was a good opportunity for us to do that. And now we’re kind of ready to take it to the next level.

25:52 – 25:57

Sophie Buonassisi: All right. Loreal. And we’ve got a couple rapid fire. Just finish the sentence. Questions for you here.

25:57 – 25:58

Loreal Lynch: Okay. You ready? Yep.

25:58 – 26:07

Sophie Buonassisi: Okay. The thing nobody tells you about leadership is be yourself. Love that. Mhm. The most underrated piece of go to market advice is.

26:07 – 26:11

Loreal Lynch: Don’t over index on activity. It’s about impact.

26:11 – 26:34

Sophie Buonassisi: I love it, I love it, I love it, and I mean, you already spoke to that too, just in terms of how you measure pipeline meetings and crazy alignment to not sauced opportunities. Brilliant. And then overall, after those kind of quick rapid fire questions, curious if you extend this, it could be any part. It could be life. It could be revenue organizations, it could be anything. But what’s just overall the best advice that you’ve gotten and who gave it to you?

26:34 – 26:45

Loreal Lynch: That’s a good question. I think where it would take this is and it sounds silly, but I actually apply this to a lot of different areas of my life. There’s no time for bad wine.

26:47 – 27:08

Loreal Lynch: And the reason that I like that is because I think it extends beyond obviously wine, but it’s more of like, there’s no time to drink bad wine, take the trip, do the fun thing, and you’ve got to be able to do that in your life, to have the balance and to really get fulfillment. And so it just speaks to kind of priorities. And I like that a lot.

27:08 – 27:09

Sophie Buonassisi: I like that too. I wish we had a wine glass.

27:09 – 27:10

Loreal Lynch: I know I would. Cheers you. Yeah.

27:11 – 27:15

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. We talked about the marketing organization at Nook’s. Are you hiring at all?

27:15 – 27:47

Loreal Lynch: 100%. We are hiring a lot. And very quickly, we need to get butts in seats. So I look out our drawing board. Check out our job board. Right now, we are hiring for a head of comms, because it’s important for us again to be able to go tell this story. We are hiring for a head of Growth marketing to get us in front of the right audiences. So really building out the leadership team. We’re also hiring for marketing operations and building solid foundations and data foundations for us. Great creative director that can come in and help really build a distinctive brand that helps cut through the noise and stand out.

27:47 – 27:55

Sophie Buonassisi: Well, the job board will be in the show notes for anyone interested. Awesome, awesome. And for anyone looking to follow along with you and your journey, where can they find you?

27:55 – 28:03

Loreal Lynch: Definitely on LinkedIn. I’m active on LinkedIn. Love to, you know, participate in communities on LinkedIn. And so find me on LinkedIn. I’m happy to connect.

28:03 – 28:04

Sophie Buonassisi: Awesome. Wonderful.

28:04 – 28:05

Loreal Lynch: Great.

28:05 – 28:07

Sophie Buonassisi: Thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure.

28:07 – 28:08

Loreal Lynch: It’s been great. Thank you.