So What? Reflections on MarketingProfs B2B Forum

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.

You can watch on YouTube Live. Be sure to subscribe and follow so you never miss an episode!

In this episode, Katie Robbert and Christopher Penn talk through what stuck with them after a busy stretch of conference travel, starting with MarketingProfs B2B Forum. They get into how brands can sound more human when every feed is crowded, why solid data fundamentals still give your team an edge over competitors leaning on automation, and how to turn a pile of session notes into something your team actually keeps using. You’ll also hear how those lessons help you earn buyers’ trust long before they reach out. Tune in for their take on what’s worth bringing home from B2B Forum.

Watch the video here:

Watch this video on YouTube

Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here.

In this episode you’ll learn:

What was hot at MarketingProfs B2B Forum
Key lessons from Katie Robbert and Christopher Penn’s talks
What are the Monday morning next steps

Transcript:

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Katie Robbert – 00:00

Well, hey everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the marketing analytics and insights live show. I’m Katie, joined by Chris. John is off doing other things today. We saw him.

Christopher Penn – 00:49

John is wandering the hills of Western Massachusetts or something along those lines.

Katie Robbert – 00:53

Yes. Chris and I have been on the road quite a bit. This week we just came back from the MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2026, and today we’re going to talk about all the things. Chris, if you want to just do a little bit of preamble, I just have to grab something.

Christopher Penn – 01:10

Yeah, of course. For those who don’t know, MarketingProfs B2B Forum is one of the premier B2B marketing conferences. Every year is a fun theme. This year’s theme was sort of the Brady Bunch. Hence why there’s a giant image of myself behind me. I promise I am not actually this much of an egomaniac.

Katie Robbert – 01:32

I can’t even see how big that is.

Christopher Penn – 01:34

That is very large. It is fully occupying the frame. There you go.

Katie Robbert – 01:39

I wanted to pull it up for scale. For those of you who shop at Costco or BJ’s, this is very much like the Costco effect. In the store it looks normal size, and then you get it home and you wonder why you have a 10-pound bag of whatever the thing is. When I was at the event before I brought this home, I thought this is normal size. I get it home and this is what I have. Chris, I don’t know what you’re doing with yours, but I’ve been hiding mine around the house for the other members of the household to be surprised by, which is always a good time.

Christopher Penn – 02:20

Mine’s mostly just been hanging out here. Although it is screwing up the facial recognition composition for AI. The event was Monday and Tuesday of this week, with workshops for Wednesday. Every year MarketingProfs B2B Forum is typically in Boston, although it’s moved around to places like D.C. and San Francisco and a variety of other places. It’s B2B marketers — about a thousand of them give or take — talking about all things B2B marketing for two full days. We have participated in one form or another with MarketingProfs B2B Forum since 2008. That was the very first one that I went to that was in Phoenix, Arizona. Katie, I think your first was 2015 or 2016.

Katie Robbert – 03:10

It was.

Christopher Penn – 03:11

A staple fixture since then as well.

Katie Robbert – 03:14

I remember the first one that I went to was in downtown Boston. This is when they were still switching back and forth between the coasts until they decided to just stay on the East Coast. It was in downtown Boston, and I was just there as an attendee. I was just tagging along with you, Chris, because I was brand new to this industry. It was my first time seeing Ann Handley on stage. She came out with a brass band and played the accordion. I had no idea what was happening. I’d never been to an event like this because the events that I used to go to when I worked on the academic side were very different. Very sterile is probably the best way to put it. They were useful for that industry, but nothing like this.

Katie Robbert – 04:04

Ann on stage with an accordion and a brass band was my very first introduction. There were hoodies on every chair for people to just take. I was like, what is happening? I remember at that event — and again, this was my first real introduction to it because I had only been working with you for about two or three months at this point — you were doing office hours at the event. In the lobby of the MarketingProfs event, they basically set you up at a table, and people were making appointments to come talk to you for 10 or 15 minutes. Like the old Peanuts therapist is in. It was very much like that. I was just sort of sitting off in the background, just listening and taking it all in.

Katie Robbert – 04:48

I was just blown away that this was how people did it. It was so different from what I had spent the first decade of my career doing, that people could just walk up to somebody and ask a question. The expert in the room would say they can help and show what the answer is.

Christopher Penn – 05:12

The event has evolved over the years, but it is still pretty much the same in the sense of having multiple tracks and multiple lessons. We talked about this on the Trust Insights podcast this week, which you can find over at TrustInsights.ai/tipodcast and over on our YouTube channel as well. Fifty percent of the sessions in some capacity were either about AI or about the strategic use of things other than AI, but they had AI in the title. We talked on the podcast about six areas that used to be on stage all the time that no longer are — like data rot inside your CRM. Katie, you went to a decent number of sessions. What were the big takeaways that you saw and heard for yourself? Anything where you thought that’s coming home with me?

Katie Robbert – 06:08

The one where I got the “that’s coming home with me” was Leanna Patch’s keynote on the second day. She got to talk on the big stage. The theme of it was all about joy, but the core of it was to find a little bit of levity in the work that you’re doing. Especially in B2B marketing, which can feel very buttoned up and dry, there are still humans on either end. It might be business to business, but inside of those businesses are humans who are also feeling how dry and mundane it is. Where can you find a bit more of that humanness in your content, in your newsletters, in your images, in your webpage? That really got me thinking about what that could look like.

Katie Robbert – 07:01

I know it will make Kelsey’s millennial heart happy to hear that I’m open to adding a little bit more personality into things with guardrails. We’re not going fully unhinged, but it’s definitely something to think about. It’s going to look different for every company and every instance. I think it’s worth exploring, especially as you know, Chris, we were brought up in the generation where professional and personal don’t mix. There’s a very clear dividing line between the two, and at work, your personal life doesn’t exist. You are there from the hours of nine to five. You take your breaks when they are scheduled. You are always polished, professional, appropriate, and buttoned up. You don’t talk out of turn.

Katie Robbert – 07:50

For me personally, that’s been harder to shake, especially since I was in it for so long. Who you were outside of work was not a welcome conversation. I’ve had such a hard time bringing more of my authentic self into the workplace. Within our team, we all trust each other, but bringing that into the content and the assets, I don’t know what that looks like. I’m very interested to talk more with Leanna about what’s possible. When I went to sessions like Amanda Natividad’s zero-click session — she just wrote the book with Rand Fishkin — that was really interesting.

Katie Robbert – 08:39

It wasn’t a mind-blowing session in terms of things we don’t already know, but it was a mind-blowing session in terms of a good reminder of what we should be doing when we’re looking at our data and thinking about our attribution. None of what she did mentioned AI. It was all the basic foundational stuff that we should know how to do. I went to Brooke Sellas’s session on social care, and she talked a lot about the kind of measurement you should be doing. Again, none of it mentioned AI. For me, the big takeaway was a lot of people, myself included, focused on the foundational pieces that don’t include AI.

Katie Robbert – 09:24

All of that work that you do in the run-up to bringing it into something like AI is important, but that foundational work is still so critical. I was really happy to see that’s what the real theme of the event was, that everybody was talking about those foundational pieces. Even Ann Handley in her keynote, as she’s talking about slowing down and thinking through who it is for. That’s all very human stuff that doesn’t involve AI. No one at the event was anti-AI, but I think a lot of the focus was on what we as humans can do. Even though it’s B2B, we’re still human to human.

Christopher Penn – 10:05

I would agree there are a couple things that stood out for me. One was Rory Sutherland’s. One of his many quotes during his talk that I thought was hilariously funny and also completely accurate was that no cruise ship boasts about how fast the ship goes. In our quest for efficiency and speed and how we can use AI to scale this stuff, he pointed out that that’s not a selling point of a cruise ship. You don’t want it to go faster. You want to go slower so you can enjoy the experience more. That’s one of those great little sentences that makes you realize the experience the customer has might be inversely proportional to the speed of it.

Christopher Penn – 10:46

If you are having a great time, you don’t want it to end. Recklessly pursuing speed at all costs is silly if you’ve got a great customer experience. Now, if your customer experience sucks, then yes, you want it to be over as quickly as possible. That was one of the things that I thought was super interesting. The other thing that was interesting was a common theme across Will Reynolds’s talk, Amanda’s talk, Brooke’s talk, and a few others. We heard the sentence a lot that the buyer’s mind is made up before they ever get to you. AI has accelerated that by giving them another thought partner to chat with.

Christopher Penn – 11:31

In so many cases, I want to say it was an Amanda session. I think that two-thirds of buyers, their research is done and their minds are made up.

Katie Robbert – 11:41

That was my talk.

Christopher Penn – 11:42

Well, that was your talk. Two-thirds. There were so many charts to try and remember.

Katie Robbert – 11:49

I know.

Christopher Penn – 11:50

As a theme I heard in multiple places, we have very little opportunity to influence a sale after a customer comes to us, except to lose it. Except to do something that’s so negligent that it is lost. We see this when we talk to our clients. A lot of our clients talk about AI traffic, GEO, and AEO. I just finished monthly reporting for one of our clients, and traffic is down. Leads are up and the quality of leads are up because people have had to fight their way through the AI and all these gates to get to them. By the time they get there, they’re ready to buy.

Katie Robbert – 12:39

I don’t want to go too far off topic, but what’s interesting to me is if you’re trying to figure out if it matters if your traffic’s down if your leads are up. Which one is more important to you? That’s when you start to get into asking why there aren’t more of those sessions at events. AI or not, we still have the same fundamental issues where we’re trying to get people’s attention, get high-quality leads, close deals, offer really good service, and have really good data hygiene. All of that can be done with or without AI. The emphasis on AI is confusing for events that are not specifically AI focused.

Katie Robbert – 13:29

MAICON is 100% AI focused. That is the Marketing AI Institute, SmarterX. Every session should be about AI. For MarketingProfs B2B Forum, I think there’s been a bit of confusion from the attendees of what they want. Not from the event coordinators or the people planning it, but from attendees who are wondering if they want to learn about AI, the fundamentals, or somewhere in between. I feel like that’s where a lot of events that aren’t 100% all-in on AI might be struggling a little bit. Not because they can’t put on a great event, but because the attendees don’t know what they need.

Christopher Penn – 14:17

One of the other themes that we heard several times — I heard it at meals sitting down with people and in Michael Barber’s session at the very end — is that the technology of AI is being misused by many people to their detriment. People were saying our junior-most people that we’re hiring now can’t do anything. They know nothing. They literally haven’t the foggiest idea how to do their jobs. He asked a room full of people at a company how many could name the 4Ps of marketing — product, price, promotion, place. He said nobody could. It was blank stares across the board.

Christopher Penn – 15:07

He told them their education has failed them if they can’t remember the 101 of marketing. At that point, you are substantially worse than AI because at least AI can name it. It may not be able to do anything with it, but at least it can name it.

Katie Robbert – 15:18

Yeah.

Christopher Penn – 15:19

I heard that at meals too, sitting down with folks and asking them what their challenges are. Inevitably, of course, AI comes up. A big one was a lot of the people new to the field don’t have the fundamentals.

Katie Robbert – 15:36

It’s such a missed opportunity for events that aren’t offering a fundamentals track. It doesn’t have to be in every single breakout session, but is there an opportunity for events to offer that? You and I talked about this on the podcast. The goal of events is to attract people. To attract people to the event, you have to have the shiny objects, the future talks, and the things that are going to be attractive to investing time, money, and resources into spending time away from work.

Katie Robbert – 16:18

I totally understand that, but is there an opportunity for companies that have employees who have been out of school for less than a year to ride the coattails of the student discount ticket and come get fundamental 101 courses? They could go specifically for that track in addition to sending their more senior team members to the other shiny object tracks. Why not send them to these events where you have all of these experts who can teach? Any of the speakers could easily teach a marketing 101 fundamentals course in our sleep and have it be something impactful that someone brand new to the industry would really benefit from. When I was brand new to the industry, I needed that stuff and I didn’t know where to start. Events make an assumption you already have some level of understanding.

Christopher Penn – 17:31

We joked about B2B standing for back to basics.

Katie Robbert – 17:37

Back to boring.

Christopher Penn – 17:37

Back to boring, exactly. I think there is a place for a back to basics boot camp for anybody because the basics change. They don’t change a ton, but they do change because the environment itself changes. If you had an SEO boot camp, you would need to talk about AI visibility. Even if you think it’s a load of excremento de toro, as our Spanish friends would say, it is still something that stakeholders are going to ask you for. It is still something that you will be asked to show reports on. We have actually taught the basics of reporting and analytics in the distant past.

Christopher Penn – 18:22

We should probably resurrect that because it’s both harder and easier than ever now to do that with tools like generative AI. A tool like Claude Code or ChatGPT can generate a report of anything you like, but you have to know what to ask for. You need the vocabulary to state your goal is to prove that this campaign did or did not work. What are my options? Use these tools to help you learn.

Katie Robbert – 18:54

You also have to understand the fundamental pieces of the campaign and what story you’re trying to tell. You don’t have to be a master storyteller, conversationalist, or report builder, but you have to understand what the pieces are. If I look at a report like Google Search Console and ask you what my click-through rate is, my click-through rate isn’t necessarily a data point that you get right out of the box. It’s something that you have to know how to calculate between the impressions and the actual link clicks.

Katie Robbert – 19:33

That’s a fundamental thing that you could hand it off to AI to do, but then you haven’t learned. While you’re in the room and somebody asks which one has the highest click-through rate, and you’re looking at five or six different things with big four- or five-digit numbers, you’re trying to mentally do the math in your head. I can’t do it. You want to know how to calculate those things, like the basic ROI calculation of something. It’s a basic formula, but you should know how to do it. You should know how to do percent change.

Katie Robbert – 20:08

I’m not saying you need to be an expert in statistics, but when it comes to marketing, there are some fairly standard metrics that need some calculation. They’re not hard. If you don’t know how they’re put together, then you can’t deconstruct them and answer the questions.

Christopher Penn – 20:27

Another one that was a very popular theme, particularly in a talk called The Flywheel Fix, was that inbound marketing is dead. I thought that was a strong but interesting position saying that social media has become so algorithmic that your chances of driving a lot of leads from that are toast. AI has made search extremely difficult to deal with because you have all these chat recommendation tools. In some cases you’re getting mentioned, but it’s not in a good way. Airbnb is probably the last place that you should book your vacation. Your average marketer is going, “Yes, we’ve been mentioned,” and everyone else is pointing out it’s not in the way you want. You were mentioned as the company to avoid.

Christopher Penn – 21:17

Even things like email marketing came up as topics. Getting leads is harder than ever through inbound ways. The flip side of the coin from some of the sessions on advertising is that ads are in a worse spot than ever. It costs more money to get less out of ad systems than you ever have before. People are spending 150 to 300 dollars a lead on systems like LinkedIn because they feel like they don’t have other options. Going back to basics, I was talking about this with someone who is marketing to a very specific demographic that they knew the demographics about. I said you would honestly be better off spending a quarter of your ad click budget literally just putting flyers on the pizza boxes that get delivered to those specific neighborhoods.

Christopher Penn – 22:16

Tell the pizza company you’re going to pay them ten grand a month to staple these to the box. You will reach the buyer faster, better, and probably more noticeably than you will with 40 grand of LinkedIn ads.

Katie Robbert – 22:35

Let me ask you this question because you just brought up a really interesting point. For a long time, digital felt like it killed direct marketing and direct mail. It almost seems like we are reversing that because digital is a cluster-F, for lack of a better term. There are so many different things, places, and competing information. Are we going back to basics, and should 2027 be the year of trying direct mail or direct marketing again?

Christopher Penn – 23:20

I think it’s one of those things we tell everybody. It should be a part of your testing plan. If you can spare 10% of your budget that you spend on pay-per-click ads doing something, then test it. There are so many good print shops now that can produce boutique magazines. I could easily see a world in which The Letters from the Corner Office by Katie Robbert becomes a bespoke magazine or a book that gets shipped to the top 10 prospects. You don’t have to ship it to everybody. You don’t need to make a million of them. You can make them available for sale for people who are not in your target ICP.

Christopher Penn – 24:00

I could totally see the senior directors of marketing at these 10 companies getting a FedExed version of Katie’s book, The Letters from the Corner Office, that we publish every year. FedExed to them at their office, and on a per-lead basis, it might be one-tenth the cost of what we would spend on the same campaign digitally.

Christopher Penn – 24:15

The other thing is experiential marketing. This is something that was not mentioned at MarketingProfs, and I was actually very surprised to not hear this. Experiential marketing conferences and in-person events in the greater event planning space is the hot area right now for 2027. People are saying the only antidote to proving that you’re not AI is for you to literally stand in front of a room full of people and say, “Here I am in real space, ask me questions, let’s chat.”

Christopher Penn – 24:56

It’s more impactful too because it physically moves somebody out of their office, rather than watching yet another webinar that’s probably pre-recorded while doing 27 things and not paying the slightest bit of attention.

Katie Robbert – 25:13

While we were at MarketingProfs, I had a dumb idea for a little bit of experiential marketing that I’m going to play around with that I put in our thoughts and ideas channel. I really feel like what AI has done is given us as humans more reason to crave those offline, tangible things and human-to-human connection. It really has muddied the waters of anything digital. Because to your point, algorithms, emails, and ads are all overloading us. When we get something different, we notice. I remember in Nancy Harhut’s talk, she did a great job of 19 ways to reach your audience.

Katie Robbert – 26:08

One of them was to disrupt what’s expected. As humans, our brains are built for pattern recognition. When you disrupt what’s expected, that’s when you stand out. If you send a physical thing that’s tangible or experiential, you are disrupting the same 10 blog posts about B2B marketing in 2027.

Christopher Penn – 26:37

If you think about it, a good marketer goes where the people are, but the competitors aren’t. If you are competing in a digital landscape where your inbox has 5,400 messages and your LinkedIn has 82 notifications, and then you walk outside to your post mailbox and there’s a spider and one flyer, there’s an opportunity to be noticed there because nobody else is there. It’s just that one flyer and the spider. The spider’s like, “Got any food?”

Katie Robbert – 27:14

I usually leave the spider alone because the spider’s protecting me from too much junk mail.

Christopher Penn – 27:18

Exactly. That is completely the opportunity to be able to say this is where we can capture attention. That disruption you mentioned works when the audience isn’t overwhelmed. The other thing that brings to mind is something that Rory had in his day one keynote, which was a very useful quote. It wasn’t his — he was citing someone else. He said the technology is not agnostic. Google Analytics inherently funnels you towards Google Ads. Meta funnels you towards Meta Ads. All of these big tech companies that form the digital space have inbuilt incentives to funnel your money to them. Everything that they tell you about marketing is designed to drive revenue to them and not necessarily to benefit you.

Christopher Penn – 28:15

One of the things that I thought was super useful showed that if you look at the attribution systems in reality versus what the ad companies say, your return on ad spend in some cases is negative. You are losing money when you buy ads from these companies, even though your numbers look good. The reality is you’re losing money because they go out and claim so much credit for things they didn’t do.

Katie Robbert – 28:44

That’s not a new problem. That’s not a problem that AI created. I have to bring up that new tech doesn’t solve old problems. This goes back to the fundamentals conversation we were having. These are problems that marketers are struggling with every single day. AI is just magnifying and amplifying them and making those issues even harder to untangle. We’ve added so much more tech on top of these rat’s nests of data issues that trying to pull them apart is going to be a near impossible feat.

Katie Robbert – 29:36

Asking AI to fix it isn’t really going to solve the problem.

Christopher Penn – 29:41

In the digital era, which has been for the last 20 years ever since the first social networks in 2005, that was the inbound marketing era. It was so popular that HubSpot built an entire company on it. If inbound marketing is dead — and I think there’s some credence to that — and the buyer’s mind has been made up before they ever get to us, then the marketing qualified lead really doesn’t exist anymore. If somebody comes in, they’re already a sales qualified lead.

Christopher Penn – 30:25

Marketing has been cut out of the picture because of all the recommendation systems, conversations, and touchpoints that happen completely outside of a marketer’s control. By the time they get to you, they’re already a sales qualified lead. It raises the interesting question of what the role of the marketer is in an environment like that.

Katie Robbert – 30:51

I think that’s something that we should explore further in 2027 of what that looks like, because it is changing. We had the opportunity to catch up with an old colleague that we haven’t seen in quite a few years since we worked at the agency. One of the things that they mentioned was when you and I were there, we were the marketing technology team. Now the agency that they work for has split up all of those different channels into individual teams. They have all of the different channel marketers.

Katie Robbert – 31:26

I think that would be a really interesting thing for us to explore. Which channels are the most vulnerable, what is the role of the marketer in each of those teams, and what are the opportunities that are being missed? I feel like it really is a chance for us to go back to basics.

Christopher Penn – 31:51

The other thing I heard and saw in a couple places, but most notably in Ashley Zeckman’s session on influencer marketing, is that in the AI world where everything is a big slop cannon, having a known human being influencer carries more weight with your audience because there’s an actual real person there with a track record. It doesn’t have to be a Kardashian. It can literally be people like you and I who are known in our space being influential.

Christopher Penn – 32:27

One of the things that a lot of companies seem to have missed the boat on is growing your own influencers. Ashley talks about investing time not in your company’s brand because nobody cares about that anymore, but investing it in you as the person. You as the person are the last bastion against a slop cannon world.

Katie Robbert – 32:51

It’s true. That’s something that, as someone who came from a very buttoned up corporate environment, I’ve struggled to reconcile in my brain. I feel like we have to build the Trust Insights brand, but you and I are the Trust Insights brand. I have to build my personal brand to be Trust Insights. I still struggle. I get it, but I don’t want to be that out there. That goes back to finding the humor and levity in things. That means that you and I have to be even more human and present.

Katie Robbert – 33:40

AI has really given us the opportunity to find those more human moments. I think that was a big part of what Ann’s opening keynote was about.

Christopher Penn – 33:51

Exactly. Notice that nobody asked us for the Trust Insights logo. They asked us for photos of us, and they put photos of us up on a wall in the speaker’s room and on the main floor. Nobody asked for a logo.

Katie Robbert – 34:12

Mine looks substantially bigger than yours. Is it just because it’s closer?

Christopher Penn – 34:15

Yes, it’s closer. If I actually bring this up closer.

Katie Robbert – 34:19

These are ridiculous.

Christopher Penn – 34:21

Yes, this is more than life-size. I just have mine back here because it’s otherwise in the way.

Katie Robbert – 34:27

Got it.

Katie Robbert – 34:30

But you’re right, they didn’t ask for logos.

Christopher Penn – 34:32

They asked for logos and that’s not what was on display. From a marketing perspective, if the influencer is going to take a bigger part of the stage for brands, which it is, then what do you as a company have to do to grow your own influencers? You also have to think about how you do it with people who are likely to stick around.

Christopher Penn – 35:04

This is the Microsoft Robert Scoble problem. Robert built his reputation at MSDN and Microsoft and then left and took his audience with him. In the case of Trust Insights, that’s not nearly as much of a concern because we are the co-owners of the company. If one of us leaves, something has gone very wrong or very right. We made a billion dollars and we’re done. But for regular brands where your principals and your stakeholders and your owners are not necessarily the faces of the company, that’s a consideration.

Katie Robbert – 35:44

I wouldn’t even know where to start approaching that because it’s so hard to know who’s going to stick around long-term and who isn’t. What does that look like when they do leave? That is why investing in the brand versus the people has stuck around for so long. There are a lot of well-known brands on social media that have their unhinged personas and that works. They can swap social media managers in and out because you’re not getting to know the people. You’re getting to know the brands almost as if they were anthropomorphic. That doesn’t work for everybody.

Katie Robbert – 36:34

If we were to have an animated mascot, I don’t even know what it would be. People would wonder if it is just performative play where they’re just trying to get attention. That’s not authentic. You can’t just do it to do it.

Christopher Penn – 36:51

Although I do have to say I have more than once toured the idea of our Monday automated AI newsletter being written by Georgia.

Katie Robbert – 37:00

I would read that. I think she has very strong opinions about things. Anyone who knows me knows that my dogs have always come first and foremost in my life, and Georgia plays a big role in that. She’s right here, actually. What would it look like to have Georgia’s perspective on what’s going on in AI today? Would people sign up for that? I think it’s worth testing. I think that feels like something that would be authentic to Trust Insights because we’ve always been very open about our love of animals.

Christopher Penn – 37:36

It would be authentic. It would still be useful.

Katie Robbert – 37:40

Yep.

Christopher Penn – 37:40

But it would also be true because there’s a difference between authenticity and truth. You can be authentically evil or you can be an authentic liar. That would be something that is very aligned on multiple axes. There’s probably a set of tests that you could put together to see if this is something that would resonate. There’s a difference between honest, factual, and truthful. Honest is internal, factual is external, and truthful is both. You can be honestly wrong.

Christopher Penn – 38:20

You can be factually misleading, but you cannot be truthfully doing those things. The mascot of Georgia as the writer of a newsletter would be internally true. The data would be factually correct. So it would be a true thing. Is Georgia actually an AI expert? No.

Katie Robbert – 38:45

She has sat through enough meetings she should be at this point if she were paying attention.

Christopher Penn – 38:50

Exactly. The whole idea of mascots and anthropomorphizing things and trying to be more human in a less human world seems like it’s worth a shot.

Katie Robbert – 39:05

I wrote about this in this week’s newsletter, which you can get at TrustInsights.ai/newsletter. We are taking a good, hard look at what we’re doing for our audience moving into 2027. That includes potentially relaunching things like the podcast and this live stream to have an even more of a focus on what our audience needs, versus where we started those assets on our own whims of what we thought the audience needed. Now that we’ve had the opportunity to really dig deeper into our own data, what does it look like to serve our audience even better in an even more focused way? I would be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t want something that Georgia creates.

Katie Robbert – 39:54

If they don’t want it, they probably shouldn’t be in our audience.

Christopher Penn – 39:59

The last thing I’ll suggest, and this is something everybody can do if you have the right AI tools and you are an attendee of the event. I’ve taken all the decks from the event because as a registered attendee, you can download them all. I put them through private AI because it’s not particularly ethical to hand off other people’s intellectual property inside of AI that trains on the data you submit to it. I put it through a private one and I glued it all together and came up with the common themes across all the presentations, all of which we talked about in today’s livestream. I recommend that people do that as well to get the most out of these events.

Christopher Penn – 40:40

We always say during the event that we are going to go back and look at these decks. After the event, we think we’re going to spend some time on it, and we never do.

Katie Robbert – 40:51

We would like to, but the world does not stop spinning and we still have work to do. We don’t get the luxury of time as much as we would hope.

Christopher Penn – 41:03

Exactly. By having the machine digest all this and extract out the useful parts from all 72 talks, I can look for those themes across talks to see what was actually hot at the show based on not just session descriptions, but the actual things delivered. I can also extract out takeaways from each of the talks that I could turn into skills.

Christopher Penn – 41:34

For example, your talk was literally how to build better ideal customer profiles. My talk was how to build an agent, with the literal step-by-step pieces. Nancy Harhut’s talk had 19 different skills.

Katie Robbert – 41:50

It’s funny you say that because I always enjoy her talks. My first thought too was that if I only had the transcript from this talk, I could build all of these different skills to use when I’m creating things for the company. That would be so great.

Christopher Penn – 42:07

Exactly. Well, we can. The takeaway that I would say there is if you have a good agentic system of some kind — Claude Code, Claude desktop, ChatGPT — and you are an attendee who went to the event and downloaded the slide decks, think about what you could turn into a skill. Pick one thing to turn into a skill and give it a try in your system. I think you’ll find that the value of attending MarketingProfs or any conference will go up because not only did you get some knowledge, but you added new tools to your tool belt that AI created from that content that lets you bring your learnings to life.

Christopher Penn – 42:52

I would hope that maybe we need to do a live stream on how to build a skill. Before the end of the month, we’re going to turn Nancy’s 19 ideas into 19 skills that will be in our design portfolio. That’s how you can take any conference and keep the value going. The next time the year rolls around and your boss asks if this conference is really worth it because it costs a lot of money, you can tell them.

Christopher Penn – 43:31

You can say, “Look at the 240 skills that I built since then and look at how much better it’s made my work.”

Katie Robbert – 43:37

That is a great way to demonstrate the ROI of attending a conference by taking what you’ve learned from the show and putting it into practice. You’re going to get that question every year of why we should invest in you going and what you get out of it. That is a very tangible thing.

Christopher Penn – 43:54

Especially if it’s something that’s applicable to more than one person on your team. You can take one neuroscience concept and use it on all of your landing pages now, and it’s in use by 40 people on your team. You can say to your boss, “Look, not only did I learn something, but the entire team has benefited from this technology that we created from what we learned.”

Katie Robbert – 44:30

I think it’s smart. I think that’s a really great way to approach it. I just want to say thank you again to Ann Handley and the team at MarketingProfs for having both myself and Chris at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum this year. We always have a great time. It’s always great to connect with people, reconnect with old friends, and just learn something new, step outside of our own little ecosystem, and see what else is going on in the world. For you and I, Chris, one of the most important things is that we have to make sure we’re attending other sessions and seeing just what else is going on.

Christopher Penn – 45:04

As you said to me early this year, don’t hang out with the people we know. Go hang out and eat meals with people you don’t know. Get to know folks and talk to folks. I talked to some really interesting folks. I talked to this one group of folks from Azerbaijan. I asked how the heck they even got here.

Katie Robbert – 45:22

I was on the other side of them when you were talking to them and I heard you ask them how they got here.

Christopher Penn – 45:27

They said they asked ChatGPT for B2B marketing conferences they should go to, and ChatGPT told them to go to MarketingProfs B2B Forum. And there they were.

Katie Robbert – 45:37

I hope you pass that information back along to Ann because I think that’s really fascinating.

Christopher Penn – 45:43

Exactly. If you got some thoughts about conferences or if you were at MarketingProfs B2B Forum and you missed a chance to say hi to us, or you were there and you just want to say hi to us again, please do. I believe next week is a regular week. The week after it will be John and Katie because I’ll be in Austin, Texas, and the week after that we’ll all be eating turkey. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you on the next one. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe.

Need help with your marketing AI and analytics?