#270: Scaling B2B Marketing at an AI Startup: Channels, Strategy, and Team Ops with Holly Xiao

#270 Strategy | Dave is joined by Holly Xiao, Head of B2B Marketing at HeyGen, an AI video generation platform that helps teams produce personalized, high-quality content, fast. Holly has led marketing at high-growth startups and now runs the enterprise GTM motion at HeyGen, where she blends strategy, creative execution, and AI-powered workflows to reach modern B2B buyers.

Dave and Holly cover:

• The 4 channels her lean team is betting on to drive enterprise pipeline (and what’s not working anymore)
• How B2B marketers are using AI video for event marketing, sales enablement, onboarding, and beyond
• Why SEO is falling short and how HeyGen is shifting focus to webinars, events, and YouTube instead

If you’re figuring out how to use AI in your marketing or just trying to do more with less, this one’s full of practical ideas to help you think differently about team structure, channels, and strategy.

Timestamps

• (00:00) - – Intro
  
• (03:48) - – Holly’s nonlinear path to marketing
  
• (06:48) - – Getting started in marketing ops
  
• (08:48) - – Why she joined an AI startup
  
• (10:48) - – How HeyGen’s marketing org works
  
• (13:48) - – PLG vs SLG: Key differences
  
• (15:48) - – The 4 channels driving pipeline
  
• (17:48) - – What’s working: Events + webinars
  
• (19:48) - – Booth strategy that stands out
  
• (24:23) - – Brand vs demand events
  
• (26:23) - – Building community and user events
  
• (27:53) - – SEO is declining. Now what?
  
• (30:23) - – Running marketing in 2-month sprints
  
• (33:23) - – Aligning product and marketing cadence
  
• (35:23) - – Her daily AI tools
  
• (36:53) - – ChatGPT vs Gemini workflows
  
• (38:23) - – Real AI video use cases
  
• (40:23) - – Personalized event promos with avatars
  
• (41:23) - – Support, training, and onboarding videos
  
• (42:23) - – Fortune telling and music videos?!
  
• (43:23) - – Why AI won’t replace marketers

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***

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Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:
You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt. Hey. My guest on this episode is Holly Xiao. She is head of B2B marketing at HeyGen. She runs the enterprise marketing function over there. They're a very cool company in the AI video space. I've been working on making my AI DG, the AI avatar of myself. Maybe you'll see that soon.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:35]:
I'm trying to make myself a rapper. It's not really. Not really working, but. Had an awesome conversation with Holly about her career landing her job at HeyGen. What's interesting right now about AI and video for marketers, why she doesn't think that all this stuff about AI and marketing is negative. She sees it as an opportunity for creatives and creators to find new ways to spend their time. And hopefully we can spend our time on the creative and the strategy versus all the kind of mundane tasks of marketing. And then I talked to her about what's working at HeyGen right now.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:05]:
Like as an AI first company. What are the marketing plays that they're running? And no surprise, it's a bunch of the things that we've all seen working for us and the other people that I've had on this podcast from webinars. Still working events, still working. One of the biggest things that's not working is SEO. And we dive into that and what it means in this world of search and LLMs. Here's my conversation with Holly. I think you're going to like it. Enjoy this episode.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:29]:
Okay. Hi, Holly.

Holly Xiao [00:01:31]:
Hi, Dave.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:32]:
How are you? Good to see you.

Holly Xiao [00:01:34]:
Good to see you. I'm doing well. How are you doing?

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:36]:
I'm doing awesome. I just was messed. We were just talking offline because I was messing around with HeyGen. And having a lot of fun.

Holly Xiao [00:01:44]:
Yes. And I love that you're doing that because I feel like your whole experience is definitely what a lot of our users are going through too.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:50]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I just wanted to have you on, like, HeyGen, as no, we have no affiliation with Exit Five, but I did. This is like, you invited me to be a guest on the webinar. And then like, we had kind of reconnected through that and I was like, I gotta have you on. On my podcast. So you're here hanging out. It's more fun to not host. You get to just hang out at work and just talk about marketing with me.

Holly Xiao [00:02:09]:
So, yeah, very excited to have this conversation for sure.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:13]:
Okay. Just so I can get it on the record, can you just introduce yourself? First name, last name? What do you do for work, and then that'll just give us a nice little sound clip to build off of.

Holly Xiao [00:02:22]:
Yeah, for sure. I'm Holly Xiao and I lead the B2B marketing team at HeyGen, which is an AI video generation platform. And so we help businesses of all sizes, from creators and solopreneurs to Fortune 500s. Fast Track video creation without the usual production headaches.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:38]:
Okay, cool. Love it. And your background, man. How did I first meet you? Were you at Eventbrite?

Holly Xiao [00:02:45]:
I was at Eventbrite when this was back in the day when I was still in marketing operations. And I remember my manager saying, like, hey, we need more MQLs. How do we find generate more MPLs? And I was like, all right, let's look into Chatbots. Because, like, chatbots is becoming a thing. Intercom was already pretty established there, and I remember looking at Drift, and that was pretty much how we first met.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:04]:
Okay, how did you get into marketing ops?

Holly Xiao [00:03:06]:
Oh, my gosh. I like lots of different. Basically it was not a linear path where, like, I don't even know where to start. I feel like, so I'll start in college since a lot of people are graduating or actually going to college this fall. But I feel like switched paths like two to three times. I went to UCSC to study medicine, because that's what they're known for. Took chem 2 and was like, nope, this is not for me. So then I thought about going to law and I got a job at a law firm and was fully planning to take the lsat.

Holly Xiao [00:03:32]:
But literally the night before I was supposed to take the test, I called my parents. It was like, law is not for me. I'm not taking the lsat. And I just remember at the law firm, I was helping them with marketing adjacent tasks. So one of the lawyers was an aspiring country singer and asked me to pitch a song to radio stations as my job at the law firm. Yeah, it was. It was kind of wild thinking back on it. But at the time I was like, oh, yeah, this is normal, right? Like, this is what.

Holly Xiao [00:03:59]:
What people do. But yeah, so here I was researching radio stations in San Diego and calling them to basically like, sell them on playing this person's song. And I thought it was like, kind of just ridiculous, but also fun. And that was actually how I ultimately chose marketing as my path. And yeah, so out of college, my first job was at this really small, small, like, residential solar company. And I started there as like a marketing communications manager to work on their website revamp and external strategy, but pretty much Like a month or two after I was hired, there was like a huge round of layoffs and I was the only marketer left at the company. And so I realized that the biggest gap that we had in marketing was actually in automation operations. So that's how I landed in marketing operations.

Holly Xiao [00:04:42]:
I basically Googled my way around to teach myself how to do it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:45]:
Love that. That's like, me too. Just, I feel like there's few people who are like, yeah, you know, I knew I was going to be in marketing when I was 7 years old and I, you know, had eliminate. Like, I think those stories are more nonsense. I think what happens is eventually you realize you have to get a real job and make money in this world and find a way to create a living, and we kind of all get there differently. And then for me, it was like, I. I got a marketing job because it was the only. It's the only company that would pay me.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:10]:
And it was like a paid internship. And I was like, okay, this is. I can at least sell this to my parents and be like, I got a real job. They're paying, it's 10 bucks an hour or whatever. And I got in this company and it was like I was using my skills as a writer and a communicator and I didn't really know those were like, cool skills to have in the business world. And I did really well. Was at a PR company and I, like, got coverage from my clients and people started to like me internally and I was like, oh, this is. I didn't think work could be fun.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:37]:
It, like, feels, feels good. So I'm just wondering, like, was there a moment in that early marketing ops journey where, like, you did something at work at this company and people were like, holly, let's go. You're kind of good at this thing. And like, that kind of is what ends up being a building block for you to turn into a career.

Holly Xiao [00:05:54]:
Yeah, for sure. I feel like for me, what I loved about it was the problem solving aspect of it. And I think that just goes for a lot of the marketing roles. But it was, it's so operational. It's like if you send this email, this is what happens. This is how it triggers. So, like, that was a lot more. There's a lot more logic going into that.

Holly Xiao [00:06:10]:
And I just remember, I think it was like a customer. I don't even remember what it was though, but I think it was something related to customer emails because, like, basically at the different stages of the residential solar installation, there are a lot of like, Logistical things that you have to do or like steps that you have to take. And so I basically like created the whole process there and like created triggers for the first time at the company using Sugar CRM, which I don't know if you ever heard of Sugar CRM but it's basically like a marketo which is for very small companies. I remember that was a moment where people were like, oh my gosh, this is great. And we got a lot of great feedback from customers saying like it was really helpful to know like, oh, you know, this stage got approved so now they can move on to the next stage. So that was probably the moment where I was like, oh, I'm pretty good at this. And yeah, that's kind of how I kept in marketing operations and ultimately ended up at Eventbrite.

Dave Gerhardt [00:06:58]:
Okay, so then you go, then you go to Eventbrite. Eventually you went to Drift, AKA Sales Loft and yada yada yada. Now you're at HeyGen and man, I'm so fascinated and interested in what's happening in the AI space and marketing. And you've been there almost a year. How did you land this job at HeyGen and did you know you wanted to go to an AI company?

Holly Xiao [00:07:24]:
Yeah, so HeyGen actually I wasn't really looking at the time and somebody from HeyGen had reached out and say hey, like hey, I think you'll be really great for this role. And the role that I was actually applying to was a solutions marketing role. So leading the solutions marketing team because as you can tell, HeyGen is a very long like we have so many long tail use cases. And so the business really wanted to start focusing more on like solutions and use cases and like teams specifically to be more customized and personalized in the messages that we're sending out. But yeah, so somebody reached out to me at HeyGen and I was like, I've never heard of HeyGen, but I just did my research on it and I remember thinking like, oh wow, this is so cool. So kind of like what you're doing right now of like playing around with it and creating these videos. I did the exact same thing. I remember showing my husband of like me speaking like five different languages but it still sounds like me.

Holly Xiao [00:08:10]:
And he was like, oh my God, this is crazy. And so yeah, I was like, okay, this is a really cool product. And you know, coming from a product marketing background, it's really important to me to work on a product that I'm personally really passionate and excited about. So that checked the box and then yeah, talked To a lot of the people here, Joshua, our CEO, it just felt like it was meant to be in the sense of I didn't know that I wanted to ride this AI wave because I know like a lot of people are just like, oh, I want to get an AI. But I think for me it's how do I work on a product that I'm personally really excited about. And I think personally it's just like a really, really cool vision and future to kind of what is happening here.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:50]:
I want to talk about this use case you mentioned. A lot of long tail use cases. I want to get to that, but I'm just trying to weave through some of these pieces and so. And then your role specifically, can you just fill us in on, you know, whatever you're. You're allowed to share just like the overall company structure. You are head of B2B marketing. Like, what does that mean? Where does that sit in the broader marketing org? Who do you report to? I'm just curious about some of the. The structure of the company and team and where marketing sits first.

Holly Xiao [00:09:16]:
Yeah, for sure. So the company itself, we are much more so originally we were much more creator focused. So a lot of the people who are using us and our customers, our users are more of like the creators and solopreneurs of the world. And so we have a growth team who actually supports that side of the business. And for my role, which is more on the B2B side, I support the SLG side of the business. So these are kind of like, how do we start to move up market? How do we sell to more corporate teams and like marketers and L and D teams at these enterprise companies. And so that's kind of where my.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:46]:
Team really focuses on who runs marketing at the company.

Holly Xiao [00:09:50]:
We don't really have like a CMO that runs it. So it's kind of me running agent.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:54]:
There's an AI agent. CMO.

Holly Xiao [00:09:56]:
Yeah. So it's basically me on the B2B side. And then I work really closely with my peer Nick Warner, who runs the side of things and it's kind of the two of us together.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:06]:
Are you talking about marketing to the CEO? To the founder?

Holly Xiao [00:10:09]:
Yeah. So I meet pretty regular with Joshua and Joshua comes from an engineering background. But it's so great because as a CEO, he's like just very naturally curious. So he'll ask you a ton of questions and then you'll be like, this is why. Here's how I think about it. And it's actually kind of interesting having marketing conversations with him because he thinks like an engineer. And so it's a very different world, I think, between marketing, engineering. It's really cool to kind of see that come together.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:34]:
I love that I've seen a bunch of different ways now. And you know Elias from Agency and Drift days, obviously, and I think he was the CTO at Drift, but he was very involved in the marketing and the company vision with David, who was the founder and CEO. And it's very refreshing. It can be uncomfortable because I think the engineering mindset is very much like, question everything. Why do it this way? Can't you do it this way? But I think especially in B2B marketing, we have so many things that are just kind of like best practices, or we do them because we've always done them that way. And one of the biggest parts of my career was in the early days of Drift being like, literally one of the only marketing people at the company, around 10 or 12 engineers. That culture becomes contagious. And it's like all these things.

Dave Gerhardt [00:11:18]:
It's like, oh, I know. I like, I'm sharing an idea with someone. Like, I don't know how to do that. And then engineers like, oh, well, we can just grab that data for you. Do you want that, or do you want me to just, like, spin this up? At the end of the day, I'm like, you can just do that. And so I think I love working with engineering folks and product folks because I do think they kind of allow me to move a little bit faster. And I like to do more of the growth and entrepreneurial type of marketing stuff. I'm not as good at the, like, sit in a meeting and this is what MQLs are and all the kind of nonsense.

Holly Xiao [00:11:47]:
We're actually currently defining what MQLs are here at.

Dave Gerhardt [00:11:50]:
Hey, Gen. Yeah, whatever. Okay. All right, so that. That's cool. So there's two of you in the marketing side. One of you is responsible for, like, the self service. I just signed up this morning and spent 288 bucks on my credit card.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:04]:
I did put referral source. Holly, just so you know, I hope you get. I hope you get credit for that. And you're.

Holly Xiao [00:12:09]:
I mean, I asked for credit.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:11]:
Ask for credit. But what is different about the. You have, like, the B2B side, and that's where you're selling. You want to sell. Hey, Gen. To other companies. Tell me, like, I'm an idiot, which I am. Actually.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:22]:
One guy wrote on this podcast one time, he was like, how was this guy ever a cmo? He asked the most basic questions I'm like, because most people sitting at home, like you want to hear the actual answers like God. So maybe talk about the difference in like your job and the go to market motion of selling B2B in hey gen versus selling, not B2B. What do they call that by the way? Self service.

Holly Xiao [00:12:44]:
Self service. Yeah. So I think, and again this is so different at different companies. But the way that it's broken out here at HeyGen is, you know, for Nick and his growth team, what they care about most is just driving anybody and everybody to HeyGen. So anybody who signs up is a win for, for their team versus for the B2B side. We are really focusing on people who are true enterprises and will want the enterprise plan in the package. So that's kind of just high level our goals and objectives. But when it comes to the tactics that align into those, a lot of what the other growth team does is really around feature based selling.

Holly Xiao [00:13:18]:
So because AI is such a hot commodity and there's so many competitors, it's like, oh, we have this new feature now and another competitor's like oh, we have this new feature. And that's kind of just like the way it kind of is in AI with a lot of competitors releasing things like every other day. But on the enterprise side we can't talk about things as like here's a new feature, here's a new feature. Everything has to be based on the why there's story to it, a lot of education on the value, the different use cases. So I think that's probably the main difference that I see between the PLG side of the business right now and the SLG side where a lot of people coming in self serve are already like enthusiasts, right? They want to like start trying it. They see Avatar 4 that we just released and like oh my God, this is so great. And they're actually the ones who tell us what use cases our new features are for because like we go in building a new feature thinking that this is going to be the use case that people use it for. But a lot of times people come up with new use cases that we never thought of.

Holly Xiao [00:14:13]:
So I think it's a really interesting part of the business. And now on the enterprise side, I think the people and the teams that we work with are actually looking to us to tell them, hey, here's the value of HeyGen as a whole. Not just this specific feature, here's why you should be using HeyGen. And also like here are the specific use cases that you can Use us for.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:32]:
Okay, I want to get into those, but I first want to talk about. So I want to do like a whole section on use cases for AI and video. There's a lot there. But I want to just, I want to talk about beyond. Hey Gen, you running marketing for this part of the business? What tools are you using? What's working? What's the strategy? Just as you as someone who owns a number and you're trying to drive pipeline and generate revenue in this, in this new world, what are the pieces in the HeyGen, you know, enterprise marketing playbook look like right now?

Holly Xiao [00:15:00]:
Yeah. So I think typically there are eight engines that you can activate. Right now we're activating replacement bets on four of them which are paid social account based marketing, webinars and field events. Those are kind of the four big bets that we're making on them.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:13]:
What are the eight engines from? Is this the some chart? Is this like an Andrew Chen like growth hacking like chart or something?

Holly Xiao [00:15:19]:
So it's SEO as one of them.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:21]:
Okay.

Holly Xiao [00:15:22]:
Hey, search, social account based marketing. I said webinar.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:27]:
Okay.

Holly Xiao [00:15:27]:
Yep. Events, technically sponsored events. Like be a separate one and then I think the last one is, I think content is the last one. And those are kind of how I typically just see like the overall engine or the engines that we can activate. And I think as a startup we really have to be a little bit choosy about which ones we test.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:45]:
Yeah. And which of those are. Are working. Right. It's interesting to hear you say obviously some of the usual suspects, paid social webinars. But I'm curious if we, if we dig into those tactics a little bit. Like what is it about them that's working? If you could give me some examples or something. Like I did that Marketing Institute AI webinar with you.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:03]:
That, that seemed great. What's working?

Holly Xiao [00:16:05]:
Yeah. So what's working so far has really been. It's honestly been like in person events and just webinars in general.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:11]:
In person is so hot. So we have a, like a big part of our business is sponsorships with Exit Five. And like if I wanted to get on a plane, which I don't. If I want to get on a plane two or three times a month, we have so much demand for events right now. Everybody wants to do events. I feel that.

Holly Xiao [00:16:25]:
Yeah. So like events is probably like one of the channels that's working really well. And this is kind of a balance of sponsored events and also like owned events as well.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:34]:
So those, let's talk about each of those. So Like a sponsored event would be, what and what have you done?

Holly Xiao [00:16:39]:
Yeah, so sponsor event would be like, there's a conference that you're sponsoring. So, for example, we sponsored a conference called Abundance360 in LA. And, you know, we had a booth and we had a lot of people there to kind of help people understand, educate them on, like, what HeyGen is. So that is kind of a sponsored event where it's not owned and hosted by HeyGen, but we are sponsoring them in that sense. And then a hosted event is. So for example, the host event that we did was actually a hackathon, and this is more on, like, the API side of the business. But that had a really, really great turnout. And we also have hosted events when it comes to community members, so our community team hosts a lot of events as well.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:17]:
And what, what makes a good modern presence at one of these events? Is it just like you're, HeyGen, lots of people know about you and you're kind of doing this like, AI video avatar thing. Or do you have to have a compelling. Like, does the booth have to be good? Is there. Are you giving away money at the booth? How do you make it relevant other than, yeah, we're paying to sponsor something, but how do you make it actionable for both your prospects and for your company?

Holly Xiao [00:17:39]:
Yeah, I think it really depends on the audience who's there. But for example, Abundance360, it was a bunch of executives. So what we did there was actually, we have a partner called Proto Holograms, and we brought one of their huge hologram machines to our booth, actually. And we were able to have, like, my interactive avatar. We were able to have a couple of other people's interactive avatars actually live in the box so that people can interact with us in any language they want and they can, like, try it out. So people have reacted really, really well to that interactive component of the avatar piece. We also basically have like, an avatar creation booth where, like, anybody can actually go in and create their own avatars. And people love that, especially executives.

Holly Xiao [00:18:22]:
They're like, oh, my gosh, like, this is so cool. And they all wanted to create their own digital twin, which was great. So, like, I think having something that's unique or interactive is really important. The booth.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:33]:
Well, that's what's so fun, like, to your point about, like, taking this job, right? It's like, it's so fun to have a product that you can do creative marketing activations like that. Like, yeah, it's not about. That's. That makes. So it's not about like, yeah, come by our booth and we're going to give you some like, cool swag. It's like, no, come by our booth and like, we're going to actually make your AI avatar and you're going to demo. We're going to demo the product. It's not some like back office type of technology that's very tough to demo.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:59]:
You can actually do it and show people. That's super fun.

Holly Xiao [00:19:02]:
Yeah. And people love it because I think a lot of times to your point, you know, it's like, oh, we have these pens or we have these stickers and we do still have those. But it's. I think that interactive piece is really important.

Dave Gerhardt [00:19:11]:
Okay. So that's a great. That's a great takeaway. So do trying to use the product at the booth that was for sponsored events. How are you measuring that as a return on that spend? Are you trying to like, do you have a sales team? Are you hammering on them to like, try to book meetings from that? What's the output for Holly to know that that was a good event for us in the enterprise segment?

Holly Xiao [00:19:30]:
Yeah. So this is actually a question that we had to answer and talk about more internally as well. But I think there's like a difference between more brand as type of events that is really just helping to drive awareness versus, like demand generation type of events. And I actually didn't see Abundance360 as more of the demand generation part. It was really more focused on like, okay, how do we get in front of these executives? How do we help them understand what is HeyGen and like, why HeyGen is so awesome? And so for me, Abundance 360 was already a big success because we already created like hundreds of avatars for these executives. And like, can we nurture them after the event? Sure, I think that we can do that. But overall, I thought the Abundance360 event was a success just given the excitement around HeyGen and just the number of people who actually like try to get their avatars created.

Dave Gerhardt [00:20:16]:
Yeah. So it's like a decision tree in your mind of like, not all events have the same purpose. And so we're going to this event for brand and that means we want to get, you know, awareness, recognition. Also, I think going to events, sometimes, being out in person sometimes is the underrated piece of events is like I feel like personally I get to test my pitch and I get to have real conversations and it's like that's the stuff that you don't put in, like the ROI calculator But man, it's so meaningful. And I would come back from an event and I'm like so fired up. I'm like, oh, I reconnected with Holly. I met this person. There's value in that beyond just like, did we generate leads from that event? And then I also think there's a whole other part of this which is like pictures from the event, social proof, stuff you can post on social follow up.

Dave Gerhardt [00:20:59]:
We don't always, always include that in the straight up ROI math, you know.

Holly Xiao [00:21:02]:
Oh, for sure. And like another event that we actually did was south by Southwest and that was for sure pure brand event. And to your point, it was so amazing just to be able to test different pitches and see people's live reactions to like, oh, what did we get? Oh, HeyGen, da da da. And that was really helpful to just kind of hear what questions people are asking, what they care about.

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:22]:
Nice.

Holly Xiao [00:21:23]:
I personally love going to events myself because I get to do this and I get to speak with these prospects and customers.

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:29]:
Are you an extrovert or an introvert?

Holly Xiao [00:21:31]:
Oh my gosh, I am an introvert through and through.

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:34]:
But you love events.

Holly Xiao [00:21:36]:
But I love events. I just need to go back and decompress by myself and then I can go again.

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:42]:
I have this amazing video on my phone of my wife after hosting Christmas at our house. Everybody left and she just was upstairs in our bed like with all the pillows on her head, just like hiding under the sheets for three hours. And there's all these memes about, you know, like your social battery being drained. And I'm the same way. I'm like a sneaky, like extrovert. I'll talk to you. But then after I'll be like, what the hell just happened to me? I feel like a demon just came through me. Oh yeah, your battery's empty right now.

Holly Xiao [00:22:07]:
Yeah, exactly.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:09]:
And then. Okay, and then for putting on your own events, have you done hey gen hosted events outside of sponsored events?

Holly Xiao [00:22:15]:
We have. So we've done a lot of community events because we have a lot of community users already. We are planning to do marketing executive, like more executive sit downs and like dinners and all that. But for the most part it's been a lot of community events.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:30]:
Do you have a community as hey, is there like a hey gen community that you all started?

Holly Xiao [00:22:33]:
Yes, we do have a hine community. A lot of our users are in the community actually and the community is great. If I mean, Dave, you can probably use the community too as you're starting to think about like how do I use this. How do I, you know, add pauses? How do I add intonations and stuff like that?

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:47]:
Where is it hosted?

Holly Xiao [00:22:49]:
It's hosted on. It's a tool called Gradual. But if you search, HeyGen Community, you'll be able to get to that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:55]:
Okay, cool. And do you have people that kind of maintain that and help with programming or is it just like a. Use a forum to like ask, you know, support questions?

Holly Xiao [00:23:04]:
Yeah, great question. We do have two people on the community team right now who is kind of managing the community, creating these events, engaging with our community members and all that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:23:14]:
And you want to do more? Yeah, more executive level stuff.

Holly Xiao [00:23:17]:
Yeah. So I think it's like, how do we already doing a bunch of these events for our existing users? How do we get one step higher to do events with prospects as well?

Dave Gerhardt [00:23:26]:
Anything not working that maybe worked back in the day at Eventbrite or Drift or whatever else? Like, have you seen anything change that? Like, yeah, this is not really a channel that's working for us right now. SEO, I feel like this is a hot topic.

Holly Xiao [00:23:41]:
It is. Every marketing leader I've spoken with has shared some form of like a drop in their SEO traffic because of LLMs. So right now the big question is like, okay, it's dropping, but how do we supplement that? And I think there's actually been a few clever ways. Like one marketing leader I spoke with was talking about how do we start using more YouTube. This is why videos are so important, because then YouTube can be kind of like supplement to the SEO channels. There's just a lot of creative ideas and I think nobody knows what the answer is, but we're just all trying a lot of different things.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:09]:
Yeah, I saw somebody post something the other day about their. It was from Google search console and it was basically showing like, impressions continue to rise, but clicks continue to drop. Because now, and this isn't Even related to ChatGPT, it's just Google's AI. If I go ask something. Actually this just happened before. Remember I told you I was, I was making this video and I wanted to bleep it out and so I just typed into Google, I said, can I do a bleep in HeyGen? And it gave me the answer in the like AI overview area. And that's search that you'll never see and you'll never have a piece of. And so the whole thing is crazy to me.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:45]:
And it's not just about like traffic from SEO. There's like, if you keep clicking into that, it's like all of the Discussions around marketing measurement and attribution. Like if all of our questions get answered by AI or Google search or whatever tool, then how do we know what to give credit for? You know, ultimately people are just going to buy your thing and then along the way you're going to be asked like, well I don't even know do we get credit for that? They ask a question at some point. It's crazy.

Holly Xiao [00:25:11]:
Yeah, I don't know what the answer is, but I think in the next few months people are going to start figuring it out and I think it's going to be a whole new wave of marketing tactics coming probably.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:22]:
And when you say SEO is not working, so are there things that you're not doing at hey gender that you probably would have done in the past because of that? From a content standpoint?

Holly Xiao [00:25:33]:
I don't necessarily know if it's not like things that we're not doing because I think we're doing a lot of the things right. We're creating a lot of thought leadership blogs, we're leveraging the SEO keywords. I think we're doing things right. It's really just this like rise in LLMs and to your point, like the AI Google solution as well that's preventing a lot of the click throughs that we typically get to drive inbound traffic to the site. And so yeah, I think it's more, there's just like a whole different market landscape now that we all have to like kind of adjust to with this like rise of AI.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:07]:
Okay, this is the other thing. So you're leading marketing at this AI first company, one of the AI startups, right? Your founder CEO is an engineer, is building an AI. Has that impacted the company view on how hey gen should do marketing? Are you being pushed to use more AI tools, to use more AI and more marketing, to have AI agents instead of employees? You know what question I'm trying to ask there? Like if it's a founder that comes up in the AI world when you're in there talking to him about, you know, marketing stack and the marketing plays, I'm guessing that it's got to be a lot of bias towards like we believe in AI and we're going to run marketing with an AI playbook here.

Holly Xiao [00:26:45]:
I think it's more so around efficiency, like AI in the sense of efficiency. So how do we be more efficient? How do we instead of investing in 10 additional headcounts, can we do 5 additional headcounts but also leverage these AI tools to help us be more efficient? So I think it's more on that efficiency piece. However, I will say one thing that's been really new for me coming to HeyGen, working with Joshua, is that instead of working in quarters, we actually work in sprint cycles. So the sprint cycles are two month cycles and I never thought I would say this, but it's actually been a game changer because the shorter cycles mean quicker feedback loops. So we can test our hypotheses, measure what's working and fast if we need to. And then it also keeps our team aligned with just evolving market needs. Just like seeing how fast the AI market moves. Like we need to also keep up to adjust messaging, all the creatives channels, stuff like that.

Holly Xiao [00:27:36]:
So that's been one thing that's been really interesting because we are kind of matching the way product and engineering works on the marketing side and it's been working pretty well and allowed us to be really flexible and move fast.

Dave Gerhardt [00:27:48]:
I think that's a hugely underrated element is the alignment. I talk about this all the time, the alignment between marketing and product inside of the company. I think we talk so much online and about in marketing, about marketing and sales. Gotta get aligned, da da da da. But I think when marketing and product are aligned, like to me product is like the heartbeat and the rhythm of the company and marketing needs to be aligned with them. Because you know, whether it's every week, every month, every quarter, whatever it is, whether you're Salesforce lining up to Dreamforce every year, HubSpot lining up to Inbound, and then you have quarterly releases on top of that, I think just builds the right type of like operating rhythm and cadence. And yes, as a marketer, my job is to tell the story of the company. But I need something, I need some ammo, I need some features, some new stuff coming out from product and we can't really tell a good story and share the vision if we don't have a strong roadmap.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:36]:
And so that seems like the right cadence. Every couple of months you have a launch and we're working on the next wave of this thing. Plus it gets you out of the kind of like weekly we're changing everything weekly. We know that, you know, every two months something is going to change and we're going to kind of run on campaigns that are every couple months, right?

Holly Xiao [00:28:52]:
Yeah, definitely. And that's not to say like the product team does, like our product team ships every single day pretty much. And that's one of the things I'm trying to align with them on of like, okay, does it make sense for us to just every single time we have something ready, do we just release it and like we'll launch it, or do we package it up into a bigger story? And I think every single company has this challenge initially of, okay, but we want to move fast. We want to show that we're innovating, which is totally true and so relevant in this AI space. But at the same time, and maybe it's a different audiences, right, for creators and these AI influencers, they want things coming as soon as possible, but for bigger enterprises, they need the packaged story. Otherwise they don't know what Avatar 4 does or like why they should care about it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:34]:
What AI tools besides hey gen. As a marketer, especially someone with a coming up kind of from a product marketing and marketing Ops background, what AI tools.

Holly Xiao [00:29:41]:
Are you using at the most basic level? ChatGPT Perplexity. Those are my best friends. I probably use ChatGPT every single day, even if it's just like, give me something to start with. I think there's a difference between using ChatGPT and relying on it solely and using it as like a guiding or just like somebody to bounce ideas off of. And I think a lot of people tend to do the former where it's way more powerful to do the latter because you still have so much knowleDGe and so much context that ChatGPT doesn't have. And that's honestly one of the mistakes I'm seeing. Like I'm actually hiring for SDRs and we had pre qualifying questions and it's so obvious when somebody just like puts a prompt in a chatgpt and just copies and pastes the GPT answer. Yeah, chatgpt.

Holly Xiao [00:30:25]:
I use it every single day. It's great.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:26]:
It's funny because I caught myself, I asked that question and then like I made this little graphic the other day. There used to be this like ipod ad. It was like a thousand songs in your pocket. And I took the OpenAI logo and I made it and I said, a thousand apps in your pocket. Because every week ChatGPT is getting better and is replacing lots of other apps. But on your point of, of writing, just this morning, we have like a new product that we're working on and I've been working on the pitch and I reached out to 10 CMOs that I want to get into this thing that we're doing and I wrote my message, the email copy that I was going to put, and I put it in ChatGPT and I put it in Claude and I kind of got the middle version of it, but I didn't really like it. And so I just went with what I wrote. And I think ultimately that is the, that is the hard part is like relying on, like knowing when it's not good just because it, it helped me get from zero to one and get started.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:17]:
But the version that I got from that was not one that I wanted to press send on. And so like, I kind of like this intro from Claude and I took that, but I like my middle section. But this chat GPT kind of had a better outro and then I end up putting it all together and like, that's my mishmash, what I end up sending out. And so I hear you on that.

Holly Xiao [00:31:36]:
Yeah. You know what I've realized too? Gemini 2.5 has gotten a lot better. So I've actually, I'm like, the main tools I use are like Gemini and ChatGPT and I do the same thing where I compare, like, give me some ideas. And I would say Gemini, it's. Don't sleep on it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:51]:
Do you have that? Because like your company has a. Did you buy the plan on your own or is it part of the G suite?

Holly Xiao [00:31:57]:
It's part of the G suite, yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:59]:
Okay, so you got it. You got it for the company. Yeah. Interesting. This is the hard part though is like, I see this stuff and I'm like, you now I'm going to be like, oh, do I need to go look? Do I need to spend my afternoon now messing around in Gemini? It's just nonstop.

Holly Xiao [00:32:12]:
Yeah. Like testing these new tools. Usually there's like one or two prompts that you just use across all of them and you just see like what each of these tools turn out. But it's really fascinating. I think it's, it's already a game changer, but I'm really excited to see what this is going to enable all of us to do.

Dave Gerhardt [00:32:27]:
All right, let's talk about some of the use cases for AI and video and avatars and video. I heard you say AI influencers and it's like, wait a second. Oh yeah, there's probably people that are fully AI influencers that are using hey gen and like we don't know what their real face is. And earlier in this podcast, you mentioned all of the long tail use cases for AI video. So I'd love to just hear like what you all are hearing from customers, how people are using the product. Teach us.

Holly Xiao [00:32:56]:
I mean, I think typically I would say for the majority of the use cases, they are going to be marketing related. So things like Product explainer videos, you know, social media ads, how to videos. Event marketing has actually been a newer one that's been popping up where it's like you can create using HeyGen, you can create like event promos or you can create personalized emails of like let's say Dave, you're speaking at an event and it's Dave thanking Holly who just registered for the event to say hey Holly, thank you for registering. I'm so excited to see you at the event. We'll be talking about X, Y and Z. I think personally that's a really cool use case because we all want to personalize more and events is a huge one where you can drive a lot more engagement with personalized videos. And then same thing for like post events. So those are kind of the new ones that are somewhat popping up in the past couple of months.

Dave Gerhardt [00:33:42]:
Is the goal for like the quality of those should be so good that you don't know if that was Dave in my phone like that I made that or I use my avatar to make it.

Holly Xiao [00:33:52]:
Exactly, yeah. And I will say, I can confidently say that most people who are using HeyGen to create their videos, their audience is not going to know what's real and what's not. Like for example, we had a keynote or inaugural keynote a couple weeks ago at HeyGen and our CEO used his avatar for parts of his keynote and people were like oh like no, this is real, this is fake. No, this is like there's. It's so funny watching the comments and so great because people just can't tell and it's kind of true. You really can't tell the difference between is this a real person talking or is this an avatar? And I think that's kind of the magic of Hadrian and enabling you to create these videos that don't feel fake and feel really authentic. Right.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:31]:
Well, there's so many times that like I've had to make a one to two minute video to promote something or and when I really need to do a good job, I don't freestyle it. I write out a script and I kind of sit there and now I have this like set up with a prompter and whatever and I can look right at it and read it, but it still takes work. I gotta turn on the lights, I gotta turn on the camera, I gotta set up everything, I gotta sit down, I gotta put my nice clothes, I gotta put a real shirt on and record a world where I can just like I gotta write the copy anyway and I can use, I can write some prompts in ChatGPT to get the copy. Like that's an amazing use case is to basically, hey, let's make a two minute video of me promoting our event that we're doing in Vermont. And I always go back to like, I see all this discussion about like, does it matter if it was made by a human or AI? And I think in a use case like this, you're not trying to trick someone and say like I'm a human. I'm trying, not trying to trick you. I'm trying to just do better content at scale without having to like sit down and pull out my phone every time.

Holly Xiao [00:35:31]:
Oh, for sure. And I. One of the objections when I first joined Haguen that I heard a lot was oh, you know, but I don't know if my audience is going to be ready for an AI video, like for us to use AI in our videos. And so we actually ran an AI Consumer report and the insight was very clear of like, people are ready for it. People are likely to respond really positively to your brand if you use AI video. Now if it looks and feels really fake, that's another story. But I think people are generally very.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:00]:
Well, like that's where it gets caught up though is like just even the term AI video. Like what if you could just type words and have a video get created? How many marketers would say yes to that? And so it's like the real challenge is like can the hey gen product be good enough where you can't tell if it's an AI or human? Like of course nobody wants a. I don't want a robot looking Dave pretending to be Dave and everybody knows that it's not really me. But if I can write prompts and I can write a script and we can match my voice and I can create little video snippets and promos like that way. That is an amazing way to work, I believe.

Holly Xiao [00:36:35]:
Oh, absolutely. And we actually just rolled out controllability features because I think a lot of times, you know, with AI it's a black box where you type in a prompt or you type in something and you don't really know what the output is actually going to be versus with the controllability features, you can actually prompt it to say wave. Like you can add it. Like if you want your avatar to wave, you can have him wave. You can also prompt it to do different gestures, like whatever gesture you want, like mind blown gesture or like whatever it is you want. So you can control that now directly in HeyGen.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:06]:
Okay, so that's A good use case. What else? What are the long tail? What are some of the other use cases here? Mainly marketing. Makes sense. Okay.

Holly Xiao [00:37:13]:
Mainly marketing L and D. So a lot of how to training videos.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:16]:
Oh, interesting. Yeah. So like I can do all my support videos, all my knowleDGe based videos with writing prompts as opposed to. Yeah, that's great. Okay.

Holly Xiao [00:37:25]:
Yeah. And think about like sales enablement. Right. Like before I had to basically create the PDF and then I have to do a live training with everyone. But with hey gen, once you create the PDF, you can automatically turn that into a video. So you actually don't even need to type a script. You just upload your PDF and we'll turn it into like a training video with like your avatar. So it makes it really, really easy and fast.

Holly Xiao [00:37:45]:
A couple other ones I thought were really interesting. Very long tail use cases are actually music videos which you. I know you checked it out. And the other one is actually fortune telling. So like horoscopes.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:58]:
Wait, wait, wait, hold on. What do you mean? What do you mean fortune telling?

Holly Xiao [00:38:01]:
Like if you're. I'm a Libra. Right. So it's like, okay, I'm a Gemini. Yeah. So the person would then be like, oh, as a Libra for the week of whatever. Like June 16th.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:10]:
Yeah.

Holly Xiao [00:38:11]:
Your favorite color is pink or whatever it is. So it's kind of like that type of fortune teller.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:16]:
Nice. Yeah. I'm trying to work on my. HeyGen. To be like my rapper alter ego. I'm working on that. So stay tuned.

Holly Xiao [00:38:24]:
People actually use us for these like rap music videos.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:27]:
I believe it. I believe it. Listen, my friend Ding, shout out to Ding Ding, the sales rapper. He runs Event Shark. He's amazing and he's like, I gotta, he's like, I'm gonna, I gotta ghost write some stuff for you. We're gonna do something ridiculous. It's fun though. I, I understand.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:43]:
I'm sure people will listen to this and they will roll their eyes and I've seen the posts of like, AI is the worst thing ever. Da da da da da. Look, only time will tell. I just feel like this would be like not using the Internet in like the late 90s to run your business. And yes, you can say that's how it always, you know, everything worked fine before. Da da. We all, you know, what about all the jobs in the creative. I think that we're going to find a way and I think we humans have a way of continuing to like reinvent ourselves and figuring out where this technology fits in our lives.

Dave Gerhardt [00:39:12]:
And so I'm trying to be an optimist and say, like, what you have in front of you right now, Dave, is the opportunity of, like, you can be one of the first people to, like, understand how to use the Internet to run your business. And that's what you're going to do with AI. And so I'm trying to lean in as hard as I can.

Holly Xiao [00:39:27]:
Oh, for sure. And I truly believe that AI is. It actually enables creativity. AI as a whole helps the humans, like, actually unleash the creativity. And with hey John specifically, we're not meant to replace humans, but it's meant to make it much easier for them to create the video. So the way we see it is that you as a human provides a creativity as the input. So, like, what is a story? And then the AI takes your creativity to then create the video as output. So the future is really a world and everybody can spend more time doing the creative and strategic work and less time actually making the content.

Holly Xiao [00:40:01]:
And that's kind of how I've always thought about AI, of like, not necessarily playing, replacing humans, but it's there to help support our creativity.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:08]:
I dig it. I hope we're right. Holly, thank you for hanging out with me. This was lovely. This was great. I can't wait to share. I can't wait to share my ridiculous projects with you. I'm more likely to now take you up on the offer of, like, going to LA and do doing the real shebang because it's very fun.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:26]:
I can only imagine what it would be like. But, hey, go find Holly on LinkedIn. Connect with her there, send her a note, ask her questions about HeyGen. Or just what she's up to. She's a good person to know and connect with. Holly, good to see you. Thanks for hanging out with me on my podcast. I appreciate it.

Holly Xiao [00:40:40]:
Of course. Thanks for having me, Dave.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:45]:
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode. You know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review, because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at Exit Five. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exitfive.com. Our mission at Exit Five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing.

Dave Gerhardt [00:41:10]:
And there's no better place to do that than with us at Exit Five. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more. exitfive.com and I will see you over there in the community.

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