“A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points,” said computer scientist Alan Kay.
Well, at his closing keynote, Wil Reynolds wowed the B2B Forum audience with multiple changes in perspective!
Safe to say, everyone left the 2024 event inspired to look at their marketing in a new light.
Get a few of Wil’s valuable marketing insights in the video clip or transcript below.
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How you look at content:
This is one of those moments where you have to look in the mirror at yourself and just answer the question to yourself.
When you wake up and have a chance to create content, is it like, “got to get this content done, how much of it can I get done? How fast can I get it done?”
Yay. Nothing wrong with that. No judgment.
Or are you like, “I like this because it helps me to build community.”
You have to know which one of these two groups you’re in. The good news is, if you’re in “how can I get it done as fast as possible,” you should probably start checking your email or leave and go check in on your kids.
Because I’m not in the “how-fast-can-I-get-this-shit-done” side of content.
I’m in the “community” side, because that’s how you build raving fans.
And I’m going to share with you my revenue numbers to show you why that actually matters at times when traffic is dropping like crazy.
So while everybody’s got their eye on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, asking, “are they going to disrupt Google?”
We’ve not been seeing the slow disruption of Google on-going to other humans to ask them questions on social media. 0:58
Most of us in here have asked somebody on LinkedIn before, for a recommendation for a software that we were thinking of buying. Correct?
We didn’t have to Google it because our boy or our girl has implemented five different CRMs in their career.
Why would I Google it if I could talk to somebody who’s done it?
The other thing you’re going to see a lot of are statistics like this, so I’m going to show you my own data so we don’t have to worry about any BS here.
1.3% of my traffic came from AI in September of 2024. Now, if I were to look at my future budget and say, well, I’m going to budget about 2%, invest in learning AI and I’m going to spend my other almost 80% on Google, ” let’s just say…
I’d be making a massive mistake!
Because 50% of my year to date traffic, all the traffic from all the AI search engines came in the month of September, which means something is growing exponentially here.
This one, I hate this slide. I haven’t found the right way to say it.
When I say that 32% of all leads that queried in one month, ChatGPT was the source for 32% of my leads, where someone is putting a query in to get an answer.
That’s my MQLs, not my leads. My MQLs.
And my hypothesis is, is that you’ve got Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo to search.
And the other places you can query to find things. Because you can’t put a query like that in LinkedIn or WhatsApp. You put a query into ChatGPT.
A third of my MQLs, in one month, came from ChatGPT.
Do you see why if I only spent 2% of my time on AI, or 2% of my budget on “figuring this AI stuff out,” how I would be making a mistake?
Now the real question is—and the gut punch for many of you is—as B2B marketers, when you [ask], “How did you find us,” how many of you have put t[ChatGPT] into your dropdowns? Hands?
Holy Shnikes, guys.
So wait, are you telling me that no one in this room has put ChatGPT or AI in a dropdown on your “How did you hear about us?”
[Guest 1: We don’t have a dropdown.]
Don’t have a dropdown? Don’t have the dropdown. That’s fine. If you don’t have a dropdown, that’s fine. Good luck trying to track that data back to MQLs like I did, to know that I should invest more.
[Guest 2: It’s open ended.]
Open-ended is fine. Open-ended is great. Alright, cool. I was just checking, but it sounds like for the vast majority of us, it’s like, “oh, we don’t have that.”
That’s why I can string this all the way through to MQL.
So now I know that real, high quality people are coming through ChatGPT. Because it’s coming right through my CRM. So I can see their behaviors.
Now you’re going to hear from some people that, “search is still up! There’s a lot of people still Googling! Don’t worry about this stuff!”
And that might be true for you, right?
Rand’s got a bunch of studies, and I got all the links in my QR code.
Rand’s done his studies, and he is right.
There are more people doing searches on Google, especially on desktop, than ever. That’s true.
But the sharks are freaking circling Google. And now’s a really good time to try to disrupt Google. You know why? Because there’s this broad sentiment that the results just are cluttered and are not as good as they used to be.
You remember when there was a thing called Yahoo, and it had horoscopes, and sports scores all over it.
And Google was like, “you know what? People just want a box with an answer.”
Well, guess who’s now become freaking Yahoo all over again? Google, right?
Every time you Google something, you’re like, “where’s the answer? I’m looking for it.” Right?
So Google’s doing a pretty good job of making it easy for those sharks.
Meta was like, “there are certain areas where we need search. So we’re going to send our customers and get answers and responses through a search engine. We’re going to partner with Bing, we’re going to partner with Google, so we can get high quality answers.”
They’re now like, “we’re going to build our own search and get rid of Google and Bing. We’re going to use Llama.”
Then we’ve got the new web version of ChatGPT launching. We’ll talk a little bit about how to show up in that. Potentially. It’s all new to all of us. Nobody knows what they’re doing here, including me. I’m learning. I’m just sharing my research.
Remember, Apple owns a lot of devices.
So when they make a change and push it out, that’s going to change the kind of queries that people are doing.
So I would be looking at my Apple traffic the day after they make an update to iOS, and see which pages start to drop from that point forward. Because maybe those pages were answering questions that now people are answering with Siri.
Perplexity is growing. We know that, right? Speaking of Perplexity…
(Also with the web version of ChatGPT search, I think you have to be a pro user or a plus user to get it. I think? Just pay the 20 bucks. It’s worth it.
If your company’s not paying for it, they’re crazy. Get a new job.
But until then, pay the 20 bucks and learn it yourself.
And if you’re still like, “ah, my company won’t pay,”
If you are an Xfinity customer… Zero sponsorship on this, I just like cheap shit and getting stuff for free. You actually can get it for free. I just found this out a week ago. You can get Perplexity Pro for free, so use Perplexity Pro.)
But there’s not just the sharks in the traditional sense of AI disruption.
There’s the social sharks.
Look at these traffic trends! Remember people will say, well, “Google’s still getting searches.” But yeah, that shit’s kind of flat. Up 1%, 2%.
LinkedIn’s growing like crazy.
Reddit, where we get answers, is growing like crazy.
WhatsApp, where we get answers, is growing like crazy.
How many of you are in a private WhatsApp group of marketers somewhere? How many of you? Okay, good. There’s some hands, some alive people.
That number’s growing like crazy.
I’m going to show you how to try to back into whether or not people are coming from these curated places of friends to get answers so that you can make the determination about whether or not your budget might need to go there a little bit more than you’d like to.
And of course, there’s TikTok in all these places. Now. So far I’ve searched a lot on TikTok for things related to SEO advice. Bad. Do none of that.
Published April 30, 2025
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