EPISODE 727: Navigating the AI Revolution in Government Sales and Marketing with Natalie Lambert

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Today’s show featured an interview with Natalie Lambert, Founder & Managing Partner at GenEdge Consulting.

Natalie and Juliana Slye will be presenting “AI & The GovBuyer’s Journey: A One-Day Workshop in Practical AI and Buyer Engagement for Public Sector Marketers. on January 28 in Reston, VA. Register here.

Find Natalie on LinkedIn.

NATALIE’S TIP:  “It comes down to changing a habit. Whether it is making your home screen Perplexity and not Google to try, what is it like to search with an answers engine versus Google?  As you do that, you’re going to see, “If it can do this, it can do this,” and it will start growing on itself. Put that into your daily workflows and see what you get.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: I’m very excited. We’re talking to Natalie Lambert today. Natalie, we first saw you speak at the GAIN Conference, which was a big government marketing conference. We also met Juliana Slye from GBR, and we had her on the show back in November talking about the government buyer’s landscape and how that’s changed and how marketing and sales are implored to come together more so because of the fact that the customer is dictating the buyer’s journey and sales and marketing need to work more effectively.

You and Juliana are going to be doing an event at the Carahsoft Conference and Collaboration Center next week. We’re doing today’s interview in the middle of January, and your event is going to be on January 28th. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about it? Give us a brief intro to you. Today, we’re going to be talking about AI, artificial intelligence, and its impact on sales and marketing. I’m excited because when we saw you speak at GAIN, everybody was blown away. We were blown away, me and Gina Stracuzzi, who runs our Women in Sales Program. I’m really excited to talk to you today. Tell us about the event a little bit and then give us an intro to yourself.

Natalie Lambert: It’s been an amazing journey, and I don’t use that word lightly given the gov buyers journey that Jules talks about. But to really start partnering up with these organizations, the government is, quite frankly, an organization that I’m learning a lot about, but just the complexities involved in the buyer’s journey there. Jules is such an expert there. Where we come together is this buyer’s journey that is more complex than I ever knew, but being able to marry that with AI, that can bring a level of scale to that complexity.

The event that we’re doing next week is really the merging of these two worlds. The recognition that the gov buyer’s journey is complex. There’s a lot of stakeholders, there’s a long process involved, and a lot has to be done to support these buyers throughout that journey, and AI can help.

By quick background on me. I’m Natalie Lambert, as you said. I’m the Founder and Managing Partner of GenEdge Consulting. I help teams figure out how to grow their impact with AI. I have a history, I spent a year at Google where I was responsible for looking across all the various use cases within marketing specifically to figure out where AI could have the highest impact. About a year and a half ago, I decided to build a company to bring these technologies to organizations around the world, because I think they’re so impactful, and quite frankly, they make work fun again, which I find just something that people need to re-see in today’s environment and to be able to partner with whether it be GAIN, whether it be Juliana at GBR, around something that is as complex as the government buyer’s journey. It’s been a great time. This is what we’re going to be talking about next week at Carahsoft.

Fred Diamond: Just so people know, at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, we have a big award event every spring. This year it’s on May 1st. We’re very excited to announce that we’re going to be having our first AI in Sales Awards. We’re going to be recognizing companies that are using AI for sales improvement, sales success, et cetera. You could find information about that to apply your company on the IES website.

Let’s get deep into this. Changing landscape, you just referred to that. You’ve been deep into the world of AI and its impact on marketing and sales. Paint a picture for our listeners of how AI is fundamentally changing the way government sales and marketing teams should approach their buyers.

Natalie Lambert: If you look at simply the number of stakeholders, buyers involved in this process, and you look at more the traditional world, and traditional world, now it’s behind us in that timeframe. There was a fundamental reality that given the number of marketers and sales folks we have, we could not address all of the needs of these various constituencies. You might have a buyer process, a buyer group of 15, 20, 30, 50 people, and they’re all at various stages in that process, how do you make sure that they have the information that they need to make a decision as they go through that process? I say traditional way, but before AI, that was a very manual process. Teams were having to go out and meet them at each stage. They’d have to create content. They’d have to have the right level of conversation at each of these different points.

AI really makes that easier and gives you a bigger ability to be able to meet people where they are. With the ability to create personas that really map to what your buyers look like, map to the various stages that they might be in in their buying cycle, and help you build the right content to answer their questions, AI is just so primed to be able to do that, that it just enables these teams to be able to talk and communicate with more people in a more effective way than they could before. I think that’s just such an amazing piece of AI in this conversation.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. Actually, I did an interview last year with Jim Kelly, who now runs Google Public Sector, your old stomping grounds. But at the time, he was running Dell’s public sector, and he talked about how they had done a lot of prep for a customer. They’ve been working with customers for years. An hour before they went into the customer, they just said, “Hey, let’s just jump in the ChatGPT and see what’s new with the customer,” and 10 pages of current information popped itself out that allowed them to be more valuable for the customer in the conversation.

That’s something that comes up time and time again on the Sales Game Changers Podcast and at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, is that customers don’t need you. That’s a big part of what Juliana talks about in the gov buyer’s journey now. They don’t need you like they used to need you because they can find information on the internet and through AI and through social networks. How do you, as a sales professional and as a marketing team, be more effective in having things to say to your customers?

Natalie Lambert: I want to address one thing you just said there, because I was doing a workshop with a public sector organization. We had everybody build a persona, build somebody that they had to go out and talk to. I think one of the examples was something like the CIO of a state government. One of the people in the room had actually had that role in a previous life, and so built the persona to be that role, and then we were going to check content and determine how well this met the needs of that persona.

As we were building it out, I just remember his face going like, “This is uncanny.” It talked about the level of education, what keeps you up at night, what is the water cooler conversation. These tools can do that and it can just put you in such a better place to have some of these conversations. I would just implore people to give it a shot. I know it might feel ridiculous in the moment, but to build these personas, to have those conversations is such a great way to leverage technology to do more.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great way to do it. Let’s talk about tools a little bit. One of the challenges is, I’m going to guess everybody listening to today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast, or reading the transcript, is familiar with ChatGPT. ChatGPT is the tool that really brought AI to the masses. It’s still extremely effective, but there’s so many different types of tools and vendors out there. While I think that we all know intuitively that AI will help us do more and be more effective, it really is a challenge to know where to begin beyond ChatGPT. You just invited people to start working. For people just starting to explore AI, what are the key distinctions they need to understand and where do you think they should focus their initial efforts?

Natalie Lambert: When I think about the tool set, I’ll put things, especially as it pertains to text-based tools, those that generate text, really four different categories. You could maybe argue it’s three, but these are the things you should be paying attention to. Chatbots, you mentioned that. Chatbots is your ChatGPTs, it’s your Geminis, it’s your Claudes. It’s those general-purpose tools to have a back-and-forth conversation. They’re great for creating content and building out plans or models or making sure your emails are professional, whatever the case may be. They’re those general-purpose models that everybody should be playing with. Pick one, just start playing. I think you’ll hear that theme of mine over and over again.

You then have answers engines, and these are tools that you might think of them as chatbots, but they’re not. Yes, ChatGPT has a version of this with SearchGPT, that’s within ChatGPT. But think about tools like Perplexity and Google’s upcoming Deep Research. These are tools that are designed to not have a general-purpose conversation with you, but to answer a specific question you ask with sources. A lot of people get concerned with chatbots that might hallucinate, might make things up. Answers engines, because they’re really trying to be grounded in source materials, you’ll see less of that in theory. I am not sitting here saying that nothing will get made up, but answers engines are really great, especially for what we were just talking about, for things like building out a persona, looking at a specific role and understanding what keeps them up at night and what some of the biggest challenges of those roles are. These can go out and scour the internet for job descriptions and really help you build that out.

The next one category is copilots, and I am not talking about Microsoft Copilot, even though Microsoft Copilot is a copilot. These are AI tools that are really built in to the tools we use every day. Think about Microsoft’s Copilot as it pertains to Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint. This is the AI built into those tools to help support you in that app doing an action. Google Workspace has the same thing, whether it be for Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides, that AI built in. It’s that ability to help you in the individual task.

Then there’s one more that I do want to call out, because it’s where, in my mind, this all comes together, is these custom models. Generally, it’s a subset of chatbots, but it’s this ability, these custom models enable you to create custom versions of chatbots to do something very, very specific. I call them AI specialists, but it’s this idea that instead of having a general conversation, you train it in one thing like a persona. Every time you use it, you can be getting feedback from that persona. These specialists that individuals like all of us can build in five minutes, really gives you the ability to do a specific task and have it create the same type of output over and over again. That’s really how I like to think about using chatbots to their best.

Fred Diamond: Let’s go a little bit deeper on the AI specialist idea. For the people who are listening, if they’re marketers, how can they create an AI specialist? What should they be doing? How should they be thinking about getting that into play?

Natalie Lambert: There’s basically three different tools that enable you to do that today. You can do that with a paid version of ChatGPT, and it’s what they call GPTs. When you go off into the right, you can create a GPT. Google has their Gems capability for paid users. Poe, you can actually do this with a free account with bots. What all of them have in common is the ability. You’re taking the general-purpose model and you are giving it very explicit instructions and background.

When you create a GPT, let’s use that example that I talked about, of the CIO of a state government. You can do a whole bunch of research in an answers engine to really understand what that persona cares about. Then you can take all of that context and actually create a GPT that says, “This is who you are to act as. This is your job. This is what you do. Every time I ask you a question, I want you to answer acting as this person.” I might ask you, what are the biggest events for you to attend this year? I might ask you, what do you want to know more of that you would like to read a blog on? You can ask a wide variety of questions, and it will always act as a specialist in that area.

One of my favorite things to do is take a piece of content, whether it be a blog, and say, how would you edit this to be more relevant and use the words you care about in this piece of content? You can create these specialists for all the personas that matter for you across the entire buyer journeys at all the various different stages. Taking that a step further, you can create these specialists to act in a certain way when you write blogs and to always have a very specific brand, tone, style, and voice. Same thing with social content. You can have this team of specialists working for you at all times.

I personally have about 80 different specialists that I call on a regular daily basis, and they all do micro tasks. But this idea of specialists, it lets you start to, and I use the word outsource, I don’t know if I fully mean that, but it’s like that outsource each of these individual tasks for yourself, but know that they are trained by you to do that task well. Just a really cool concept.

Fred Diamond: We keep talking about you need to talk to your customers. You need to be in constant contact with your customers. This sounds like a great way. Just curiously, how do you maintain the quality and accuracy? Let’s say someone takes our advice and creates these AI specialists, what are some ways to maintain the quality and accuracy as they continue to move on with this?

Natalie Lambert: I try, I’m not going to claim to be the best at this, but on a monthly, quarterly basis, go back, and as I’m using them, as things don’t come out exactly right the way I want, to go in and update them. I think one of the things that I like in all of my writing is I’m big into sentence case and the Oxford comma. Sometimes it might write something and do title case and not the Oxford comma. I’ll actually go back into it and say, even though it’s in the instructions, I’m like, “Remember, your job is to always include this.”

Sometimes I do have to go back and just really make sure some of the things that I care about are there. It’s the same thing with an updated persona. If you think the persona has changed, those would probably be a little less, maybe six months or so, go save the questions that you ask the answers engine to build what the persona is and then update it and just go in. It’s a simple copy and paste exercise. If you re-ask the question, to paste it back in, we’re talking about two minutes. To keep these updated, it’s not the level of effort, the way I say custom model might feel. It’s just that paying attention to what its output is, and when it’s not to your liking, going in and making changes.

Fred Diamond: As the marketing leader, your job is to have the most current information so you could pass it on to your sales team. One of the great things right now is that as marketing leaders, we try to figure out, because there’s so much content we can create. As a matter of fact, this podcast, I can create 30 different things from AI. I can create quotes, memes, LinkedIn posts, like we’re doing.

Natalie, before I ask you for your final bit of advice and for your action steps that sales leaders and marketing professionals can do right now, I guess we do need to touch on the concept of legal and ethical considerations. That’s something that comes up especially with things like copyright and ensuring that you’re not stealing things from other places, you’re attributing them the right way. The legal landscape for AI-generated content is it’s still evolving. We’re doing today’s interview in January of 2025, and if you’re listening to this sometime in the future, some things will of course have come up since then.

What do you recommend? What are some of the most crucial legal and ethical considerations that the people listening need to be aware of when using AI for content creation and campaigns targeting the government buyer, specifically the government buyer? There’s a lot of risk in what you say to the government buyer for a whole bunch of different reasons.

Natalie Lambert: First of all, I have to say my standard caveat, I’m not a lawyer, I just play one on TV. But I do work with an IP attorney on a monthly basis to check to make sure nothing has changed. With that caveat, there’s really three things folks have to pay attention to. I think, first of all, just as an uber-comment, you said it correctly, but this is still being worked out. There are not answers to everything right now. But the three things I would say to always pay attention to is first, the AI tool’s rights to use your content and reuse what either you put in or what it gives out for you.

All of the tools want to take and use your data. There are hidden, in some cases, sometimes very visible, abilities to turn off the ability to have the AI train on your data. I would recommend everybody do that so that you don’t have to worry about content that you put in, or content that it writes for you being used for somebody else. All of the paid tools do not store your data. But some of the free tools, for example, Meta, you don’t have a choice. It is going to use your data. But with Gemini in the free version, they recently changed that you can turn this function off. Just make sure you’re always paying attention in doing that.

Two, as it pertains to copyright. This one is the one that’s really sticky right now. Currently, US copyright law states that content cannot be copyrighted if written by AI. A human can create copyrighted content, but AI cannot. The reality is, is that so often humans should be involved in that process. Where is the line? That is still working its way through the court system. On the flip side, like in the UK, copyright goes to the prompter, the person who sits in front of the chatbot and asks the question. We don’t know where this is going to lie. I think it’s going to sit, as humans, as we’re participating in the content and we’re editing it and we’re making sure it’s accurate and making those edits, I believe that it is going to probably fall in the middle there to support that, but there is no answer today. It is just something to be very careful of and to make sure that you are reviewing to make sure everything is accurate.

The final piece of that, it actually is very related to the second, which is if AI provides you something that is somebody else’s copyright, or provides you something that’s inaccurate, you are responsible if you publish. If you publish something inaccurate, to your point about government buyers, that is on you. You need to be the human involved to make sure everything you publish is something you can stand behind. But if AI does publish or give you content that you use that was somebody else’s copyright, you can be held liable. There are a lot of tools out there, Copyscape, I think Grammarly has one, that you can do free checks of content before you publish it to make sure that it is not someone else’s copyright. But do make sure you’re doing those checks for accuracy and the quick checks for someone else’s copyright just to make sure that what you publish is something that you can stand behind.

Fred Diamond: I want to thank Natalie Lambert for giving us some of these great ideas. A lot of this Sales Game Changers Podcasts that we’re going to be doing in 2025, we’re going to be bringing together sales and marketing leaders from companies. The coupling is more critical than ever before, as Juliana Slye talks about in the government buyer’s journey. We talk about that a lot on how sales and marketing need to work together to be more effective.

Natalie, you’ve given us so many great ideas and so many actionable things that people can do, but I know that people are feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the prospect of integrating AI into their workflow. Give us a bit of advice. What’s an actionable thing, something people should do right now after listening to the show or reading the transcription to take their sales career or their marketing career to the next level? Tell us a specific recommendation for leveraging AI, for how to begin leveraging AI more effectively.

Natalie Lambert: It comes down to changing a habit. In my mind, that’s what it is. Whether it is making your home screen Perplexity and not Google to try, what is it like to search with an answers engine versus Google? How do I like that experience? One of the ones that I’ve done more recently, because of the current announcements, but I have the new iPhone 16 and the Action button. I have made that Action button ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode. Every time I click it, I can ask any question that I want and have that full ChatGPT experience there to have a conversation. That’s what I think it is. I think it is changing a habit so you see how these tools can come into your every life. As you do that, you’re going to see, “If it can do this, it can do this,” and it will start growing on itself. I think just pick one habit to change and put that into your daily workflows and see what you get.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great idea. Actually, to be honest with you, you could go to ChatGPT or some of the tools that we’re referring here and ask that question. What are some habits that I should be implementing today? It’s just unbelievable the wealth of knowledge. It’s all the information in the world. It’s everything that we’ve ever thought about and have documented.

Natalie Lambert: It’s so much more than that too. I was in Mexico over the break and the microwave oven was all in Spanish. I opened Advanced Voice Mode with the video camera and said, “Here is the microwave. What do I press to turn this on for 30 seconds?” It was able to read all the words on the microwave and tell me exactly what to do. That is a level of being able to help that I never dreamed possible. It’s find ways to bring this into your personal life. It will grow on itself, without a doubt.

Fred Diamond: Once again. I want to thank Natalie Lambert. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

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