Disney+ to AI Marketing Powerhouse: B2C Storytelling Lessons That Will Disrupt B2B ft. Swati Paliwal

# Bridge the Gap Podcast Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by none other than Revenue Reimagined. Today's guest is Swati Paliwal, who is the head of marketing at Sprout AI and a force in the intersection of media tech and modern go-to-market. She's led campaigns for Disney Plus Hot Star, scaled digital growth at MX Player and Flipkart. Now she's helping AI-native startups rethink how they tell stories, build demand, and win attention in a world of infinite content. Hint: we're going to talk about what works in B2C that likely will work even better in B2B. So if you're trying to blend art and science, logic and emotion, brand and behavior, she's done it across all industries. And now she's going to show us what GTM storytelling actually should look like. Welcome to the show.

**Swati:** Thank you so much, Adam. I'm feeling kind of slight pressure there. I mean, you gave such an amazing introduction. I don't know if I can do justice to what you asked me, but I'll try my best.

**Adam:** Listen, the bar on this show when you have Dale and I as the hosts is really low. So if you can level up Dale, which is not hard, you have already won.

**Swati:** I totally agree.

Let's jump right into it: from streaming to Sprout AI and doing this with marketing without script. You didn't come up through traditional SaaS. You came up through media, content, storytelling, which by the way I believe is way underrated and is the next evolution that we're coming from, not only in marketing but also in sales. So what pulled you into go-to-market from your storytelling world?

**Swati:** I think it was the people. I've worked with Karan, who is the founder of Sprout. I worked with Karan in the past when I was heading marketing for TVF, which Karan was the CEO of, and we built a product there. During my Disney stint, I also happened to interact with Karan. And when he built this company, he wanted me to head marketing. So it was really simple. It wasn't about what I'm doing, but more so about the people that I'm building this with. That's what it boiled down to. The team that we built together at Sprout was absolutely wonderful—people that we'd worked with in the past who could understand that vision.

Karan's thought and my thought also here was this: anybody who's thinking of GTM is thinking of GTM in a very B2B SaaS structured way—thinking emails, thinking data, thinking ABM. And he said that he wanted me to bring in that storytelling video experience, the way I was structuring for product, because it's anyway product. It's content, but it's product at the end of the day that you're working on.

I was heading the P&L for three geographies for Disney Hotstar—Canada, Singapore, and UK. So the entire P&L responsibility was there. The product was definitely a part of the marketing piece. So the drift happened. Like I said, it was more people-driven rather than thinking about what I'm going to do. I was honestly lost in the beginning with all the short abbreviations. It took me some time to get used to the abbreviations because there we had DAU, MAU—daily active users, monthly active users—and here suddenly ARR and MRR. It's a shift. We do have similar terminologies, but there were certain different ones as well.

**Adam:** But it's very interesting, you know, like monthly active users. I think it's lost in B2B.

**Swati:** If you have—even if you're in the B2B space—monthly active users are very important for the viability of your product or service. So I think bringing that in cross-functionally from a B2C world makes a lot of sense. And if you had a cheat sheet of all those terminologies for Adam, he'd really appreciate it.

**Adam:** Yes, I did. That is not nice. I know what MAU and DAU is. I think a lot of B2B SaaS companies get it wrong by not looking at that. It's like, oh, we built this product, we signed up this customer, that's great. Do they use it? Are they logging into it? What are they using? Maybe you look at that and you could fix some of your churn problem.

**Swati:** Yes, I think product engagement is a big thing in B2C, and it's very important for us. Product engagement is tagged to the extent of days of usage and how many times a day you're using the product. I mean, that's how deep you go into it. But when it comes to B2B—I don't think B2B is missing the beat there, but the GTM motion, if it's PLG or if it's sales-led, that's how you structure it. So if it's more PLG, I think you do look at these metrics. Otherwise, it's not viable.

However, when the motion is more sales-led, the ACVs are higher. Now that was a new one for me—ACV—because we have very fixed pricing when it comes to B2C products. So if the ACVs are bigger, if you're targeting mid-market enterprise clients, the sales cycles are different. So hence the metrics are very spread across the board because of varying ACV, and that was the difference. But yeah, now I'm kind of comfortable with all the abbreviations. That was a big change for me. The metrics and KPIs meant similar things, but we're looking at it in a different way.

**Adam:** But in B2C, you guys are probably gathering data a lot more precisely. I think in B2B, one of the biggest challenges that they have is not being able to gather that data precisely enough, especially in the startup world. So one of the things I'm curious about was what was the most unexpected part for you stepping into an early-stage tech company from a marketing perspective?

**Swati:** Yeah, I think coming from the Hotstar marketing ecosystem where everything is very structured and the pace—I think the pace was the most important thing. The pace at which we were doing things at Disney was very long. I mean, I used to plan for months and then the final thing used to happen after six months.

But the pace here was really fast. And I think with AI, the pace is getting crazier because we can just—and I think that's what you wrote about the other day, Adam—when you talked about how quickly you can deploy solutions. You don't have to wait to activate certain accounts. You can at least test theories. And pace was one of the most different things.

Another thing was while building the product. When you're building a startup product, you're more concerned about user experience, and the metrics that matter are whether we're able to give the end result to the user. However, working with Disney Hotstar, we were tracking a lot of engagement metrics within the product, which is not a product priority when you're building in a startup ecosystem. So that was very difficult for me to get used to because for me, marketing meant data. It meant, okay, how many people came in? But not just signups—why are we stopping at signups? What activity have they done? How deeply are they using the product?

But I think it took us some time to get there. And these are the kind of insights that, if we pump into the data, we'll be able to better understand our users and target better with more insights around our users.

**Adam:** So I think the insights thing is super interesting. And I think that ties into, you know, in order to get those insights, you have to be able to capture attention. And I want to call this kind of like AI isn't the threat, it's the test, right? So you've written that AI is making everything abundant except attention. What does that actually mean in practice?

**Swati:** So actually, the thing is, volume is easier to get out of AI, but how do you really get—so when we talk about content, this statement is absolutely correct. There's abundance of content, but human behavior itself is changing. I don't know if I'm answering your question correctly, but the way we are doing search now, just a year or two years from today—like two years back or a year back—when we searched, we scanned through links. We opened links in new tabs. We scanned through those pages. We built up an answer in our heads, and then we felt good or bad about that answer. I don't know, we searched again or we went to the next page of Google. That's how we searched.

Now, marketing or GTM has to evolve with consumer behavior. That's how I look at it inherently.

Just taking this example: now the way we are searching is completely different. We put in a question, we have the answer. All of that exercise and activity that went into getting that answer is zero because of AI. Right now, looking at it from a marketer's perspective, brand becomes important. We're already seeing this shift to zero-click marketing happening, and a lot of brands are seeing their traffic go down because earlier the blog used to answer that question. Now the answer is given by AI. The question is: was your blog answer cited for that answer or not? So that eventually, when the user is ready—

# Transcript

Want to look at the products or want to test them out, then your name comes up. So the game has completely changed. You don't get the—you need to catch LLMs' attention rather than the user attention when it comes to content, and that's how I look at it.

So I think go ahead.

I was going to say, but are we going into a place where the AI is giving false positive reinforcement to people? So what I mean by that is they're giving you what you think you want to hear, and people are taking that as gospel versus thinking, what's the next question? Did I really ask the right question? Because you're only getting the answer to maybe a shitty question. Maybe you asked a bad question and you're getting a bad answer. So I'm curious your perspective on that. Is there AI bias happening in the answers that are being received?

One hundred percent. I completely agree with that, and there was a recent research which said that the answer that you get from AI today—say, for example, you get AI to write a blog post for you, and maybe you wrote a blog post two years back without AI, right? And this one that you got from AI is ten times shittier than what you did without AI. You, as a human being, are more happy with the result that you received from AI. And that answers your question, Dale. It's basically the human—it's magical. It's like I feel I have something. I'm saying something and it's happening. It feels magical. But when you check into it, when you check yourself, and that's how we need to train ourselves to use AI better, because when you get into asking the next set of questions, next set of questions, reprompt—keep asking AI itself to validate its results—you get better results.

And the solution that I have for the same is I do not depend upon a single LLM. So what I teach also, when I talk to students or anyone who wants to learn how to do AI and marketing—Perplexity, GPT, and Claude—like a combination of the three of them. Running each of their answers, getting the one LLM to check the other LLM's answers. So it's like a team of LLMs keeping a check on each other's answers. That's what solves for that problem that you talked about, and that's what I would tell all marketers to do.

Yeah, I see so many who rely on one source, and then the hallucinations come through, and you're not validating. And it's taken me time even to realize that certain LLMs, certain models are just better at other things than others, right? Like, know what model is great for what.

Um, in the AI world now, what signals tell you that a content play is working versus something just happened to go viral?

Um, so virality has too many angles to it. I mean, it just needs to connect with people, and plus, it's a very algorithm—algorithm play is also very, very important. How much of a story-driven it is.

And the thing is, the kind of content also that picks up and goes viral is not something which—how frequently have we seen branded content really get picked up and go viral? There's a lot of push that happens behind it. So media content definitely goes viral, entertainment content, but there's a huge amount of money that goes into it. Like I was telling someone, you know, you see these songs come up top of the charts. Most of these songs have hundreds and thousands of dollars pumped into it and activations happening across meme pages, across Instagram handles, across TikTok handles, and the amount of effort is insanely crazy. So it's not what we see. It might just not be viral if it's branded. There's a lot of thought, structure, and money spent there as well. So it's not purely organic.

However, when I say content now, when I look at content, if I talk in B2B context and I talk about textual content particularly, I have started analyzing what content is getting cited by Perplexity, by ChatGPT when it's pulling together that answer. And then I run a deep analysis in Claude—because that's how I structure my LLMs. Perplexity is great for search. It's kind of like hitting directly at Google. Crazy amazing results with Perplexity. The labs have really done a much better job. And Claude is simply amazing at analysis. GPT doesn't even match the analysis that I can run at Claude. So Claude then I utilize for analyzing those links and telling me why this link is different and why this one is not. But GPT again is great at content writing and creation. So all of this research, when it flows into GPT, then we have a whole playbook that we utilize to get content out. And then that content getting distributed is important.

So once you've written a great piece of content, it's not okay to just sit there with hosting it on your website. Making sure you can get the correct backlinks from sources which are getting cited today in LLMs in Google AI mode—that's equally important. And that might again not be completely organic. There's an inorganic element of pumping in money there and buying those links. But the content needs to be relevant if you need to be cited in the right sources.

Yeah, that's it. It'll be a whole different mindset. Sorry, Dale.

Well, and it'll be very interesting because it's similar to what's happening with all of SEO, right? Because it's not about being found on the web. It is for certain people, but there's a whole new world about being found in an LLM. Like you were saying earlier, you ask a question, you go to get an answer. If you're asking a question about a certain product or feature or whatever, you want to be found as part of that LLM. So it'll be interesting to see how Google plays into this space with Gemini because they do have the advertising background in the back of it, where some of the other LLMs don't.

However, yes, not a lot of people use Gemini as opposed to you're talking about Perplexity and Claude and GPT.

Um, let's move a little bit into GTM strategy. So what's one decision you've made over the last year that defined how marketing impacts pipeline?

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Marketing would basically take care of all the different channels. I mean, I think channel ownership is what's something that we start looking at because obviously email as a channel—and why I'm saying channel is because in B2B, that's what I brought with me. That's the baggage that I brought with me from B2C as well. Because channels are very important. How much are you investing into a particular channel? So email is demand gen. Email outbound was one big channel for us, but we started developing inbound as well. Now within inbound, again, there were different channels. There was social. There was LinkedIn, the LinkedIn Live ecosystem that we created. Then we wanted to do community as well, wherein we started getting active in existing B2B SaaS communities like Pavilion. There's Genius. There's quite a few good ones. So there were different channels, and within those channels, then we had certain plays that we activated. We experimented with some. Some worked for us. LinkedIn thought leadership was also another one that we experimented with.

So yeah, I mean, I brought in the channel piece. LinkedIn Live is something we do at Sprouts. That is a great inbound channel for us, and outbound remains one of the best channels that works for us in demand gen because inherently we are a product which basically gives you insights on your data. And over time, we realized that data is super dirty, super unclean in terms of how you're saving it. Like, when we plugged in CRM, we started plugging in Salesforce for a particular client and to enrich the data, the amount of data overlap was insane in terms of what they had saved in Salesforce and what the new data said in terms of the updated email ID, whether the person's still in the company or not, and even other signals.

This is what we built into our product wherein at account level and contact level, you get signals enriched on accounts as well as contacts, and then you can do your outbound in a very structured way—in a way that it's inbound-led outbound. I think that's the term that our B2B founder coined: "inbound-led outbound." So I would quote him on that, but that's precisely what we are. We've solved for that in Sprouts, and that channel works best for us.

So when I—I love inbound-led outbound. I think Adam Robinson was spot on with that. Um, we talk about that all the time. I think in today's market, and Dale, you were saying this just the other day with one of our new clients—I think with one of our new clients, like we could hire all the great sales reps in the world, build the best emails, the best call scripts, put them on the phone, and tell them to go dial. If you have no brand awareness, no signals, no one knows who you are, it's literally like me calling you out of the blue. It is. It's me calling.

You out of the blue to sell you something that may or may not be relevant. And you, who the heck are you?

So if you could shift that and build that awareness and create this inbound lean you outbound, that is where I think go to market and marketing is going now.

So we went a step ahead. I mean, I just would like to add something there. What we realized—yes, so we were doing, we started with pure outbound. And I said that I do feel that there is a certain overlap. Attribution is something that I feel is, instead of like solving for a problem, and that I realized while talking to a lot of our customers as well. It becomes an inherent thing between marketing, sales, and demand team wherein you're all fighting for that attribution of that particular lead going to one particular person.

So instead of that, we kind of put in a system wherein we were doing a lot of marketing-led outbound. Also, there was this inbound—we could scrape website visitors to our website and we could actually see who's visited our website, and to them we were sending out playbooks, content. We were sending out invites to our LinkedIn lives. We were even inviting a couple of folks we felt who had a great fit and who could come onto our lives. And then when the outbound was happening, we saw a direct overlap.

So we saw that at least 60% of our leads, or the accounts, have had some engagement with the marketing ecosystem. Now, these are the ones that we could really tap into and target. These are the folks who probably at least filled up a form or interacted, engaged with us on LinkedIn. We were regularly scraping our LinkedIn engagement. We were scraping the LinkedIn engagement of our leadership team, founders. So we were doing all of that just to understand the overlap, and the overlap was huge.

And that's when we started working on playbooks wherein we were not selling in that first email. We were doing a warm-up to our ecosystem. And then picking up—we anyways had the data. We could pick up the phone anytime. But when we saw a warm-up happening, and a lead, somebody opening the email, at least coming to our website and seeing that kind of traction, and then the outbound happening on them, like the outbound team hitting them with calling—the results were better. They were coming onto the demo calls. They had done their research, and now they were comfortable with Sprouts ecosystem, kind of, you know, talking to them essentially.

Yeah, it's very interesting. What's—um, I'm very curious because you come from the B2C world. How do you build alignment with sales and marketing without falling into like all the clichés—like, oh, we just have to collaborate together? Like, what's the tie-in, especially from a B2C perspective?

All right, I think how the leadership is looking at KPIs—that's what it eventually does boil down to. So I think the difference in KPIs—if we are all chasing the same KPI of how many demo calls happened, how much revenue did we work—then it gets really difficult because then there is that fight for whether I get, you know, say in this lead. And in B2C, the attribution was never won, so it was always percentage attribution to any lead. And that's what B2C cracked down on.

I mean, there was first touch, there was last touch. There was how many touches that have happened. And there were platforms we used—Tableau, we used Looker. We had multiple analytics heavy analytics ecosystems telling us everything that happened around this one particular individual and the journey they went through.

So essentially, every time they came to the website directly, that was given to brand. And there's a huge, heavy brand spend that happens in B2C. B2B also does brand spend, but it's more event-led. It's very differently structured. The brand spend, whereas for B2C, it's very common for B2C brands to go like pick up a billboard, do TV ads, right? It's so there has to be some attribution there as well.

So any direct traffic, even online, used to go to brand. Then there was ads. Then there were different kinds of ads. So the journey was mapped to an extent that the percentage allocation was pretty much to the 10% this much, 20% this much. And then needs to decide on a model. So you had to, as a company, decide on whether it's first touch, which gets 50% attribution, or last touch, which gets 50%.

So one major attribution was given to either first touch or last touch, and then the attribution was divided across the different channels the individual had interacted with. And that's how detailed it was.

Now when we do that here, I think we can still build it for bigger companies when you have that money to spend on analytics and even have to build events within the product. Because then the product, PLG, it has to be PLG. If it's sales-led, it again gets difficult because there's manual intervention there. However, if we give like an equal amount of weightage to what, um, and which lead has come in through which channel, if there's been some interaction—and that's how we started seeing it.

So we started giving the top of the funnel matrix like impressions, at least inbound impressions, website traffic, leads coming in, downloads happening, engagement happening across the ecosystem. Because it became, it is a lot about conversations that we are doing and less about leads. So we started changing the internal terminology from leads to conversations. How many conversations are we doing? And these conversations can be around the LinkedIn live that we are doing, around the events that we are attending—all of those things.

So these conversations marketing—there was a lot of manual effort, honestly, that went into it initially to making sure that we are scraping these conversations digitally from LinkedIn and recording them as much as we can. If we are going and attending events, and then these conversations then turning into actual demos. And when it came to demos, together there was a combined thing between sales and marketing which kind of led that piece.

And at the end of the day, I think it boils down to—people going back to my very first thing—why I joined the Sprouts ecosystem. It's not about, let's collaborate. I do believe in each other enough that both of you, or all three of you, or the five of you are doing everything that it takes to kind of get that lead to convert. If that belief and faith is there, I feel that it doesn't really matter because then there is that trust. And you have your different core KPI and you have shared KPIs as well.

So like, yeah, that is something I think people don't understand enough. There are shared KPIs. Yes. And you have your own core KPIs. It's not just these are the four KPIs.

Swie, let me ask you something. So there's a lot of GTM teams that are in what we'll gently call transition. Um, you've seen all sorts of different organizations throughout your marketing experience. What's the very first conversation marketing should have with the CEO? Not with sales, but with the CEO. Where does it start?

What's the CEO's core vision?

I mean, dig deeper from it. Like you're talking to an LLM. Keep asking more questions. What's your core vision? The core vision is, oh, I want 100 million ARR. How do we reach there? What do we do? Okay. If it's, if it's I want the best product, or which kind of gets wins, the product of the year award in this case, or changes the way things are happening. Yeah. And you know, like I think that's what marketing needs to, and that's what we miss. I mean, everyone says, hey, I can do this, I can do that, but no, it doesn't matter because you want what's best for the company. The KPIs remain the same, but how do you structure the KPIs? How do you prioritize resources? Because resources are not limitless. Once you understand the founder's and the CEO's vision and how he is thinking about it, there'll come a point wherein he will tell you that that's what I have hired you for. And that's when you stop. You're like, oh, I can take it up from there. I could have taken it up from the very first question—what should the objective be? But I would want the answers as much as I can and get him to a point where he tells me that now I am the. So go, go, go. What's the vision? Go deep. Tell me more. And then what signals tell you whether it's B2C or B2B. What signals tell you that a brand is trying to fake strategy just by throwing money at it?

If the product doesn't match up to the promise.

I love that.

Yeah.

We've all been there and done that, haven't we, Dale?

Yes.

More than I'd like to admit. Yeah.

Little bit of vaporware. When you switched over to B2B, like, what would you say is like the most common mistake you see B2B marketers making that would never fly in the B2C world?

Um, okay, I mean, the mistake that B2B marketers make—I think it's in the whole gamut of scripts and, you know, like, pain points. It's become too playbook-y, structured, I feel. That B2B is so, marketers as such are so used to the concept of playbooks. And by, and we were doing playbooks. I realized when I when I...

Started talking with a lot of markets in B2B playbooks. We have this playbook, download the playbook. And I was like, you're so married to that one playbook. It's great you've created a process and a playbook around it, but I feel sometimes we're too married to that process and we're not changing it on the go because B2C you're dealing with such volume of people and people are unique and different and the ICP is not that targeted. It is targeted, but it's not insanely targeted like having an accounts list and only these are the companies that I can sell to. Which also, in that case, playbook can be structured in a great way because it's a targeted, dedicated account list you're targeting. And that comes to an enterprise sales play and that's very different. But in general, a similar enterprise sales play when you have this whole account list and only these many accounts can I target, it doesn't work that way when you're targeting SMB, mid-market, and startup segments as your end customers. Then you play the people game. Then the playbooks need to change. Then the playbooks need to be more free and be able to breathe.

I think that was because I myself probably tried to change a lot, bringing a lot of change to the playbooks that we had initially. And yeah, that breathing space really helps. And now with AI adding on to what you said initially, we can do so much more. So much more experimentation. I think that's what is needed.

I love that. That's really good. Okay, Swati, how about we do some rapid fire as we wrap up here, coming into the final stretch. Ten words or less for each of these.

What's one piece of advice? What's one piece of career advice you wish more women heard in tech today?

Don't be afraid to ask questions. No question is stupid.

I love that. It's funny. What's one marketing trend that you're just over? Like, it just needs to go away?

Download this playbook. Comment download. Comment hello and I'll send you this free playbook that's going to get you $15 million in revenue. You just have to comment hello and I'm going to give it away for free.

Yes, just don't drop it.

Fake engagement. Fake engagement.

Tell me about it. Yes. Who's a marketer or GTG thinker more people should be learning from?

I think I would say Jason Lemkin. I follow his content. He's really good. And recently, I've also started, I mean, there are quite a few people out there. I quoted Adam Robinson. I mean, he talked about inbound versus outbound. But then he also went, I mean, I had to take a smaller answer, but yeah, if I have to take one, Jason Lemkin. His posts I really like. But quite a few out there, and everyone who's doing building in public on LinkedIn, I like to follow their content. Because sometimes they give real good insights onto how they crack something on their product.

Yeah, that's that's become a trend. I'm shocked and never thought I would see the whole building in public.

What's one mistake you made early in your career that still stings? That when you look back at it, you're like, "Oh, that one still hurts."

Leaving. So when Flipkart, in India, was the exact replica of Amazon when Amazon wasn't there in the country and I was building an app, building the Flipkart app. So I was in the app ecosystem when we were launching apps way back in 2014. And that's when I did a career switch. And I think that was something that, had I stayed there, my career journey and track would have been very different.

Okay, let's wrap this up a little bit. What's your dream vacation destination?

Dream vacation destination: Bora Bora.

Bora Bora. Nice. Have you been?

No, of course not.

All right. No, listen, there are places that you could have been that were so good that that's where you always want to go back to send you.

Yeah, I would have to go to. I would love to visit New Zealand again, but I think I need to tick off Bora Bora first before I visit any other country again.

Yeah, that's a dream destination that I will definitely go to one day.

I love it. Swati, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for sharing your knowledge, for chatting about the differences in B2C and B2B and how if you really want to level up your B2B marketing, maybe you just take a play out of the B2C playbook.

Why not? Thanks for joining the show. We appreciate it.