AI Announcer (00:10.126)
Alright listen up. This here is Prompt This, the podcast for all you business big shots who've had enough of the AI nonsense and just want the straight goods. You got Greg right? He's your go-to guy when it comes to scaling sales teams and cracking that Silicon Valley playbook like it's a safe. Then there's Clint, a real heavy hitter in the startup game, turning those big ideas into cash cows, you know?
These guys, they cut through all the chatter bringing you the real deal analysis and playbooks on using AI to get your ideas off the ground, scale your business, and for crying out loud, stop getting left in the dust. Now let's get to the good stuff here are your hosts.
Clint (00:54.51)
Welcome to the prompt this podcast. This is Clint.
And this is Greg.
Today's episode is a master class in learning about all the different ways a company can successfully deploy CHEP GPT for their go-to-market functions. I really enjoyed how our guest described 28 different custom GPTs deployed for her sales and marketing teams.
Yeah, definitely. Our guest is a perfect example of how a high-performing, modern, cheap growth officer thinks, operates and the skills that need to be successful.
Definitely. All right, well, let's jump into the episode and meet our guest.
Clint (01:38.254)
Today we're joined by Emily Maxey, Chief Growth Officer at Firm 360, a practice management software solution for accounting firms. She's also a leading voice helping B2B SaaS companies navigate the AI transition with clarity. She's known for busting the myth that more content equals more growth, and for showing why high output strategies fail without real go-to-market alignment.
Emily brings firsthand experience building revenue engines that scale with AI, and her insights and strategies are well known in the startup community. Emily, welcome to the show.
Hi, thanks for having me.
Pleasure to have you here today. We're excited to dig into the topic. is certainly go to market is our favorite place to chat about AI. That's the background for both Greg and I here.
have a guest that's either on one side or the other and this is good. Clint and I can both dig in on this one.
Clint (02:37.614)
Yeah, that's right. Right. both sales and marketing. Excellent. So let's get to know you a little bit better first and introduce you to our audience here. Can you tell us a bit about your career journey that brought you to being the chief growth officer at firm 360 and maybe, you know, certainly tell us a bit about how AI tools fit into that and your thoughts along those lines.
Absolutely. So I started my career in marketing, had head of marketing CMO type roles throughout my career, but have always been a revenue oriented marketer, which I think all marketers should be.
Agreed, agreed.
I agree as well.
It was always my goal to own the entire revenue generating function of a company. And so I've been building toward that for quite some time and recently got promoted to Chief Growth Officer at Firm 360.
Greg (03:38.54)
Congratulations.
And that's a title I'm seeing more often these days is Chief Growth Officer spanning across both sales and marketing. Absolutely.
Yeah, it's an interesting title. It's it doesn't roll off the tongue. CGO but
Yeah, I've never thought about it that way, actually.
And yeah, how AI has played a role in that about three years ago, I realized that AI was going to radically transform the way that we work, the way that all knowledge workers work and decided that I could either become at the forefront of that or I could become obsolete and I...
Emily Maxie (04:27.182)
didn't like the idea of becoming obsolete. decided to teach myself everything that I could to become a better marketer, a better revenue leader using AI. And so that included certifications and courses and experimentation. it's been a really exciting journey and has helped me achieve
what I've been able to achieve so far.
So it sounds like you saw that generative AI wave early and you jumped on it.
Yeah, I was fortunate enough to be my prior company was a development agency that had machine learning individuals on the team. And when I started there in 2017, sat down with them and said, okay, what is machine learning? What is data science? And really had them explain it to me from
soup to nuts and got very technical in terms of what I understood the technology to be capable of. And then as soon as Generative came on the scene, I was like, okay, now this has applications that really impact my world versus things that are a little bit more theoretical or specific to other functions.
Greg (05:54.37)
Dig into that a little bit because, you know, I've been spending a lot of time seeing what's being advertised that AI can do and can't do in sales. if you just scroll, you get flip-flopped back and forth that it can do it and can't do it in probably about 20 times in about four scrolls.
So you're the perfect person to ask, you know, because you've been pretty vocal about the gap of it, you know. What are some of the biggest misconceptions when taking AI to, you know, the sales motion?
Yeah, I think one of the biggest misconceptions is just that we aren't going to need people anymore. I think honestly, we could reach a world where that becomes true, but at the end of the day, in the market that I'm in, accountants want to talk to humans. They want the human touch.
People want to
There are probably industries where that's not true. If you're selling to a software developer, they would probably rather not talk to a person if just broad generalization there. I think the way that people buy is going to change pretty dramatically. But I think the role of people and of empathy and human connection in that is always going to be a part of it.
Greg (07:27.64)
You know, we've looked at this for many, many years in sales, how to grow and, know, our constraints are really a production constraints of a human. We're at a point where we can, we can supercharge these efforts and you're talking more content doesn't equal more growth. You know? So, so, so what do you mean by that? Yeah. Cause if you can do it all, why not just do it all?
Well, there's a very real reason why Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2025 was slop. And that is because 2025 was the year of AI slop content. And I think it's a really amazing thing that Generative AI has given people who may not have had the ability to create, it's given them that ability.
a really amazing thing. It has also just exploded the amount of content that's out there and most of it is real bad. It's just bad. It reminds me of when content farms were a thing in early days of SEO and things like that. it really comes down to humans and AI both want unique perspectives and they want
information that they can't find anywhere else. And there's a framework that I really like for SEO and for content growth that is called EAT, E-E-A-T. And it's four things that you should infuse into every piece of content that you're creating. And the first thing is experience. So some sort of
personal experience that you've had or that a customer's had, that someone has had that can't be found elsewhere. The next thing is expertise. So what is something that you're an expert on or that your company is an expert on? The third thing is authoritativeness. So the reputation, social proof, things like that. And then the last thing is trustworthiness. And so
Emily Maxie (09:50.07)
really bringing, whether it's a hot take or whether it's a custom research report that isn't found elsewhere, people are craving unique points of view. frankly, AI is craving the exact same thing. Because if AI is searching the web for who to surface and all of the content uses all of the things it already knows, why would it surface your content?
it to create the content. yeah, think most marketers have come to that conclusion that the slop is not the answer, but there's still a lot of it out there. There's still a lot of it out there.
really good point.
I agree.
Clint (10:43.64)
That's right.
I'm going try to write that way after this podcast. I like that. I like that. That's good. So you're building go-to-market teams and obviously you're an AI expert. We see different kinds of teams built. We see teams with hundreds of people all using chat GBT at the desk. We see teams that are highly optimized humans and a lot of systems around it. What do your teams look like?
Yeah, so my teams look like fewer humans with a lot of automation and a lot of tools being given to them. My most recent hire on the marketing side of things made it very clear that the person that I was hiring needed to be familiar with AI and eager to learn.
On her first day, I told her that 10 % of her week every week should be learning about AI and how AI can impact her role. And she went from, you know, sort of knowing how to use it to write emails and things like that to building her own custom GPTs and looking into ways that we can use it for optimization and all of that. It's been really transformational.
How long did that journey last for her as she or I'm sure she's still on it but how from the time that she you know first got started to the point where you were saying you are definitely proficient at this now how long do you think that took?
Emily Maxie (12:19.278)
Four or five months. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
I want to work on Emily's team. Sounds really progressive, sounds fun.
Well, and the thing is, it's like some people I've talked to are like, really 10%. Wow, they could be doing other things. I'm like, yes. But do you have any idea how much more productive she is now that she's able to build her own custom GPTs and build it? It's just.
It's an investment in explosive, yeah, output later. Yeah, no, I can see that. So talking about that, we see a lot of efforts happen. We've heard of failed AI implementations, good projects, bad projects. How do you measure if you're actually effective with this? If AI is doing anything different than if you were to just hire two people.
Yeah, first of all, think the first step is you have to be really intentional about what you are hoping to impact on the front end. And so for me, there are sort of two flavors of impact. One is doing things that you would already do, but doing them faster. And then there's doing things better or doing things you wouldn't have been able to do at all. And so I have a tracker.
Emily Maxie (13:45.518)
specifically for the marketing team, but now that I'm leading the sales team as well, we're going to build it out for sales also that has each of the custom GPTs that we've built and measures how long the task took without the GPT, how long it took to build the custom GPT, how many times it's used. That's one of the benefits of doing custom GPTs versus just really great prompting. You can see how many times it's been used.
And then that calculates time savings and ultimately a dollar value. And so that's for the time savings piece. And then it's obviously harder to measure some of these net new activities or things you wouldn't be able to do. And those end up, you know, the impact is told more by a story. And one example would be we...
do not have in our budget to do extensive focus groups with our customer base or prospects. But what we do know is our personas. We know them really well. And so what I did is had a chat GPT do a deep research report on our buyer personas on each of them and create a 60 page buyer persona document. Obviously, that's way too much for any human being to read or consume.
but it's not too much for AI. And so then I created a custom GPT that is a focus group facilitator. So its job is to facilitate a conversation between me and these three different personas that it knows a lot about. so anytime I have a new idea, I will, for a campaign or for messaging or for swag,
That's fascinating. have not heard that one. That's a new idea. I think chat GPT as a focus group. Yeah.
Greg (15:44.782)
Yeah, I like
Greg (15:48.238)
That's a new one. Yeah, this sounds like Clint and I measure either are you going faster or discovering something you don't know yet? Yeah, I like this this is great. This is really good. So yeah, I'm gonna I think we need to measure some of our efforts within this podcast Clint this way and see what we got
I agree, man. We've been measuring a lot of things in the background. think turning those into insights that you can start chatting with ChatGPT about and explore further, that's a whole new area to uncover. I like that. I'd like to dig into that a little bit more, Emily. So you're probably the first...
sales and marketing leader that we've talked to who's actually really dug deep into building these custom GPTs inside of ChatGPT. First question, why ChatGPT versus Gemini or Copilot or something like that? Why did you choose that tool?
At the time that I started learning, it was at the very forefront of everything going on. Since then, other tools have caught up and what I've seen is they tend to leapfrog each other. So what is the leading tool? One day, then a new model comes out and it's not the leading tool. I've been of the opinion that it's more important to commit to one and get really fluent.
in working with it versus.
Clint (17:28.33)
Choose your tool, become an expert. Yeah.
And the skills are transferable. Like if chat GPT went away, I could build the same thing using cloud artifacts or I think they call it projects or Google gems or you know, it would work either way. But I think for me, just from a productivity standpoint, I wanted to be able to just deep dive on one tool and really go with that. So that's what I did.
So what was that first custom GPT that you built? Still using it.
Yeah, yeah, good question. So the first one that I built, I always recommend if people are overwhelmed with tools to start with a use case in their personal life, because it's a lot easier to wrap your head around a problem like meal planning than it is to be like, want to
change everything about sales and marketing. And so my first app was a meal planning app. I wrote down dietary restrictions. I wrote down where we shop for groceries and had it create both a meal plan and recipes day by day. And that was the first one. It was really simple, really basic. But I actually cooked the food. And it had an impact on my
Emily Maxie (18:54.936)
physical life, which was really cool. I'm trying to think what the first one was that I did for work. I'm sure it was content related. Because just content is such a low hanging fruit for these things.
How many custom GPTs do you have running in the business right now?
Right now, 28 that are shared between me and the team, there's additional ones that I've built that are just for me. So I have one that's a co-chief growth officer and it's essentially a strategic thought partner for me. has the
or your digital twin, if you will, right?
Like I use it all the time for brainstorming and things like that. But yeah, 28 that are shared amongst the sales and marketing team.
Greg (19:48.942)
That's great, you got AI Engine in there then.
That's amazing. Tell me how you approach building one. Tell us about the last one. What kicked off the idea and what was the process you went through and that sort of thing.
Yeah, the last one.
probably Monday? I'm trying to think which one it was. It was, it was about, have a conference season is coming up and just brainstorming swag ideas that tie back into our brand and all of that.
which could easily just be a chat with chat GPT, but I like having it as a custom GPT because then I can add in, I can attach our buyer personas to it so that it knows that and just add some more context and things like that. That's a really simple one though.
Clint (20:59.114)
I've heard some folks talk about building a product GPT. So any questions that you might ever have about the product and it can be used by the support team, it can be used by the sales team and even figuring out how to surface that to customers through the website. Did you go down that path as well?
Yes. So actually our head of product created one of those that pulls from our knowledge base, our product knowledge base, and that anyone in the company can interact with. we also have one of the things that's really cool. It's like my favorite thing that I've built is a competitive GPT. So it pulls
the competitive information from our battle cards, but it also pulls from any mention of a competitor in our Slack instance, anywhere in Slack. And so it pulls all of that information into a Google Sheet that then the custom GPT references. And so there's a lot of times where we'll get information about a competitor from a customer and someone posts that in Slack or we get it on a sales call or something like that.
I created the GPT in a way where not only does it answer the question, but it does it in a way that is sales friendly. if the question is something that we don't do, for example, I've told it like, position it as a strength, find a way to position. And then because the sales team at the time were not currently using chat GPT,
That's, I created a Slack application that they could do just backslash, compete, and then their question, and the answer would populate directly in Slack. And that's been a really popular.
Clint (23:01.422)
So you're a chief growth officer focused on sales and marketing, and you're talking about building all this stuff. Do you have somebody that works for you that does the actual building of the GPTs? Are you doing it yourself? Where's kind of your skill set fit into building all these things versus bringing in people to help make it happen?
Yeah, so I have been building them all myself.
That is an awesome answer.
I think Emily is, she's the modern CRO. This is what they're gonna look like. And she's way ahead of the curve. You can tell.
However, not all of them have been big successes. I mapped out a sales optimization GPT. I had all of these different data sources that I wanted to bring together. I wanted to bring together call recordings and emails and deal status and
Emily Maxie (24:02.23)
all of these things into one database and I realized like this is much more technical than I have the capability of being. And also by the way, there are tools that do this that already exist that are really good at it. And so my approach is always try to build first and then if you can't build, either reach out to someone who can help build or buy. And so that's what we ended up doing with that.
solution.
So if you were to advise other CROs in the industry, where to start? You know, there's plenty of CROs that have zero AI, but it's staring them in the face, or they are just getting started, but really don't know where to start. What do they do?
Yeah. So the first thing that I would recommend is building yourself a digital twin of sorts. There's a website called SmarterX or an organization called SmarterX, and they have a webinar on building a co-CEO. And it's essentially the instructions for building this custom GPT. It doesn't matter what your title is. You don't have to be a CEO to use it.
I would do that first because it teaches you how to build a custom GPT and it gives you some context on sort of how to use and build these things and it also gives you...
Clint (25:29.678)
I just published a blog article yesterday on that very topic. Oh, How to Build a Digital Twin. so.
Go to Clint's Bois!
Look at that pivot. That was awesome.
But yeah, it's super valuable and will help you as you continue your journey. And then the next thing I would do is find out the things that your team does again and again and again that are repetitive, that are data driven or generative. creating something again and again and again. And use that as sort of the starting point for
for your first custom GPT. again, it doesn't have to be a GPT. It could be a gym. It could be whatever you choose. But start building that out and start a tracker for your ROI because you, six months from now, a year from now, will be so glad that you did that.
Clint (26:31.214)
device. Tell us about that tracker. What do you mean by that specific
The ROI tracker that has the different custom GPTs, how long it took to build and the number of times it's been used and things like that.
that's right. you're saying how inside of Chad GPT you can... I... But, Chad GPT will tell you how often a custom GPT is being used. Right. Okay.
Just have a spreadsheet.
Emily Maxie (26:55.938)
Yeah. And so we saved in the last six months of the year, unfortunately, I only started this in halfway through the year in terms of the tracker, but we saved 650 hours. so that's amazing. A head count. Yes. And that's only with it implemented on the marketing side of the house. And now we're building on the sales side of the house.
That's great. Yeah. All right. Yeah, that's a good, that's good advice where to start. I that's huge gain, huge gains in just your very, very first efforts. That's great.
Well, and I think the biggest thing, it can be so intimidating and there's so much, everyone's an expert and everyone's telling you do this, do that. And I think the most important thing is just to start because it's a skill, it's something that you're gonna learn and like anything, like you're gonna be a beginner, you're gonna make mistakes, you're gonna not know what you're doing and just be comfortable with that and start figuring it out. And also don't be afraid to ask people questions.
People ask me questions all the time. How did you build this? Or can you share the prompt with me for that? And I think in general, people are very willing to share. so yeah, your first step, if you get stuck, reach out to me on LinkedIn, say Emily, I'm stuck, and I'll try to help.
I like that advice he gave a little earlier about getting started with something personal. I've heard two pieces of advice. Just get started, start playing around with it, and you'll get value out of it. And then I've heard other people say, no, no, Have a very specific project that you're trying to do, a problem you're trying to solve, and go solve a specific problem, and then build from there. And I think both are true, but I like the idea of
Clint (28:53.758)
of what you suggested of just get started with something personal just to kind of get yourself familiar with the tools and playing around with the ideas and it's something that doesn't have, no commitments are being made to the business. Maybe a commitment to the family of better food on the table for dinner. But then once you've kind of started playing around with the tools and got some basic level of familiarity.
Then you go in and start solving specific problems in the business and it sounds like you found 28 different problems in the business that you're solving with custom GPTs. That's great.
So you seem to know so much about AI.
What other tools do you use even outside of business? Like what do you, where do you have AI involved in your life? Fun, not fun?
Great question. I use it a lot. So I have my work, chat GPT account and then I also pay for a personal chat GPT account. That one I do for trip planning is a super fun use for it.
Emily Maxie (30:10.086)
I am in the process of buying a house and I'm wanting to do some remodeling. so before and after pictures, it's really good if you say, know, hey, take this image, but add this type of furniture or repaint to this. It's really good at creating images that can show you sort of the art of the possible. So that's fun. I use a device called Plod, which is this for
for transcribing conversations. So a lot of times I, and of course, always ask for permission, but there are conversations that I want to capture for myself, not for the business, whether it's, know, okay, we're brainstorming where to go on vacation, let's transcribe this, let's load it into chat GBT, and let's get it to then riff on it in terms of where we should go, things like that.
Where else?
I I think my tech stack is pretty simple.
Is it pretty much just chat GPT? Is that the main AI tool that you're using both in business and at home?
Emily Maxie (31:26.668)
So for personal chat GBT for work, we also use Gong for sales. We just implemented it and we've seen tremendous productivity gains. And I think we'll also see improvements in win rates as well. It's just been, that's the tool that we ended up buying when I tried to build it and realized it's way more complicated than I thought.
Certain ones, yeah, you need a company to tackle.
And then we use some AI components of HubSpot. We use clay for data enrichment and things like that. We use mid-journey for image generation. What else?
I think that's about it.
That's a great list of tools. Hey Jen. Hey Jen. there you go. It's been a while, Drake. We haven't heard Hey Jen.
Greg (32:21.53)
We heard it every episode, then it went away. Yeah. We used it, went away, and then here it is, it's back. Yeah. It is amazing though. That's an amazing tool.
Yeah, we're always testing out something or another. Yeah, so the list grows and then decreases
With that list, know what Clint's gonna be doing for the rest of the day.
Yeah, exactly. I'm to be exploring them all.
Greg (32:53.44)
Okay, it's time for this week's AI Challenge. Now the AI Challenge is a takeaway assignment for our listeners to get their hands on some AI tools and do some exercises.
This week's AI challenge was suggested by our guest today. We're going to go ahead and create a custom GPT and make that into a focus group based upon your ideal customer profile, where you can run ideas against that focus group and get feedback based upon who your best customers are. So it's going to be a lot of fun taking chat GPT into a whole new direction for us.
Yeah, look down into the show notes and you'll find a link that goes right to the blog. It's got all the instructions that you're gonna need. Now, if you have an AI story and business to share and wanna be on the show, go to www.promptthis.ai, go to the contact us, fill out the form and we'll be in touch with you.
Greg (33:54.028)
This has been a fabulous conversation. mean, you you really, it's so much fun to talk to someone hands on and actually applying it to better performance and better business and, and, and not scared to experiment and work. And those are the people that make it. yeah, so that's been great. So for the listeners, if they want to continue the conversation or ask you some additional questions, where are they, where can they find you?
Yeah, the best place is on LinkedIn. I am the only Emily Maxey on LinkedIn. Last name is spelled M-A-X-I-E. And yeah, that's the best place to find me.
Standing in your company.
Firm360, our website is myfirm360.com.
Well, Emily, we really appreciated having you on the show today. That was very insightful. Learned a lot of great new stuff myself. I think our audience did as well. That was a lot of fun. Thank you, Emily.
Emily Maxie (34:53.803)
I had a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.
And that's another episode of Prompt This.
AI Announcer (35:04.61)
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