Are your buyers building shortlists with AI before they ever talk to your sales team?
In this episode of Connect To Market, host Casey Cheshire sits down with Melissa Beck, VP of Corporate Marketing at Sumo Logic, to explore how marketers can connect to their market by staying “relentlessly close” to the buyer journey as AI reshapes how prospects discover, research, and decide. Beck makes the case that buyers increasingly use AI tools, communities, peer recommendations, analyst reports, and review sites to form shortlists before engaging any vendor, making AI visibility and presence in the right channels critical for any company that wants to stay in the conversation.
Beck walks through how Sumo Logic is responding, from experimenting with tools like Profound to measure AI visibility to investing in organization-wide AI proficiency through an internal AI marketing summit and collaborative sharing of prompts and projects. She shares practical use cases including using AI for analyst report comparisons and building agents like a “brand guardian” workflow, while emphasizing that human connection and storytelling still matter because people buy from people. Beck also reflects on her path from aspiring journalist to comms and marketing leader, shaped by teamwork, curiosity, and continuous learning.
In this episode, we cover:
Why buyers are forming shortlists using AI tools, communities, and peer recommendations before ever engaging a vendor, and what that means for marketing’s role
How Sumo Logic measures AI visibility with tools like Profound and why tracking your presence in AI-generated answers is now a marketing priority
Building organization-wide AI proficiency through internal summits, collaborative prompt sharing, and practical agent workflows like a “brand guardian”
Why human connection and storytelling remain irreplaceable competitive advantages even as AI transforms every other part of the marketing stack
If you’re a B2B marketing leader wondering where your buyers are actually spending time and whether your brand is showing up in the AI-driven research channels that matter, Beck’s framework for staying relentlessly close to the evolving buyer journey is the strategic reset your team needs.
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Connect with Melissa:
Sumo Logic: https://www.sumologic.com/
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