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JD Jeanne DeWitt Grosser Jeanne DeWitt Grosser On Marketing Against The Grain

“At the outset, we arguably let the agent take the wheel too much. We gave it full drafting rights, which we ended up pulling back on, because we realized, I don't really want Claude deciding my value prop.”

Marketing Against The Grain · Media & Creator Economy · November 2026

“At the outset, we arguably let the agent take the wheel too much. We gave it full drafting rights, which we ended up pulling back on, because we realized, I don't really want Claude deciding my value prop.” — Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Marketing Against The Grain

Context

Kieran Flanagan asked what worked and what didn't when Vercel built a prospecting agent. Vercel's COO says agents now do the research while carefully written templates carry the positioning.

Transcript

Marketing Against The Grain Around 02:15 into the episode
Speaker 2

Awesome. I'm thrilled to be here.

Kieran Flanagan

…but like prospecting agent, because I think you all have had a bunch of success there. You have a whole wealth of experience in selling as well. And I kind of just want to kind of ask what worked, what didn't work, and kind of what did you learn trying to instrument a prospecting agent at Vercel?

Speaker 2

At the outset, we arguably let the agent take the wheel too much. And so we sort of gave it full drafting rights, which we ended up pulling back on because we sort of realized like, I don't really want Claude deciding my value prop, right? Like

Kieran Flanagan

that's kind of

Speaker 2

my job as a go-to-market organization. And so we now intermix much more, let the agent do research, but let it then use templates that, you know, we just like classical, you know, sales and marketing, we have carefully crafted that ensure that we're capturing the right value prop and positioning…

Kieran Flanagan

Okay. So today it's a fully fledged prospecting agent. It qualifies your inbound demand, reaches out and tries to book a meeting with a rep. And a couple of the things you learned actually are pretty interesting in that you kind of didn't want AI deciding how to pitch. And so you kind of…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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