There’s a quiet risk I see with teams that overtrust AI: hallucination cascades.

One model invents a detail. Another tool builds on it. A third turns it into something polished and persuasive. And suddenly, decisions are being made on top of something that was never true.

It often starts innocently. You ask one tool to summarize a trend report. Feed that summary into another to shape a campaign idea. Then use a third to turn it into a sales deck.

If the first output was wrong, everything downstream is built on sand.

That’s a hallucination cascade. And it’s dangerous.

AI tools don’t cross-check each other. They compound errors. So if you’re stacking tools, your oversight has to stack too. Validate the foundation before you build anything on top of it.

Bottom line: don’t just review the final output. Audit the inputs that created it. One hallucination can multiply faster than you think.

Contact Us:

Email: podcast@stringcaninteractive.com

Website: www.stringcaninteractive.com

Reach out to the hosts on LinkedIn:

Jay Feitlinger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayfeitlinger/

Sarah Shepard: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahshepardcoo/

Buy the Revenue Rewired book: https://www.amazon.com/Revenue-Rewired-Identify-Leaks-Costing-ebook/dp/B0FST7JCXQ

Your sales team is sitting on a goldmine of customer insights. And your marketing team will probably never see any of it.

In this episode of Revenue Rewired, Jay Feitlinger and Sarah Shepard tackle the persistent gap between what sales knows and what marketing actually gets to work with. Inspired by a real conversation Sarah had with a sales leader who admitted he writes his own materials because "marketing doesn't get it," they dig into why this keeps happening and what companies can actually do about it.

Jay brings the sales perspective: asking salespeople to fill out forms, attend extra meetings, or log insights into the CRM is never going to happen. Sarah brings the marketing side: there are ways to extract that gold without burdening sales at all. Together, they walk through practical, low friction solutions that are working right now.

What you'll learn:

• Why salespeople go rogue on messaging and what it really says about your alignment
• The brutal truth about asking sales to "just fill out a form" for marketing
• How AI meeting recording tools like Fathom and CallRail can feed marketing insights without adding a single task to your sales team's plate
• Why your CRM is probably a swamp and how that kills the information bridge between departments
• How to use website analytics, FAQ heat mapping, and chatbot data to learn from customers without touching sales
• Why the old one way bridge from sales to marketing needs to become an infinity loop
• How showing salespeople the revenue impact of shared insights is the only way to earn their buy in

Key insight from this episode: Stop trying to push rope uphill. If you want sales insights flowing to marketing, remove the friction, show the money, and build systems that do the heavy lifting so your salespeople never have to.

About Revenue Rewired:

Revenue Rewired is a podcast for B2B marketers, sales leaders, and business owners navigating the intersection of sales and marketing. Hosted by Jay Feitlinger and Sarah Shepard, each episode delivers actionable insights for mid market companies looking to grow revenue strategically.

Contact Us:

Email: podcast@stringcaninteractive.com

Website: www.stringcaninteractive.com

Reach out to the hosts on LinkedIn:

Jay Feitlinger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayfeitlinger/

Sarah Shepard: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahshepardcoo/

Buy the Revenue Rewired book: https://www.amazon.com/Revenue-Rewired-Identify-Leaks-Costing-ebook/dp/B0FST7JCXQ

Keywords: sales and marketing alignment, CRM, sales insights, customer intelligence, B2B marketing, lead quality, Fathom, CallRail, AI sales tools, revenue operations, mid market growth, sales enablement, marketing strategy, ROI, marketing tactics, business scaling, sales strategies

AI is excellent at processing content. It’s far less capable of processing conflict.

I was working with a team reviewing customer feedback using AI. The model neatly summarized the themes, grouped the insights, and surfaced patterns. It did exactly what it’s good at.

What it missed was the tension underneath. The friction between marketing and product. Who was under pressure. Who had influence. Who was quietly fighting for budget or ownership.

AI doesn’t see that layer. It treats every input as neutral. It doesn’t read the room. And in most organizations, that’s where the real signal lives.

So if you’re using AI to support leadership decisions, remember this: it can organize the noise, but it can’t interpret the undercurrent.

That part is still on you. The dynamics. The stakes. The nuance that never shows up in a prompt or a transcript.

Bottom line: AI can summarize the data, but only humans can decode the politics. Context isn’t in the input. It’s in the room.

Contact Us:

Email: podcast@stringcaninteractive.com

Website: www.stringcaninteractive.com

Reach out to the hosts on LinkedIn:

Jay Feitlinger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayfeitlinger/

Sarah Shepard: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahshepardcoo/

Buy the Revenue Rewired book: https://www.amazon.com/Revenue-Rewired-Identify-Leaks-Costing-ebook/dp/B0FST7JCXQ

Think customer loyalty comes from going above and beyond? The research says otherwise.

In this episode of Revenue Rewired, Jay Feitlinger and Sarah Shepard share insights from their company book club read, The Effortless Experience, and why meeting expectations consistently beats delighting customers. They break down real examples of how small friction points cost businesses big money and introduce the "big P, little P" framework that changes how you think about customer preferences.

What you'll learn:

• What "big P, little P" means: big P is your customer's fundamental preference about your product or service, little P is how they prefer the transaction to happen
• Why delighting customers doesn't actually move the needle on loyalty, but meeting expectations consistently does
• How one extra click, one repeated phone call, or one unnecessary step can be the straw that breaks the customer's back
• Why companies build processes that work for their back end systems but create friction for customers
• How a roofer lost a major job by asking the customer to climb on the roof and take measurements himself
• Why the bare minimum expectation at a medical facility was simply "don't kill me" and what that reveals about customer priorities
• The questions every department should ask: Are we easy to find? Easy to buy from? Easy to work with? Easy to pay?

Key insight from this episode: The friction that seems small to you is often huge to your customer. Before investing in ways to delight customers, make sure you're not failing them on the basics.

About Revenue Rewired:

Revenue Rewired is a podcast for B2B marketers, sales leaders, and business owners navigating the intersection of sales and marketing. Hosted by Jay Feitlinger and Sarah Shepard, each episode delivers actionable insights for mid market companies looking to grow revenue strategically.

Effortless Experience: https://www.amazon.com/Effortless-Experience-Conquering-Battleground-Customer/dp/1591845815

Contact Us:

Email: podcast@stringcaninteractive.com

Website: www.stringcaninteractive.com

Reach out to the hosts on LinkedIn:

Jay Feitlinger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayfeitlinger/

Sarah Shepard: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahshepardcoo/

Buy the Revenue Rewired book: https://www.amazon.com/Revenue-Rewired-Identify-Leaks-Costing-ebook/dp/B0FST7JCXQ

Keywords: customer experience, customer loyalty, effortless experience, customer friction, B2B customer service, customer expectations, customer retention, sales and marketing alignment, mid market growth, revenue operations, book club, customer preferences, business growth

Let’s name a blind spot most people miss: AI doesn’t reach for brilliance. It reaches for what’s most common.

Language models don’t start with the breakthrough idea or the edge case. They start with what they’ve seen the most. They predict the next word based on frequency, not originality.

So when you ask for blog titles or campaign ideas and everything comes back flat, the tool isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Safe ideas are statistically efficient. That’s why prompts like “Give me five LinkedIn hooks” keep producing the same recycled openers you’ve already seen a hundred times.

The fix isn’t better prompting, it’s pressure.

Add constraints. Make it argue with itself. Feed it your recent work and tell it to avoid every repeated phrase. Ask for the second-best idea and force it to explain why.

Think of AI like a smart but distracted strategist. It needs direction and resistance to move past the obvious.

Bottom line: AI defaults to average. If you want original thinking, you have to push it beyond “good enough” because that’s all it will give you if you let it coast.

Contact Us:

Email: podcast@stringcaninteractive.com

Website: www.stringcaninteractive.com

Reach out to the hosts on LinkedIn:

Jay Feitlinger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayfeitlinger/

Sarah Shepard: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahshepardcoo/

Buy the Revenue Rewired book: https://www.amazon.com/Revenue-Rewired-Identify-Leaks-Costing-ebook/dp/B0FST7JCXQ

Everyone says they're using AI. Very few can point to what it's actually done for pipeline.

In this episode of Revenue Rewired, Jay Feitlinger and Sarah Shepard share what their agency is actually building and deploying with B2B clients right now: AI consulting, AI audits, and AI driven ABM. Not theory. Real work that's been tested internally for over three years before rolling it out to clients.

What you'll learn:

• How AI consulting works: using custom GPTs and strategic prompts to turn years of client data into a Vision Brief that guides real recommendations
• What an AI audit actually uncovers and how it helps leaders see where they're missing opportunities before competitors pull ahead
• How AI agents are transforming ABM by validating ideal prospects automatically, taking lead quality from 10% valid to 90%
• Why one marketer thought his Google Ads were broken when 90% of the issue was untracked traffic from ChatGPT and AI search
• Where AI hits its ceiling: memory limits, repeated outputs, computing power, and how to push through it
• Why ignoring AI now is like ignoring Google Ads when it first launched

Key insight from this episode: The companies winning with AI aren't using more tools. They're feeding the right data into the right systems and asking better questions.

About Revenue Rewired:

Revenue Rewired is a podcast for B2B marketers, sales leaders, and business owners navigating the intersection of sales and marketing. Hosted by Jay Feitlinger and Sarah Shepard, each episode delivers actionable insights for mid market companies looking to grow revenue strategically.

AI Readiness Assessment here: https://stringcaninteractive.com/ai-marketing-services

Contact Us:

Email: podcast@stringcaninteractive.com

Website: www.stringcaninteractive.com

Reach out to the hosts on LinkedIn:

Jay Feitlinger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayfeitlinger/

Sarah Shepard: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahshepardcoo/

Buy the Revenue Rewired book: https://www.amazon.com/Revenue-Rewired-Identify-Leaks-Costing-ebook/dp/B0FST7JCXQ

Keywords: sales targets, revenue goals, sales leadership, quota setting, annual planning, sales team morale, B2B sales strategy, sales and marketing alignment, mid market growth, sales management, employee retention, revenue operations

AI is already sitting in your meetings. It’s taking notes. Summarizing conversations. Sending follow ups.

On paper, that sounds like a win. In reality, behavior shifts the moment people know they’re being recorded.

They choose words more carefully. They soften opinions. They hold back half formed ideas.

One client told me their brainstorms lost energy once AI joined the call. Not because the tech failed, but because the transcript felt permanent.

AI note takers can be powerful, but only if psychological safety stays intact.

If you run meetings, set the ground rules. Be clear about what’s captured and what’s off the record.

Because trust still beats documentation every time.

Bottom line: AI can support collaboration, but if you’re not careful, it can quietly shut it down.

Contact Us:

Email: podcast@stringcaninteractive.com

Website: www.stringcaninteractive.com

Reach out to the hosts on LinkedIn:

Jay Feitlinger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayfeitlinger/

Sarah Shepard: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahshepardcoo/

Buy the Revenue Rewired book: https://www.amazon.com/Revenue-Rewired-Identify-Leaks-Costing-ebook/dp/B0FST7JCXQ

Raising revenue targets sounds like progress. Until deals slow down, morale drops, and your strongest people quietly start disengaging.

In this episode of Revenue Rewired, Jay Feitlinger and Sarah Shepard unpack why increasing revenue goals without changing the system behind them often costs far more than it delivers. Sparked by a real story from inside a sales organization, the conversation moves past quotas and pressure and into what actually breaks when leaders ask for more without addressing capacity, enablement, and flow.

They explore how unrealistic targets create invisible friction across sales, marketing, and operations. From ghost handoffs between teams to burnout leaders do not see until it is too late, this episode pulls apart the assumption that pressure equals performance. You will hear why volume is often mistaken for progress, how quality gets lost in the middle, and what intentional planning really looks like when revenue goals are meant to be achievable.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why raising revenue targets without removing barriers slows growth instead of accelerating it
• How the ghost handoff quietly drains momentum between marketing, sales, and delivery
• What happens to culture and performance when teams are asked to do more with less
• How strong leaders work backward from targets to tools, capacity, and accountability
• Why revenue growth is a systems challenge, not a motivation issue

If you are a CRO, CEO, or revenue leader responsible for aggressive growth goals, this episode will help you see the real cost of how targets are set and what needs to change before the bar gets raised again.

Key quote from this episode: "Goals without resourcing are just pressure." – Sarah Shepard

Whether you're a sales leader setting quotas, a founder planning for growth, or a rep trying to make sense of aggressive targets, this episode offers practical strategies to align your revenue goals with reality.

Mentioned in this episode:

Revenue Rewired book by Jay Feitlinger (foreword by Verne Harnish)

The 5 revenue bottlenecks framework

Lencioni's Working Genius and the concept of "galvanizing" teams

About Revenue Rewired:

Revenue Rewired is a podcast for B2B marketers, sales leaders, and business owners navigating the intersection of sales and marketing. Hosted by Jay Feitlinger and Sarah Shepard, each episode delivers actionable insights for mid market companies looking to grow revenue strategically.

Contact Us:

Email: podcast@stringcaninteractive.com

Website: www.stringcaninteractive.com

Reach out to the hosts on LinkedIn:

Jay Feitlinger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayfeitlinger/

Sarah Shepard: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahshepardcoo/

Buy the Revenue Rewired book: https://www.amazon.com/Revenue-Rewired-Identify-Leaks-Costing-ebook/dp/B0FST7JCXQ

Keywords: sales targets, revenue goals, sales leadership, quota setting, annual planning, sales team morale, B2B sales strategy, sales and marketing alignment, mid market growth, sales management, employee retention, revenue operations