How People Data Labs Uses AI to Accelerate MarOps

How PDL Replaced a Patchwork Stack with One AI-Native Platform — and Made Ops Feel Like a Team of 10

PDL helps customers solve problems with data. As a data-as-a-service company, their buyer base is wildly diverse — spanning industries, company sizes, and use cases. That breadth makes marketing uniquely challenging: when you could talk to almost anybody, personalization isn't optional. It's survival.

Korey Beaver is the marketing operations manager responsible for making that personalization real — fast, at scale, and without a team of 10 behind him.

THE CHALLENGE

A revolving door of MAPs that never fit

PDL's marketing ops journey started on Pardot. About a year in, the team decided to switch to Marketo — a move Korey had reservations about from the start.

Marketo didn't deliver. The platform felt bloated, rigid, and poorly suited for the kind of fast, personalized campaigns PDL's diverse audience demanded. Korey started exploring alternatives, but the bigger enterprise MAPs felt like more of the same.

The question stopped being "which MAP has the most features" and became something more pointed: is there a tool that's actually built for the kind of ops person I am?

THE SOLUTION

An AI-native closed-loss nurture that builds itself

Korey found Conversion and immediately saw the difference. Instead of stitching together segments, templates, and triggers across multiple tools, he could build personalized workflows in one place — with AI doing the heavy lifting.

The first major build: a fully automated closed-loss nurture sequence.

Salesforce data piped in: Closed-lost opportunities and their associated contact data flow directly into Conversion, keeping the nurture list current without manual exports or syncs.

Gong transcripts layered on: Call transcripts from lost deals are pulled into Conversion, giving the platform real context about why each deal didn't close — objections, timing concerns, competitive mentions.

AI-generated email copy: Conversion takes both inputs and generates personalized marketing emails tailored to each contact's situation. No copywriter bottleneck. No generic "just checking in" drip.

Fully automated end-to-endThe entire sequence runs without manual intervention. Salesforce data changes, Gong transcripts update, and the nurture adapts — all on its own.

THE EXPERIENCE

Built for ops people, not against them

What stood out to Korey wasn't just the AI capabilities. It was how the platform felt to use day-to-day.

Segmentation and personalization that used to take hours could be spun up in minutes. Workflows were intuitive to build and easy to iterate on. The platform didn't fight him — it matched the speed he wanted to operate at.

For Korey, Conversion solved a problem that went beyond any single campaign: it gave a one-person ops function the output of a much larger team. He could focus on the strategic work he loved about marketing without sacrificing execution quality or coverage.

"I feel like Conversion is the marketing automation tool for the kind of ops person that I am. It's going to allow me to focus on the thing that I love about marketing, but not at the expense of being able to run what feels like a team of 10 ops people — really just from one person using one tool."

THE OUTCOME

One person. One tool. Full-team output.

With Conversion, PDL consolidated a fragmented stack into a single AI-native platform — and unlocked a level of campaign sophistication that wasn't possible before.

1 ops person running campaigns that previously required a full team across tools
‍100% automated closed-loss nurture pulling from Salesforce and Gong with AI-generated copy
‍3 tools consolidated from Lead scoring + Marketo + manual processes into one platform
‍Zero manual email writing for the entire closed-loss nurture sequence

The closed-loss nurture is just the beginning. For Korey, Conversion represents a shift in what's possible for lean ops teams: instead of choosing between doing more and doing it well, you can do both.

"We're moving into the era where you want to switch to the one tool that can do mostly everything, and for us, that is Conversion."