Why Buyers Disappear Internally

Matt Wilkinsson 0:00

I think there's a huge opportunity to be really thinking about how do we advertise to the boss.

Customer Presence Versus Customer Data

Joeri Billast 0:06

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories Podcast. My name is Joeri Billast. I'm your podcast host. And today I'm happy to have Matt on the podcast. Hi Matt, how are you? I'm good. How are you doing? I'm really good. The sun is shining outside. You have seen it yourself in the beginning of the month. And if you're not wondering who am I speaking with, today I'm speaking to Matt Wilkinson. He's an AI marketing strategist building life sciences authority that generates demand. That's I see on your LinkedIn headline, which is quite clear. And also, you mentioned Persona AI Creator. We will come back to that later in the conversations today, Matt. As my guests know, my listeners know too. I dive straight in. So we already know each other for some time. You were, like I said, at the retreat in the beginning of the month. You often say that companies don't have a customer understanding problem, but a customer presence problem. Where exactly does the buyer disappear inside most organizations?

Matt Wilkinsson 1:15

Well, I think actually in the systems that they use to collect the data about the customers first and foremost. So it can be whether you've got voice of customer, it ends up in a folder. If you've got the CRM, it sits in a CRM. And what I think so few organizations really do is turn that all of that data into real insight that can be used throughout every process. Very often, what I see is that the people that are responsible for signing off on content actually have the least insight into what the customers' wants and needs are. And so we really find that different people along that process want to put different claims in, want to change things, soften things, and it all moves the decisions about what is communicated, how it's communicated, away from what the buyer really needs.

Organizational Gravity And Safe Messaging

Joeri Billast 2:06

Okay, that makes sense. You also talk about organizational gravity. When you describe organizational gravity, what is the moment where good strategy quietly turns into average messaging?

Matt Wilkinsson 2:22

Well, it it's where all of a sudden the organization it's so difficult to move the organization. And so rather than, you know, if you imagine that you're trying to send a rocket to the moon, just like recently happened, you've got to have that escape velocity to be able to get that messaging out into the world. And so often what happens is the gravity that the organization has means that the messaging just pulls it back into low earth orbit, which means that it's using the same wording, the same language, it's safe, it's exactly what the company needs and wants, and it doesn't move the company, but it's not doesn't ever reach the customer, which in this analogy or metaphor is the moon. But that's really where organizational gravity kind of just stops everything from really landing with the customer.

Joeri Billast 3:10

And so if someone is listening now and they recognize this in their own company, what is the first signal that tells them their marketing is already drifting away from the buyer?

Matt Wilkinsson 3:23

So I think the first signal is really that you've got a lot of research. And if you compare the research and the understanding and what comes out of that in terms of creative, in terms of the campaigns that are proposed versus what actually gets delivered and lands, and sort of the response rates, the way that the marketing team is able to execute, and the commercial team therefore doesn't get the results it needs from its sales conversations. Those are some of the big signals. I think you can see that early when sales are having early conversations with their customers and they stop using the materials that marketing are providing. So I think there's some really obvious signals that show that rather than everybody pulling in the same direction and everything really being aligned with what the customer needs, you've got this drift. And so all of a sudden, what marketing has tried to really dig into and craft diligently to meet customer needs, organization gravity has pulled that away from the customer, pulled it back internally so it's safe. And then sales are finding that what they actually need is something completely different.

Persona AI Keeps Buyers Present

Joeri Billast 4:30

Absolutely. And now you build persona AI to keep the buyer in the room. What fundamentally changed in the last few years that made this possible now and not before?

Matt Wilkinsson 4:45

Well, generative AI is what happened. And when Gen AI first came out, yeah, it was a it was a fun toy to be able to play with and write some content. But it wasn't really until sort of GPT-4 and 4.0 came out and the ability to create custom GPTs that I realized that you could take Persona and start using them and creating Persona councils in a custom GPT and really engaging with them as if they were manifestations of your customer. And then as that journey went on, deep research started to allow us to get into the minds of our customer by sort of looking at LinkedIn profiles and other profiles of our customer on social media, by looking at the questions that people are asking on social media, by looking at their brand sentiment around your brands and other brands. And then being able to build a really big picture of what is the digital footprint that our customers might be leaving behind, and how can we interrogate that? And then, of course, we can take that even further by logical extension. We can then add in voice of customer that we've captured as part of interviews, we can add in interview transcripts, we can add in even quantitative research and get that direction of where how would people answer those questions? And so, really being able to build up a big picture of who our customers are. And then because these are not just static persona documents that are often either really, really thin or too bulky to read, you can create these using generative AI and turn them into chatbots that you can talk to. And so you can imagine that you're going through a marketing approval process, an obvious case study here. And marketing's created content probably with the help of one of these Persona AI tools. So they've kept their eye on the customer needs and wants that they've already understood. And as you go through that process, I work in the Life Sciences, so there's quite often a number of steps, a number of people regulatory wanting specific claims to be involved. There might even be legal reviews, other people in the marketing team wanting to make sure that they've left a little bit of red pen on the messaging as well. Making sure that you're actually at each stage able to come back and query, what does that do to the way that our understanding of the customer would change? And so it's not perfect, but it allows us to at least keep the buyer in the room for a lot longer. And it because these AI tools can follow the process alongs, you know, can walk alongside the process, it really feels like they're there with you in the process. And you can update them based on the information you get from the market. So it becomes a much more iterative process where you're always trying to make sure that what you're learning about your customer is involved in every decision you're making and how you communicate with them.

Joeri Billast 7:38

I read your LinkedIn article about synthetic customer. You haven't mentioned it yet. I think that's also what you're talking about. How do you define the concept of synthetic customer?

Matt Wilkinsson 7:50

Well, it's not my definition, so but synthetic customers were proposed early on in the days of generative AI by a number of researchers from the likes of Stanford, Harvard, and Cornell, and a few others. And really what they were looking at is in the first instance, they looked to use the data that was already within the large language model to create representation to customers. So the standard operates as a whatever kind of persona, and they were very, you know, able to create some very, very powerful responses and sort of correlations between how real populations would respond to certain questions versus others. And of course, those are sort of what they would call ungrounded synthetic customers. What I've been trying to do is to add onto that with a lot of context to really be a bigger contextual picture of your customer as possible, on top of what's already in the model, to really guide those answers towards the sort of responses that your customers are likely to give you.

Joeri Billast 8:54

Okay, so I understand it's an iterative process, you already mentioned that. To be sure that you know the synthetic customer really reflects the real buyer instead of becoming a polished internal echo chamber. You already mentioned a bit about that, but do you want to add something?

Avoiding AI Sycophancy And Overreliance

Matt Wilkinsson 9:12

Yeah, so I think the important thing there is to then test. You know, we don't want to create, you know, I come from a science background, so everything needs to be, you know, start with a hypothesis that we can do this and we can get better responses, you know, if we do this. I ran an account-based marketing campaign for a client, and this was to a list of unknown, you know, cold emails of those that didn't go through, although those that we could get through, could never guarantee the quality of the list that you get hold of. They were all GDP GDPR compliant, of course. Was able to send emails out and get for 44% engagement rate with those that actually got through to the system, and got delivered a staggeringly large number of marketing-qualified leads through that process. And that was because the way that we'd architected the journeys were based on these persona, these persona AI. Uh, the content was specific to them, and we were really able to tailor these different parts of these campaigns to very specific personas and answer the questions that they were likely to be asking. And that to me says the comparator is with the opt-in email newsletter, where actually we were getting higher open rates and better engagement rates than the people that were opting in to the newsletter themselves. Now I know it's an email blast rather than something that somebody signed up for once and maybe has got bored of after a while. But this is just, I think, just goes to show that being able to use these, I mean, that's a great case of proof point. But over time, what you would look to do is here's the process, and I would never say that we should stop getting the voice of customer. So if you're putting together a big marketing campaign, if you were going to do voice of customer and then message testing at the end, make sure that you're doing the message testing with your Persona AI, your synthetic customer, and then also see how well it replicates with the real life customers as well. And if you get good correlation, great. If not, go back and feed that data back in because that becomes extra data to enrich the way that your synthetic customer responds. And so that's why I say it's iterative. You've got to always be learning. But hopefully, what we can do is to build better and better pictures of our customers so that we can actually make sure that one, we're building the discipline of always speaking to our customers, and two, we're building the discipline of iterating and building these, but keeping that message with the process, you know, and with the customer sort of message all the way through that process.

Joeri Billast 11:42

Yeah, it sounds uh really great, and you make me think, of course, of uh all these other questions. Now, you and I, and a lot of my listeners, we get a lot of messages, you know, on LinkedIn on our email box. So you say you are iteratively working on it, so you know what their frustrations are or what they are thinking about, what their problems are. But yeah, where you have seen teams misuse this approach and actually move further away from their customers instead of closer. That's an interesting question I would like to ask.

Matt Wilkinsson 12:16

So I I don't know that I've necessarily seen teams move away. This is, you know, we're still in the early days of for this sort of technology, but the big danger is I think it's two big dangers. One is how you interrogate the AI. So we've got to always be careful and aware of AI sycophansy. So if we ask the wrong questions, we're gonna get bad answers out. So that's one thing that's really important to stress. The other is it is very easy to rely too much on what the AI tells us and not enough on what the customer signals are. And so that's something that I'm very conscious to avoid for myself. It's very cop, you know, something I'm very conscious to talk to clients about when delivering these to make sure that yes, these are fantastic tools that really help us to give other perspectives, to make sure that we're asking, and to actually help us create and interrogate our ideas. We've got to be really careful to make sure that we never get rid of the real customer in the loop. And that's something that I'm really passionate about. This should be additive to any of those customer touch points, really to help us increase the amount of presence the customer has as part of any of our marketing processes. We shouldn't be doing research six months ago, creating marketing strategies, campaigns, going into the market, and then when it doesn't work at the end, only then thinking, well, what did we get wrong from the research? And that's really the gap that I'm really passionate about trying to solve.

Joeri Billast 14:38

Yeah, I love that. I know that you're also working on writing a book. I don't know if I can ask this question, Matt, but do you want to share something about it or is it still too early?

Matt Wilkinsson 14:49

It's probably a little bit too early to share too much, but the book is on a lot of what we've spoken about already, and I'm hoping to be able to announce something in the next month or so about when I'm gonna be able to launch it. Amazing. Well, no, I just you've got the cat out of the bag already. So yes, there's a book on the way.

Joeri Billast 15:09

Another question I have because it's really interesting, you know, these personas. This is what I, as a fractional CMO, of course, also want to do, you know, start with the customer in mind and see, you know, uh draft a persona. But in B2B has complex environments where you have multiple stakeholders that are involved, and that's often a challenge, of course. How realistic is it today to model an entire an entire buying committee?

Marketing For AI Agents And Trust

Matt Wilkinsson 15:39

So I think it the difference is maybe between trying to model the entire buying committee, and we know that buying groups have got more and more complex, even since COVID. Gartner research from some years ago said that buying groups are between seven and twelve in size, they maybe even up to twenty, depending on the complexity of the product or the service. What I always try to do is to model the roles and to make sure that you're addressing the key buying roles within the decision-making unit. So that might be the users, the instigators, the decision makers, finance, procurement, the different roles then to make sure that you're being able to look at what our messages are to make sure that we're on the on one hand, making sure that we've got the right architecture in place so that we support those people that are going to be our champions to help deliver messaging to other people. So you can imagine that if I've got, I know I've I've I'm the person in an organization that's recognized that I've got a problem. You know, I reach out to you, Joeri, and you tell me, well, I can do X, Y, and Z. I've got to bring that back in and I've got to sell it internally. So how do I make sure that I've got the materials that procurement needs, that finance needs? And then complex B2B sales, they'll have really, really great conversations and it ends up in sort of this black hole internally. And you'll hear sales saying, Well, it's great until procurement get involved. And the question then is, why is procurement the blocker? So that means that you then need to go in and understand more about the procurement people in your process and understand what it is you need to do. You're addressing their concerns, their needs, and that you that you streamline their buying journey as well as the others. Because in the world that I work in, you know, the technology, fantastic. You know, if I can deliver benefits for scientists, brilliant. But if procurement come along and say, well, hey, where's your anti-slavery policy? And what's your sustainability like? What's your supply chain like? And you can't answer those questions or those those the answers to those questions don't meet their requirement, they're not gonna buy from you. Just like if procurement, if it's really hard for procurement to place an order with you, they're gonna go with the lower, you know, it might be more expensive, it might be slightly less efficacious, but they're gonna just people are just gonna default to what's easier. So you really have to be looking at what are what do all of the people in that group need? How do you meet their needs? And and so I think that you can really look at that, bring these persona together within a single environment and actually get them to simulate what it might be like in a buying group. Is it gonna be perfect? Absolutely not. But is it gonna give you insights of the sorts of things that you need to make sure that you are covering? Yes. And every time I've done this, people come away going, I've never thought of this, this, or this. And when they bring those changes in, it always seems to make a bigger difference than they expect.

Joeri Billast 18:38

Yeah, well, sounds wonderful. Of course, AI is not only part of the process on the side of marketing and sales, but also on the buyer side. Um, and then the question is we all also discussed this uh in CINTA, but are we now optimizing for human understanding or increasingly for machine interpretation as marketers?

Matt Wilkinsson 19:04

Yeah, I think we have to really consider the AI as at least an extra decision maker. Yeah. First, we've got this we've got this phenomenon called citation compression. So if you're not one of the top four or five uh named organizations, if you do a deep research search, you're not likely to come up in any searches anyway. So there's a there are fewer results that you get that the AI recommends to you if you're using deep research as part of your process to investigate a solution to a problem, compared with Google, where you've got tens, hundreds of pages to deep of results. The difference there is that in Google the long tail of results still exists, even if people don't go much past page one. Whereas in the you know, in in the AI world, that that extra that long tail doesn't really exist unless you really deeply probe it. Um that's where you know our mutual friend and an inspiration with Mark Schaefer would sort of say that brand is the ultimate override. So you have to be able to make sure that if you don't turn up in a result, somebody says, that's strange. Why isn't Joeri in that conversation? And all of a sudden it will be it'll give you an answer and you go, Yeah, but X, Y, and Z, and then you'll be able to bring them into that group. So that's the first piece. The second is that you know, I think it's 90% of all B2B sales now involve Gen AI at some point, and a lot of that, and buying I should say, and a lot of that is for organizations creating their own buyers' guides, but also looking at the information they receive and comparing and contrasting it. So we have to make sure that everything we provide is machine readable, that it's easy to understand, that it's clear. And so making sure that we're really focused on not just our human customers, but also our AI customers as well, really makes a big difference. It's a bit like why I believe that Meta bought Maltbook, the social media site that was created by yeah, the the Clawbot, the the the sort of the agentic system that was created not too long ago, I got a bit tied up because it kept changing its name. That got that that got brought up by OpenAI. Meta bought the social media platform where all of these agents were engaging with each other. And I really believe that Meta bought that to advertise to the agents. And so you can imagine that if Facebook is no longer somewhere that people are actively using and dying off, and you're struggling to monetize attention. With the AIs, you've got to have somewhere where you can get their attention. And if there is a social media site for AI agents, then advertising to them is likely to do great things for your customers, or for their customers at least. So, yeah, I think there's a huge opportunity to be really thinking about how do we advertise to the bots.

Joeri Billast 21:59

Yeah. And this brings us to another important point. You are one of the early readers of my book, The Future CMO. I also did a TEDx talk about that. And for me, the word trust is important. You also talk about that, about authority being selected by the algorithms you mentioned already our friend Mark Schaeff with personal branding, and maybe this is already the answer. But how should marketers think about building trust when the first impression happens inside an AI instead of on the website?

Matt Wilkinsson 22:32

Yeah, I mean it's a difficult one because things change so quickly that a response today is likely to be wrong tomorrow. But the way that I believe that human nature works is that one people buy from people and people buy from people they like. So, first of all, how do we make sure that we're in front of the people that we want to sell to and in a place where they can learn to know, like, and trust us? So, personal branding's part. Of that, and I really believe that being in the room is even more important now than it ever has been. So being able to look somebody in the whites of their eyes and not just over a screen but actually in person. I think that's really you know gonna be coming increasingly important. The other thing though, I think, is that recognizing that AI exists and recognizing that people are their buying habits and their buying processes are changing, making sure that we architect those journeys so that the parts of the journey that they're comfortable with AI using are answered by AI, but making sure it's really easy to get hold of a human being as well. So AI should be additive and it should solve problems as part of a process, but it should never replace the human. That's something that I really strongly believe in. That've been doing some research with a friend of mine, Professor Morris Singer, University of North Northwest Texas. We've been looking into a bit of a phenomenon called the AI wall as part of what we're doing, where people just end up going in circles around and around with AI chatbots, where really what they want to do is to actually get to a point where either the AI has agency to solve the problem for them, and often they don't, or it has the ability to flag this to a human being and to move this forward in another way. And so I think we've got to be really careful to make sure that we're providing great customer experience. AI can be part of that, but it shouldn't be the sole purpose, not unless the AI has complete agency to make decisions. And we already know how dangerous that is when airlines have already found that applying chatbots to their websites have already landed them in the situation where what responses have been deemed the legal response because they are deemed to be an agent of the organization. So we have to be very, very careful as to where do we apply AI and how do we use it?

Joeri Billast 24:51

Now, Sinter Synergies is still in my head, of course, Matt. After we met there, you and Charlotte were there. We had some great conversations around AI marketing, around human connection. Is there anything that you took away that changed your thinking after those discussions?

Matt Wilkinsson 25:09

Yeah, there's been a lot that's really changed. It gave me a lot of impetus. One to refocus the book a little bit. Secondly, it's really helped me to look at some of the things that I've been doing with the business and try and refocus in different ways there. So those were two things that were very practical to me. And it was a great event. So thank you for putting on. But I think on a big, you know, on the big picture thing, there was a conversation that you and Mark had. I think it was Mark said that we're all now in the diaper business, where essentially our job is to be selling something to essentially humans, where actually the agent that's involved in the diaper industry, you know, that's the adult, but where the end user, the human being, actually isn't making the decisions anymore. And so I think we have to be careful to understand are we in the diaper business or actually are we still in the old style business? And I think there's going to be a transition from one to the other, and depending on the sort of products or services that you sell, depends on where you sit in that continuum. And so I think there's a really, really interesting kind of shift going to happen. And so that's something that I've been really sort of thinking about well, where do we sit here? And how much of the journey can and should be AI and digital, and how much of this can and should be the human piece. And so for a lot of what I do, I believe it's very much still the human needs to be there because essentially, you know, like like you, where you're you know, where you're often you're working as a fractional CMO, people need to trust that you understand what's going on and that they can trust you to deliver. And that's something that I think is vitally important still. And we've come back again to the word trust.

Joeri Billast 26:46

That's a good moment, you know, at the end of the podcast episodes. Because yeah, the time always goes fast, you know, when I speak with you, Matt. And of course, I imagine if people are hungry to hear more about you or find out more about the work that you are doing, maybe the book that you are writing or going to write, where would you like people to find you?

Matt Wilkinsson 27:08

Yeah, so they can find me on LinkedIn pretty easily. And if you're connected to Joeri already, we're I know we're connected, so I should be easy to find there. Also on our website striven str-iven.com.

Joeri Billast 27:22

Amazing. As my listeners are always show notes, you know the links that you mentioned will be found in there. It was really a pleasure talking to you on my show.

Matt Wilkinsson 27:32

Likewise, Joeri. Thank you for having me. A real honor.

RYO Teaser And Life Wallet Update

Joeri Billast 27:35

Guys, what a brilliant episode. I'm sure that you have people around you that could also benefit from listening to this episode. So be sure to share this episode with them. If you're not yet following the show, this is a really good moment to do this. Hit the subscribe button. If you haven't given me a review yet, if you give me these five stars, this really goes a long way. And of course, I would love to see you back next time. Take care. There is news coming up from Rio. I cannot yet share it, but stay tuned. But what I can say is that the life wallet that is created by Rio, which is a wallet that your grandmother should be able to use, well, that wallet is available on both Apple as Android.