S2 Ep 26: Four Sightings of the Same Missing Person

Speaker: Jasmine [00:01]

Hey Matt.

Speaker: Matt [00:02]

Hey Jasmine, how you doing?

Speaker: Jasmine [00:04]

Good, good. It's still warm and humid here in Virginia.

Speaker: Matt [00:10]

Yeah, it's about twenty four degrees Celsius here in the UK. So what's that, somewhere late seventies, early eighties, I guess. So it's still nice and warm.

Speaker: Jasmine [00:17]

Yeah, something like that. Nice and warm. Okay. Right. Well, hopefully you're having lots of ice cream to keep yourself cool.

Speaker: Matt [00:26]

Well, lots of iced coffee. I have a big cup in a Buc-ee's mug right here.

Speaker: Jasmine [00:34]

Buc-ee's, look at you, brand loyalty there.

Speaker: Matt [00:39]

Well, you know, there's the brand loyalty but also the fact that I'm missing my chicken and waffles in this heat.

Speaker: Jasmine [00:46]

Okay. Fun, fun. So shall we pivot for a second and go to our discussion about the buyer in the loop and the dangers of the buyer leaving the room?

Speaker: Matt [01:03]

Absolutely. Yeah, let's do it.

The four-gap consensus, and why it is one missing person

Speaker: Jasmine [01:06]

Every life science marketing team that I know can recite the four gaps in their sleep. Sales and marketing don't talk to each other, or don't talk enough to each other. The messaging blurs into the next competitor's. Nobody really understands the buyer. And the sales cycle drags because there are eleven stakeholders instead of three.

Say that list often enough in enough boardrooms, and it stops sounding like description and starts sounding like a diagnosis, something you can hand to an agency and get fixed one line item at a time. It isn't a diagnosis, at least not in my experience. It's four sightings of the same missing person, or groups of people.

Here's why that distinction actually matters. 81% of labs walked into this year with a mandate to cut costs, and we're talking mostly about the United States here. Most of them told researchers they'd drop brand loyalty entirely for the cheaper option. At the same time, 67% of B2B buyers now say they'd rather research and decide without a rep anywhere near the process.

Put those two facts next to each other and you get an uncomfortable result. Fixing four separate problems, one workshop at a time, doesn't actually get you any closer to that buyer. Not if there was only ever one thing missing in the first place. And every consultancy in this industry has spent years treating the symptoms as four unrelated diseases, so to speak.

The story behind the reframe

Speaker: Jasmine [02:57]

So you, Matt, have spent some time pulling that four-gap consensus apart and did it in about one sentence. Before I let you defend that sentence, I want to understand where it actually came from, because this isn't the kind of claim you arrive at from a trend report. So yeah, tell us the story behind the story, Matt.

Speaker: Matt [03:26]

Yeah, so it started as a pattern, and recognising a pattern. You know, client calls weeks into an engagement and somebody in the team saying apologetically that the persona deck is in a file, in a folder somewhere, can't find it, they can't locate where the voice of customer research is. Let me go and look at what the CRM tells us about those latest X number of calls we've had.

They know the hard statistics, but what they seem to forget so often is what the buyer's actually saying. And there's just no consensus around that. And that's why I feel it's really sad that organisations have all of this information and yet they seem to forget about it. They seem to forget the buyer.

Speaker: Jasmine [04:27]

So where are the actual decisions happening instead, if not with that persona in the room or that buyer in the loop?

Speaker: Matt [04:36]

Yeah, so they happen when you've got the internal briefing meetings, you've got those editing sessions where somebody decides that because they personally want it to say something, or they personally feel this is important, that that's what has to go in. Nobody in any of those rooms actually is speaking to the buyer and asking their opinion.

They're not actually trying to understand who they're writing or creating for. What they're actually doing is they're saying, hey, we've got this technology, how do we do this? We've got this technology, how do we make it sound cool? And there's a big, big delta between those two positions. And one of the things that you look at across all of those four gaps that you highlighted earlier is that to me they're symptoms of the same disease. They're not individual diseases to be treated whack-a-mole, one at a time. They have a consistent root cause. And that root cause is the fact that the buyer is no longer in the loop of those conversations. They're not being asked. They're not involved in making decisions about the things that we would then want to sell to them. Whether that's messaging, whether that's product or service.

One root cause across four departments

Speaker: Jasmine [06:01]

So if we could have a little bit of a window into how you think, how many times did you sit through that same call before you connected it to a bigger pattern?

Speaker: Matt [06:16]

That's a great question. It must be quite a few. I think it's almost every engagement I've had over the last ten, fifteen years. I noticed that the buyer just disappears from the room. Even back when I was working in PR and marketing and delivering inbound marketing programmes for an electronics company, we would talk about how things would sound better because the engineers wanted it to say certain things, not because that was what the customers needed to hear.

So I've been hearing this for the last 15, 20 years and I don't think it's ever changed. I think we've always had this internal locus of focus, if you will. We focus internally as an organisation. We're more worried about getting things through an approval process than we are about getting things that actually matter to the customer. And I think that's why Steve Jobs was such a genius. Not necessarily because of how he, you know, I never got to meet him, but because of the way that he positioned things in customer language and he focused on products that customers would love, rather than looking at here's this great technology, how do we sell it?

Speaker: Jasmine [07:49]

Right, so I love this locus of focus phrasing. So can you walk me through the actual mechanics here? Because one root cause is a big claim to make about four problems that show up in completely different departments with completely different symptoms.

Speaker: Matt [08:10]

So take any one of those four and pull on the thread far enough. Sales and marketing misalignment, generic messaging, weak buyer understanding, sales cycles that drag. If you look at each one of them, each one looks like a distinct operational failure. But if you follow any of those back to where they actually originate, you land in the same place every time. It's the fact that we don't have a consistent understanding of the buyer. The people that we're actually trying to serve aren't in the room. So we're not asking them those questions. And even if we've asked them the questions, we're forgetting what they've told us. So they are physically absent when those decisions are being made.

Customer-centric in name, organisation-centric in practice

Speaker: Jasmine [08:58]

So here's the part that I find confusing. I've also lost count how many times I've heard the CEO of the company I've worked for, or the company that I'm working with as a consultant, say we are customer-centric and we are customer focused. And yet there is this clear absence of the customer, the buyer, in every decision they make. How do you reconcile those two?

Speaker: Matt [09:33]

Well, some of that is, maybe it's just performative language. Maybe we are just saying that we're customer focused because we want to be and because that's what we're told we should be, without really looking at how organisations operate. I really believe that it is a desire and a want and a belief that they are. It's just that the internal processes pull against that.

If your approval process never includes a step where you're asking the buyer, or if you're only asking the buyer intermittently, and if you're maybe being selective about which buyers you ask, and how you listen to that information that you get back and you filter it through your lens, not an unbiased lens, of course you're never really listening to the answers the customers are giving you. Because what you're really doing is you're paying lip service to customer centricity. And really what you're doing is you're playing up to organisational centricity. And how do I make sure that I'm able to meet my targets, the KPIs I'm set, by getting certain things through, because actually I'm not really measured on the end goal of what it means to the customer. I'm too far away.

Why fixing messaging sameness fades

Speaker: Jasmine [10:59]

So let's look at maybe a more concrete example. When a company hires an agency specifically to fix what they call messaging sameness, what's actually happening there in your view?

Speaker: Matt [11:15]

Well, they're treating a symptom, and sometimes that symptom genuinely improves. I'm not saying at all that the agencies don't do a great job, they do. The problem is that you get a new tagline, sharper visuals, those workshops where everybody leaves feeling aligned. The problem is that eighteen months later, two years later, the exact same complaint starts surfacing again and again. Because while you've fixed the symptom for that one thing, you haven't kept that piece of work, you haven't changed the organisation, you haven't reoriented the organisation around what the customer really needs. What you've done is you've actually asked an agency to go in and be the surrogate for the customer, to do all of that work and build something that performs. And of course the agency will want to make a great impact, and the way they do that is by having great results with the customers. But then once that engagement has ended, things drift back to the norm.

Organisational gravity

Speaker: Jasmine [12:20]

So tell me a little bit more what you mean by reorienting the organisation.

Speaker: Matt [12:27]

Well, I think it's worth naming something that I believe exists, which is this force called organisational gravity. So every decision, every approval isn't just influenced by what the customer says. It's influenced by what our peers in the organisation say. And as you're working through any project, there are specific time points where the customer is involved and we're asking questions. And maybe every few stage gates we go back to a customer. But in between, we never talk to them. Their insight is never brought back into those projects. And in the middle, all we're doing is we're listening to our peers. And we're listening to that organisational, institutional learning, the things that we've always done in the past. Rather than actually, where is the customer right now?

And so there are groups across the business, often sales, parts of marketing, that are very focused on the customer. And they get frustrated because the organisation isn't pulling in the direction that the customers are trying to pull them in. There's always this back and forth between what's best for the customer and what's best for the organisation. And so really what we have to do is try and find a way to bring what we know about the customer into that process and embed it far more closely as we go through any process.

Bringing the buyer to functions that never meet them

Speaker: Jasmine [14:06]

And sometimes it's even more important to bring the customer in the loop, or in the room, have the buyer being present with functions that don't often get to interact with customers.

Speaker: Matt [14:25]

Yeah. I mean, how often do regulatory ever speak to a customer? How often do those people actually go out and understand what it's like to be a customer? So I think one of the things that AI does for us is it gives us a great way of being able to turn all of that insight into a way of simulating the customer, in a way that they can then actually have a bit of a conversation to say, actually if I'm going to suggest we do X, Y and Z, are we going to diminish our impact? How can we make sure that we're achieving what we need to achieve? Because regulatory is massively important, don't get me wrong, but we need to achieve that in a way that doesn't put it away from the customer. We just need to be very careful about how we do things.

Sales and marketing alignment

Speaker: Jasmine [15:14]

So if we dive in a little bit more into the sales and marketing dynamic, only 34% of life science teams tell the HubSpot group their sales and marketing functions are actually well aligned on goals and process. However, you're telling me more alignment workshops isn't what's going to move that needle.

Speaker: Matt [15:39]

No. They might move things temporarily. But the two functions were never really that misaligned with each other anyway. Yes, one's maybe measured on the number of marketing qualified leads generated, and the other is measured on sales, and there may be some short-term versus long-term thinking. And there are elements of misalignment, but generally they're pointing in the same direction. The way they're measured is maybe a little bit off. But they're both independently misaligned with a buyer who's no longer in the building.

And sales, arguably, they get to know individual buyers really, really well, and they don't get to see across the whole spectrum of them. They might get to see the customers they're looking after. Marketing on the other hand don't get the deep insight that sales have, but they get a broader experience across all of the input. At the same time, we're not singing from the same hymn sheet, if you will. Those two parts of the organisation are working in silos. And what brings them together is a common understanding of the customer. And I think that's the bit that's really missing.

Is buyer presence just a better persona?

Speaker: Jasmine [16:53]

So let's dial in a little bit more here. I think this is what most experienced marketers will say the moment they hear buyer presence. It sounds like a persona with better branding. Every company in this space already has personas, already has voice of customer research, already has a segmentation deck somewhere, already has competitor analysis information and so on. You're telling them to build a fancier version of something they already have and calling the underlying problem solved.

Speaker: Matt [17:30]

Entirely no. I'm saying there is a way of building something that brings all of that together and brings it alive. But on its own, just having a tool is no good. You still have to use it. You still have to look at how do we re-architect our processes. And processes are being re-architected right now thanks to AI. Or at least they should be. Our customers are changing because of AI. Our internal processes, our understanding of the customer, need to change as well. And while we're re-engineering our whole commercial function to be able to adopt AI in a way that is more efficient and takes advantage of AI, we really should be making sure that one of the key parts that we're doing is using AI to really help us better understand our customers. And if we can re-architect the functions around the customer, and what AI can do to help us understand the customer, then we're in a much stronger place.

Re-orging around the customer with synthetic buyers

Speaker: Matt [18:37]

So we have to re-org around the customer rather than just, hey, here's a tool bolted on, use it when you're doing X, Y and Z. We actually have to, there's a little bit of process redesign here as well that I think we need to really consider. When do we ask the customer for help, a real set of customers, and then when do we use the synthetic ones to keep their voice alive.

Speaker: Jasmine [18:59]

Yeah. Took the words right out of my mouth, in terms of, you're not saying that the synthetic customers are the definitive answer. It's about continually going back to real humans.

Speaker: Matt [19:18]

Yeah, absolutely. I mean there are organisations out there at the moment that are using large language models to simulate large groups of people. And they're doing that without a lot of grounding. That can work on a population scale, and you have to start doing some fancy things to create a series of agents that essentially represent groups of people. What I'm really saying is that most B2B organisations can't cope with hundreds and thousands of opinions. What we really want to do is to be able to understand, what does this person really need? What does that type of person really need? We need to do it with enough fidelity that it makes sense for sales, but enough containment that it makes sense for marketing and product development. So there's getting that balance between how do we really create something that's helpful and helps the organisation really align behind what's important to the people that we're looking to serve.

First moves for marketing and sales

Speaker: Jasmine [20:26]

So for our listeners who are in marketing, what's that first move you'd recommend they do?

Speaker: Matt [20:36]

Well, first of all, I'd start looking at where is all of that data that you already have? I know a lot of people have great CRM systems, they've got a lot of data, they might have got lots of voice of customer research. How old is it? Where is it stored? How do we start bringing that together in a coherent manner that allows us to start interrogating it in a way that actually will help us better understand what it's like to be our customer. Not just to be our customer, but to be in their shoes. What does their day really look like? And what have they been telling us? What did they tell us the last time we spoke to them? What did they tell us 10 years ago? Those things are really important.

And I think if we can start activating that information and turning it into insight, and more, going from insight into action because we can use AI to then do things for us, that then turns a job that's really hard to do. You know, if you look at a persona document, it can be quite hard. They're either very thin and therefore not that helpful, or they're really thick and so dense you can't really try on their outfit. You can't get into their skin and their clothes and you certainly can't fit in their shoes. The jacket doesn't fit and the belt's maybe too small. If you're in that position, it's easy just to forget about it. Whereas if we've got a way of synthesising all of that into a grounded synthetic customer, what that allows us to do is not just to talk to them, but to say, hey, I know I need to do this, help me write something for that person. Yes, you're still going to want to have a human editing, but all of a sudden you're giving yourself the right series of lenses to be able to separate out messaging that's still on brand, that's still got the right positioning for the company, but you're able to target that messaging even more tightly onto those different personas.

Speaker: Jasmine [22:52]

So if we look at the other angle of the commercial team, from a salesperson's perspective, what advice would you give them, for example, when they're sitting across the table from a prospective buyer?

Speaker: Matt [23:11]

Yeah, so one of the things that I think's really exciting here is that you can use these synthetic customers, one, to be able to practise your sales pitches, to be able to look at how do I tailor the proposal or whatever document I'm going to be delivering to this person. Now AI can do a great job of helping you focus on this is what's going to be important to this type of persona in this situation. You can take that even further by really then going from the synthetic customer persona level through to the context of the business and all the rest of it. But really being able to then look at it so that I go in, here's my hypothesis about what's going to land really, really well. Are we going to need to tweak and adapt? Yes. But if our hypotheses about what is going to land are much closer to reality, we don't have to adjust so much. It gives us a chance to make better decisions and focus on different things.

The essay and the book

Speaker: Jasmine [24:21]

Love that, love that. So the full piece that you've written, How to Fix Life Science Go-To-Market Gaps in 2026, is on the strivenn.com website under the Strivenn Thinking part of the menu. And the link will also be in the show notes if you want the version with all the sources intact.

Speaker: Matt [24:46]

Absolutely. Yeah. And of course, if you want to learn more about synthetic customers, shameless plug for my book, The Buyer in the Loop. There's a little postcard with the cover on it there. It's out on the 22nd of July. So by the time you listen to this, it will be out, available for purchase worldwide at Amazon and Lulu and a whole range of hopefully other places as well. So I hope people enjoy it.

Speaker: Jasmine [25:16]

I'm sure they will. I certainly have enjoyed it and continue to enjoy it as I flip through different sections that I think will be relevant for the project I'm doing at this moment. So thank you very, very much, Matt. This has been yet another interesting discussion.

Speaker: Matt [25:33]

Thanks, Jasmine. As always, great to see you. Thanks. Bye.

Output 4 • Q and A

Q&A

We already have personas and voice of customer research. How is buyer presence different in practice?

Buyer presence is about activation, not another document. Next week, pick one persona and one recent decision. Pull your three most recent customer calls or emails for that persona, load them into an AI tool, and ask it to react to your current messaging as that buyer. The output shows you where your internal view and the buyer's reality separate. Cost is an afternoon and one person.

My sales and marketing teams are misaligned. Should I run another alignment workshop?

A workshop realigns the two functions with each other, which was rarely the real problem. Both are usually adrift from a buyer who has left the building. Next week, bring one salesperson and one marketer into a single call and have them each describe the same buyer from memory. Where their descriptions diverge is your gap. Repair the shared understanding of the buyer first, then tune the process metrics.

We fixed our messaging sameness last year and it is drifting back. Why?

The agency became a temporary surrogate for the buyer and then left. The organisation was never reoriented, so organisational gravity pulled the messaging back to internal preference. Next week, add one lightweight step to your approval process: before sign-off, one named person must state how a specific buyer would react. It costs nothing and keeps the buyer present between agency engagements.

Regulatory and other functions never speak to customers. How do I bring the buyer to them?

You will not get regulatory into customer calls at scale, so give them a grounded synthetic buyer instead. Next week, build one simple buyer profile from your existing voice of customer notes and let a non-customer-facing colleague ask it questions about a decision they are about to make. It costs an hour to set up and surfaces the buyer impact of choices that usually get made in isolation.

How do I make our persona documents actually usable by a busy team?

Thick persona decks get ignored and thin ones say nothing useful. Synthesise what you already hold into a grounded synthetic customer a person can talk to. Next week, take one persona, feed the source research into an AI tool, and ask it to draft a short piece for that buyer. Keep a human editor in the loop. You get sharper targeting while holding brand and positioning, using data you already own.