S2 Ep2: The Buyer Has Already Decided

Transcript

Transcript

Matt and Jasmine explore two critical shifts in life science marketing: the execution gap between AI optimism and actual use, and why field intelligence transforms product development. They discuss where purchase decisions really happen, how to signal vendor stability, and why product managers must capture customer language before it gets sanitized into feature requests.

Introduction and Episode Overview

Matt Wilkinson [00:03]

Welcome to a splice of Life Science Marketing, your go-to show for life science marketing professionals in biotech, medtech and diagnostics. Join us for sharp strategic conversations that turn cutting edge insights into real world marketing advantage. I'm Matt Wilkinson.

Jasmine [00:22]

And I'm Jasmine Greer-Grey. In each episode, we'll cut through the hype and complexity with practical plays you can use to earn trust, stand out in crowded categories, and convert attention into momentum.

Matt Wilkinson [01:14]

How you doing?

Jasmine [01:15]

I'm doing great and how about you?

Matt Wilkinson [01:17]

I'm good, thank you. And I'm really excited to be talking about these two topics today. In this episode, we start with an uncomfortable truth. Your buyer has already decided before they ever speak with you. And from there, we look at why your field teams see problems product and marketing never hear about, and why that disconnect is now a real commercial risk.

Article 1: The Execution Gap and Where Decisions Happen

Matt Wilkinson [01:46]

And on to our first article.

Jasmine [01:53]

Matt, in your article, you state that by the time a buyer reaches your website looking for product information, they've already decided on the shortlist and is already building the narrative ready for procurement. Your job isn't to convince them, it's to help them justify what they've already concluded.

Your latest piece cuts through the 2026 predictions to expose the execution gap that's actually deciding winners and losers in life science marketing. 68% of companies say they're optimistic about AI. However, only 7% are actually using it at scale. The pattern's identical for marketing strategy, widespread acknowledgement that something needs to change, minimal evidence of action. This isn't about tactics. It's about whether your marketing signals resilience or fragility and whether anyone in your organization owns how buyers actually understand you. So let's get into it. What I really, really love about your article is this pivot from marketing being the lead generation department or marketing qualified lead department to the persuasion and alignment department. For me, that was a huge mental shift. And you also open with your buyer has already decided before they contact you. That reframes the entire marketing conversation. What are teams actually getting wrong about where decisions happen? and what does that misunderstanding cost?

Matt Wilkinson [03:48]

Well, thank you for that. And teams still think the decision happens during the sales conversation, but it doesn't. Your buyer is building a mental shortlist long before they ever fill in a contact form or they reach out to you. They're reading Reddit or research gate threads you never know existed. They're asking colleagues in the lab or on social media. You know, they're scanning your about page late at night.

or they're actually asking CHAP GPT or Claude to do all of that for them and to create a buyer's guidance summary for them. By the time they actually reach you, they're not evaluating whether to choose you or not. They're looking for evidence that confirms what they've already decided. They think of it not as persuasion, but more like defensive justification. The cost of missing this?

You optimize for the pitch when you should be optimizing for the silent research phase. You create content that's persuasive in conversation, but not quotable in a procurement document. Here's the thing. If a budget holder can't copy your value proposition into a grant application or business case, you've lost before you've started. They'll choose the vendor who made it easiest to defend internally, even if your product's better. The behavior change audit your content for quotability, not just persuasiveness.

Jasmine [05:17]

Yeah, I love that. I think that more and more marketers, as well as the sales organization, needs to think about pulling that thread on persuasion to quotability and give the prospective buyer that language so that that can help not only if you're an academic and writing a grant, but if you're part of your decision-making committee in a pharma organization.

Matt Wilkinson [05:57]

Yeah, it's and it's and it really is showing up more and more. AI is helping here, of course, but our buyers are becoming so much better informed that the ability for us to persuade is diminishing. And so really what we have to do is to provide evidence in formats that the whole buying group needs.

Survivability Signaling and Fragility Signals

Jasmine [06:15]

Yep, completely agree. So you talk about survivability signaling, the idea that buyers optimize for vendor stability, financial stability, not just product performance. What are the fragility signals that life science teams accidentally broadcast? And what's the fastest way to audit for them?

Matt Wilkinson [06:43]

Yeah, there's when you're engaged in long term research, particularly for capping, you know, for long term capex, or you're looking to, you know, do research that might take many years and, you know, to complete, you know, those fragility signals are really important to watch out for. They show up in patterns that we don't really necessarily see. So aggressive discounting whispers desperation.

Constant pivots of branding and messaging signal uncertainty. High turnover and customer facing roles broadcast chaos. Now these aren't secrets. They travel fast through tight-knit scientific communities. Here's a concrete example from our LRIG research. We watched exhibitors at Drug Discovery 2025 focused entirely on new customer acquisition, but failing on differentiation and follow through.

You know, the booths were, you know, that looked identical to almost every competitor. You know, most exhibition floors feel like you're wading through a sea of beige. You know, yes, some of the colors stand out, but everybody's doing the same thing. And those conversations that you have, most of them could come from anyone, any company. They're not saying anything differently.

And then the follow-up that never arrives or maybe it arrives is generic and it just forgets the conversation that you've already had and each one of those signals that the companies aren't paying attention. So I think of survivability not as what you say, but what buyers infer from how you show up. know, when funding environments are constrained, buyers optimize for vendor survival, not vendor performance.

Article 2: Field Intelligence and Voice of Customer

Jasmine [13:18]

So Matt, in your article, you make the case that marketing's biggest execution gap isn't AI literacy, it's specificity. You argue that most teams fail not because they lack tools or expertise, but because they refuse to choose who they're actually for. You write, pick customers, not markets. Company X or academic institution Y won't buy from us because our platform requires high throughput workflows and they run low volume fixed cell work. Now you've got focus. You've got specificity. You stop debating edge cases and you price with confidence. Your messaging speaks directly to people who actually need what you built. And honestly, there's an ego here too. Teams want to believe everyone could be their customer, but that's not reality. That's not real customer centricity. That's wishful thinking. And sort of going back to your blog around persuasion, in order to focus on persuasion and carry through to alignment, You have to be laser focused on specific customers within your market and it can't be everybody.

Matt Wilkinson [21:18]

That's really interesting and absolutely speaks to the challenge of positioning where you have to choose who you're for and who you're not for. Your blog also reminded me or recommends that how important it is to go and spend time in the field. And you recommend that, you know, a product manager should be spending at least a day, you know, in the field per month with 24 hour debrief. Walk us through what what you believe that product managers and managers should capture that transforms those observations into requirements engineering that can actually execute.

Jasmine [22:02]

Yeah, so I want this to be every product manager's New Year's resolution. Get out there and travel with your sales and FAS colleagues at least once a month. I've worked with way too many product managers that just sort of sit in the office. They say they don't have time to get out. They'll call a salesperson when they have a question. That's not good enough.

Customer language, when something breaks, is so, so important to experience firsthand. And not think of it as a feature request. The exact words they use when they're frustrated is important. Because customers very, very rarely say, I need better signal stability.

What they will say instead is it worked one day, then the signal vanished after fixation. And I've been there as a bench scientist and that frustration comes out, hopefully not in expletives, but it comes out. hearing that firsthand is so important. That's the emotional side.

that every scientist has as well as their logical side. And that makes things so much more memorable and so much more urgent. And when you write that directly into your product requirements document or PRD, now your engineering team stops debating about abstract specs and starts solving a real problem. Plus that language becomes your launch messaging and you're able to pull that through from true VOC into actions during the launch. Every requirement document should have at least one line per section in the customer words. It keeps your team honest. It makes it so much more memorable and relevant. And it's a great reminder of who you're actually developing and launching product for. Here's the thing. Customers buy on emotion. The idea that we're scientists and we only work on logic, that's a Vulcan. That's not a scientist. We also have an emotional side to us, which helps to justify the logic. And you need both. So again, I implore product managers, go to the lab. travel with your sales and FAS colleagues, hear the frustration firsthand, and capture it before somebody sanitizes it into a feature request. Meaning, do that debrief before the 24-hour clock is over, because we tend to forget after that.

Ethnographic Research Reveals Hidden Customer Pain

Matt Wilkinson [25:12]

Fantastic. Now, you claim that most voice of customer is theoretical because it captures what customers say they do. And you touched on this a minute ago, not what they actually do. So what does firsthand observation reveal customer pain that surveys and advisory boards, maybe even working groups consistently miss?

Jasmine [25:39]

So a lot of it is firsthand observation. So ethnographic research and watching that customer do things in the lab that a customer may not articulate or remember to articulate. There is a gap in memory sometimes between what you're actually doing and what theoretically you should be doing. So watching that workflow in real time, firsthand becomes so important. It also gives you as a product manager that opportunity to ask, why did you make that choice versus that choice? We had originally thought the workflow would go ABCD, but you're choosing to do it as CDEF. Tell me a little bit more about that. So that interaction and that observation is so critical.

Matt Wilkinson [26:42]

It's hard not to agree with that. Now the number of ethnographic studies I've conducted where people will say one thing, but actually they're doing something different. Those examples are really, really interesting. And it's not that the customers are lying. It's just that they actually think they're doing what they're told. But in reality is they're having to use workarounds to get things to work just the way they need it. And that, I think, gives us a great opportunity for looking at product improvement.

But even if that's just instruction improvement, but also it helps us look at actually, maybe there's some competitive advantage we can be gained from doing CDEF rather than ABCDE. And so if we if we look at those things, it becomes really, really important. I think the other thing about being in, you know, getting to observe people in their natural habitat is that it gives you a really good grasp of the of the subtlety of the messaging that's needed, or how to really pull those levers. And of course, one customer visit doesn't make an entire portfolio, but it does make a, if those things compound over time, those visits compound and that insight really compounds. And if you're able to capture that, especially if you can record audio, video, get transcripts and start using that with, starting to make sense of all of that data with AI, you can actually use that through the CRM and kind of create a knowledge base that is far greater than the sum of the individual visits.

Post-Launch Messaging Must Evolve

Jasmine [28:17]

I think you're making a really important point, which a lot of product managers miss. Just because a product is launched doesn't mean your job is done and you need to move on to the next product. There's an opportunity through this observation to sharpen the message, to fine tune the pains and gains, the two sides of that messaging as the adoption curve continues.

Matt Wilkinson [28:54]

And one of the things that we know is that as we go through the adoption curve as well, buyers needs change, our customers needs change. An innovator wants to play and learn and experiment with the technology and a process, whereas a laggard just wants to get it done. If wants to get the result out at the end of the day, they don't really care. And so depending on the maturity of the technique and that really depends on what do we need to... What kind of capability do we need? All the functions that maybe an innovator wants is maybe way too much for somebody as a late majority or a laggard who actually just wants to hit a button, get the result and say, did it give me a yes or a no?

Jasmine [29:38]

Yeah, it's so critical to marry that stage in the product lifecycle with that messaging. And again, keep in mind who your customer is, what their job to be done is, and what their mindset is.

Matt Wilkinson [29:57]

Yeah. And, and it's so interesting that you say that because, you know, and, and if innovators are often, you know, so have such a different mindset and they might be using, you know, with some techniques, they might be innovators in others. They might just be using them as sort of part of the process and they just need it to work every single time. So it's not that somebody is an innovator or, you know, a late majority as a person, it just could be that their needs. For some things, we just need it to work and it needs to be simple and just predictable. Other times, actually we need to be innovating. And when you're trying to push the boundaries of science, it's really interesting that actually a lot of what we're trying to do is to build on, push the boundaries of science by building on a stable foundation. So we have to realize that even though somebody's an innovator here, they can't be building innovations on a foundation of sound.

Closing

Jasmine [30:55]

So true. This has been tons of fun, Matt. Thanks.

Matt Wilkinson [31:00]

Yeah, thank you. It's been a lot of fun as well. For those of you listening, hope you've enjoyed sort of us deconstructing and digging in a little bit to the two topics about what's changing in 2026 for marketing teams and some of the things that product marketers can do to help adapt and make sure that they're really keeping up with what their customers need.

Jasmine [31:25]

Well, looking forward to having everybody listen again in the next episode of a splice of life science marketing.

Matt Wilkinson [31:35]

Likewise.

Q&A

How do I audit my content for quotability rather than persuasiveness?

Open your latest product page or case study. Highlight any sentence a procurement officer could copy verbatim into a business case or grant application. If you struggle to find three quotable lines, your content is optimised for conversation, not justification. Fix this by writing value propositions as complete, standalone statements. Include specific outcomes, timeframes, and comparison points. Test by asking a colleague: could you defend this purchase using only our website content?

What fragility signals should I audit for first?

Start with your exhibition presence and follow-up process. Review your last three trade shows. Did booth conversations sound identical to competitors? Did follow-up arrive within 48 hours and reference specific discussions? Check pricing consistency across channels. Aggressive discounting or frequent promotional pivots signal desperation. Finally, audit LinkedIn for customer-facing team turnover. High churn in sales or support roles broadcasts operational chaos to tight-knit scientific communities.

How do I get product managers into the field when they say they don't have time?

Make it mandatory and calendar it now. Block one day per month as non-negotiable field time. Pair each product manager with a specific sales or field applications scientist. Create a simple capture template: customer exact words when frustrated, workarounds observed, questions asked three times. Schedule the 24-hour debrief before leaving the field visit. The ROI shows immediately in sharper requirements, better launch messaging, and engineering teams solving real problems instead of debating abstract specifications.

What's the difference between theoretical and ethnographic voice of customer research?

Theoretical VOC captures what customers say they do in surveys and advisory boards. Ethnographic VOC captures what they actually do in their natural environment. The gap matters because customers can't always articulate unconscious workarounds or recall exact frustration language. Watch a scientist run your protocol in their lab. Note where they deviate from instructions, what triggers visible frustration, and which steps they repeat. That observational data reveals product improvement opportunities surveys miss entirely.

How should messaging evolve through the product adoption curve?

Innovators want technical depth, experimental flexibility, and learning resources. They'll tolerate complexity for capability. Late majority and laggards want predictability, simplicity, and guaranteed results. They don't care about features—they want the outcome. Audit your current messaging. If you're selling workflow flexibility to customers who just want to hit a button and get a yes/no answer, you're misaligned. Match message complexity to adoption stage. Innovators get detailed protocols. Laggards get push-button reliability statements.