S2 Ep4: When the Funnel Breaks

Transcript

Transcript

In this episode, Matt and Jasmine discuss Strivenn's North American expansion, unpack Roxana's provocative challenge about whether brand building is conviction or vocabulary, and explore the strategic framework for executing dignified product end-of-life transitions that preserve customer relationships.

Opening and Strivenn LLC Announcement

Matt Wilkinson [0:00]

Matt, 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 Gruia-Gray [0:25]

and I'm Jasmine Greer gray 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 [0:42]

Hello, Matt, hello, Jasmine. How you doing good, good, and yourself, I'm very well. Thank you. And I think you've got some exciting news to share.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [0:51]

Yeah, we do in the spirit of sharing what's new at striven, we recently opened striven LLC to be able to serve the North American market my home country, Canada, as well as the United States.

Matt Wilkinson [1:12]

Yeah, exciting news indeed. And you know, it's great that you agreed to be the managing partner of our US enterprise. Thanks for twisting my arm. It's really exciting, and I have to say that we're really, yeah, we're really pleased to have you on board and leading the charge for us there. So thank you,

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [1:29]

and I'm really proud to be part of the theme. Thank you. Excellent. Well, I guess

Matt Wilkinson [1:34]

that's probably enough about us, and probably we should move on with resume normal service.

Roxana's Challenge: Brand Building as Vocabulary or Conviction

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [1:39]

So in your most recent blog, you talk about that your cmo has declared brand building the top priority for 2026 it's all over. McKinsey reports it's all over. Forrester Gartner agrees. But here's what a friend of ours, Roxana, her Ducas actually said, in a room where no one was selling anything, she said, We've tried everything. We chased performance, we chased SEO, we chased content. Then AI came, and everything seems to be for nothing. That's not the consultant narrative, that's the truth underneath it all. And you've gathered insights from a 60 minute conversation in a recent rise community session that Mark Schaefer organizes, where seven marketers speaking with uncomfortable honesty about the gap between what researchers say should happen and what actually gets budget approval. 70% of B to B buying ends with no decision that just blew my mind. CFOs now make the call on 20% of six figure deals, and marketers are measuring MQLs while the leads that actually matter arrive through channels they can't track. This isn't about predictions. It's about whether brand building was just vocabulary or actual conviction, and roxanna's challenge to prove it by January 2027, is something that you and I agree should should be taken up. So the question I have for you, Matt Roxanna, cut through the optimism. Immediately we've tried everything, and then AI came, and everything seems to be for naught. That's not burnout, that's a strategic crisis when brand investment is rising. Is it because marketers finally understand its compounding value, or because it feels like the only defensible spend when AI is commoditizing performance tactics.

Why Marketers Ruin Everything

Matt Wilkinson [4:04]

I think there's so much to unpack here, but I think that the truth is, is that marketers tend to ruin everything. We now have tools to help us create content at speed and at scale that we never had before. We've also got ways of automating outreach, and I don't know about you, but the number of LinkedIn connection requests and messages I'm getting that kind of show a little bit of personalization, but kind of completely missed the point. It's just getting really annoying. So I think that a lot of the performance marketing may still work, but I think it's struggling to cut through. We're getting bombarded with more and more messages, and I think that people are just getting turned off by that sort of sell. And with AI voice dialers now, and with the number of scams coming through, if you don't recognize the number, thanks to tools on your iPhones and other phones, you can actually look at, oh, who's coming? It's not just looking at the numbers. You're able to actually go, oh, this is a potential scam. Is. Ignore it. And so and our mutual friend Lynn, fell foul of that because it didn't have a number saved in my phone. And so actually it went to, this isn't in your address book. Let's call screen you. So it's a real challenge. Mark Schaefer has said that sort of brand is kind of the AI override button, and I think it's right, but I sympathize and empathize with roxanna's perspective that while brand is probably the thing that we should have always been focusing on, and that sort of brand reputation and word of mouth marketing and doing the right things and letting kind of the marketing take care of itself by just focusing on the fundamentals, I wonder when push comes to shove, whether, and I tend to agree on this, whether actually marketing teams will still be measured on exactly the same things they did before people say brands important, but what they're really going to put the money behind is still generating the same number of leads doing the same things they always have done because they're scared to make the shift.

Measuring Brand Perception

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [5:56]

Is it really being fearful? Or it's much more difficult to come up with tangible metrics, on measuring brand perception, on measuring the trajectory of your your brand, unlike marketing qualified leads, that's an easy one.

Matt Wilkinson [6:18]

I think there's two sides to that question. One is, is it expensive? Traditional methods of measuring brand perception and recall? Yeah, it's expensive. You've got to go out to the market, you've got to run surveys, and they're not cheap to run, because you've got to get people's attention and that sort of first party qualitative research. It's expensive. And for good reason, there are surrogates, though, so if you're a big enough brand, we can now start using AI to help us with social listening and start being able to track mentions over time. Now that's not going to be applicable to I would imagine, most of the people that ever listen in here, because you need to have a significant customer base to for those mentions to feature strongly enough you know people to be talking about you in enough depth to really be able to track those mentions. But for the big brands in the space, like the thermos, the promigos, the NEBS, the agilents, whoever you want to focus on, those brand mentions are there in significant number, while you probably track year to year, or even six months to six months, and get a good sample about what are people saying about us on social media. And you can do that, run those reports. You can even schedule them in something like chat GPT to run a schedule a deep research report to happen every month, or whatever it is to look at how's our sentiment on social media tracking. So I think that the measurement is maybe less of the challenge now. I think that the differences is the time lag between brand metrics changing and actually that delivering revenue.

Persuasion Marketing and Sales Funnel Connection

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [7:48]

Yeah, so to build on that, it's connecting the dots to the sales funnel and and understanding that connection is a much more difficult thing to do, and that's why my sort of part two of roxana's challenge would be to focus on persuasion marketing and using the Psychology of Persuasion And the psychology of branding to also connect the dots to the sales funnel.

Matt Wilkinson [8:26]

I think that's massively important. And that sort of comes to something that Bruce Sher, who appeared on Episode Eight of the podcast, quoted a stat that said that 70% of B to B buying ends with customers deciding not to proceed with any supplier at all, it just ends in no sale, no decision. And while that can be difficult to get larger groups of people to decide, I think that there's a big part to play in actually unblocking those decisions with a brand as well. So it's not just about the number of sales conversations that you help support as a marketing team and sort of help initiate. I think it's also those that you help grease the wheels off. And I do believe that brand really helps support the entire customer journey, not just the upfront marketing piece. And so I think we have to be really quite firm in our approach that branding is really, really important. It always has been, how we make customers feel has always been one of the most important things out there, but I think it's becoming even more so now, and I think that's partly because there's just so much noise that we actually need a brand to sort of cut through that and to go this is this is somebody, this is a group of people that I Trust. This is an organization that I trust. I know what they stand for, and when I get advice to do X, Y and Z, that's what I'm going to do. So I think that the fundamentals of branding, of clear positioning and differentiation are really, really important, more important than

Brand as the Hub

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [9:56]

ever before. So the visual I get in my head as you're just. Describing this is hub and spoke model branding, and brand marketing is the hub. And then you have persuasion as a spoke, you have word of mouth marketing as a spoke, and so on. Is that a fair analogy?

Matt Wilkinson [10:15]

I think so. I think the brand is should always have sat at the at the center, but often, brand has become a subset of marketing, whereas actually brand is bigger than marketing. It's bigger it's the entire organization. It's everything the organization does. Every interaction it has with the outside world and the inside world within it adds up to its brand. And I think that it's foolish of us to think any other way.

The Power of Referred Leads

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [10:43]

There was somebody else on the rise community who had pushed the discussion even further, where she said the most important lead is the one who was referred to you. How do you tell that? It's hard, but those are the ones that convert a lot quicker, versus what Bruce was saying, that 70% ends in no deal. Do you agree with these two statements?

Matt Wilkinson [11:11]

I think so. A bigger organization sends out bigger buying groups, and you stick your neck out as part of that buying group and something goes wrong, your career is more at risk. So actually the pain of change is actually greater than the pain of fixing the problem very often. And actually just trying to convene the buying group can be incredibly difficult. And so I think that there's sort of death by committee in many ways, and that's sad, but I think it's what happens in organizations. They grow to a size where trying to turn them is like trying to turn the Titanic and in the age of AI, we're seeing organizations that are so much smaller and nimbler being able to do things that big organizations just can't do. And I think that that's that's where brand is going to really be important, because those small organizations can out innovate, they can outpace but can they provide the personal connection at scale, the emotive connection? I think that's going to be something really important.

Rethinking Ideal Customer Profile

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [12:02]

Yeah, I think what it will also beg is the need for rethinking who your ideal customer profile is. Is it always going to be those large companies who tend to have more budget, but as you say, can be death by Committee decisions, or is it going to be more your medium and small size companies, or is it more of a mix of them all?

Matt Wilkinson [12:28]

It is going to be a mix, because some organizations may be much bigger, but they operate in smaller units within those big organizations. But I think you're right. There's an interesting kind of observation about the Japanese market, where the bigger organizations only buy from bigger organizations. So you almost have to be at that sort of peer to peer level to do business. So if you're a small business, you sell through bigger businesses, you partner with bigger businesses that might be your customers, and you kind of have this chain of organizations that all the work with each other, and that's partly because of the relationships that are existing, and it's very much more of a different culture of selling, but also it's because of how these organizations actually do business, and there's entire sort of functions there to manage those external relationships.

CFO Involvement and Marketing ROI

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [13:13]

So there was somebody else in this rise community conversation that that had a really interesting observation, and she said that small medium enterprises she has she sees a link in their marketing to business outcomes or clients won't keep working with her, but in larger enterprises, size creates permission for misalignment, if that's the structural reality, what's the antidote? How do large organizations force the same accountability?

Matt Wilkinson [13:49]

You know, it comes down to leadership, from the top chief financial officers being being involved in decisions about purchasing far more than they used to be. They used to just be the person that used to say no. Now they're actually becoming the decision maker. They're taking FAR more interest in that. But now marketing has to prove ROI, and that becomes really hard to do. You've got got to be able to look at metrics across the board. And I think that's why, in many ways, we're sort of talking about performance marketing in different ways now. But if I go to an AI suit and I do a search and I create my own Buyer's Guide, and all of a sudden I've got a buyer's guide that's got my four or five options. I might have done some research into an organization, but never actually go to the website. And actually, the moment that I turn up to place a purchase or to instigate a sales call, I may have actually done that without ever visiting the site, because the information is in the chat bot. Or I may have gone to the site, found the contact details and gone right? I want to organize a call now, with the integration of Shopify and sort of MCP selling, you're able to actually purchase directly from within chat bots, certainly for smaller companies. That's that's particularly exciting. And if you've got a setup where you've already created punch out systems and you've already got E commerce actually creating an. CP server to do the same thing. Isn't that hard.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [15:03]

We should take a pause here and explain what an MCP is, model,

Matt Wilkinson [15:06]

context protocol. Had to think tough on that one. It's basically like an application processing interface as one allows a large language model to interface with other systems. Okay, it's the sort of thing that as an example, Claude will use an MCP server to then look at say, and then create a Google doc in Google Drive. As an example, there goes via an MCP server. Great.

Roxana's Challenge and Strategic Intent vs Reality

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [15:33]

Thanks for that. In summary, I think roxanna's Challenge stands along with my suggested edition of persuasion marketing, and let's meet back here in January 2027 and see if brand building was actually embedded in strategy decisions and execution, or if it was just another trend we talked about while doing something else entirely. Strategic intent and operational reality are not the same thing. The predictions are clear. The research is solid, but 2026 will be defined by which teams actually did something about them. So our suggestion to those who are listening this week identify one gap between what you say matters and what actually gets funded close it. That's where competitive advantage lives.

Matt Wilkinson [16:28]

I agree. And I'd say that's also where not doing those things is where competitive advantage goes to die. And speaking of which, every product has a life cycle. And this week, you'd write Britain about what happens at product end of life, and the challenge, you'd say, is recognizing when a product's reached the end of its utility, not just for your business, but for your customers too. R and D may have moved on six months ago. The product may still be in use, and sales is still carrying the products out of habit, but customers may still be asking for these things. It staggers me that people are still using very, very old versions of Microsoft Windows long past that time that that product has reached its end of life. It's no longer supported. It doesn't get security updates, and yet it's still in place, and often that's because other software vendors haven't updated their software to work on the new systems yet, or if they have, there's an extra cost, and people don't want to migrate out of what they've built before. They're not comfortable in the new systems, and that's just software. And enterprises have their own sort of way of managing that, but it can cause huge bottlenecks with support having to answer lots of questions and really not having a roadmap to back them up, because the roadmap has come to the end of life. That's not really a crisis. It's sort of natural tension point that most companies handle poorly because they lacked a framework for the exit. Even organizations that do it well still, still see angst about end of life of products that were well beloved. It's easy to see that if you've got a 200,000 product, product that's assuming $400,000 in engineering, bandwidth and opportunity, teams can't afford to switch that, so engineering cost, they keep updating it while you suck about the next steps. So the real question isn't whether to exit the product or not, but it's how to execute the transition in a way that preserves those customer relationships and frees the organization to focus on what matters next. This isn't my area of expertise, so I was really interested to see that you created a six step framework for executing this sort of thoughtful product end of life, stakeholders have competing priorities. And what was nice to see that it was about balancing what your internal teams need with what your customers deserve during that transition, and how to sort of Sunset products strategically today to create organizational capacity to build a better tomorrow. So could you, first of all just walk us through why teams struggle to align on end of life timing for a product? What's really happening when R and D and products have moved on but sales still wants to keep the product available?

Product End of Life - Function Perspectives

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [19:00]

It's natural that each function is going to look at product end of life through their own particular lens, and they each will have their own legitimate concerns. So you sales, on the one hand, sees revenue that's still coming in, and even more importantly, they're focused in on the deep customer relationships that they've built over years. They're not necessarily being difficult. They're protecting accounts and the people in those accounts that they really care about. So then, on the other hand, you have R and D that's moved on because the technology has evolved, they're maintaining legacy code instead of building the next generation platforms. And there's an opportunity cost there that's real. Support is caught somewhere in the middle, answering technical questions without road map. Clarity on what's coming next. Think of it not so much as difficult, but more like each function is holding a different piece of the complete business picture. The product manager's job, on the other hand, is to bring those perspectives together and make the trade offs. And there are trade offs explicit with numbers attached. So when you show that maintaining, for example, a $300,000 product requires $500,000 in engineering bandwidth that instead you could launch a $2 million product next year, that conversation ends up shifting from a defensive position to more of a strategic decision making position that can be done together across all the different functions. It's more about creating a shared visibility into what you're preserving versus what you're giving up. And once teams see more of the full picture, I think it becomes easier to get alignment, because everybody understands what's at stake for the business and more importantly, for the customers.

The Triage Assessment Framework

Matt Wilkinson [21:14]

And I love that you're focusing on what's important for the customers while maintaining the sort of the financial stability of the business and making sure that you've got sort of the economics of the firm and the customer sort of in two hands. And that's always a difficult thing to balance. How does that triage assessment help product managers make those explicit trade offs between sort of preserving internal resources and honoring sort of external customer commitments.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [21:41]

Yeah, so the heart of this triage assessment is a two axis framework. On the one hand, you have the profitability after fully loaded costs, and on the other is the strategic value. And the strategic value means customer relationships worth preserving high value IP, the transfers to maybe a next generation product or market position that matters competitively. So the easy parts of this framework is when you have low profitability and low strategic value, yeah, okay, will end of life the product that that's a no brainer, in a sense, the other no brainer is when you have high profitability and high strategic value. Of course, you're not going to go through a product end of life. In that case, you might extend and invest the portfolio, the messy middle is more when you have high profitability but low strategic value, or the converse, you have low profitability and high strategic value. And that's where thinking through the framework becomes much more important. So here's here's the thing. You might have, a reagent or an assay that, for example, has a gross margin of 60% so that's profitability on paper, but on the converse, it's serving a shrinking application with no future development path. So that's an easy business decision about where to invest limited resources. On the other hand, you could have a product that has a 20% margin that barely breaks even, but here's, here's the strategic value. It keeps pharma customers engaged with your platform during the transition to your next generation offering. So that's worth extending, because you're protecting that customer relationship that drives longer term value. So the framework forces you to ask both the business and cross functionally, are we keeping this product because it genuinely serves customers and the business strategy, or because it's easier than managing the transition when you make the distinction visible, often, teams move from debating whether to exit to problem solving how to exit, a transition that serves both internal efficiency and external customer needs. It's about strategic resource allocation and not so much about the product itself.

Dignified Exits and Customer Relationships

Matt Wilkinson [24:41]

That's, yeah, that's a really fascinating way to look at it. And I think that that really lines me up nicely for my last my last question, which is, and I love the way you put this that you spoke about the need for a dignified exit, a dignified exit for products that customers have been. Or workflows around embedded in their processes, and that, frankly, may actually cause great inconvenience if you stop manufacturing. So how does that sort of thoughtful approach to the transition and protect those future business relationships?

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [25:13]

Yeah, this is where it's so important to not only think about the logic side here, but in incorporate the emotion customers who feel supported through transitions stay with your company, and they remember that customers who feel abandoned take their future business somewhere else. So here's here's what can happen in a lab the the group has validated your protocols around your product. They've trained staff so they've invested a lot of time, money and effort. They've built a workflow that depends on reproducibility, and then you announce the product end of life without transition support, you're not just ending a number a skew, you're creating uncertainty, that emotion of uncertainty that can affect how that customer and groups of customers view your entire portfolio. All of a sudden, it spreads beyond just that one product and the dignified exit instead, acknowledges their investment and acknowledges their effort, and by the way, all the data that they've generated with your product, and You build protocol conversion guides instead. So you've put thought into how they can transition. You provide technical resources during migration. You offer transition pricing. That's another helpful thing for budget limited labs these days, that bridges economic gaps. And you notify strategic accounts early so they can plan for budget cycles and regulatory revalidation timelines if that happens to be the case. So this addresses the emotion and also a little bit of the ego side of customer decision making they need to feel their partners in this matter, not that they're a line item that you're just deleting almost willy nilly. When you provide the tools and support to preserve continuity, most customers migrate to your replacement product because you've shown that you understand the constraints that they're under, that you've shown that you value the relationship with them, and that that you're you're putting your efforts behind all of that, and this dignified exit protects future revenue by honoring that relationship you've built, even As the specific product reaches maybe an end of utility. It's strategic customer retention, not just good manners, if you will.

Product Inheritance and Brand Impact

Matt Wilkinson [28:09]

And I love that. It's not just good manners. I think that's a great way to place to sort of end this. What I took away from this, and I'd never really spent a lot of time thinking about this in this way, was that strategic product end of life. It's not just about cost cutting. It's about quantifying what you're preserving, balancing internal resource constraints with external customer commitments, and sort of helping to migrate transitions that protect those relationships and the intellectual property that serve your next product. So it's really about helping to bring as much as you can from what you've got already, and preserve all of the goodwill, all of the knowledge, all of the knowledge that those customers have got as well, and bringing that into the next generation. That framework that you created looks like it works when you're having to make some really difficult trade offs that are particularly trade offs between different functions and really understanding what each declining product carries forwards as its inheritance, and making sure that you're designing exits that really honor customer investments instead of just abandoning them to try and figure out how to cope once you've once you've gone. So I know that you look to the challenging people to pick one product that was a print approaching the end of its utility, and to run a triage assessment with sort of fully loaded costs. What inheritance does this product actually carry forward that has value for what we're building next? And I think that's a really, really important question, and a really important way of looking at everything you build up with a product that it has an inheritance to take into

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [29:45]

the future, and it all, it just struck me that it's almost like we've come full circle, because doing product end of life in a thoughtful sort of way has a knock on effect on your.

Matt Wilkinson [30:02]

Brand and on brand marketing,

Matt Wilkinson [30:02]

absolutely, if you can manage that and actually make people feel good about the fact that something new is coming, that's, that's the, that's the essence of building a long, lasting, thoughtful, well

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [30:11]

loved brand. Well said. Well, thank you, Matt. This has been a fun conversation, as

Matt Wilkinson [30:17]

always it has, and look forward to doing it again next week.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [30:22]

Sounds good. And thanks to all who have been listening to another episode of a splice of Life Science marketing, see you all next week.

Matt Wilkinson [30:30]

See ya. Thank you for listening to a splice of Life Science marketing. We hope you enjoyed the episode.

Speaker 1 [30:36]

If this conversation helped you, the single biggest way you can support the show is to subscribe and leave a review on YouTube, Spotify or Apple podcasts, we'd really appreciate it, and it makes a huge difference.

Matt Wilkinson [30:51]

You can find out more about us and the topics we discuss@striven.com or on LinkedIn. Thank you so much for listening. We hope to see you next time you.