In this episode of 'a splice of Life Science marketing', hosts Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray interview Rohit Veerajapa, Chief of Staff at humantic AI, about moving beyond volume-based outreach to intelligent buyer engagement. Rohit shares insights on personality intelligence, account research, and the "buying committee magic quadrant" that helps sales teams understand group dynamics and build authentic connections with prospects.

Introductions and Background

Matt Wilkinson

Hi, I'm Matt Wilkinson, and welcome to a splice of Life Science marketing. Jasmine and I are here today with Rohit Veerajapa, the Chief of Staff of humantic AI. Now humantic AI is a personality, buyer, intelligence tool, and I've been a big fan of their work for the last few years. Every time before every meeting, I receive an email with a personality assessment of who I'm going to be speaking with. And so just before we jumped on this call today, I received an email from humantic about Rohit, and apparently, he's a thorough evaluator. He's rigorous and demanding and he's precise and practical. He's less concerned about the product and more about its potential impact, and he puts a lot of effort into ensuring personal success. So I'm really excited to welcome Rohit onto the show today.

Rohit Veerajapa

Thank you so much, Matt. In life, I'm a far more friendly person, but humantic does not recognise that part of you. But we'll get to that in a bit.

Matt Wilkinson

I'm looking forward to that bit, and thank you for coming on the show. So really, just like to understand a little bit about who you are, your role and maybe the key performance indicator you're most focused on right now.

Rohit Veerajapa

Okay, so maybe a bit of a background, had my education in computer science, then started my career as a software developer, right? But I realised I had bigger ambitions. So in 2011 I started up, I ran a company called Bob labs for the next nine years. And then fate had it in a way, where I ended up working for an accelerator for the next four and a half years, an accelerator slash fund. It is the Y Combinator equivalent in India. It's called Upekkha. So of course, there I played the role of coach and a VC, but now I'm back in the playground. So right now I'm here at humantic as a chief of staff, but my primary role is to take care of the customer success and partnership teams. Right? Matt, you asked, what is the KPI that I'm really obsessing about right now that would be delivering value to customers? Right? So, of course, there are lagging indicators like NPS and CSAT that you can measure them with, or leading indicators like product adoption and usage itself, right? So that's what I'm currently obsessing about. I know humantic is a great product. It can really help people achieve great results. So I'm extremely passionate about helping people realise the value of the same. So that's what I'm trying to do right now.

The Problem Humantic Solves

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Thank you. Hi, Rohit, and welcome as well. I love that you said that you're back in the playground. Maybe you can help describe, at a high level, the problem that humantic solves and how you're positioning humantic today.

Rohit Veerajapa

Okay, thank you so much Jasmine for asking me that question. Well, if I have to say, humantic helps sellers understand their buyers better, that's what we do now, usually I ask people in the current world, right? What is the bottleneck? Is it the seller's productivity? Is it the buyer's mindshare? Do we have really a dearth of sellers hours, the number of hours that they can work, or is it the mind share of the buyer, primarily because of the number of emails, calls, messages that they receive, right? And the overwhelming response I get is the buyer's mindshare. So that is what we help solve. We help solve the buyer's mindshare. We are a buyer experience tool, right? So we believe that there are two parts to every sale, right? One part is what the buyer wants. Second part is what the organisation needs, primarily because we're a B2B sales tool, right?

To understand the buyers wants, I again ask a simple question. I usually ask people that if you have a client who the native Japanese speaking client, and you had the ability to speak Japanese, would you not sell to them in Japanese? And overwhelming answer again, is yes, we would. And my counter question to them would be, then, why do you not sell in their personality style, but still in your personality style, right? And that is the aha moment that people realise, yeah, maybe they've left a lot on the table. So that's what we do as one part of a product, which we call people intelligence. We help understand the wants of the buyer, how they want to buy the product.

And of course, the second part, which is the needs of the organisation. There we have an account intelligence tool. It's typically wherein you spend about 30 seconds of your effort, and it saves you 30 hours of effort, if not 30 days of effort in researching the account that you're selling to. It typically understands the goals, the needs, the challenges, and the impact of not achieving those goals for that organisation, and then it marries it with your own solution and how you can help them. So this is what we do. We on one hand, have the people, intelligence part of the product. On the other hand, have the account intelligence part of the product, and together, we call this the complete buyer intelligence, and that's what we do in humantic.

Company Origins and Evolution

Matt Wilkinson

I was fortunate enough to meet Amarpreet, the founder and CEO of humantic, and it was three years ago at a Sandler sales and Leadership Summit in Florida. And I was curious how humantic started, because I've only ever experienced humantic as a sales tool. But if I'm not mistaken, the company started with a slightly different focus, or at least the technology did. So can you tell us a little bit about how the company was founded, and maybe about a little bit more about that shift and how you've ended up helping sales people?

Rohit Veerajapa

Well, that's quite a bit of a story, right? The story begins with this one mad man that we could call Amarpreet, and this mad obsession to humanise the internet, right? And one sliver of it is what you see today, which is trying to humanise sales. But of course, Matt, you got us that we did not start with the sales use case. Initially we started with the HR use case, right? We felt that the people intelligence part of the product that we had, then could be very useful in a hiring use case, because it can help the recruiters understand their candidates better and hire the right people. So happy that sometimes you don't choose the market. The market chooses you. So while somebody asked us for sales use case, and we had that also available, we just realised that the buyers mindshare or the buyer experience was a bigger and more acute problem, and we've definitely seen more traction there. That is why we've pivoted away from the HR use case, even though we do have a few customers from the early days that we yet serve. But as a company, we've shifted focus from the HR use case to the sales use case.

People Intelligence vs Account Intelligence

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I'd like to go back a sec to the two components you described, the buyer, intelligence and account intelligence components. Is it fair to think about this a persona perspective and an ideal customer profile perspective.

Rohit Veerajapa

Well, if we have to break it down, I would break it down into the people perspective and the company perspective, right? Because in every single sale, there are two components, right? You're selling to an individual or a bunch of individuals, it's very important to understand what makes them tick, right, because there's a famous saying that says everybody buys irrationally and justifies rationally. So everybody have their own set biases. They operate a certain way, like when Matt read out my profile at the starting of the show, it said that, I really care about the impact that the product can cause. Because in humantic parlance, which is the DISC personality, I am somebody who is a speedy type of a personality, so I'm pretty dominant. I really care about the impact that my work causes. So that is where it is. Whenever I'm in a buying equation, I look at what impact the product can cause, and not just, who is the seller? I really don't care so much about relationships in a selling persona, in a selling equation context, but in real life, I really care about relationships and everything. So that is where every individual is different. Every individual in a selling context is different. That's why we have the people intelligence to understand the individual that they're dealing with and how to sell to them in their personality style, if we go back to the Japanese analogy, in their language versus our own language, right?

And of course, the other part, the other part, being the company itself, that is where Why is this person or individual buying? Of course, their wants are going to be addressed to the people, intelligence part of the product. But why are they buying? That is because there's a mandate from the organisation. So the organisation itself is an entity, and it has its own needs and challenges. That is what we cover with the account intelligence part of the product. So that is where to answer your question. In short, it is the individual and organisation that we typically try to cater to.

The Buying Committee Feature

Matt Wilkinson

Is there a feature that you think first time users of humantic, perhaps overlook, but could really help them in their day to day job as a salesperson?

Rohit Veerajapa

Yes. So typically, we have a bunch of features, right? We, of course, show the buyer insights. We tell them how to personalise their cold calls. We tell how to personalise their emails, as long as you put in a template or the pain points, we go ahead and produce an email in the way that they want to read, right? And, of course, we help them personalise LinkedIn connection requests and mails, etc, etc, right? These are features that get very easily used. But one feature that anybody who uses, but doesn't get used because it's a slightly different use case, is what we call the buying committee.

Now, so till now, we were talking about we personalise it for an individual, right? But more often than not, especially in a mid market and above sales use case you are selling to not an individual but a set of users that are buyers, right? That is where it is very important to understand the group dynamics, not an individual persona, right? That is why we go ahead and we build something called the buying committee maps, because it said that the best deals are lost in rooms that you don't get to enter. How do you win these rooms that you don't get to enter? By understanding the people there and building your crusaders who will fight your battles for you in your absence.

So we typically in the buying committee map, we go ahead and divide the buying committee or the people into four quadrants. We call them the friendlies, the sceptics, the crusaders and the neutrals. Neutrals are people who may or may not sway the deal towards you or away from you. Sceptics are the ones who have the ability to kill your deal. Crusaders are the people who will fight for you, and friendlies are the people who are most response friendly, right? We tell them, start with the friendlies. Use them to get to the sceptics and to the crusaders. Don't try to make a sceptic your crusader. They're never going to do that. So keep their scepticism at bay by constantly giving them data. That is the kind of personality they are. And with the crusaders, they are extremely demanding and rigorous. Once they believe in your product, they're going to fight your battles for you.

So we call that a Magic Quadrant, because it is borderline magic. We've had our users come back and tell us stories. I have one user who told us that she got a deal, a million dollar deal, back from the dead because she understood the buying committee and started taking the right approach with the right person. So that is where it's an extremely powerful feature. But of course, it comes later in the sales cycle, and not when you're prospecting, etc, etc. So it sometimes gets used. It's extremely effective. And anybody who uses it swears by it.

Matt Wilkinson

I have to say, it's definitely one of my favourite features, especially when you're selling online. Because one, it's great to know who you're selling to, but if you're on a zoom call, like we are now, and especially if people don't put their cameras on, or it's a room where you can't really see everybody actually in the room, because maybe it's a conference room, I find that it's incredibly helpful to then be able to direct bits of information to different people based on where they might sit, and being able to get that insight as to how are they going to want to receive information and where do they sit in that group? So it's definitely been one of my favourite tools since I've started using it. So I definitely recommend anybody that's getting to play in the playground, as you said earlier, that they can go and explore that.

Rohit Veerajapa

Thank you so much for the kind words, Matt. Whenever customers speak well about the product, it's always music to my ears. I'm really glad that it's adding value to you. Thank you so much.

Competitive Advantage and Personalisation

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

So continuing on that thread, as we're all well aware, sales and marketing folks, when they're looking to adopt a new tool, are all about how this is going to give them the competitive edge. So maybe I would ask you, how can learning to use a tool like humantic AI give someone an edge compared to their peers?

Rohit Veerajapa

That's a pretty straightforward answer in my mind, right? But for the larger audience, everybody today are using AI tools, right? What are AI tools like GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc, etc, right? And everybody are using these tools to write emails. Why not? Because it's writing better emails. Of course, it is writing better emails than majority of the individuals that they themselves would, but they're not using it for that reason. They're using it because it's easier to do it. So everybody are doing it. How are you going to differentiate is your competitive edge? First of all, if you're not even using ChatGPT to write your email. Okay, then God help you, right? But if you are, then everybody else is also doing that. How are you going to get the competitive edge? The competitive edge comes by understanding your buyer better, not by selling more. It is by helping them buy more, right? So that is where humantic comes into play. And by using humantic, you can understand their needs, their wants, how they like to behave, what are their biases? What moves their needle? Using these you can personalise your sales techniques, of course, in all channels, right, be it social, be it calls, or be it emails, so that you have the competitive edge others may not.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I think my interpretation of what you're saying comes down to one of Matt and my marketing heroes, Mark Schaefer, who says, gotta cut through the pandemic of dull and really, the value proposition between the buyer, the people intelligence and the account intelligence gives you that background to cut through that dullness.

Rohit Veerajapa

Absolutely like, if I were to give an example, right? We have a client called Rohit, and I was showcasing the product to him, and then he was like, Hey, why don't you write a cold email to me using your humantic? So we pulled out the product, and I just went ahead and gave it a template where I'm giving my selling points and usual pain points that a client would have. And what humantic did was it went ahead and it picked up his latest LinkedIn post was the fact that he had started this leadership position in this company, and then it congratulated him for that. Then went ahead and understood what their CEO has said in public, or the problems they are facing, or the goals for 2025 and married it with our offering, and of course, listed all our solutions, and then said, Hey, can we go ahead and book a 15 minute video meeting?

And I asked Rohit, is this the email you would read? And he said, absolutely yes, because it shows that somebody has taken time to craft that. But let's be honest, if you were to do all of this work, it would easily take you about 10-15 minutes even, even if you're very fast, it would take you 10-15 minutes to research and write this email. And nobody has the time or patience to do that. That's where we come in, and we help you cut through the dullness that you spoke about right where we have this pitch slapping contest that's going on, right where every email is the pitch, every call is the pitch, every LinkedIn request is a pitch. How do you differentiate yourself from all the pitch slapping that's happening by going ahead and personalising and it's just not personalising based on the data that's available in the internet. It's also personalising based on their personality, right?

Like Rohit, if it's a D type you directly want to get into the meat of the email. Would not like fluff in the email. Would like the email to be extremely crisp. Let's take an I type personality, that type of personality might be willing to read a long email. They might want the email to start with a greeting, hey. How are you? Hope this email finds you well. But a D type personality may not need that. D type person is like, get to the point that's where every personality has a different way of reading the email, and humantic goes ahead and it does that end to end email personalisation for you, so that's where you cut through the dullness. You cater it to the way that they want to receive it.

Customer Success Stories

Matt Wilkinson

You've already talked about a couple of customer examples and proof points that have shown real impact. Do you have any other favourite stories of where humantic really shown massive impact?

Rohit Veerajapa

Oh, that there are way too many. So for anybody who's interested, we have a YouTube channel over there. We have a playlist with, at this point, I think, about 32 videos where we have CEOs of different organisations talking about the impact that humantic caused for them. A few that if I may say, is we work with a publicly listed company in DevSecOps, publicly listed company, and while we work with them, they initially said that they wanted a 30% pipeline improvement, right? But we ended up delivering 49% for one group and 151% for the other group. Right? So that is where sometimes we say that these numbers sound so too good to be true, right? Because, of course, on paper, it looks outlandish, right? But that's where we have all of this data. We have these people claiming it themselves, so I really encourage any of your listeners to just go ahead and check that out.

And we also work with another publicly listed company called Domo right, and their CMO Mohammed, measured and reported that they saw a 37% improvement in their win rates by using humantic. Right. So there are, I think Jeevan Fox, who's the CEO of Adstudio, said that the conversion rate was around 15% but after using humantic, it moved to 42 to 50% right? So that's like more than a 3x so I have stories after stories that I can share as to how it's been positively impacting people. Anybody who's interested in further understanding this should just go to the YouTube channel and look at the playlist. They'll get all the data points.

Working with Technical Audiences

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yeah, maybe we can pull on that thread a little bit. The audience for our podcast is mostly focused on what has been called the most sceptical audience on the planet, the scientists and the clinicians. Do you see any unique challenges in applying personality AI to technical audiences like that.

Rohit Veerajapa

In short, the answer is no right, primarily because the only limitations that we may face is with respect to data, and how much publicly available data is there for us to go ahead and predict whatever we are predicting, right? Usually I get this question. Another variant of this question would be, hey, does this work well for big companies? Does it not work well for small companies? So my answer is that, hey, we are agnostic, right? We are agnostic with company size, with people, etc, etc, because we are an AI company. And what does an AI model need? We have a proprietary machine learning model. What does our model need? It needs data. As long as there is data we can predict, and as long as we can predict, somebody can use that and apply it in their line of work. Now that is why, in short, the answer is no, because we are agnostic their profession.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

And can one of those data sources be their publications? So PubMed, for example.

Rohit Veerajapa

Absolutely right. So we typically, right now, do not pull PubMed data. But if, let's say, they publish something and they want to use that for analysis, we have options where they can go ahead and add additional text, we will go through and, refine our predictions. Or if there's no other data available, just use that to make the prediction.

Privacy, Ethics and Compliance

Matt Wilkinson

So when I've shown a few people humantic AI, they sort of thought it's a bit magic. And also, there's been a few people that have sort of thought, wow, where are you getting this data? What concerns about privacy, ethics and sort of compliance are there, and so, yeah, sort of curious. Your stance on sort of that, unpacking that whole sort of AI, privacy, ethics and compliance and humantic's stance on that, because obviously, you're analysing people in a way that maybe is, could be uncomfortable.

Rohit Veerajapa

Totally curious, right? And that is where we are extremely prudent about data privacy ethics, compliance, etc, etc, right? So currently, all our analysis is on publicly available data. If they have publicly put it out there we are using that to analyse whatever we are advising about an individual. So for any good reason, let us say that they are unhappy or uncomfortable with the analysis, right and they do not want us to analyse them. Then we have a simple opt out option where they can go to our website and put their LinkedIn URL or their email address or their name and say, hey, I want to opt out, and we will make sure that we do not provide that analysis to anybody else, because that is the right thing to do right and we really care about people and their privacy, so we want to do the right thing.

With respect to compliance. Of course, we are GDPR and SOC two compliant. That is a testimony to the fact that we truly care about our customers and their privacy. In a nutshell, we are very vigilant about this. Whenever we get feedback, we develop internally, try to think and work towards making sure that it's a safer place for everyone.

Future of Sales and AI

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Thank you. So I'd like to take a page from your background and ask you to think about your spidey sense. See the future of sales in the next two to three years, and the role of AI in that.

Rohit Veerajapa

So the future that I see, or that we see as an organisation, right? The future that we are seeing is that nine out of 10 tools today are about seller's productivity, right? Helping you send more emails, helping you make more phone calls, helping you automate LinkedIn, email campaigns, etc, etc, but that is where we've taken the contrary view we've gone to the other side, and we are saying, Hey, we are going to solve the buyer's mindshare. We are going to humanise selling. We are going to ensure that we are not about selling more, but we are going to ensure that people buy more, right. So we are not the more people we are, the better people. So that is the future that we are betting on, that the general audience is going to get more done, but we want to get things done better, right? So that that's what our spidey senses tell us, and that's the future that we are trying to create, right? Because there's this thing I don't know who said it. They say, What's the best way of predicting the future? And the answer is, by creating it. So, we are trying to create the future. Let's see how that pans out.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

So I think said a little bit differently, you're looking at lifetime value of a particular account.

Rohit Veerajapa

Absolutely right, not about transactions. That is where during a qualifying process, because we sell our product to someone else, right? So even we qualify. So when we are qualifying? One of the things that we see is whether they're doing velocity sales or long tail sales. If they're doing velocity sales, we tell them this is not a product for you, because in velocity sales, you have to play the volume game, you have to play the numbers game right? You have to send so many emails. You have to make so many calls. So wherever the sales cycle is longer, right, where it's typically mid market and above. Sales cycle is anywhere between three to six months can be a year. Here you don't know how you lost the deal, and when you lose the deal, there is where people do want to leave any stones unturned to ensure that they are doing everything in their power to make a sale happen. Those are the type of people who can appreciate this better. And those are the people who really care about the lifetime value. They really care about the churn, etc, etc. So those are the people that we try to sell to.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yeah, so just wanted to interject for our listeners. Rohit is talking to all of you folks who have robotics types of products, who have high end scientific instrument type of products. So listen, listen up. I think this is a really valuable point for that sales and marketing cycle.

Metrics That Matter

Matt Wilkinson

And sticking with the sort of the Spider Man sort of themed questions. This is a tool that with great power comes great responsibility. And so if I was a chief revenue officer or a head of sales, what is the one metric you think that I should retire based on when I implement humantic AI, and what's the one that they should adopt instead?

Rohit Veerajapa

Oh, well, maybe I wouldn't limit to a single metric, but I would continue the overarching theme that I've been speaking about over here, right? I would tell them to stop measuring volume, because, unfortunately, the nature of the beast today is such that SDRs are measured on how many contacts are they reaching out to, how many emails are they sending? How many calls are they making? Right very similarly, with AEs, how many accounts are they handling? What is the entire pipeline coverage, etc, etc. That's where I would request CROs to look at this slightly differently. I would request them to measure the number of personalised emails or personalised touch points that you're making, whether it could be a call or LinkedIn or email or even in a meeting, right whenever you're going into a meeting, how prepared are you? Do you know each of those individuals? Do you know collectively, how they behave? Do you know what is the needs of the entire organisation?

Gone are the days where you just Google something, or you go to their website and pull out two data points. Today, everybody are prepared, right? So go ahead, make sure that you stop those vanity metrics and start looking at these value metrics, because Amarpreet has a very good analogy out here, right? He usually speaks about something called the Dust Bowl effect, which happened in around the 1930s in parts of the US, where, typically, people resorted to over farming, and then that left the soil vulnerable to wind erosion. And today, with the incoming of AI, we could have that same dust bowl effect where people are sending too much, too many outreach and that could really make it a very worrying situation. So that's why I would request every CRO to move away from these vanity metrics and move towards value metrics and see how that works out for them.

Making the Case to Sceptics

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I really like that analogy to the Dust Bowl. You're right. We're being inundated with lots of emails and lots of outreaches that are dull and not on point. So if I had to explain the value of humantic AI to a sceptical colleague, what's the most straightforward way to frame it so that they'll give it a fair shot?

Rohit Veerajapa

Well, in my humble opinion, what works best is my Japanese buyer analogy. Okay, nine out of 10 times people get it and they have an aha moment. Now, I would encourage you to go ahead and use the Japanese analogy, right? If we would speak somebody's language, let's be honest, we all sellers, are used to persona based selling, right? That we typically try and understand the persona. We are like, Hey, let's try and understand the culture, let's try and understand their demography, let's try and understand XYZ, right? Everybody have been doing that, but it's time to start selling, not only to the persona, but also to the person, because each individual is different, and with AI, you can do more. So I would tell people is to go ahead and try and sell to the person, to the person, and not only the persona. So maybe that is how you could explain it to them, right?

Where to Learn More

Matt Wilkinson

That was brilliant. Rohit, so many good questions that you've answered today. But my final question is possibly the easiest one of all, where should people go if they want to learn more about yourself and humantic?

Rohit Veerajapa

Oh, well, we are humantic.ai, h, u, M, a n, t, i c.ai, please find us on our website. We go by the same handle on all social media accounts so you could find us there.

Matt Wilkinson

Brilliant. Thank you so much. And thank you for the really fun discussion today. I've really enjoyed it.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yeah, thanks for sharing the humantic AI advantage, as well as your spidey sense. We really appreciate it.

Rohit Veerajapa

Well, Jasmine and Matt, thank you so much for having me over. You've been great hosts, and I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much.

From Static Documents to Persona AI: Making Customer Personas Actually Work

In this episode of 'a splice of Life Science marketing', hosts Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray explore how to create personas that go beyond static documents to become living, interactive tools. They discuss the evolution from demographic-focused templates to AI-powered personas that can help with role-playing, message testing, and understanding the jobs customers need done.

What Makes an Effective Persona

Matt Wilkinson

And welcome to a splice of Life Science marketing. I'm Matt Wilkinson and

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

and I'm Jasmine Gruia-Gray. Hi, Matt. How you doing today?

Matt Wilkinson

Good, good. It's a little bit steamy here in Northern Virginia,

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

quite warm here in the UK for once, which is nice. Today we're going to talk about persona. And that's probably quite an interesting way to start really is because you, if you create a persona of an English person, you might actually say that one of the things that they're always talking about is the weather, and you might say that they're always complaining about the rain. But before we delve too deeply into persona, it's probably worth starting with, well, what actually do we mean by and a persona is a really helpful way to represent a group of our customers. The way I like to view them is that within our ideal customer profile, we have a buying group, and within that buying group, we typically have people that are our primary buyer, and then we have users, and then we have those that are also involved in the buying decision. So that could be procurement, finance, health and safety, quality, whoever it is there's often quite a few other people that are involved in that buying group itself, and we can create across our different groups of ideal customer profiles, we can create persona. And those persona are these aggregated views of who they are. And so we can start off by thinking about trying to humanise our messaging around the roles that they play in the jobs that they do.

So for example, you might be looking at a lab, so a bench scientist in the lab, and so you know that first thing in the morning they come in, there's a certain number of tasks. Maybe they're checking their email, they're doing a few things, but then they're going into the lab, they're putting on their lab coats, they're putting on their safety specs, and there may be going on, there's certain tasks that they're getting on with. And so it's about understanding what their day looks like, what keeps them awake at night, and really, what gets them excited and what motivates them. And if we can understand that across a group of customers, we can speak more closely to their needs, wants and the jobs that they need to be done.

From Templates to Jobs to Be Done

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yeah, just sort of pulling on that thread some more on the jobs to be done. I think that's where persona development has really taken off in the last three, four years. And the analogy I like to use actually works really well from what you and I are wearing, I think in the before times when people thought about personas, it was very much a template. It was very black and white, and it was some cutesy name for the persona, what their age was, what their hobby was, all stuff that really, by and large, wasn't relevant for how they make decisions, what motivates them and what the jobs are to be done. Today, we're living in colour. We're living in a world where anything goes, where the templates are okay. I mean, I absolutely have my playbook of templates, but we think about the template of a persona from a much more human perspective, not only jobs to be done, but behaviours. What are the steps they take in making a decision? What are how do they think about what they really need, what they don't need, what they're fearful of, what makes them successful?

Matt Wilkinson

I absolutely agree. I think there's another thing that's really important about persona is that once we've created them, they can be a real pillar of coherence between sales, marketing, customer support, about around how are we going to ensure that our interactions with this group of people that we're tying up together as a persona within a single person, that we're going to make sure that we're trying to address their needs and wants and what they're trying to accomplish, and that we're able to really be able to provide better customer experience overall. I think that's the big thing. Because if we try to, if as human beings, we try to address every single person as an individual, we just can't cope with that. I mean, research shows that we can have maybe 100-150 friends before we sort of have to move out and sort of just sort of calling them acquaintances. There's a reason why communities kind of top out at the size they do. That's why organisational structures don't get too big before having bigger structures in place, because as humans, we just can't cope with that many connections. And so this is really a way to help us simplify that, but also keep it very human.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yeah, I think there's a really important point you made at the beginning, which is that personas, and I'd add also that ideal customer profiles, the bricks and mortar, are really the unifying elements across a commercial organisation, and it's really critical that sales, marketing, customer experience service, FAS are all on the same page regarding the ideal customer profiles and the personas, so that you're all going to be targeting the same segments, the same potential buyers with a very similar message, and a message that you've tested, that you know is going to resonate with them.

Understanding the Complete Buying Group

Matt Wilkinson

Absolutely, I think that's why it's always so important to try and get those people around a table to agree on not just who are ideal customer profiles and what are they, but then who are personas and what do they look like. And I think that there can be huge benefit gained from going through that process, because you get that unifying kind of coherence around who's important to speak with, who do we speak with, who do we know, and also maybe getting insight about who don't we know, who do we need to spend more time getting to know you know, the number of times that you speak to clients, and the sales team, are doing really well. They're great at getting into conversations. They're great at putting in proposals. But then once it hits procurement, things go quiet. And so then maybe there's a conversation that we need to look at. What is it we need to do to make sure that the procurement like us as well. And so then, by creating persona around procurement, understand what is it that we're not doing that's not communicating with them. Maybe we need to get them in the room as part of our buying process. Maybe it's actually we just need some really simple sales enablement messaging that allows us to continue to have messaging that resonates with that persona.

So I think that's a really important thing to do, because we understand who's in our buying group, we can better understand what jobs, what's important to each of them, what jobs are they measured on? And so there's some really interesting ways about taking that forward, rather than just taking the very vacuous kind of approach of, well, they're going to be this old and be married with kids, or they're going to have these sort of demographic traits, but actually understand what are they measured on? And because each of the people in that buying group are measured in different ways, and I think that's a really important thing that we have to look at. So we have to try and create coherence within our buying group that helps make them that helps the buying group as a whole come to a decision.

How Many Personas Do You Need?

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

So in your experience, how do you think about this? Is there an ideal number of personas that a company should have, or a product group should have.

Matt Wilkinson

So that's a really nuanced question. I think, in the days before AI, or at least before Gen AI, I would have said that trying to understand, in detail, who your key people you need to influence, and really digging into making sure that we're creating, we've got messaging for maybe, typically, there are five roles with any buying group, we sort of listed them out earlier, sort of the initiator, the user, the initiator is kind of the problem that recognises the problem. You have a champion, who's there that's also part of that similar group, but is there and sort of willing to take the drive to really solve the problem. You have end users, you have procurement, and you have finance, so you sort of have these interested parties in completing sale. And of course, those roles will change. They will be different depending on who you're selling to what the organisations are like. But I would have said, start off with any particular type of sale, with having about five persona within a segment, within an ICP group, however you're creating that segmentation.

The problem I've always found with persona is that very often what will happen is that agencies will go away. You'll have a fantastic meeting where you'll get everybody around the room, great workshop. Everybody's really enthused, and they're agreeing on things, getting these, the notes that come back sort of half formed. People then go away do some desk research, spend hours kind of trying to fill in the gaps. And then once you've created these, they get turned into beautiful documents that then just rust away on a hard drive somewhere. They get used for the initial piece of work, and then people forget them.

Using AI for Deep Persona Research

Matt Wilkinson

And so a deep research came out. I realised that rather than doing the manual work yourself of going through LinkedIn profiles job descriptions, you could actually create a way of using the deep research tools themselves to go off and analyse and think about a group of profiles that are on LinkedIn that fit your persona, looking at their job descriptions and then really trying to enrich what the conversations that you'd already had with genuine data that could really help to help you better understand who you're speaking with. And so that's something that I've been using now for, I guess, the best part of a year.

And then on top of that, rather than just having these sort of persona documents that are having to analyse and read through and go right, what was their key questions that they asked as part of their buying journey, what matters most to them? We could start creating custom GPT or AI assistants where we're actually uploading those into as a knowledge base within the AI itself, and then using that to not only be a queryable kind of persona that we could actually interact with and ask questions of rather than having to us ask the questions of the document. We can just go into the AI and ask the chat bot ourselves, but we can take that a step further and then actually interact with them and use that as kind of as a an in silico version of our persona themselves to do everything from brainstorming, testing messaging, creating messaging, the whole gamut of the sorts of things where you can almost have a virtual customer at your desk all the time. And I think for me, that's been one of the real eye opening ways that I've certainly changed my workflows, and I think that we can really look at making these personas so much more useful and helpful and shareable.

Creating Unified Commercial Teams

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I can't say enough about this. I think this point is so important, and links back to what we were talking about earlier, about creating unification across a commercial team, because once you can agree on the jobs to be done and on, as Adele Revella calls it the five rings of buying insight, priority initiatives, success factors, perceived barriers, buyer's journey and decision criteria. And then you operationalise that to an extent, as you say, in silico with a custom GPT or a gem, or whatever your favourite LLM is, you can now use that to create sales scripts, to create sales presentations, to really evaluate your website, to evaluate your marketing tools and your sales tools to helping your customer experience team, because now you're all working on this using the same platform to think through what that outbound messaging is going to be like, and what that experience is going to be like from a proxy persona.

Matt Wilkinson

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that especially when you've got the ability to share these now, having everybody using the same data source or the same AI and silico version allows you to have consistency across the silos. And I think that's then really important. Now, of course, one of the criticisms has always been a persona has always been that there are one and done. I don't think we're quite there yet, but you can imagine a future where you build these persona into an AI that sits within your website, you can imagine that then you're learning not just on what does what we're telling it do within a website, but what actions do they actually take when we can recognise a specific persona? And then, if we're at that point, can we use data collection to then enrich them? I'm sure that there's, there are ways to do that. I, clever ways. I don't think there's a product out there that does that just yet. And I'm sure that HubSpot and Salesforce are probably working on this as I speak. But I'm sure there's ways to do that.

Role-Playing and Voice Coaching with AI Personas

Matt Wilkinson

I think there's also another thing I've seen is that there are now these speech coaching tools that companies like use it usually, and a few others, where you are able to not only understand to look at your customers and understand them better, but you can build those persona into a voice, into a conversational AI, and then you can set up scenarios. So let's just imagine that we've built our AI, we built our persona for a lab scientist. If I'm a salesperson, I'm going into a call with that lab scientist. Maybe I take that same person and build it into a conversational AI, and within that I can then actually practice a specific scenario. Let's just say that I'm going in and meeting them for the first time and I'm trying to introduce a new product range to them. I can actually practice that conversation. I can practice that cold call. And so there's a whole wide range of ways that, once we've got this, these data sets, that we can start using them to not just create better and more, but also to be better and more with them, to actually be able to practice with them. And I think that's just one of the really exciting things that I'm seeing.

There's also ways to look so get buyer insights around their personalities. And so you could imagine that there are different DISC profiles or Big Five personality traits. And you could look at those and go, okay, so if we've got these different types of personality, because we know that people aren't all the same, even if they're doing the same job. Well, we can then look at what would it be like if that person is more of a D rather than an I in their DISC profile, and be able to practice those same conversations with different personality traits. And I think that then just takes things to a whole different level, where all of a sudden we can be more prepared for the conversations that we might want to have.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yeah, the word that comes to mind when you're describing this use case is informed, so it will help. It's the classic role playing that we used to do at sales meetings, right where somebody in marketing would play the role of a customer, and somebody in sales would have to practice their pitch, but the scenario you're describing with an AI helps you actually build something that's much more informed, much more real world and more scalable, so that it doesn't just live in the sales role playing, it can live in the customer experience role playing and how they deal with different scenarios and being on the front line as they often are.

The Importance of Real Customer Interviews

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I think the other point I want to pull on is that just because we can train LLMs to be a very good proxy for customers and for personas, that doesn't negate the need to actually do the hard work and do some of the interviewing. And I really want to encourage our marketing colleagues and listeners to get out there and get that experience and roll up your sleeves and really understand face to face what that buyer's mindset is, what that buyers context is and how your company and products and services can be useful to that buyer firsthand.

Matt Wilkinson

There's nothing better than that firsthand experience of what it's like to walk in the buyer shoes for even if it's just a few metres or a few miles. But I think there's something else we can do as part of that, if we're given permission, if we can record those interviews, or we can at least take notes and add to them, we can add those verbatim quotes, those transcripts, to the data set as well that we're going to add in. So rather than just having a very polished persona, the AI doesn't really care how much data we give it. So we can then go through and actually add transcripts after transcript to these that will then actually only enrich the data. So we can constantly update these by simply by adding extra data to them, whether you're updating the same file or just adding extra files to say, hey, here's a couple of transcripts from interviews with this persona. You can do all of that and really start to build out a wealth of real customer voice, and have that shining through in actually, the way that they might speak, in the way that they might want to be spoken with. And so I think that's a really powerful thing.

Another reason to go out and speak with customers, not just because it's great for each of us individually to get that sense of that humanity, but because we can add that in, and we can then share those insights across the entire organisation through these in silico versions of our customers.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Right? And it's not only your customers that you can interview. You can also interview folks that didn't go with your solution, that chose your competitors solution, or chose some internal solution.

Matt Wilkinson

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I use the word customer, but I think it's target, or potential customer, prospect, whatever we want to call them. I think that there's absolutely that it's really important that we do get that sense of, well, who's buying from us, who isn't, and what are the differences? Is it just because of brand, or is there something inherently different about the way that we appeal to certain groups of people and not others? As you know, when we're selling things, some decisions are made purely based on the procurement level, where you have a single supplier and or you have a group of suppliers, and if you're not part of that supplier list, you're not in the game. And so then it's a case of, well, how do we get in the game? But being able to just even understand that, I think, can be an incredibly powerful part of this sort of conversation.

Common Persona Mistakes

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Right? So just before we wrap up as a take home message, what do you think are the two biggest mistakes that marketers make when they create buyer personas?

Matt Wilkinson

So I think there's so many mistakes we're about creating and then, but I think the biggest mistake is that often personas get created and then they used and forgotten about. So I think the first one is that they get forgotten about that, I've seen some beautiful persona being created, and then people aren't even using them when you're having to remind people to go back to the persona, because the information is in them, so they're not using them as a source of truth. So that's the very first thing to remember, is to use them. And I think that by turning them into an AI representation of those personas, actually makes them so much more useful, you just get far greater ROI for those efforts. Anyway. So that's number one.

And I think the other is, by being a bit too shallow with the questions that you're asking, I think that the five rings of buying insight so powerful understanding what jobs to be done, any of that insight that we can really get included? Yeah, there's things that are important about what channels they want to communicate through, but the more important thing is, is actually, how do we move them emotionally? How do we actually meet what their needs, the jobs that they need to be done? How do we actually help them achieve what they're looking to achieve? And if we can answer those questions within our persona, all of our messaging will then be just so much stronger, more focused, and will resonate so much better. And that's really, I think the big thing that I'd focus on is make it so that's usable. And it's not just pretty fluffy pictures. It's actually something that really can be used by marketing, by sales, by service, and anybody else that's interacting with our customers and prospects.

Starting with Personas in Campaign Development

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

To sort of add a finer point on everything you've said, and I agree with is I sort of appeal to product marketers and marketing managers when you're creating your next campaign, start with the persona. Who is it that this campaign is appealing to, what are their jobs to be done? What are their motivators? What is their buying context? And then put the campaign together, and then after the campaign is executed, and you look at the data, who has responded to your campaign, not only from a persona perspective, but also for an ICP perspective. Are there any surprises there? Are there any outliers from the trends that help you to then loop back to your ICP and to your personas and tweak them and lift them up even further?

Matt Wilkinson

Yeah, or even find that you've got a segment that you didn't realise that you were actually, that you were able to serve, that needs to be treated differently. Maybe you've hit an outlier that actually should be a separate segment, and we can do even more with that with those outliers. So I think you're absolutely right. I think being able to treat everything a little bit like a an experiment and a hypothesis. And knowing that very much like in science and in chemistry, when I went to do my first year of chemistry, basically they told us everything that we'd learned up to that point was wrong and that the models we'd use were all too basic. And as you go through doing organic chemistry and inorganic chemistry and physical chemistry, all you're doing is applying a model to serve a certain to solve a specific problem. If you try to use the most complicated model, the kept scientific model here, I'm not talking about large language models, but the most complicated scientific model to solve a simple problem, you'll be just wasting too much time, but you'll get the same result 90% of the time, 99% of the time. So what you're really looking for is finding the appropriate model.

And I think this is really the trick here with persona, is that they are an appropriate model for a whole range of communications and helping us get communicate better with a group of our customers or prospects. But they're not perfect, and of course, we do need to layer on top of this personality and individuals and the individual context of every customer. If we were taking to this to Account Based Marketing and a key account, we might create individual personas within a market of one company. So I think we can, and with AI, the way it is now we absolutely have the ability to do that. We can scale these things far quicker, and then we can use these in a way that actually makes that make sense. Whereas if we were doing this on a basis where we're looking at hundreds of persona potentially, but you're having to do the analysis, and kind of, you or I are having to try and understand the difference between somebody in the same job role in two different companies. We wouldn't be able to necessarily do that. I think the subtlety of that's different. But within the AI, maybe actually within some of our most important accounts, it's worth us doing that. It might not be, it's a hypothesis that we can test. Does it make sense to do that? But if we treat everything like an experiment, where we start off with a hypothesis that this is a good this is going to be good enough to make a difference, and for us to be even just 1% better than if we don't use those, that's where I think it's just so important.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yeah, I think that's fantastic, and I think that's a great message to end on. This has been tons of fun. Thank you for sharing and helping us all learn, Matt,

Matt Wilkinson

and thank you, Jasmine, it's been great fun as always.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

And thank all of you for joining us on a splice of Life Science marketing. Bye, for now.

Matt Wilkinson

Bye.

ICPs vs Personas: The Critical Difference Every Life Science Marketer Must Know

In this episode of 'a splice of Life Science marketing', hosts Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray tackle one of the most misunderstood concepts in B2B marketing: the difference between ideal customer profiles and personas. They explore Philip Kotler's segmentation requirements, share a practical five-step process for crafting effective personas, and demonstrate how AI tools can revolutionise customer research in minutes rather than hours.

Philip Kotler on Market Segmentation

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Welcome everybody. I'm Jasmine Gruia-Gray,

Matt Wilkinson

and I'm Matt Wilkinson, and today we're going to be talking about segmentation, ideal customer profiles, and how these are not personas,

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

right? So I'd like to kick off with Matt is a quote from Philip Kotler, the esteemed marketer. He said, All customers are important, but some are more important than others, which sort of comes to the fine point of segmentation, and even further from that to ideal customer profile. And he said, If markets are to be segmented and cultivated, they must meet certain requirements. Segments must be measurable, sustainable, accessible, differentiable and actionable.

Matt Wilkinson

I'd fully agree. And I think you can take that even further to looking at actually down to how do you, once you've got an idea of your markets, actually even down to key accounts, and how you treat accounts and therefore how you market to them as well. So I think it's a fantastic quote from Kotler, as per always, one of my heroes. It's a really interesting challenge. And so often we see segmentation reading on a very high level based on the end market uses. But I'm curious, Jasmine, what have you seen that sort of best practices in terms of segmentation that goes beyond the end market

Beyond Product Market Fit to Company Market Fit

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

so it's really interesting. A lot of companies focus on product market fit, which don't get me wrong, I think is super important, but I think there also needs to be an equal amount of time and a continuous amount of time on looking at what company is the best fit for your company's products or services and goals, and so some of the Best Practices I've seen for established companies is actually go to your data, look at your own data, and look at where you're getting lifetime value with certain customers. And what makes those customers a coherent group? Is it the size of the company and their behaviours on your website? Is it the types of applications that they're involved in and the unmet needs that your products and services solve? So it's a combination of looking at the data from, certainly from a firmographic perspective, but absolutely layering on top of that, the attributes around environmental and behavioural,

Matt Wilkinson

fantastic. And so I guess it also comes up to, could be a little bit down to the structure of the organisations internally as well. So it could be to do with the nature of the teams, who's involved, who's doing the work as well.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

This is a team sport. This is not an independent department exercise and thought process. It involves sales. It involves marketing. It involves the field applications team. In some cases, it may even involve R&D as well.

The Iterative Process Between Segmentation and ICPs

Matt Wilkinson

And so when we then move to ideal customer profiles, do we need to? Do we go backwards and forwards between our ideal customer profiles and segmentation. Or do we start with segmentation and then look at our ICPs? Or do we, how do we, what's the best practice you've seen doing that? Because, obviously there's a nice process where we say, let's get this, let's identify our segments and then look at the ideal customers within those segments. But actually, is that a sort of a two way conversation, a bit of a cyclical, iterative process?

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yeah, I think that's a great question, and a great pitfall that many companies and commercial teams fall into, that they think it's a linear process. You start with the segments you're either given the segment where you start with identifying the segment, and then you pulled on that thread and go to the ICP. And then, typically, when they think of the ICP, the only think about the firmographic side, the company size, number of employees, the geography kind of thing, but your point is really well made and super important that it's an iterative thing. You may start with the segment and go to your ICP, then you've defined your ICP, go back to the segment and constantly think of it as a cyclical process. And then, depending on your business, this may be an annual process, or it may be an every six month process.

Matt Wilkinson

So it's a bit like the scientific process. Then really, where you start off with a hypothesis on your segment, move into a hypothesis on your ICPs, and then you revisit once you've and you get closer and closer to a model that hopefully fits and delivers value.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yeah, I love that analogy. It is very much like that. In the case of larger companies, your hypothesis can be borne out by the data that you have, the data from finance, the data from your website, the data from your conferences, in terms of smaller companies you may not have access to as much data, and so in that case, your hypothesis can be tested by going out into the world and actually talking to folks to really hone in on that ideal customer profile. And you know, we should go back for a second, and maybe this is a good transition into personas. Ideal customer profile is the brick and mortar. It is not the person.

ICPs Are Not Personas

Matt Wilkinson

I think that's an incredibly important point. I've definitely had heated discussions when people have started describing their ideal customer profile as a person. And I think particularly, I guess, the origin of that starts off a little bit in the B to C world, where actually your ideal customer is your ideal customer and it is a person, whereas in the B to B world, I think that distinction is incredibly important. And then you can, as you say, you can then go into looking at who's involved in your buying group. Who do you need to influence within those ideal customer profiles? I think a really nice way to almost segment your ICPs is actually making is, by, once you've been through that process, is to then look at what characteristics of our ICPs actually contain similar buying groups and have similar questions that they're going to be asking? So if we can identify kind of the consistencies between ICP buying groups that helps us set in sort of segment our ICPs in a different way, maybe, or create micro segments that allows us to then maybe target them in a different way, in a more customised way, to really make sure that we can have the impact that we want on both generating new customers into maximising customer lifetime value.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

That word personalised is thrown around so much these days, especially with AI. And I think the really, the only way that you can get to the true meaning of personalisation is to really understand those ICPs very deeply, and that means getting down to the level of the buying groups.

Using AI for Account Intelligence

Matt Wilkinson

Absolutely, I mean, I know you can get a lot from account intelligence and looking at what's going on. I think that's really important to understand the pressures that our individual organisations were selling to are under. But then it's really about getting beyond the firmographics, what, where are they headed to? What are they doing? And, of course, I was excited this week with the launch of MIA from humantic AI, that with just putting two names in the amount of data that you can get from an agentic accounts intelligence, sort of the research approach is just staggering. I mean, what you can pull out now compared with two years ago, it's almost criminal if we're not using these tools when we're going through these processes, to be able to find out information that might be buried in investor relations reports, or what the investors are talking about, or then the other side of things that sort of looking at what's going on within the business. Are they having trouble recruiting? So all of these things, I think, can be such an incredibly powerful way to understand the pressures that our ICPs are under.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I think what these tools enable us to do is give more meaning to the question of what keeps you up at night. And it enables marketers to arm their sales partners with that kind of information, not that you're going to know everything that keeps that company in that R&D group up at night, but at least you have a foundation of what's important to them and what's unsolvable by them, and how that then relates to your offering.

Matt Wilkinson

Anybody that's ever been involved in sales will say you don't tell the customer about them, but you ask them good questions I think it gives you a fantastic wealth of starting points for asking questions and being learning more about your customer and what bothers them. And I think that's the really interesting thing, because you can then guide the questions to really understand what if A, B and C are really bothering the customer, then we're able to start figuring out, how can we create something that's really going to answer not just their technical problem, but maybe build an offer that actually answers maybe a challenge with getting capex or OPEX, or whatever it is, build an offer that actually makes sense for them in that moment,

Five Steps to Craft Meaningful Personas

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

if we sort of become super focused on being practical here for a second, Matt, Could you outline five steps of what you would recommend somebody in marketing who's listening to this podcast should do to really craft meaningful personas,

Matt Wilkinson

as I said on a recent Sam's webinar, there's sort of five key steps, and that was focused around Account Based Marketing. But I think it's the same sort of approach. First of all, try and understand the accounts you're going after, as I mentioned earlier, sort of account intelligence. But you can also use deep research tools now to search across the web, to understand the context of your individual ICPs. And it's worth probably doing it on a at an ICP level, individually, and then looking for the trends across those so you can get to that sort of micro segmentation within your ICPs.

Then I would look at using those same sort of approaches to try to understand what does procurement look like in those organisations, there's quite often, certainly for big companies, sort of procurement policies are quite well articulated on the web, surprisingly enough, and you'll find a lot of information about what people maybe have purchased. So you can find out an awful lot about what their buying habits may or may not be, and also get some insight into who's likely to be in those roles in the buying group. And of course, once, whenever you're doing any of that research, the insights that you can then build on from the sales teams and that in the field get at the coal face, as it were, really getting that insight, and marrying those two together can be an incredibly powerful combination.

Once we understand who's in the buying group, I think it's really important to understand, well, who is it that we end up having conversations within these organisations? Who should we be having conversations with? Who do we know that is influencing the buying decision? But never we don't get to see very often, and who are the key blockers? I think those bits are really important, because very often it's very easy to build messaging that appeals to our the champions as part of a sale, or internal champions that are really want, that have a problem, that want us to solve that for them. But where I think it's really interesting is, what can we do to help influence and support the decision making of the people that we're not in front of. So that might be procurement. What is it the procurement wants to see from a company? Yes, they're going to want to make sure that the product or service meets the specifications, but they're going to have other needs, and so being able to get under those needs is really important.

So if we've got an understanding of who we need to influence and why we can then go away. And, very often the persona creation process involves sitting people down, and they're sort of making guesswork as to who they are. And so approach that I've been advocating for is to absolutely take that approach, agree. It's critical to get the teams aligned. But once we've got alignment, find real life examples of the types of people that fill those persona and agree on those and then go away and use deep research sort of capabilities within openAI or Gemini to go off and search those LinkedIn profiles and build really detailed persona based on the insights that we can glean off of the web based on the profiles themselves and the job descriptions, because job descriptions give an awful lot of way about how people are measured.

So by building all of that together, we can build really detailed pictures of persona based on publicly available information, which we can then take back to the sales team to validate or to edit an update. And then, with that information in hand, we can then take those persona and create persona AI, as I like to call them, essentially in silico, versions of our ideal members of our buying group. And that can then allow us to do a whole range of things, from rather than just having to read and try and find the right information, being able to ask some questions all the way through, to being able to brainstorm with them, to strategise with them, to get them to help craft messaging for them, or even to validate messaging that we've created and check that actually it does hit the right buttons. So there's a whole range of things there that we can really use to better understand our persona. But I think it's really crucial that we're they're not just a one and done. And we don't just create persona, use them for a campaign and then leave them to rust away on the hard drive somewhere. I think we really need to be able to turn these into essentially, in silico versions of reality that we can actually really use and extract maximum value for.

The other thing I'll say is that the deep research approach, in about 15-20 minutes, you can get so much detail from those searches that you wouldn't be able to get if you were doing that yourself. So in 15-20 minutes, you can do a better job of getting real insight into from across a range of different profiles that you would never have got from doing it yourself behind a desk and maybe several hours of work. So I think that's a really powerful thing. The other thing, of course, is that, if you've got more time, can you then go away and interview those persona themselves, and enrich the data that you've collected with real life interview data? And it's really interesting that you can add the quotes themselves, or even just upload them separately and have them as two knowledge bases within the same custom GPT or AI assistant, and be allow the AI to create the vision of what's important.

Personas as Part of Your Marketing Plan

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

There's so much there to unpack. Maybe if we start with your point about not letting this information just rust on a hard drive somewhere. I actually believe that today, persona and using AI to develop personas and use that as a resource becomes part of your marketing plan. Think about price promotion, product, place, processes, proof points and people is the sort of seven PS, that seventh P on people, I think, has been underutilised and under thought about when you build marketing plans for the quarter or for the year, and now AI has given has enabled us as marketers to really hone in on that people part of the seven Ps.

Matt Wilkinson

I'd agree. I think it does add a layer of complexity in the thinking and planning of campaigns, to some extent, but it gives but it also unlocks incredible ability to want to try to resonate and connect better and more effectively. I think the other side of it as well, as if these tools give us the fantastic ability to create faster as well. And so I think that while there's maybe some extra complexity about trying to not just create a segment led campaign, but maybe micro segment based on the ICPs and then the persona in question, it's just then creating forks in the campaigns themselves, and trying to figure out how and when you make sure that you've got content to support their role in the buying decision. It's quite a complicated thing, but it does. It absolutely necessitates deeper alignment between sales and marketing, more communication, and I think that's one of the things that has always surprised me, is that sales and marketing so often only meet up at quarterly or yearly events, and other than maybe regional marketers speaking to the regional sales teams. Now, as across a group, we're not necessarily solving problems together, and I think that's a big miss.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I completely agree. I think a lot of these tools are now an enabler to bring the team together as a single commercial team and discuss how to make campaigns better, how to make the sales tools and brochures and other marketing materials more useful, more resonant with the buyer persona you're targeting and ultimately make the brand unforgettable.

The Future of Customer Intelligence

Matt Wilkinson

Absolutely, I think it's critical, and I think that we're actually only at the start of this journey as well, because, as you mentioned, so we're getting the data and being able to understand that, but it won't be that far in the future before the data that we get from what people interact with, the stuff that we can at least see when they're on the channels that we own, and how they interact with us, being able to then leverage that back into update those models. Whether you want to do that live, or do that on a fairly frequent basis. But being able to update those the models that we create of our customers based on not just the hypothesis and research that happens sporadically, but being able to do that on a really frequent basis, I think is a really exciting prospect for me.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I recently learned of this study that Gartner did in 2023 where they were looking across a lot of different industries. So it's not specific to life science, but they found that marketing teams waste 37% of their budget targeting the wrong audience, 37% wild.

Matt Wilkinson

I'm lost for words. Really. I mean, it's kind of unforgivable in many ways, and I guess it goes to show that maybe life science marketers are set up to do this. Well, particularly those that have come out and would come out of the lab, because we're trained to experiment, we're trying to come up with a hypothesis and then prove what we're thinking. And I think that's also the basic foundations of an agile marketing approach as well. But I do think the traditional desire to have a yearly marketing plan, if you will, with everything buttoned down, it kind of forces you into not being able to experiment and test and be agile as you go within each of those. So it's really about, yeah, we know there's some fixed points in time, but what can we do to be really agile and maximise every single thing. And how can we figure out how to test and learn before we waste nearly 40% of our budget, do it on the wrong things?

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yeah, I think you bring up a good point in my experience. I think there's a balance you do need to have your annual marketing plan, just so everybody is aligned and everybody understands the big picture. In addition to the fact that within that annual plan, you have to have experiments. You have to do, what would people who are embedded in Lean called tri storming, go out and experiment and look at different situations, whether it's your ICP, and better understanding what your ICP is for that quarter or for that year, having a scoring criteria for your ICP that applies for this point in time, or whether it's experimenting with different personas and different messages for those personas to dial in the understanding of the pain points and the motivators.

Testing and Learning

Matt Wilkinson

Absolutely. I mean, I think with the tools we now have available through some of the pay per click style advertising, whether that's on Google or on LinkedIn, or wherever it is, we actually have the ability to run very small experiments and get some pretty interesting data quite quickly. I'm always taken, I think this was Tim Ferriss that came up with the idea of, when he was coming up with a book launch, he test the names of the books that he was thinking of using pay per click advertising, and set a small budget for each one and see what got, did the best, and then whatever was the best that had the best click throughs, that essentially spent his money the fastest, I guess, was the one that people wanted the most. And if that was the case, that was the title that you go with. And I think by saying, Well, how can we test if we, if we can approach marketing and list out the assumptions that we're basing our approach on and look at, how can we test those and then, therefore test the market, the messaging and everything else, knowing that we've also got these assumptions, if we can look at testing those things, I think we can make some really big gains just by making sure that we test and learn.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I think that's a fantastic take home message to end this podcast on it is all about testing. It is making no assumptions, going into every aspect of marketing with an open mind and learning from other people around you and learning from the data that come out of the experiments that you run.

Matt Wilkinson

Absolutely. Thank you very much for today, Jasmine, it's been great speaking with you as always.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Thank you, Matt. I love the discussions we have. And thank all of you for attending another episode of splice of life, science marketing, see you again soon.

Matt Wilkinson

See you soon.