Shownotes and transcript

Shownotes

Most buyer personas end up in a drawer. You spent weeks on workshops, interviews, and research - then created a pretty PDF that nobody opens again. What if that document could talk back?

In this episode of Splice of Life Science Marketing, Jasmine Gruia-Gray interviews Matt Wilkinson about PersonaAI - a process that transforms traditional persona documents into interactive synthetic customers powered by AI. This isn't about replacing human insight. It's about making that insight usable every single day.

Who this is for: Life science marketers, product managers, and commercial teams who want their buyer research to actually work for them - not gather dust.

The key idea: Static persona documents become powerful strategic tools when converted into AI-powered synthetic customers you can query, challenge, and create with.

What you will learn:

• Why traditional personas fail after the initial project ends
• How to build synthetic customers using LinkedIn profiles and AI reasoning models
• Practical applications: website reviews, sales pitch rehearsal, content creation, and product development
• How Matt used PersonaAI to prep for a keynote and received harder questions from the AI than from the live audience
• The role of voice-of-customer data in enriching your synthetic personas
• How to personalise ABM campaigns without being creepy

Chapters:

• [00:00] Introduction to PersonaAI
• [01:03] Why Matt created synthetic customers from personas
• [02:48] What is a synthetic customer?
• [04:45] The problem with traditional persona workshops
• [09:18] Pressure-testing a keynote with AI
• [12:05] AI-powered sales role play and scoring
• [13:35] Static PDFs vs interactive synthetic customers
• [16:33] Product management and user requirements
• [20:59] The PersonaAI offer - $1,000 in 48 hours
• [24:01] Overcoming the "too busy" objection
• [25:47] Account-based marketing applications
• [27:40] Building around feelings and needs that endure

Keywords: buyer persona, synthetic customer, AI marketing, life science marketing, PersonaAI, account based marketing, voice of customer, product management, sales enablement, biotech marketing, ChatGPT, custom GPT

Watch the full episode, subscribe for more life science marketing insights, and visit strivenn.com to learn how PersonaAI can transform your marketing strategy.

Transcript

In this episode of Splice of Life Science Marketing, Jasmine Gruia-Gray interviews Matt Wilkinson about PersonaAI - a method for converting static buyer persona documents into interactive AI-powered synthetic customers. The conversation covers the limitations of traditional persona approaches, the technical process behind building synthetic customers, and practical applications across marketing, sales, and product development.

Introduction to PersonaAI

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [0:04]

Hello, Matt. Hi, Jasmine. How you doing today? Good. Thanks. How are you? I'm good. Thank you. I'm good. Well, welcome to A Splice of Life Science Marketing, everybody. In today's episode, we're going to do something slightly different. I'm going to interview Matt on a synthetic AI process. It happens to be a process that he's developed and that he calls PersonaAI. So ready, Matt?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [0:36]

Absolutely. Okay.

Why Matt Created Synthetic Customers

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [0:40]

So you've built buyer personas for years using traditional methods - workshops, interviews, desk research. I think we've all been there. What made you decide to turn those static documents, some of which I have to admit are in my drawer, into interactive AI assistants? And when did you realise that this was something other companies needed?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [1:03]

It dawned on me pretty quickly after the launch of ChatGPT 3.5 and I think it was then, when four came out, custom GPTs became a thing. And one of my friends had essentially created a group of different developers to talk to, and then somebody else had created a different group of consultants, and I went, we can do this with personas. So while people had put in some very basic groups to kind of help guide them, I thought, well, why don't I use these detailed persona documents that we created?

And so I created a persona group, or a buying group, and very quickly found that with some careful prompting in the back of that, I could get them to act as synthetic customers, and that was great. And I could get them to very quickly test messaging and test strategy that I'd already created. And I could get them to argue amongst themselves, which is really fascinating to watch. The AI essentially arguing with itself, the different personalities within an AI persona group arguing amongst themselves.

And so that was kind of the first step. But the thing that I think really changed the way that I looked at this was when I realised I could use it to create content, and then when I realised that we could actually disrupt the process of generating the persona in the first place. And that really came from the launch of the reasoning models and the deep research capabilities. And when that happened, I started realising that we can replace a lot of that manual work with a lot of AI work. And that was really when the big shift happened.

What is a Synthetic Customer?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [2:37]

That's fantastic. So maybe we can take a pause here for a second and just describe what you mean by a synthetic customer.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [2:48]

Essentially, what we do is we put those flat, boring personas into the AI, and it's essentially creating a RAG or a retrieval augmented generative AI system. And with some clever prompting, we get that information about our customers to behave as if they are a synthetic version of our persona.

And with that, as long as we've generated information related to the questions we're asking them - what's important to them, what are their buying needs, what stands in their way of achieving a certain job, what jobs do they have to be done - all of those great questions that I know we talk about a lot. If we've covered all of those within our persona, we can then use that and interrogate the AI, and we can use that to help guide brainstorming sessions, come up with strategies, come up with messaging, come up with creating content.

And it breaks my heart when I know that personas I'd created for you in the past never got looked at again after being used in the project. So that process made me realise that we can turn these documents that hold loads of great information into something really, really useful.

The Problem with Traditional Persona Workshops

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [3:59]

While I had admitted that my personas, whether you helped develop them, or I worked with another group, ended up in the drawer, PersonaAI has never ended up in the drawer for me. So yeah, I agree with all of what you've said. So moving on to my next question, most small life science companies can't afford six-figure persona research programmes that go into excruciating depth on the personalities and so on of personas, but they can't afford to guess at buyer motivations either. How does PersonaAI solve that tension for teams with limited budgets and even less time?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [4:45]

So if I go back to the standard process, and it maybe helps, we can then look at how I've tried to disrupt that process, to make great results more achievable. So the standard process very often involves getting a big group of people together on a workshop, whether that's in person or remote. And typically you'd be asking, you start off trying to identify an ideal customer profile, and then within those ICPs, who's involved in the buying group, what kind of job roles are involved in that buying group, and what role do they take in the buying process.

And so in the room, you typically want to have your sales and your marketing and your customer services people. And even if you take the external costs out of that equation, the costs for those people's time is immense. Now there's huge value still to be had for getting everybody involved on agreeing who are we selling to. And so that strategic alignment is absolutely vital.

But the next step always seemed incredibly vacuous to me. People would end up in a workshop trying to answer questions, and very often they'd end up looking at a LinkedIn profile of somebody that they sold to and basing their responses off kind of, oh, we know a little bit about this. Here's a LinkedIn profile. Let's just type some answers out into a question, and then they present their persona. And very often, after that process, you'd go away and take that and the organisation supporting that effort would go away and try and embellish it and make it nicer, and then you would create a pretty PDF and there's a static document that would then get used to help inform the rest of the project, whether that be branding, inbound marketing, product development, whatever it is.

For any of those projects, understanding who your customer is is really important. But that kind of falls down a little bit when people are having to make the psychological jump from going, this is what a document says, therefore this is what I need to do. And I think that's why they get forgotten.

So that's kind of the old process, and that's why I think those personas have limited value, not because of the information process, but because actually people still have to do too much thinking to make that jump. And AI is brilliant at helping make those correlations and those connections.

So the process that I've been through still involves some of that upfront agreement. It really does help to know who you're trying to sell to, who's involved in that. And I think that strategic alignment is really important. But then the process that I developed involved getting as many LinkedIn profiles of the type of person you're trying to sell to, whether they're customers, prospects, or just people that we think we want to sell to.

And then, using a long-winded prompt and 40-odd questions, I try and get the AI to answer, using one of the reasoning models, deep thinking, deep research, and going away and researching that. There's a lot of acronyms for what AI stands for, whether it's artificial intelligence or whether it's just average information. And I love the one that says it's average information, because here we want average information, but we want specific average information. We want average information about a subset of people.

So we get the AI to study a group of LinkedIn profiles and create an average of them. And what's great is that it doesn't just look at here's this career history. It looks at everything they've posted. But we can then take that, and I will get maybe a persona document with 10-point font, just to give a scale, that can be six pages long as an Excel sheet. So these things can be huge. You can have loads and loads of detail, and that detail will be absolutely useless for a human to use, because we can't cope with it. But the AI loves that context. The AI absolutely thrives with that context.

So we can do that, but we can go even further. If we have transcripts of conversations we've had with customers, we can add those in. We can embellish them further. So there's a process that you can do to really get a great starting point. And I think those personas work better than most I would have created previously. But then you can embellish them with real-life information, real-life thoughts, feelings, quotes, and really get a deep, detailed perspective of who your customers are. And then once you've understood who your customer is and generated one of these, all we have to do is put that into the AI itself, and all of a sudden we've got that synthetic customer that we can then interact with through the chat window. And that's really where the process kind of changes.

Pressure-Testing a Keynote with AI

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [9:18]

So I'd like to pull on that thread of how we can interact with the AI. I love the story you had told me just before you were giving your keynote or preparing for your keynote in Washington, DC this summer, where you had used PersonaAI or Atlas to interview you to pressure-test your message. What did that conversation reveal that traditional speech prep wouldn't have?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [9:49]

I was able to use - I'd created personas for who I thought was going to be in the room and who my targets in the room might be. And so that was the first piece. Clearly, I'm trying to market to those people anyway. So that was helpful because that had a dual purpose there.

Then what I was able to do was to upload my slides, provide a transcript of my talk as well. I practised my talk to myself, and then I was able to ask the AI, based on who you are, what questions are you going to ask me? Where are the gaps in what I'm saying, where don't I make sense? So rather than this being a generic "these are the holes," it's actually "these are the holes that are going to be important to people I want to sell to, the people I want to influence, the people I want to connect with."

And so that's really where that difference happens. I got far harder questions out of the AI than I actually did in the room. Now, did it ask me every question from the people in the room? Absolutely not. But it had two roles. One, was it able to ask me some really interesting questions that I could then respond to, and I could answer those just by pressing the microphone on and actually speaking back to it, get the transcript and then put that in. So that was helpful.

Point number two, that then turned into a great blog post anyway. So that was helpful. That's a really fun way to create some content. But the third thing I think it really did was it highlighted that there were things that I needed to make sure that I said to bring people on the journey that I wanted to take them on. And it gave me the confidence that when people were asking questions that I probably already covered about 80% of them, which was true, and that meant that the questions you get asked are maybe on something a bit different, but it just made me feel a lot more prepared.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [11:30]

Yeah, for me, it's the same thing. It's about this feeling of being prepared. I mean, you're never going to know all the potential questions that somebody might ask you, but the AI is a pretty good approximation, as long as you've trained it accurately and got a good sense of who your target audience is, whether you're preparing for a speech or whether you're a salesperson and you're preparing for a visit to a new client, for example.

AI-Powered Sales Role Play

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [12:05]

That brings me beautifully onto the talk I'm going to be giving next week in Boston at SAMPS. And the talk I'm giving actually shows - walks people through the process of how you can use AI both to research and then prepare for those conversations. So while I don't go into a lot of detail about creating personas as such, it does talk a lot about the personality side of it, and then uses tools where you can actually create those personas in conversational AI programmes, where you can create personas and then actually pitch to a buying group and get Q&As from a buying group, and where you can actually engage - they will then talk back to you, and you have a conversation with them, and they then grade you against key metrics.

Now, of course, for me, I'm practising, I'm creating the whole thing, so I'm saying I need to hit these milestones. So you might think that I would, if I've created this as a scenario, actually do pretty well, but actually, my first attempt at that, I only got scored 50%, and we know that if you're a salesperson and you're only hitting 50%, that's a fail.

And so it was really interesting to see that even though I'd created all this information and I'd been through a process to try to read it, actually what I really needed to do was to use the AI to help me learn and digest it in ways that I would absorb it better, so that I could then take that into another role play and be able to score higher.

Static PDFs vs Interactive Synthetic Customers

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [13:35]

Yeah, there are so many places we can take this role-playing idea, and maybe that's an idea for another podcast. But another part of this whole concept with PersonaAI is that it is intended to be a synthetic customer, and not back to the old static PDF that gets shoved into a drawer. Walk us through what actually happens when someone uses PersonaAI versus pulling up a traditional persona. What's the difference in practice, not just in theory, and maybe we can use a marketing example this time instead of what we just talked about in sales.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [14:18]

Sure. So let's start off by imagining that we're looking at a web page. I've got a new product that I'm coming out with, and I need to make sure that it appeals to my persona. Well, I pull out my persona on one document, and I've got my web page on the other, and I've got me in the middle, and what I'm having to do is I'm having to try and read the persona document, put myself in the shoes of that person, and then look at that web page through that lens of that persona and see, how am I actually answering those questions? And I have to keep bringing myself out of myself into the shoes of the persona to do that.

Now, if I'm editing something on a web page, that's maybe not so bad, because it's a constant comparison. If I'm then creating something from scratch, let's just say I'm writing for a specific persona a blog post, or I'm writing that page in the first place, I'm constantly having to shift who I am, to try and be in the persona. And that's a really difficult leap for most people to do, to put themselves in the shoes of that person, and remove their own perspective, their own bias from that.

AI is really good at doing that. And so if you're using it with AI, rather than you trying to do all of that manual mental gymnastics - you know, who am I in? What role am I playing on this piece here? And am I looking at brand tone? Am I looking at what the persona wants? All of that stuff. Actually, using PersonaAI, and a more complex version where you go through a number of stage gates, what I've called Atlas on the website - what we're able to do is really use the AI as "I want to achieve this, this, this, and this." You give it some specific instructions as to what you want it to do, and it puts it through the filter - the persona, and then maybe the brand style guide, whatever else, maybe there's some rules we need to adhere to, and it will jump through those hoops for us.

So the outputs, they're not just generated by the AI, but what they are is actually generated by the AI for that persona. And so we're getting something that's really close to where we need to be. Is it going to be perfect? No, but it's going to be a heck of a lot quicker to go from A to B and then edit and then do that double-check than it is to go through and try and do that mental gymnastics for yourself.

Product Management and User Requirements

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [16:33]

The other use case that I think is often missed is using personas and PersonaAI in the product management role, especially when you're trying to put together user requirements. You've got lots of voice-of-customer input that you then have to synthesise and describe as user requirements to hand into R&D in order to generate the functional requirements. How do you see PersonaAI helping in that way?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [17:07]

Well, I think it helps in a really similar way, in the fact that - and I think in some ways, with the voice of customer, and you're looking at user requirements, it's even more important. When we're collecting voice of customer, we'll hear quotes, we'll have certain bits of information that maybe resonate with us personally, but maybe become overweighted in the way that we look at things. So using the AI to synthesise all of that information, maybe thematically, and analyse it before we go into the persona - that's really important.

I've been doing some work with friends at the University of Leicester and some others who are actually going through and using that thematic analysis approach. It allows you to analyse data in ways that most organisations just don't have the time or the bandwidth for. To give you some perspective, what probably took about eight or more human days to complete in terms of thematic analysis by going painstakingly through and coding each of these statements, and making sure that you're putting those into the right models, you can accomplish that in about 15 minutes with AI.

Even more, what you can do is you can actually go away and ask what sort of questions people are asking. What are people saying online about these things as well? So you're not just getting voice of customer from the interviews and maybe your CRM and those sources that you've got internally, but you can also look at things online. What are people saying? What sentiment are they about these problems? So you can actually enrich your data from what people are talking about online as well.

So you can get a lot of that information, you can then build that into essentially your synthetic customer that you're going to then be able to interrogate through the life of the product. And of course, then if you're getting voice of customer and feedback at all, which I would strongly recommend - by the way, I don't suggest that we ever use these tools to replace human input, but rather to represent that human input and to keep us on track.

So if we've used it to get through the first phase gate of a development project, and then we go to the customer and say, here's what we've got, let's get some feedback on this. Once we then update our persona with that extra information, we're able to carry that forward, and it becomes like a living record of how we really resolve customer needs and really make sure that we're meeting their jobs to be done at every stage of our development process.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [19:34]

And then there's the opportunity to have a dialogue with the AI and ask it questions. Something simple, like, should I state the user requirement this way or this other way? Which is more accurate based on the voice of the customer? And then once the R&D team has had a chance to put the functional requirements together, you can input that data as well to augment the PersonaAI and ask, what's missing? It sounds like a simple question, but this is now your personal assistant and your helper to make sure that at this very important and expensive phase in product development that you're getting it right.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [20:22]

And I think the other beauty of this is that some people will want to see personas, they'll want to see requirements. They want to see different things out of that document. And the translation from one document to another may be imperfect, and then the interpretation of that may be imperfect. We don't have to do as much of that if we actually base it off of a synthetic knowledge base, a synthetic customer. Because even though we still need those documents signed off as part of a rigorous product development process, we're able to go back to that persona, that synthetic customer, and ask it questions. Am I interpreting this wrong? And that becomes really important and really powerful.

The PersonaAI Offer

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [20:59]

So you're offering fully built PersonaAIs for $1,000 delivered in 48 hours. That's a radically fast and inexpensive offer compared to traditional approaches. Some people out there might be sceptical and say, what's the catch? And what does someone actually get at the end of these 48 hours that's really of value?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [21:31]

Well, the first thing you don't get is a pretty PDF. You do get a PDF, but that PDF is actually of the output - the data that goes in the back end. We want to make sure that that's validated. Typically, that might be somewhere between four and six pages long, so people get the chance to check that there's something real in the back end.

And then the other thing that they actually get is, depending on the systems that they use, we can either build it inside their Copilot environment, or custom GPT so they can access - and anybody with a paid ChatGPT account can access - or can even build these things as skills or projects in Claude. So we can use these in multiple places.

What they get is actually the real-life version of - well, a synthetic version of their customers that they can then engage with. That's what they get. If there are specifics that they want to get, the inputs are pretty simple. There's a series of questions that I would need to ask somebody. I would definitely need to make sure that I've got a series of LinkedIn profiles that they provide me. But if there's also VOC that they want to give me, other bits of information, they just have to provide that. And we use the AI to convert all of that into a really rich design.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [22:44]

And then I think the key is that you then need to use it for a myriad of different opportunities like we've already discussed. Help me review my current website. How well am I articulating the positioning, the value proposition? Are your needs as the buying persona being addressed on this web page? Again, lots and lots of questions you can keep asking it, and it will provide you with suggestions on how to improve.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [23:20]

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's the key - that we can then engage with them in such a nice way that it just makes life easier and quicker, and it makes these personas that so many of us go through those processes for - it just makes us able to engage with them in a way that's actually helpful rather than a hindrance. And I think one of the reasons why so many personas just end up rusting away on a hard drive somewhere is that it's hard work keeping them up to date, and it's actually hard work using them. So if we can make that easier, it just makes life easier for everybody. And it increases the value tenfold or more.

Overcoming the "Too Busy" Objection

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [24:01]

So here's a scenario. A lean marketing team might think I barely have time to execute. Why would I spend time talking to an AI about my buyers? How do you respond when someone says they're too busy to use the tool that could save them time and, more importantly, make them more efficient?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [24:23]

Well, you can take a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. So that's the first thing. But it's so easy when you show somebody an example of what these can do. So I can very quickly build a persona that just knocks the socks off of what most people would be able to build themselves using the process that I've developed. And then by being able to build that into the AI, quickly show how, even with no extra training, we can turn pieces of content that are technically sound but maybe not focused on our persona, into something that is focused on our persona. So we can really quickly show that. We can quickly say, hey, look at this on the website and go here. And that's really easy to do.

Account-Based Marketing Applications

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [25:09]

So we talked about how PersonaAI can be helpful for website reviews. We talked about it in terms of how it can help salespeople prepare for a pitch and prepare for objection handling. We talked about it in the context of product management and the use case in user requirements and functional requirements. And you now just mentioned helping to review marketing materials and brochures. Any other examples? Maybe some examples on how it can be used in your personal life?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [25:48]

Yeah, well, I can definitely talk about the personal life, but I think that the other great example that we haven't touched on today is account-based marketing. And I gave a webinar for SAMPS - some of this feels like it's a running advert for SAMPS today, so thank you, SAMPS. It's great to sponsor and be a member. But yeah, gave an account-based, AI-empowered ABM webinar, and showed how we can then use these tools - at least synthetic customers - to take generic marketing that's focused at just one of our buying group and cascade that out into multiple messages.

And how we can then go even further, if we really want to target individuals, using personality AI tools like Humantic AI, to then further understand within our persona - actually, what are the groups that we're looking to target? The personalities of the different people that might be in there. So we can do a whole range of things there that allows us to go from very generic marketing through to something that's feeling very personal and really hitting on the jobs that those people need to complete, the jobs to be done, without being kind of, hey, we've seen you visit X, Y and Z, and you've gone to this trade show and you published this, without feeling like we're being stalkerish. So that's one of the things I think is really powerful about this. We can personalise without being creepy.

In personal life, I have to say, I don't trust the AIs too much with my personal conversations. I still, as much as I love working with AI, still have some boundaries with it. But I think that you can get advice as to what's going to appeal to them, what's going to appeal to your persona, and so that really becomes the key thing. And again, talking about giving talks, getting up in front of people, being able to engage with your persona can give you a huge amount of confidence to be able to do that.

Building Around Feelings and Needs That Endure

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [27:40]

Yeah, couldn't agree more. Maybe we can end with this. I just finished reading Mark Schaefer's latest book on how AI changes your customers. If our audience hasn't had a chance to read it, I strongly encourage it. You can see lots of dog-eared pages here and lots of ideas in the margins. But I wanted to read one sentence because I think it really encapsulates what PersonaAI is about: "In an age of AI, don't build your brand around features that are constantly evolving. Build it around feelings and needs that endure."

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [28:22]

I think that's very, very powerful, and that whole book is amazing. And I think it's absolutely right. These personas should not replace the customer. But if we can use them to capture customer needs, customer feelings, and then cascade that through the process, we can really use them to focus on what's important to them. And I think that's how we make a difference, certainly in this first stage of AI.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [28:48]

Completely agree. This has been a fabulous discussion. I don't even think it was an interview. So thank you for your time, Matt, and thank you for creating PersonaAI and Atlas, which, by the way, more information is available on the strivenn.com website. And want to thank all our listeners for listening to another episode of Splice of Life Science Marketing.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [29:14]

Thank you, Jasmine. And thank you to everyone listening. All right. Bye for now.

Q&A

I only have three personas from an old project. Can I still use PersonaAI?

Absolutely. Start with what you have. Upload those existing persona documents into a custom GPT or Claude project. Even basic personas become more useful when you can ask them questions directly. The AI will work with whatever context you provide - and you can enrich it later with LinkedIn profiles, call transcripts, or survey data as you gather them.

How do I get started if I don't have budget for the full service?

Build a basic version yourself. Gather 10-15 LinkedIn profiles of your ideal customers. Use a reasoning model like ChatGPT or Claude with deep research to analyse them and generate a detailed persona document. Then upload that document as context for a new chat. You'll have a working synthetic customer within an afternoon.

What's the first thing I should test with my synthetic customer?

Your homepage headline. Ask your PersonaAI: "Based on who you are, does this headline speak to your biggest challenge? What would make you stay or leave?" You'll get specific, persona-grounded feedback in seconds. It's a quick win that demonstrates the value before tackling bigger projects.

Can I use this to prep for a single important sales call?

Yes - and you should. Upload what you know about the prospect: their LinkedIn profile, company information, any previous correspondence. Ask the AI to roleplay as them and challenge your pitch. Request the three hardest questions they might ask. You'll walk into that meeting far more prepared than winging it alone.

How do I keep my synthetic customer from going stale?

Feed it regularly. After every customer call, win-loss interview, or trade show conversation, add relevant quotes or insights to your persona document. Even a monthly update with fresh voice-of-customer data keeps your synthetic customer sharp and prevents the drift that makes traditional personas obsolete.

Shownotes and transcript

Shownotes

Your team is using AI right now. The question is: with or without you?

 

In this episode of A Splice of Life Science Marketing, Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray unpack findings from their ELRIG Drug Discovery 2025 survey of 107 life science exhibitors. The data reveals a troubling pattern: organisations are buying AI tools, but adoption remains fragmented, unguided, and risky. Most concerning? 38% of employees in organisations without AI programmes are already experimenting personally - becoming what Ethan Mollick calls "secret cyborgs."

 

This conversation challenges the assumption that access equals adoption. It explores why light users hold the key to AI growth, how the Dunning-Kruger effect shapes power user confidence, and why software-as-a-service companies are outpacing traditional life science vendors in AI maturity.

 

What you'll learn:

• Why 44% of survey respondents have tried AI but aren't using it daily - and what that means for commercial teams
• The "secret cyborg" phenomenon: how employees are adopting AI without organisational guidance or guardrails
• Why AI readiness matters more than budget - and how structured programmes drive 53-73% daily usage rates
• The cognitive offloading risk: what happens when we stop challenging AI outputs and exercising our mental muscles
• How SaaS companies achieved higher AI maturity than tools, reagents, and automation providers
• Practical steps to close the confidence gap between light users and power users through AI clubs and train-the-trainer models

Chapters:

• 0:04 - Introduction and survey context
• 1:30 - The light user paradox: gym memberships vs AI adoption
• 3:27 - Are power users overestimating readiness? The Dunning-Kruger effect
• 5:31 - Cautious optimism: what 68% of respondents really feel about AI
• 8:52 - Cognitive offloading: the hidden risk of AI dependency
• 11:03 - Why correlation isn't causation in AI-assisted analysis
• 12:58 - SaaS companies and AI maturity: why they're ahead
• 15:00 - The secret cyborg problem: 38% are experimenting without guidance
• 18:17 - Beyond text generation: where AI sophistication breaks down
• 21:15 - Closing the confidence gap: AI clubs and collaborative learning
• 24:34 - AI maturity as competitive differentiator: WPP vs Publicis
• 27:26 - Creating space for human connection in an AI-augmented world
  
  

Keywords: AI adoption, life science marketing, secret cyborgs, AI readiness, ELRIG survey, cognitive offloading, AI maturity, light users, power users, AI governance, commercial teams, life science vendors

 

Subscribe to A Splice of Life Science Marketing for more insights on marketing strategy, AI adoption, and commercial growth in the life sciences. Visit strivenn.com to explore our AI readiness diagnostic and persona development tools.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray discuss findings from their ELRIG Drug Discovery 2025 survey, revealing a critical gap between AI access and adoption in life science organisations. The conversation explores why 38% of employees are becoming "secret cyborgs" - experimenting with AI personally without organisational guidance - and what commercial leaders must do to close the readiness gap before it becomes a competitive liability.

Introduction and Survey Context

Matt Wilkinson [0:04]

Matt, hello and welcome to a splice of Life Science marketing. This episode is brought to you by humantic Ai. Imagine if you could close 22% more deals overnight using a buyer intelligence platform. Imagine slashing prep time by 70% and boosting close one deals by 37% that's what customers the world over achieving using humantic AI's account and buyer intelligence system. Today, we're going to be staying on the theme of AI and talking about some of the results that we got when we were interviewing exhibitors in L Riggs drug discovery, 2025 conference in Liverpool. I'm joined today by my co host Jasmine. Hey there, Matt, and we're going to be digging into all of the all of the responses that we got when we were talking to our exhibitors, or the exhibitors of El Rigg up in up in Liverpool.

The Light User Paradox: Why 44% Have Tried AI But Aren't Using It Daily

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [0:57]

Yeah, there are so many surprises in this survey, it's almost hard to figure out where to start, but let's kick it off anyway. So we know that from the survey, 44% of the respondents have tried AI but aren't using it daily. They've overcome some skepticism, but haven't seen enough value yet. Why do you think these light users hold the key to AI growth?

Matt Wilkinson [1:30]

I like to think of the analogy of AI being a bit like a gym membership. You can have a license or you can have a gym membership, but if you don't ever grow, you never grow. And I think that's exactly the same sort of thing. So if you've got a light user, it's not so much that they've they've not got the gear, they haven't invested enough time to start seeing the gains that they would be getting. It's not about getting more information. Everybody knows that the more you go to the gym, the fitter, the stronger you get, and it's the same by exercising your AI muscle, if you will. Really, it's not about telling people how I want it's really about showing them the use cases that matter and then getting them to be able to understand how they can then adopt it for their own bespoke use cases, B to B marketing terms. It's the difference between selling capability and really selling the resolution to a problem. It's a lot

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [2:21]

about how people learn. People really learn by showing each other rather than just telling each other and then expecting you're going to go off as a novice and try it out on your own. So yeah, I think use cases of all varieties are super important, not only to embed it in sort of your current processes, and as we learned about taking the donkey work out of out of what you're doing, this is sort of the mundane stuff, but also helping to stretch and augment what you're doing. Still requires people to show you when for you to be able to ask questions and learn that way?

Matt Wilkinson [3:04]

No, absolutely. I mean, as our friend Dr Lisa Palmer, who's a real AI expert, would say, you know, we have to show AI and not tell it. And I think it's, I think it's really important that people really get the opportunity to roll their sleeves up and become familiar with these, you know, these really, really powerful assistants that can help them accomplish so much more than they could do on their own.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Are Power Users Overestimating Their Readiness?

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [3:27]

So do you think these two groups that we're calling regular users and power users are overestimating their AI readiness?

Matt Wilkinson [3:36]

I kind of feel that actually, that the regular users probably not, but I think the power users probably are underestimating their capability. There's something called the Dunning Kruger effect, which means that sort of, the more that you know, the more you realize you don't know. And so the most advanced users of AI that I know actually realize how little we know about how AI actually works, the inner workings of the AI itself. I mean, even the experts that are building these large language models don't really know what's going on within those neural networks. So, I mean, we have to be really careful to understand that they are black boxes that we really don't understand the insides of. And so it's, it's really important for us to realize that actually, as users, that definition can become quite tricky to understand. What does that look like and the well, realms of coding. There's a lot of people that are using vibe coding and using platforms like lovable and others, or people are creating agents in platforms like M A 10 that have multiple steps. But then when you look at the real capabilities out there that some of the advanced Apple people that are applying this, there's a gentleman called Reuven Cohen that is using agent swarms to create vast amounts of code and to check that code. And when you start seeing how people are really using this in practice, you start realizing that even if you I'm a power user within the Gen AI tools for creating text and creating multi step workflows, that actually is an advanced compared with some you know, where some other people are going with this, particularly in the world. Realms of

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [5:00]

coding, I completely agree it's I think the Dunning Kruger effect really summarizes it really well.

Cautious Optimism and the Psychology Behind AI Sentiment

Matt Wilkinson [5:06]

And I know I've been introduced once or twice as an AI expert, and I shy away from that absolutely, because I know how little I know. I think one of the really interesting things that I found was just how people felt about AI itself. And in terms of that, I was surprised that more than 60% said that they were cautiously optimistic about the use of AI. How did you feel people responded to that question?

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [5:31]

I actually wasn't too surprised at this cautious optimism. In part, a lot of sales and FASS are scientists at heart. By the way, we didn't see very many marketers and product managers on the trade show floor, which is why I didn't mention them in the at the beginning here, they're scientists at heart. And as scientists, we're looking for the evidence. We're we build up that evidence and that knowledge and test it out over the course of time, and in many cases, the exhibitors we spoke to were just getting their hands wet on using AI and in thinking about use cases and practicing it out and having others to talk with and brainstorm with. So I think part of that cautious optimism, optimism comes from that that scientific background. I think the other part is that many of whom we saw and spoke with, as the previous slide showed, were light users. So it's almost a factor of, well, I don't know what I don't know. There's also what you hear a lot of in the news. Should I be worried about it taking my job? So that was lurking somewhere in the background, I think unnecessarily. But that's, you know, that's a fact of what, what some people were thinking. I think some of the caution also comes from what people are hearing about guardrails and depending on the organisation. Some some organisation had really well thought through guidelines and how tos, but others did not, and I think all of those things sort of factor into this cautious optimism. Did you see the same thing?

Cognitive Offloading: The Hidden Risk of AI Dependency

Matt Wilkinson [7:27]

Yeah, I actually found this question quite interesting, because as I was asking it, I realized that I probably am cautiously optimistic myself, but actually, and that's how I would have responded, but actually, I'm both excited and optimistic, but I'm also very concerned about the risks. There are risks in terms of the way that cognitive offloading. I think there are big risks about the data that we're giving up to organisations that are owned by some very, very wealthy and powerful people. You know, you just have to look at the really, the race towards AGI and the number of data center, the vast number of data centers that the US is is building in comparison with the rest of the world. And then you start looking at who are the big players that have big vested interests in that, and we're almost concentrating the power of this intelligence in a handful of very, very powerful people, and that that that in itself, carries some risk. And so the more you do to sort of understand the kind of the politics behind who's creating the models, the politics behind who's funding the models, and actually the risks to the economy because of the vast amounts of money that's going into AI development. There are some risks that I think we all need to pay attention to, because they risk not just necessarily our data. And, you know, the potential risks of AGIS going, you know, going mad and wiping out humanity in kind of Terminator style. But there's also the risk of, what does that this mean towards the, you know, the general financial situation of the world? And so I think there's some some economic risk in there as well.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [8:52]

I think it's worthwhile pausing here for a second and talking a little bit more about cognitive offloading, because some of our listeners may not know that term to me what, what is most important to understand about cognitive offloading is this trend towards people giving up the ability to think and not continuing to exercise that really, really important muscle, so that it becomes an exercise where whatever the AI tells you, you just accept it as fact, rather than constantly challenging it and constantly thinking yourself, what other questions are there behind the information that the AI has given me. Do you have another interpretation of cognitive offloading?

Matt Wilkinson [9:45]

Maybe not a different interpretation. But I think there's two key things that I've definitely seen, and people are starting to make memes on social media about this. And as soon as you start seeing as a meme, you start knowing that it's real. And so I think that the big concern that I have is. Making sure that we're we're still exercising our mental muscles. There are definitely things that we don't need to do maybe as frequently as we can offload some of the drudgery work, but we really need to make sure that we're exercising the things that keep us human. I like to think of AI as a bit like a cover. It's great. They create fantastic things. And actually, when it's really tracked, well trained, and you give it great context, it can do a really, really good job of creating stuff. And actually it can do a better job than most people can, but you still have those geniuses where there's the creative spark, the ability to do that. And in our own right, as human beings, we all have have our own genius. And I think we have to be really careful to preserve our own genius and not offload everything, so that we still have our own opinions, that we still start to think about, how do we do this? There's a fantastic couple of episodes of The Simpsons where they're talking about what they're calling cheat GPT. And again, you know when, when the Simpsons is featuring something that it's become something that you need to pay attention to, as you know, as a societal shift and something that is worth paying attention.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [11:03]

I think that's well said. I tend to think of cognitive offloading as the sort of but what if situation? It's about constantly asking the what if it's this and not that, to constantly challenge yourself, as well as not accepting what, what the AI has said.

AI-Assisted Analysis: Correlation vs Causation

Matt Wilkinson [11:25]

I think even looking at the results of this report, absolutely used AI to look at correlations across different data, different questions, and that was really, really interesting. AI is brilliant at find correlations that maybe that humans wouldn't find, but it can very easily fall into the trap of assuming that correlation equals causation, and humans do that as well. But I think that, you know, we need to be able to learn from our own experience, to be able to say, hey, this hasn't necessarily caused this. It may be a byproduct of something else. And I think that really then speaks to one of the more unsurprising things that we found was that software as a service companies, those companies that do an awful lot of software development, had, by far and away, the highest level of AI maturity. And so that was then really, really interesting to see. But then, of course, they're working with code, and code has already been one of the most disrupted areas of the industry, where I don't necessarily know that we're seeing huge numbers of developers being laid off just yet, although that may be coming soon, but we are seeing huge increases in the amount of code that's being created by AI. And so I think that that just goes to show that those organisations that treat AI as an infrastructure, non novelty, it really is just baked into their daily workflows, and then they're looking at, well, this is our core product, but we could also use it in sales. We could also use it in marketing, and so it's far more accepted across the organisation, whereas, I think in some of those organisations, where maybe we're more focused on the lab, AI, doesn't impact day to day operations as much, just yet. What was your perception of those conversations?

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [12:58]

I think software as a service or SaaS companies are so much more mature than than the exhibitors, more closely associated with our industry, the tools providers, the reagent providers, even the automation folks, because they've got all the use cases right. Coming back to what we said earlier, people learn from use cases, and it just felt more like a natural fit for them to adopt AI much sooner than any of us had, because they had the proof right in front of them. So even in folks that said their organisation is not using AI or it's not embedded in their processes, 38% of those folks are experimenting personally with AI. It feels almost like a grassroots movement that suggests AI innovation is bubbling up from the bottom. Should leaders identify and empower these internal AI champions, even if they are light users, instead of imposing a top down program. Do you think

Secret Cyborgs: The 38% Experimenting Without Guidance

Matt Wilkinson [14:10]

this is a really interesting observation? It's one that's not new. Those 38% of individuals are what I like to call secret cyborgs. I think it was a term that was coined by Ethan monarch, Professor of innovation at Wharton University, and these secret cyborgs are essentially using AI in private because they're using it in their daily lives, and they're bringing those tools into work. It's pretty much like saying, Hey, we're not allowed to search the internet anymore at work. And so for those people, why would I not use AI? The problem with that is, is that very often, people that are using AI, personally, they don't have paid for accounts. They may not have set up privacy restrictions on them, and they may not have been given guidance around what data they can and can't use in the AI. And so that's really where the real risk lies. So for me, that the first bit is. Is about understanding that this is going to be happening in any organisation. And an organisation that doesn't yet have an AI policy doesn't necessarily mean to say that they don't yet have aI users just because you haven't given people licenses doesn't mean to say people aren't using it. So that's the first thing that's that's absolutely clear to me. Then I think it's the case that we really need to be building both top down and bottom up approaches to usage of AI, maybe even also sort of side on from it as well. So from a top down perspective, what we really need to have in place is to understand a culture of experimentation within the organisation and actually enabling people within a set set of guardrails. Maybe there's some approved tools that you're allowed to use, there are some approved ways of using that and actually encouraging people to be able to use those tools. And one of the most important things about that is, I think it actually helps us to not only start to understand the tools, start to understand what we can achieve and actually benefit the organisations that we work in, but it also helps to allay the fears that we're going to be made redundant because of AI. So that's a really important thing, from a bottom up approach, absolutely identify as AI innovators, celebrate them, celebrate those use cases, and encourage that culture of experimentation, and also write experimentation and making sure that we're doing that. There's some great examples of this across the life sciences. You've got organisations like Promega, like moderna, that were very, very early on in the adoption of AI in various different ways. And they've really, really been able to achieve some fantastic things within their organisations. Speaking with people in Promega, is adoption as uniform as the case study on the open AI, you know, website might say, probably not, but the adoption is there, and everybody's using it, everybody's becoming aware of it, and people are using these things without, without it being in the shadows. And that's really, really important.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [16:55]

I think this is an opportunity for companies to elevate the culture of collaboration within their companies, and have groups made up of of the C suite, made up of middle managers and people on the ground level to come together and create some initiatives. It doesn't have to be really extreme business cases that require integration of multiple systems, but create an initiative within each department so that you get the collaboration from the users with the C suite and its purpose built for that particular department. And that way, I think you integrate guardrails along with use cases, along with sort of taking the fear factor out of learning it and embedding the so what into your day to day. When we

Beyond Text Generation: Where AI Sophistication Breaks Down

Matt Wilkinson [17:54]

when we asked about what people were using it for? Unsurprisingly, 75% were using AI for text generation after you are for analytics or automation, or maybe they didn't know that. What do you feel that sort of next natural, next step on that sort of sophistication ladder sort of comes into what did you hear from, from folks on the on the exhibition floor?

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [18:17]

It was very natural for people to to to use it for content for content creation, for content editing. I didn't find very many people using it for graphics creation. For example, I didn't find very many people using it for process efficiencies. And, you know, taking the grunt work out of scenarios where you're copying and pasting from one document into another document, or for creating dashboards in that can be updated in real time from meeting minutes that you just completed a few hours ago. So I think part of it is that folks, again, need more use cases. They they need more inspiration for what what's possible before they're going to understand how to go up that, that sophistication ladder beyond content creation,

Matt Wilkinson [19:22]

it's interesting, isn't it? I think the other thing that that really struck me was that people aren't even thinking about more than I'm going to create a piece of content. They're not necessarily thinking about, how do I actually daisy chain prompts or, you know, custom gpts, whatever we want to call them, AI assistants together to achieve tasks and that may end up with still needing to copy and paste text out together. Didn't hear many people really think using it for reviewing or even that much for research, although a few were using it for competitive analysis, which I did think was a really interesting change from maybe some of the things that we found out when we were talking to people in in Washington over the summer.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [20:00]

Yeah, brainstorming is a fantastic use case. You know, I'm going to put a shameless plug in here for Atlas and Persona AI and creating a GPT that is a synthetic customer that you can then brainstorm with that synthetic customer on your marketing content, on your sales presentation. And here's shameless plug number two, for folks who are in sales and marketing that really want to dig deeper into use cases and how to think beyond the traditional uses of AI, I strongly suggest they attend the upcoming samps conference, the sales and marketing professionals and science conference on December 3 and fourth in Boston.

Matt Wilkinson [20:48]

Yeah, of course. I hope they come as well, because I'll get to meet them in person, which would be fantastic. So how do you think we can sort of help close that confidence gap between light and power users of you know, for myself, because, you know, I've been realized I had to dive as deep as I could into this early on, I find it quite difficult for me to sort of see that, that disconnect between, you know, the fear of adoption. So what can we do to really help people become more familiar with using these tools?

Closing the Confidence Gap: AI Clubs and Train-the-Trainer Models

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [21:15]

Here's where I'm going to combine a little bit of high school with our day to day lives, professional lives, high school, from the sense of we always used to have these after school clubs. You know, there was the chess club, and that's where you got to teach each other moves and learn from each other. So combine sort of a club kind of atmosphere with an initiative in your your office or which ultimately means a train, the trainer perspective. So even if you're a light user, you can contribute to helping others learn how to use AI and build different use cases. And the novice. The beauty of a novice is in asking questions. There's no such thing as a dumb question, especially when it comes to AI. And that way the light user and even the power user help is learning more and can sharpen their skill sets as well. So that that's, that's my challenge to our listeners, built, built an AI club and work together and try it out.

Matt Wilkinson [22:24]

Yeah, one of the things that always surprises me is how few people actually ask the AI how to do that. How to prompt the AI better. When Claude launched its skills, which was in the last month or two, I was quickly came up with the use case of being able to then call that, call my, you know, one of my groups of Persona AI into any chat that I have within Claude, and I didn't know how to do it, so I upload how to create a skill, and I gave it all of the materials, and it did everything for me. It created the database it needed to and then it told me how to go about putting that skill in in the back end of Claude. So then I would have suddenly got a skill that I can use wherever I want to use it. The AI is incredibly helpful. So just ask it to help you do what you want to achieve, especially, you know, with it itself. It doesn't necessarily always have the most up to date knowledge about how to do things within itself, which is always interesting. So you do sometimes have to rely on a web search, but the information is there. And I think being able to collaborate with the AI, and getting the AI to help you get to where you want to go. That can be really powerful. The other thing I found to be incredibly helpful as a top tip for anybody that's struggling to get out of an AI, what they want to get to if they put their prompts in and they've got a first draft of something, and then they get to, you know, they've gone through edits, and they end up in a certain place that's different to the original output, put that final copy back in and say, Hey, this is after we've, you know, been through editing and everything. This is where we ended up help me build better prompts, guide my prompting, so that we would get closer to this, you know, this final output. And by doing that, you actually end up getting to a point where you can build something that's repeatable and really, really robust

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [24:03]

and keep remembering challenge AI's answers. It may not link to what your experiences are. It may not really understand the nuances of what you're trying to get out of it. So use it as a companion. Ask it questions back and forth, just as you're saying. So do you think that AI maturity could become this new differentiator, and differentiate between thriving and lagging commercial teams?

AI Maturity as Competitive Differentiator

Matt Wilkinson [24:34]

Absolutely the ability for people using AI to accomplish things in almost no time, compared with or to compress timelines to create something is just astronomical. You can create websites in minutes. You can create new position. You can interrogate positioning through the eyes of your persona. And if you're using persona AI, you can create new text. You can create new things. Now, of course, there's going to be things about getting it so that it's. Is ready, and that you're comfortable with it, and there's still a need for the expert in that loop. And please don't think I'm ever going to say that. There isn't, but the speed at which you can operate, the volume at which you can create really, really high quality outputs, the way that you can become more focused on the customer through using AI, you know, if you're if you're able to, you know, create customised messages to your different persona within your buying group, which you absolutely can then that's more likely to hit if you're then going to take that a step further and understand somebody's role and then maybe their personality type using a tool like humantic Ai, apologies for the shameless plug, there you'd be. You're able to get even closer to how not just what looked important to that person in their role, but also what's important to how they want to receive information. And so by doing all of those things, what you're really able to do is to accelerate your path to results. And of course, we're still working with humans, at least for the time being, but I think that we really have to be able to look at there's that moment where if we don't jump on board, we can, we're going to end up in trouble. You just have to look at the contrasting fortunes of two of the world's biggest ad agencies. Up is currently struggling and has seen significant amounts knocked off its market value, whereas publicist has invested heavily in AI and has seen a completely contrasting shift in shift. So while WPP has lost about 5 billion euros off of itself, 5 billion pounds off of its share price over the last three, three or four years, publicist has done almost the opposite. And I think that just goes to show where there's other things going on behind the scenes, but that that ability to adopt and adapt is just so crucial for organisations today.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [26:44]

Yeah, I'd add another word to the adopt and adapt. It's preparedness as professionals. This is, this is the gift that keeps on giving in helping you prepare for a customer presentation and debate with it what objections the customer is likely going to ask. It helps you prepare for an internal marketing presentation. It helps you become more persuasive when you want to ask your manager something for something. So I think that it's absolutely going to be the in all of our professional lives as well as our personal lives.

Creating Space for Human Connection

Matt Wilkinson [27:26]

No, absolutely, I think it's, I think it's one of those things where we're just going to have to be really, really careful about maintaining the personal connections and the creating those spaces to connect with real human beings, but we can use AI to help us get to that and maybe create more space to spend more time with humans, rather than just spending time behind spreadsheets.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [27:48]

Completely agree, yeah, it is about those relationships and giving us back time to have deeper relationships with with the folks that we care about, as well as new folks that we want to learn about. Well, this was spectacular. Thank you. Really appreciate your insights, Matt and looking forward to seeing everybody again on a splice of Life Science marketing the podcast. Thank you, Jasmine

Matt Wilkinson [28:18]

and thank you for everybody that's listened. You

Q&A

What should I do first if I discover secret cyborgs in my team?

Start with a no-blame conversation. Ask what tools they're using and why they sought them out - this reveals the gaps in your current processes. Then establish basic guardrails: which tools are approved, what data shouldn't be shared, and how to use privacy settings. Create a safe space where experimentation is encouraged within boundaries, not punished. This turns risky shadow adoption into sanctioned innovation.

How can I help light users become more confident without overwhelming them?

Show, don't tell. Pick one repeatable task they do weekly - perhaps formatting a report or drafting meeting notes. Demonstrate how AI handles it in under five minutes. Let them try with your guidance. Once they experience the time saving on something mundane, confidence builds naturally. Avoid dumping 50 use cases on them. Master one workflow first, then add another next month.

What's the simplest way to start an AI club with limited budget?

Schedule a 30-minute weekly session where one person shares a use case they tried. No preparation required - just screen-share and talk through what worked and what didn't. Rotate facilitators so everyone contributes. Use free tools like ChatGPT or Claude. The goal isn't polish, it's creating psychological safety to experiment and ask questions. Start with three people. Growth happens organically.

How do I measure whether our AI adoption is actually improving productivity?

Track time-to-completion on specific recurring tasks before and after AI adoption. For example, measure how long competitive analysis takes in week one, then again in week twelve after introducing AI tools. Also monitor daily usage rates - structured programmes achieve 53-73% versus 31% for unstructured experimentation. If usage stalls below 40%, your guidance or tool selection needs adjustment.

What's the first guardrail every organisation needs before encouraging AI use?

Define what data never leaves your organisation. Create a simple one-page document: customer data, unreleased product specs, and financial information stay internal. Everything else can be used to prompt AI with care. This removes paralysis while protecting what matters. Pair this with a list of approved tools where you've verified privacy settings. Clarity beats comprehensive policies when you're starting out.

Shownotes and transcript

Shownotes

Your antibody copy could land you an FDA warning letter. One wrong phrase on your website transforms a research tool into an unapproved diagnostic device in the eyes of regulators.

This conversation is for marketing managers at life science tools companies who need to promote Research Use Only (RUO) products without crossing regulatory lines. Josh Levin, former FDA compliance officer and diagnostics consultant, explains exactly which words trigger investigations and how to communicate analytical performance without implying diagnostic intent. Words matter: phrases like "used in diagnosis" or "detects disease" create regulatory risk; safer language references literature findings or analytical capabilities.

What you will learn:

• The specific RUO disclaimer language FDA requires and where it must appear
• Red flag phrases that imply diagnostic claims versus safe alternatives that reference published research
• Why written website copy receives more FDA scrutiny than verbal sales conversations
• How to present clinical data and analytical performance without crossing into diagnostic territory
• What compliance language belongs in distributor agreements to prevent off-label promotion
• Three strategic tips for tools companies considering entry into the diagnostic space

Chapters:

• [0:00] Introduction and defining Research Use Only
• [1:26] What RUO means and how FDA determines intended use
• [2:29] Required RUO statement placement and formatting
• [3:58] What manufacturers can and cannot say about RUO products
• [6:35] Red flag words versus safe phrasing for website copy
• [9:23] Framing analytical data without implying clinical validity
• [12:01] Application notes and case study guardrails
• [13:09] How AI might change FDA compliance monitoring
• [14:24] Working with diagnostic and clinical lab customers
• [21:38] Distributor compliance and partner training
• [22:51] Combined-function instruments and software considerations
• [26:13] Three tips for tools companies entering diagnostics

Keywords: Research Use Only, RUO products, FDA compliance, life science marketing, diagnostic claims, regulatory copywriting, antibody marketing, lab developed tests, ISO 13485, clinical lab regulations, tools manufacturer compliance, FDA warning letters

Ready to ensure your marketing copy stays compliant? Watch this essential conversation, subscribe for more regulatory insights, and visit strivenn.com for expert guidance on life science marketing strategy.

 

Transcript

Former FDA compliance officer Josh Levin explains the regulatory minefield of marketing Research Use Only products. This conversation covers the exact language that triggers investigations, how to present data safely, and strategies for working with diagnostic customers without becoming a diagnostic company yourself.

Defining Research Use Only and FDA Intent

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [0:00]

Hey, welcome to a splice of Life Science marketing. I'm Jasmine Greer Gray, and as always, I'm joined by Matt Wilkinson. Hey, Matt, hi. So today, tracking what you can and can't say about Research Use Only products or sometimes that's abbreviated as r u O, and how to avoid tripping the FDA wires. Our guest today is Josh Levin. He has led post market work at FDA, CDRH for molecular and pathology devices, focusing on compliance around Ruo products and lab developed testing as well as working with firms on transitioning their CLIA quality systems to an FDA compliant system. He later drove quality system implementation at pgdx and diagnostics regulatory strategy at A, S, E, L, L and G, s, k, through iron line consulting, he now advises labs and diagnostics teams on regulatory strategy and QMS. Prior to FDA, Josh worked at research product firms for 10 years, including a stint as director of R and D at kpl. Matt, why don't you kick us off? Thank

Matt Wilkinson [1:26]

you so much. Now, Josh, Research Use Only sounds pretty simple, but in one minute, what does it actually mean, and how does the FDA determine a product's intended use in practice versus the sort of totality of claims and context, and not just considering this a disclaimer,

Joshua Levin [1:46]

sure. Well, thank you Matt and Jasmine for the opportunity to speak on this subject. So FDA views Research Use Only as almost a diagnostic product that's in the developmental stage. So you know that because the product is being developed, FDA understands that there might be kits that are being developed for the purposes of researchers to try and use in their research, but there's also an understanding that FDA quality system regulations don't apply at this stage, and the claims that companies can make around these products are very limited. Not sure. I completely answered your question, but happy to elaborate

Matt Wilkinson [2:26]

further. Thank you for that. Now that was that was

Required RUO Statements and Labeling

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [2:29]

really useful. So what specific Are you? Oh, statement has to appear where and does punctuation, capitalization matter for ads, data sheets and slide decks.

Joshua Levin [2:42]

Yeah, so there's a standard statement, which is defined in the FDA regulations. And there's, there's actually a very useful FDA guidance on this. And the statement, I don't remember exactly, but it's something about for Research Use Only, not for use in diagnostic procedures. And this is something that our UL company should have on their labeling, just to make it very clear that they're not promoting the product for diagnostic use.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [3:06]

Yeah, I've often used this in companies where I've worked and seen it in many others, for example, on antibodies. On the label of the vial, it says Research Use Only, so that that sort of covers it, does it?

Joshua Levin [3:21]

Yes, I think we'll probably talk about how Research Use Only manufacturers tools. Manufacturers can work with their partners who might be using the product and diagnostic applications and and what firms can do to protect themselves against FDA inspection or oversight.

Permitted and Prohibited Claims

Matt Wilkinson [3:39]

I can't wait to get into that. But before we do, what can a manufacturer say and not say about a Research Use Only product? And maybe more importantly, is there a difference between written copy and verbal communications, or are you creating both of those treated exactly the same?

Joshua Levin [3:58]

That's a very good question, especially around the written and verbal communication. So So companies, tools companies, or research use products companies are allowed to talk about the analytical capabilities of their product. So to give you an example, I had a and that should be very transparent to the user. We had a company who we were investigating at FDA, where the company had a combined score of 80 different biomarkers, and they were claiming this was a Research Use Only tool. And we said, Okay, well, what are the 80 markers you need to disclose that to your to your customer, and what the analytical performance is on each of those? And because they were unwilling to do that, we said, this is not a research tool. You're marketing. This is a diagnostic because of that lack of transparency. So tools companies should be very transparent about the analytical performance of their product on the particular marker. So for example, if you have an antibody, you know, being able to show western blots or Elisa data or what have you on performance of that antibody.

Matt Wilkinson [4:57]

So that's really interesting. So you're allowed to talk about the analytical capabilities, and then it's up to the user to go that extra step if they want to use it for diagnostic purposes, they have to then do the proof in the lab developed test. And this is

Joshua Levin [5:10]

where the difference between written and verbal communication comes in handy. So written communication is what FDA is going to scrutinize, and website copy, for example, is probably the most accessible medium to FDA, and where companies tend to get tripped up a lot, because the website copy is often written by marketers. No, no offense, but there's, there's a bit of a desire to overstate what that product can do, and be happy to share some suggestions for how to imply a diagnostic claim and written labeling in verbal communication, you have a lot more flexibility, because the court has ruled, I don't remember the exact case, but there was a court ruling that FDA cannot regulate freedom of speech. So for example, if you have a salesperson saying something to the effect of, well, we we know customers are using this in diagnostics. We're not supposed to be marketing it for that purpose. But you know, you can do what you want with it. You know something that statement like that FDA, FDA can control what a salesperson says. That being said. However, I definitely recommend training your sales staff very closely that they don't cross that particular line and that. Again, I think statements like the one I mentioned are ways you can kind of get around saying what you want to say without actually saying

Matt Wilkinson [6:26]

it brilliant. And that's it. That's such a subtle distinction. And I love that free speech comes in even to a conversation about, Oh, you are brilliant, yeah.

Red Flag Words and Safe Alternatives

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [6:35]

So I'd love to go back to what you said earlier, about how what's written, particularly in very public information, like a website, can trip you up. What are some of the red flag words that you've seen in your experience? What is some safe praise phrasing? What kind of guidance would you give our audience?

Joshua Levin [6:57]

So let's say that you you had this antibody, and the antibody had a had a particular diagnostic use for, I don't know, let's say prostate cancer, just to make something up. If in your website copy, you were to say, our product is useful in the diagnosis, diagnosis of prostate cancer or something like that, that could trip you up, and FDA could say you're making an implied claim. But if you said something like this antibody has been shown to be a useful marker in prostate cancer, and then you list literature references, then you're not saying it's your product, you're just saying that this is what the scientists say. So FDA can't or will be less willing to call you on that, because you're not making a claim specifically about your product, but about this class of products and this particular biomarker

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [7:42]

can are there documents that can help researchers with this phrasing and with how to avoid making claims on diagnostic intent

Joshua Levin [7:54]

happy to use the opportunity to promote iron Line consulting services, where we certainly work with clients on on this issue, you know. And I'll give maybe another example that we worked on with the client where the clients marketing department wanted to claim that they were interference free for a particular interference this was a diagnostic company, but they hadn't performed the testing, so we recommended that they use the language of interference free by design, rather than simply interference free, because we didn't want to imply that they had done the testing. So that's an example of where we can work with clients. I don't think there's anything specifically written. Again, the Research Use Only guidance the FDA puts out as a good general guidance, but it doesn't necessarily talk about specific examples, promote the use of a good regulatory consultant, even for tools firms, to help avoid that particular issue, and it's usually something we can solve fairly quickly. That's that's

Presenting Analytical Data Safely

Matt Wilkinson [8:52]

got me thinking. I mean, I know the words can be interpreted in different ways, but so can data. So if I'm marketing an iuo product, I want to look at analytical performance and talk about some of, you know, some of the performance of, you know, the tool that I'm selling. I could imagine that even that data could actually imply clinical validity. So is there a way to ensure that you're framing that data in a way that isn't implying clinical or diagnostic validity, but it's actually just sort of showing this is the analytical performance

Joshua Levin [9:23]

of the product. Yes, certainly. And it you mentioned, Matt, it's a very subtle distinction. I think, if you're clear that you're you're testing, you're doing retrospective testing on pay, on patient samples, for example, like if you, if you're not implying that this is part of a clinical study. It's especially useful if it's someone else's data. If you have like a research collaborator, and then you're presenting that person's data, it can be a very subtle distinction. So you do want to make sure that the language really avoids any implication that it's a diagnostic tool. Let it start with the thought that this is a research tool and you're showing research. Research data's data in support of your research clients. I think you know, you'll, you'll be in good shape, if you kind of look at it that way. I think firms get into trouble where they try to, they try to be cute, and they know they have diagnostic customers. And you know, again, happy to get into how you might actually work with a diagnostic customer.

Matt Wilkinson [10:18]

I'd love to do that sort of just to dig into sort of something that made me think of there, which was, if I was to, you know, to have a product, you'd look at some retro, you know, retrospective samples. Then if I look at a correlation between, you know, the analytical capabilities of my tool and my test, and shall we say, the diagnosis of condition is that then implying that it can be used as a diagnosed, as a diagnostic, or am I actually just saying, In this study, we showed a great correlation between the analytical capabilities and diagnosis?

Joshua Levin [10:52]

I think that you do want to be careful there. I think saying if, again, if it's sort of like put in a research frame of mind that that we took patients with prostate cancer, we measured them, and, you know, our antibody showed that X percent had had this marker. As long as you're, you know, you're not, you're not going out and and implying with your data that people can then use this product directly for diagnosis. But kind of the goal of the study is a research goal, and that is, it's put in that context. I think that's kind of the mindset to have in mind. But it can be very subtle, because a lot of these tools, obviously are of interest for for diagnostic purposes as well. So

Application Notes and Case Studies

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [11:31]

as as you probably know, Josh, a very common tactic in the r, u, O space is to have application notes, case studies, whether it's from a key customer or a key opinion leader. Are there any guardrails around applying these, these success stories or these application notes and any disclaimers that that need to be included in the messaging,

Joshua Levin [12:01]

I would again promote the use of a good regulatory consultant to screen the language. But I think keeping to the same mindset that you're you're putting out an application note as a research tool. If you were putting it out for diagnostic purposes, you wouldn't be a tools company anymore. I think you know if, it's written by a third party, I think you're a little safer there, because it's the third party's opinion. If, for example, that third party the Kol was to say, I think this product could be useful in the diagnosis of XYZ, that's their opinion. And you may, you may get away with that. It's, it's often a little difficult to know what FDA is going to pick on, because oftentimes FDA gets told about things by competitors. You know, what's, what's the risk of putting that language in your documentation, and how important is it to you? That's what you really have to balance. Do

AI and FDA Compliance Monitoring

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [12:51]

you? Do you think that AI will actually have an impact on what the FDA finds out that they no longer rely on information from competitors, but they actually go searching out for these misses themselves. So

Joshua Levin [13:09]

Jasmine, I think you've given FDA a great idea, because, as you know, FDA is very resource strained at the moment, and you know, there's been, as you can imagine, a brain drain from FDA, especially in the diagnostic group, and they're really struggling to get good people they so they have, even when I was there, we had very limited resources to do compliance, so AI could really potentially help a lot there. FDA has tried to use AI, not entirely successfully, in the review process, but I think in the fact that they took a step in that direction indicates that that your idea might not be too far off about them using AI for compliance, it could actually be very effective there in as a screening tool that would be later vetted by humans you

Working with Clinical Lab Customers

Matt Wilkinson [13:55]

mentioned earlier, sort of looking about how r u O companies can maybe work with, you Know, diagnostics or clinical labs, you know, if I'm selling iuo product and my, you know, my sale, you know, I get a request from somebody in a clinical lab, how do I handle it if I learn a customer is using an r, u, O product diagnostically, is there anything I need to say or do or behave differently if they're if it's obviously an academic lab versus if it's actually a clinical lab that is Using an IUI product in a maybe a lab developed test or something like that?

Joshua Levin [14:24]

Matt, that's a good question. As you know, this is an area I'm very passionate about. I've been in kind of all sides of that. As director of r&d kpl, we were balancing the needs of our research customers and our our diagnostic customers. Then again, at FDA, and then at pgdx diagnostic company. So I can, I can speak to my experiences at a Tool Company at kpl. And there we we knew who our customers were and what they were doing with it. So we would, we would put the disclaimer in very big letters. Now it was a little different, because we sold antibodies for food detection salmonella and Listeria and things like that. Well, was FDA regulated, but not in the same way diagnostics is, but with diagnostic companies, sometimes they would come to us and say, well, we need you to be GMP. And we would say, No, we're not going to do that, you know, but we're ISO 9001 you take it or leave it. And then they would come in and do an audit and satisfy themselves, and then leave. So we knew what they were doing. They knew what we were doing, and our attitude was, whatever you guys want to do with the product that's on you. We're selling it for research. You want to make it into a diagnostic have fun. Try not to make any any bones about us being a diagnostic company, and that was one of the reasons for not going to full GMP with our production at pgdx. We were selling our product as as kind of for beta testing or alpha testing. We did have to train our sales staff. I remember a meeting where they put up a list of our customers for the Ruo product and and they had clinical, clinical, clinical, and so we made them take that off. So don't put that on slide. That's discoverable. We are going to get FDA inspected at some point, and well, with lab developed tests, that's a whole nother situation. And when I was at FDA, we were actively trying to get a handle on lab developed tests by going after tools manufacturers. And you can see this with a couple of recent warning letters. We actually have a blog post about a warning letter that was sent to a Gina diagnostics Well, first of all, the name of the company makes it sound like a diagnostic company. So okay, that there's that, but they had an Ruo product where they were making very explicit diagnostic claims, and FDA called them on that, and then when FDA showed up for an inspection, the quality manager just didn't handle it very well, so they weren't really prepared to deal with that kind of question. So they got a warning letter, and there have been a couple examples like that. We did put a lot of effort into to trying to find some use cases when I was at FDA, and it was very difficult to prove intent. So what I would recommend to the tools company is imagine getting inspected by FDA, and think about how you would handle that and make sure your documentation, and, more importantly, your quality people are well equipped to handle a kind of visit from FDA, because it can happen

Matt Wilkinson [16:59]

that's pretty interesting. So in terms of being able to, you know, you wouldn't necessarily go down the GMP routes, there's actually almost things, from a business perspective, to avoid, to almost protect yourself from, saying, Hey, we're a diagnostics company. There's clearly some, some language that you've just you've just told us that have to be really careful of it still feels like there's a, there's this, there's a there's a large sort of gray space that you have to operate in to be really successful

Joshua Levin [17:23]

here. That's true. I would say that some tools companies do go to the effort of creating GMP products and and they'll tell the IBD customers in vitro diagnostic customers, do you want the GMP product or the regular product? Because FDA is very clear on that component suppliers to an in vitro diagnostic do not have to be GMP. So for example, if you're making that antibody and you're selling it to a diagnostic company, you're not required to be be under GMP. But there is a lot of gray space in that. We FDA knew that these tools manufacturers knew where they were selling to and the laboratory developed test situation, which we could talk for another hour about, is another reason why FDA would like to get a handle on Research Use Only products, because they've been told by a court they can't go after lab developed tests. So that that then gives FDA the incentive to move backward into the supply chain to try to get some control over these diagnostic tests, which laboratory developed, tests not cleared or approved by FDA, make up probably 99% of the diagnostic testing market. So 1% of the diagnostic tests are actually FDA regulated. And so FDA would like to get some sort of handle on this, if they could. And that does put tools companies under the microscope

Matt Wilkinson [18:39]

a bit that's almost frightening, that whatever the lab says they are, where's the accountability in that?

Joshua Levin [18:43]

So the lab position on this is that they're regulated by CLIA regulations. Our position at FDA was that CLIA does a very good job of regulating the laboratory operations and and making sure that patient results are not, say switched, for example, which is a very important thing. So you know, you send a sample into Quester LabCorp, and you want to make sure that test result is is yours, and CLIA does a very good job on that. Where we FDA felt that CLIA wasn't doing a particularly good job, was on the test validation. So the requirements are very weak on what constitutes a validated test. And not to go into some detail, but New York state actually has some more sophisticated requirements. But to make long story short, FDA doesn't believe that CLIA is adequate for assuring develop a validation of a diagnostic test. But the labs disagree that the you know, and many of the big labs actually do have very good validation programs. You know, the very sophisticated FDA approach was, well, not we're not worried about you big labs. We're worried about fact that anybody can do this. So there's been a debate for many years to which the labs currently have the upper hand, both because of the court case and because, frankly, the labs FDA has mentioned doesn't have a lot of people left who can really speak to this issue. Most of us have gone to industry where we feel like we can, honestly, we feel like we can do a lot more good by by helping companies work with FDA.

Distributor Compliance

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [19:59]

So if we can pivot a little bit on the business side of things, as you know, many tool companies use distributors, what compliance language belongs in a distributor agreement? What kind of marketing approvals and partner training is typical to prevent off label promotion of an r, u, O product by a distributor.

Joshua Levin [20:24]

So I do have to admit, this is an area where I don't have a large amount of knowledge, but speaking from the regulatory side, or when I was in a research products company working on the R and D side, it would be, you know, scrutinizing, making sure we had the ability treating that distributor as a supplier and making sure we had adequate supplier controls. We had the ability to scrutinize their language. We had the ability to audit them. For example, you know, putting those things into place. And the tools companies I worked with were ISO 9001 certified, which is a good way to build quality system that lets you perform those kinds of supplier related tasks. So I kind of turned my answer into a quality regulatory answer, which I probably didn't fully answer your question, but some of that I have less experience with the contracting side. Well, I

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [21:09]

think what you said makes, makes perfect sense, auditing your distributors, having some kind of approval process to review the documentation before it goes public, review their their website language before it gets public, goes public.

Joshua Levin [21:26]

Absolutely, I think treating them like a supplier, like you would handle your critical suppliers that way. At least I'd hope tools companies do that. They're obviously not required to. But the supply chain is, is a very important piece of these products.

Combined-Function Instruments

Matt Wilkinson [21:38]

Absolutely, just for keeping on that sort of supply chain, but maybe sort of, sort of looking at usage again. If an iuo reagent runs on an instrument also used clinically, or your analysis software outputs a report that could be perceived to be patient like, what marketing lines can't be crossed before you trigger this sort of the IVD requirement. So

Joshua Levin [22:02]

this is a great question. Matt And FDA actually has a guidance on instruments with combined functions. So if you think about like an Illumina sequencer, for example, or PCR device, those can be used both in IBD and Ruo environments. And FDA wants to make sure the instrument manufacturer has a way to carve that out, you know, in order that the instrument isn't going to report. Going to report out, ru, oh, data in a clinical environment. So for example, if you're selling that product, if you're an if you're an instrument manufacturer, like an Illumina or or bio rad, or whoever makes the PCR device, you're selling the instrument into a clinical laboratory, you're able to keep from from that reporting. It is complicated somewhat by the laboratory developed test situation. But FDA does have a guidance on on how you, you, as an instrument manufacturer, can appropriately close off certain functions for diagnostic customers,

Matt Wilkinson [22:51]

and what sort of functions would those be, just so they can, so they can understand, I'll give an example

Joshua Levin [22:55]

from next generation sequencing, which is probably the technology I'm most familiar with. With a lot of these tests, there's, there's a limited number of variants that the system can report in diagnosis mode. So if you're using but of course, next generation sequencing, you can port out, report out an infinite number of variants for research purposes. So FD will want to help have the instrument designed that if it's being run in diagnostic mode, that only those variants can be reported out. In fact, there's a couple of approvals where FD went further and tiered the analytes in terms of how much evidence there was around that particular analyte marker. So some had very clear clinical data associated with them. Some only analytical data, and some were more preliminary.

Matt Wilkinson [23:39]

That's really interesting. And I love the example, because you've got me thinking about some work I used to do with, you know, with the software company that essentially created a software as a service to be able to look at genomic data. And it's being used in by the NHS and, you know, so it is a in some ways, you'd call it a diagnostic product, but it's when it, you know, it was focused on rare disease, and often rare disease. We don't have diagnostic markers yet. We have Mark variants of interest, if you will. So it isn't, it isn't, it's almost impossible to get it validated as a diagnostic instrument in its you know, tool in its entirety, because what you actually want to do is, okay, we've got these markers, as you say, that could be reported out as a diagnosis, but everything else could actually be something of interest, where they are variants of interest, where, actually, if we get enough data, we might be able to one day say these are diagnostic of this particular rare disease.

Joshua Levin [24:34]

That's correct. There are four companies who've gotten approval under pre market approval for their next generation sequencing system. I mean, in addition to Illumina, that has a clearance for the instrument, but those four companies were asked by FDA to come up with a plan for how they were going to continue to monitor variants and update their their test as more information became available from the variants. And to be fair to clinical labs, clinical labs that are doing next generation Sequencing, especially the good ones, are doing this all the time. They're also updating their knowledge base.

Matt Wilkinson [25:06]

Yeah, it's so important, and it's getting that right balance between being able to help a patient with a diagnosis and actually also being able to continue to further knowledge about what are many times are underserved and understudied diseases. No,

Joshua Levin [25:19]

absolutely. And this is one of the areas where the line between Research Use Only in in vitro diagnostics is very tenuous. And at FDA, we were very interested in this, because there's obviously a lot of there were a lot of companies offering sequencing services, and then there were other companies, as you mentioned, Matt, offering the software. So labs were able to put two and two together and come up with a next generation sequencing, oncology diagnostic we were at FDA a little concerned about how to deal with that particular situation. Again, I think, given that laboratory develop tests are no no longer under FDA peer review, that effort has at the moment, it's not a priority of FDA, but that's something to look for. They look at at companies combining different r, u, O, components to make an in vitro diagnostic, which is completely legitimate if they're bringing that diagnostic through FDA. You know, again, as I mentioned before, there's there's nothing wrong with having Research Use Only components in your in vitro diagnostic, long as you go to fda

Three Tips for Entering the Diagnostic Space

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [26:13]

with it. So to round out our discussion today, which has been fantastic, and it's just surfaced how complex this talk is, but to put you on the spot a little bit, are there three tips you can give to tools companies about getting into the diagnostic space? Well, that's

Joshua Levin [26:33]

a great question, Jasmine. So first of all, I would say, go in with your eyes wide open. And again, I'll give you a brief plug for what iron line consulting does. So we look at four elements, the science behind it, which presumably, is there, if the tools company has been doing good science all along, the commercial goals, which are very important, and what is as a company? Maybe this is one of the three tips I'll give us as as a tools company, what is your goal in getting into the diagnostic space, and really understanding that. And then the other question is, what diagnosed diagnostic Do you want to develop? And why? You know, we often see companies coming to us with great technologies, and we ask them what they want to do with it, and what disease do you want to look at? Because you when you develop a diagnostic, you have to have that sees expertise on your team to understand how customers are going to use your product. So I think that would be one, is understanding is understanding the commercial space. And maybe I'll say four tips, counting the good science, because that becomes even more critical as you go to validation under diagnostic realm, then your quality system is very important. As I mentioned, we think it's best practices for tools companies to be under ISO 9001 that's not always possible, but it's it's a good general practice, and but then how do you elevate that, from that to the medical device quality system, which is ISO 1345, which is a lot more explicit around the design process, and has is tied into risk management and things like that. So that is kind of a step up that tools companies need to take. And I'll give an example of something that happened during the covid era. I was working in a diagnostic company at the time, a cell and we wanted to partner with this, a little tools company that had this really cool technology, and they said they could run their assay in two hours. And I said, How is that possible, given all the all the steps you have in your assay? So they invited me over to see them, and I said, Okay, I get how you're doing it in two hours. You're not documenting anything where, in a medical device company, you're writing everything down when you when you run that assay, where they were not even lab enough, this wasn't even best practices. But anyhow, so like quality system, I think is the third, and then regulatory engagement. What's your strategy around engaging with FDA? We recommend something called the pre submission, which is usually a really good way to engage with FDA, and doesn't cost any money, you know, and it's a good way for companies to tow into the water with FDA and get an idea about what the validation requirements might might be and what the regulatory pathway might be. So I think those are the those are the areas we we would look at. That's a great question. I think those companies are often afraid to take that leap.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray [28:58]

It's a big commitment, both financial, well as culturally. Really, really appreciate all your insights today. Thank you so much for joining us on a splice of Life Science marketing and

Joshua Levin [29:10]

thank you both. I enjoyed this conversation. I appreciate the opportunity you.

Q&A

How do I audit our current website copy to identify phrases that might trigger FDA scrutiny?

Start by searching for any language that directly connects your product to diagnosis, detection, or clinical outcomes. Flag phrases like "diagnose," "detect disease," "for use in clinical," or "identifies patients." Replace these with references to published research and analytical capabilities. For example, instead of "detects cancer biomarkers," use "has been shown in literature to correlate with cancer biomarkers" with citation. Have both marketing and regulatory review every product page, especially antibody descriptions and application notes.

What's the fastest way to train our sales team on safe RUO language without overwhelming them?

Create a one-page comparison chart showing "Red Flag Phrases" versus "Safe Alternatives" with five real examples from your product line. Include the key principle: describe what the product does analytically, not what a doctor could do clinically with the result. Role-play customer scenarios where they're asked about diagnostic use. The safe response formula is: acknowledge you know customers use it in various ways, state you cannot market for diagnostic use, and redirect to analytical specifications and published literature.

If a clinical lab customer asks us to become GMP-compliant, how should we respond?

Clarify your positioning as an RUO supplier upfront. Explain you maintain ISO 9001 quality standards appropriate for research tools, and that FDA regulations do not require component suppliers to be GMP. Offer to host their audit of your facilities and quality system. This allows them to qualify you as a supplier while you maintain clear RUO status. Document everything and ensure your sales team never promotes the diagnostic application. Consider offering both RUO and separate GMP product lines if diagnostic business becomes substantial.

How do I present retrospective clinical data in a case study without implying diagnostic validation?

Frame all clinical data within a research context, never a clinical decision-making context. Use language like "research study on archived samples" rather than "clinical validation." Always attribute findings to the research collaborator, not your product's capabilities. Include the research goal explicitly in your description. For example: "Dr. Smith's research on prostate cancer tissue used this antibody to explore biomarker expression patterns in 50 archived samples." Never state or imply the data supports using your product to diagnose patients.

What documentation should I prepare now in case FDA shows up for an inspection tomorrow?

Ensure your quality team has: clear standard operating procedures for how RUO disclaimers appear on all labeling, documented sales training records showing RUO compliance education, audit trails of website and distributor marketing material approvals, and customer communication templates that reinforce RUO status. Create an FDA inspection response plan identifying who speaks to inspectors (quality manager, not marketing). Keep a clean separation between research and any potential diagnostic activities in all documentation. Review recent FDA warning letters to tools companies to understand current enforcement priorities.

Shownotes and transcript

Shownotes

Most life science tools are complex, technical, and sold to skeptical, data-driven buyers. This conversation shows how to turn that complexity into a story scientists believe—without dumbing anything down. Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray speak with Bruce Scheer about simplifying solutions, naming your big ideas, and building a business case that wins over both scientists and the C-suite.

Who this is for: Biotech startup marketers and commercial leaders selling high-consideration solutions with multiple stakeholders and high switching costs.

What this covers: How to collapse sprawling product lines into a human-friendly solution map, craft a buyer-led narrative (Problem → Outcome → Solution), and back it up with economic proof. You’ll also hear why a shared narrative aligns sales and marketing, reduces buyer confusion, and boosts renewals—not just new deals.

KEY IDEA (suggested): Name and simplify your story—lead with the buyer’s problem, paint the desired outcome, then prove economic value to overcome switching pain.

What you will learn:

• A practical method to simplify complex portfolios into 3–4 named solution categories

• How to name your problem, outcome, and solution in four words or fewer

• Why tension between current state and future state is your persuasion engine

• How to build CFO-ready business cases for high-consideration deals

• Using a shared narrative to align sales and marketing and reduce buyer confusion

• Visualizing your story (whiteboards first) to increase recall and internal retell

 

Transcript

In this discussion, the team digs into how life science companies can translate complex, technical products into compelling buyer narratives that scientists and executives trust—by simplifying the solution, naming big ideas, and proving economic value to overcome switching pain.

Translating Complex Tech Into a Narrative

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson

Thank you. A lot of our readers, listeners, sort of market life science tools or products that are really, really complex and technical, and their buyers can be really skeptical, sort of data driven. People completely get the emotion piece. And I'm a big believer in the approach. But do you have any tips on being able to translate something that's really, really technical into a compelling story that still rings true to the scientist, especially when that pain of switching can actually sort of feel like an insurmountable kind of mountain.

Speaker: Bruce Scheer

The pain of switching again, you know, I do start as we're crafting a narrative, and it's complex. You know, I was brought into Alcatel Lucent at the time they had 146 products. And talk about complexity, so we quickly went to simplifying that into a solution framework with four pieces. So all those, all those random, various products, had had a home within a category, four categories. So we had to figure out the solution side of what we were selling, and how do we simplify this in a way that a human brain can wrap their head around it? But then also, still, you know, getting into a core narrative. So with Alcatel Lucent, and working with our head of strategy, he said something that I heard, and I'm going, oh my gosh, that's it, we coined a big idea concept called dynamic enterprise. And the beauty in that is, when we went in to talk to enterprises, we could talk about this big idea of dynamic enterprise, but contrasting that with where they are today, which is anything but dynamic. You know, bureaucratic, slow, lethargic, and that created just an immense amount of emotional tension. And again, the value very often, is in that tension or contrast between, you know, what current state is and what future state could be. But that's typically what I'll do. I'll try to find some core concepts like that. I'll name them, which is a little bit unusual. I don't see other people in my in my field, naming things as much as I do, but I like to name my big problem. I like to name the outcome. I like to name the solution in four words or less. And it used to be three words or less, until Trump ran with the campaign Make America Great Again, which is probably one of the, you know, best campaigns ever run, even though, you know, I, you know, politics aside and fandom aside, I do give him credit. He didn't invent that. Ronald Reagan ran with that way, you know, way in the past. But boy, talk about moving the universe with a powerful phrase, so that helped me break my model into no more than four words or less. But I don't know if that helps in terms of helping people. You still want to get them excited about the potentiality before you start doing all the due diligence and stress testing, and you know, and you know all that detail to follow. Here's another really interesting statistic for you, a 2025, statistic. There's an organization called g2 that does a lot of buyer research, and I met their head of research a couple months ago, and he had just come out with a fresh report with a huge data set. But if you have a high consideration solution, meaning it's disruptive, it's very complex, multiple buyers, expensive, big investment, chances are 42% of those opportunities that you might be selling against 42% of those require C suite check off. And of that 42% 20% of the 42% of that number is CFOs. So if you've got a high consideration solution, chances are one out of five of your deals opportunities require CFO check off 42% of your opportunities at least somebody in the C suite. Very often those people in the C suite are held accountable for fiscal responsibility of their organization. And so, you know, my argument is, you better have a business case for those folks and showcase the economic or the financial value associated with that change. And that's very helpful. And rare is the seller who does that supports the buyer in doing that, hopefully that's helpful. Thank you.

Sales–Marketing Alignment via a Shared Narrative

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray

If we sort of continue on the theme of organizations and how they think, one of the topics that's very near and dear to my heart is sales and marketing alignment. I actually moderated a session about a month ago at the marketing elements summit in DC on this topic. From your experience, how does a shared narrative help get everyone on the same page, and equally importantly, what kind of outcomes can an aligned commercial team realize?

Speaker: Bruce Scheer

Well, an aligned commercial team isn't very normal. I'll tell you that, based on my 25 years of working with them, normally, marketing is doing what they're doing and banging a drum, and their metrics are around, you know, MQLs or so. They've got their own vanity metrics that they're trying to hit. And then they, you know, throw that over the wall. Hey, sellers, here you go. Here's your leads that you've been asking for. And then the sellers, you know, you know, gosh, it was really funny. I was in a workshop with sales and marketing, because I normally do a cross functional team when I'm building a narrative Autodesk. You guys have probably heard of I had their rock star sales rep in the room, and I'm like, going, Hey, how's marketing working for you? How are their leads? And he goes, Oh, Bruce, I tell one of my SDRs that works for me. I tell him to ignore anything from marketing. And so Peter, the marketing leader, was in the room too. I go, Hey, Peter, did you hear that? And he's like, you know, gives me this sheepish, you know, embarrassed look. He did hear that. But you know, the, you know, the rock star seller said marketing leads are a waste of time. So they're just complete misalignment, misalignment on the buying journey, where marketing saying something and sales saying something else. And so that creates buyer confusion, which is never a good thing, especially the role they have to play in buying, which can be quite daunting, especially for high consideration solutions. If you create Miss messaging, either they're going to skip you, or you're going to create confusion, lower their confidence, or they can't buy and last time I looked, it's still there. But six out of 10 opportunities end in no deal, no action. You know, isn't that horrifying, all that time and energy and nothing, nothing changes, nothing moves. So, yeah, when it does happen, it's magic. And I've had that magic happen for me multiple times, luckily, where? But it's never it. I don't think it's ever happened where it's been overly pleasant, but I even, oh, I was out in London, Matt, I did a project for a company called concur, before they were acquired by SAP. And out in London, a group of marketers cornered me, and one of the VP said, Bruce, you have made our life miserable. And I'm like, going, oh my gosh, you know, Hey, I am sorry. I don't know what I did. And he goes, Well, Robson, who was their CMO, saw a sales narrative that I had made for their commercial sales team, and loved it, and then went back to his marketing organization. Said, Hey, stop our brand marketing. I want to redo everything around this, because he saw the value former Citrix cmo as well. But, you know, very seasoned CMO, he saw the value in that alignment that they did not have, you know, marketing was talking about stuff that, you know, sellers would certainly not be talking about in their selling conversations. So just complete misalignment. He wanted to solve for that problem. CETA. Matt, I don't know if I've told you about a company called CETA, but I worked with them across the world and their Chief Commercial Officer, thank goodness. I met him in Dubai at one of their global sales kickoffs. And that morning, he had asked all the sellers to enter, you know, introduce C to hit to him like he was an executive for the first time. And so they did a big, huge round robin. And at the end of it, he felt like hanging himself. He just, he just felt royally sick and distraught because CETA they'd been around since World War Two and and he was trying to rebrand CETA, rightfully, as an incredibly innovative organization and a pioneer that's still progressive and in the forefront. And the sellers were making it sound like, you know, Sita was old and stodgy and stuck in their ways. And, you know, just sending signals, brand signals that he absolutely didn't want. And so thank goodness I was there. Had lunch with him. He was really bummed, and I'm like, going, Hey, we need a unified narrative. And so we called it seed a story for sales, so the sellers could have a better narrative that they could use in their introductory selling conversations. But very interestingly, the narrative we built became the impetus for their whole organization's reorganization with their new CEO that they hired, you know, and that's the power of getting this right. And then, you know, when you have that, you know, that crossover executive, like this gentleman's name was author, the Chief Commercial Officer, he could make sure both sides of the house were speaking at, you know, a similar language and having a similar go to market narrative. So it's when it happens Jasmine, which isn't all that often. It's a beautiful thing. And of course, you know, the promise is, you know, more revenue growth when you do have that alignment, internally and externally, with CETA, for example, it was kind of funny. They have a whole analyst team, and they do their annual survey of the parent, transportation sector, and they come out with their big insights and point of views around those insights, and that becomes also a growth engine for them and part of their innovation that they bring to the market. So I got in touch with one of the analyst team and said, Hey, would you be interested in understanding the story that the sellers are telling? And he's like, going, you know, yeah, sounds kind of cool. And I go, Yeah, because if you understood that, you could probably help your sellers. And he's like, you know, trying to connect the dots. But I was like, going, Yeah, you know, based on the narrative that they're saying, you could help give them some gravity, some insights, some statistics that they could bring into their selling conversations and make them that much better, and then he's starting to get it. Oh, my God, that sounds awesome. And so what I did is, you know, we had built different narratives for their different solution domains, and I shared that with him, you know, the all up and the solution stories so that person could do a better job of designing their thought leadership questionnaires, their studies to get the right information to fuel these better selling conversations, as well as their marketing thought leadership platform.

Impact on Buyers and Retention

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yeah, while I think a lot of companies recognize that the rift between sales and marketing is not healthy, and they sort of talk about how to fix it. I think what they most importantly forget is the impact on the future buyer. When you have that rift, well, you say future buyer. Weirdly enough, Jasmine is actually the existing buyer as well. You know, you wouldn't believe how many buyers buy and have remorse after they buy. You know, there's confusion, remorse, and then in this whole world of everything as a service, there's, there's also a big drop off rate where customers, you know, cancel subscriptions or cancel contracts they want to consolidate. You know, there's other reasons nobody's using it, and so these narratives can can also be incredibly clarifying and useful for existing buyers, giving them the reason to stay, funny enough and and customers that stay are, you know, way more profitable than acquiring new customers. Of course, we've already, we've all seen those economics. But in the in this day and age, especially with the tough economy that we're in right now, many organizations, you know, go to market teams are doubling down on existing customers, looking for white space. How do we upsell, cross, sell, grow with our existing customers? And that's where, you know, a compelling narrative, this contextual narrative, can be so helpful for them, and not only keeping the contract, but adding to that, or adding additional solutions to to the contract, as well as those future customers, as you say, Jasmine,

Becoming Bolder and Visualizing the Narrative

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson

keeping on this sort of sort of narrative story you've said that you know that we're talking about the stuff, and that one of the things in the book I really liked was that you would, you said an awful lot about trying to get people to be bolder. There's a, there's a bit of an old adage in the, you know, in the marketing world, that nobody gets fired for playing it safe. It's only, you know, it's only the people that take those big, bold risks that fail, that tend to get let go. But you kind of said the opposite, that playing it too safe is actually the far bigger risk. You know, we both work in a very, shall we say, conservative industry that tends to for years, everything was kind of pale blue and white. So how do you encourage companies to be more audacious with their narratives, and how do you get them to be bolder.

Speaker: Bruce Scheer

Oh, man, you really bring back an old story. I did some work for McKesson technologies, and I see, if I've got a visual in here, one of the big things that I work on is a narrative. We start with words, but then how can we visualize the narrative? And I don't know if you can remember that chapter, I spent a whole chapter on talking about the importance of that, just to a help customers truly understand what you're trying to speak to, the problem, the outcome, the solution that you're you're speaking around. But how can you help them visualize that as well? And if you can, memory goes way up. You know, the retention of that, but also, you know you probably heard the framing of a picture is worth 1000 words. You know, when you see the picture, you get a big aha moment. And a friend of mine loves to cite this. Have you seen Daniel Pink's some of his animate videos in the past? One was on Drive, you know, motivation. And this buddy of mine, you know, you know, had a degree in organizational development and loved the book, but was kind of confused. But he reads, reads the whole book, likes it, but he sees that video, and just bang, light bulbs go off, that that animation, that story. And so when you know you get a great narrative, you you help visualize it. But once that happens, this one project with McKesson technology, such a great narrative, beautiful visual. And the sellers that had that I was talking to one of the general managers there, and what he had witnessed was the sellers became so much more confident in their outreach to their prospects and in their selling conversations, because, you know, they just knew they were on it. There was big value in it, extremely clear story. The buyers could get it quite quickly. And, you know, the magic would happen. And so their confidence in selling their platform, instead of selling this complex platform, they had a very simplified narrative that people would buy into, and it elevated their confidence, their boldness, and they were so much more effective because of that. And you want your sellers super excited and convicted about what they're selling. And that's what this narrative was able to do, just kind of overnight, you know, introducing that new narrative, they're like, going, Yeah, this is gold. And I've had that happen again and again. When they are loaded right, with a great narrative, it's so empowering, both for them and also their buyers. Very often, I'll teach sellers to whiteboard the narrative in front of their client. And so all you know, when we design the visuals, we design for whiteboard first, and then you can create animations around it, marketing things, and, you know, update the website, etc. But first and foremost, we typically start with doodles, stick figures that sellers could truly draw on a whiteboard. And you wouldn't believe how many times that sellers have said, Hey, Bruce, I went back to my prospect. Oh my god, you wouldn't believe it. You know that whiteboard that I drew, it was still there, and I'm like, going not a surprise. I've heard it so many times that it wasn't your whiteboard anymore. It became their whiteboard and and they used it to retell the story. The CEO didn't want to erase it from the whiteboard because it was so compelling. So that that transfer of ownership of that narrative was is can be incredibly useful for that internal buying journey that the seller is typically not involved with

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson

fantastic I mean, that that's, it's incredibly powerful. I actually saw a stat from, I think one of our mutual friends, Dr Lisa Palmer, who published, posted something on LinkedIn recently about the the amount of revenue per employee. And McKesson leads with about 8.2 million US dollars per employee. And so if those value narratives are delivering that kind of return, how can anybody not take this up as an approach?

Speaker: Bruce Scheer

Yeah, well, and so many don't, but you'd be surprised. You just truly would be surprised in one of my workshops. Have you guys ever heard of a company called Razorfish? Yes, yeah, yeah. So Razorfish, it's the two founders of Razorfish, and 60 Minutes decides to interview them, because they're just so wildly successful. At the time, they were valued at $4 billion and so they're asking the co founders, hey, you know, could you explain just in a nutshell, like you did with me, Matt, what do you guys do? And they couldn't really answer the question, you know. They said, You know, we help business recontextualize themselves. And the 60 minute guy goes, recontextualize. That's kind of confusing, you know, Could you, could you make it simple? What do you do? You know? And they just couldn't, you know, but, but here they are, $4 billion company doing okay. So, you know, organizations exist and thrive without a narrative. But my argument is, if they do have an or if they can have one, which few do, especially, you know, especially few do that, put the buyers the hero. If they do have that you can see just, you know, wild success, one of my clients Tableau, I built their sales narrative, pre IPO, and they just exploded. Of course, the technology was awesome and the use cases were great, et cetera. But I'm telling you that organization, they took my narrative and they made a whole company training. I even have a story about a woman in training and development using it with a prospect down in Vegas and getting a deal. She wasn't even carrying it, you know, in a sales capacity. But, you know, they just believed everybody needs this story, this, this is it. And it became part of their whole company training from Chairman all the way down. So it, you know, when that, when people kind of line around that, you know, the the world can change much faster. And typically, you know, a lot of people might think that they have a narrative. And what I typically ask them, I go, Hey, that's great. I'd love to see it, you know, I don't see it. And I go, Yeah, yeah, I'd love to see it. And especially, show me a picture of the problem that you guys solve. And that's where, that's the total shakeout, where they're like, What do you mean? I'm like, going, Okay, let me repeat myself. Show me a picture of the problem you solve. And they can't, because they don't have a picture like that. They have a picture of their tech, but they don't have a picture, a picture of the customer world and how they're impacted and how that could change that visualizations like that typically don't exist.

Digital Buying, Remorse, and the Role of Sellers

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yeah, I love that story, and I love that that question about show me a picture. I think a lot of product managers could also learn a lot from that way of thinking. But I wanted to pivot for a second. I was listening to your discussion with a lead judge on the Business Marketing podcast. Yeah, sure, and you quoted this, this metric that just blew my mind, and that was 59% of influence on a big B to B buying decision comes from the buying experience, and only 41% on the influence comes from the offering experience outweighs offering on a buying decision, but with most buyers getting At least 70% of the way through a buying decision before contacting a company rep representative, the experience is wildly dependent on a digital person free experience. Yeah, a little counter intuitive. What advice can you give commercial teams to mitigate this situation?

Speaker: Bruce Scheer

Yeah, it's, it's such an interesting dynamic now, because buyers don't want to engage with sellers, and they're, you know, many marketing organizations have started to kind of like, go, Okay, well, we get it. You know, we hate dealing with sales, too, makes sense, and I've even heard CMOS go and, yeah, our sellers are just order takers. They're useless. You know, you get into all this posturing stuff. But here's one of the other counter intuitive statistics, buyers that do all that self research and buy often have buyer buyers remorse at a huge percent, I think I'll have to fact check this, but roughly four out of 10 buyers who bought think they made the wrong decision after they bought and are unhappy with where they're at. And then the renewal rate, you know, you know, doesn't go and so there is a role to play for sellers, and I typically counter with this consumer based response, but I was working with a company called eBay Motors, part of eBay, and they sell 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of cars every year on eBay. And they, the team I was working with, they were going dealership to dealership, saying, Hey, if you got extra stock, throw it on eBay and you can sell it there and get more turnover, and it will improve your business. And so when I wanted to build those sellers a narrative, so they could go out to dealerships and tell that story. And so I asked eBay, who's your number one dealership in the world, throwing their stock up on eBay and driving a lot of sales, they go, Oh, that's easy, Lexus of Atlanta. So I arranged a meeting with the owners of that dealership, and said, hey, you know, tell me, why is this working for you? Etc. But then I out of curiosity, I asked them, hey, how many customers that come out there or buyers that already purchased their car online? How many of those buyers drive away with the car that they bought and again, they flew from their home state all the way to Atlanta, hopped on a train, took the train to the dealership that was right off the train line, went in there to pick up their keys so they could drive the car that they bought home. How many of those buyers drove their car home? Could you help me with that? Just take a guess. What percent of the buyers drove the car that they bought home, 50% 50 No, 80, 80% so four out of five of those buyers drove their car home. Why'd you say 50?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray

My thinking was because the that's when the the seller got in there and started talking them up into a different solution. So built a different kind of relationship with them, and they were persuasive enough to convince them to buy something else half of the time. So I was giving them a lot of

Speaker: Bruce Scheer

you can call it, yeah, you can call it powers of persuasion. But you know, they were able to, I would argue, they were able to help one out of five buyers get into a better car, into a more suitable car. Hey, Bruce, you're here to pick up your Porsche. Oh, wow, that's a sexy Porsche. You're gonna look so cool. Tell me about your life. Are you single? No, no, I got a wife. Be not kids yet. No, no, no, I got three kids. Are they in school? Yeah, yeah. And do they have friends? Yeah. And how do you shuttle them around? I don't know. Hey, Bruce, instead of getting that Porsche, would you be interested? Interested in a minivan? I could make sure you get a sport addition so you still look cool, but, you know, or I use that as an extreme example, but they were able to help people find, you know, the right car, because a lot of people make assumptions, you know, I buy things online, and it shows up the house, and I go, why did I buy this? This isn't what I was expecting. That happens in these B to B deals as well. So there is a role for sales to play in these buyer journeys, you know. And so, you know, the world is the way it is, and sellers haven't earned earn that right. Many buyers, you know, actually want to run from sales again. 75% of B to B buyers prefer to have a sales free experience, according to Gartner, and so, you know, it's broken, but if the buyer tries to take it all the way on their own, you know, there's a huge risk of remorse and just making the wrong decision on behalf of their organization. So I don't know if that's helpful at all, but you know on the marketing side, you can still lead with that narrative. And my firm, we build value calculators, especially if you know it does require that executive check off the business cases is super duper helpful. In that regard, nine out of 10 deals often require business value justification, even by the procurement system. It's a form that they have to fill out. So you need to go there on many of these high consideration solutions, or bold solutions based on that buy in experience staff that you gave. So you can support that online, and we do that as well, you know, try to give the buyer information they need to do a better, you know, make a better buying decision. And so we're, you know, that's our mindset, to try to support that online and with the sellers.

Trends: AI and the Buyer’s “Agent”

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson

Makes sense. Thanks, brilliant. Thank you, yeah. Finally, Bruce, we've got one last question for you. And I'd like you to put your futurologists hat on, if you will. You know, I know I've had a chance to sort of check out that the sort of the business case calculator, I know it involves quite a bit of AI witness, and it is really cool. But what trains trends or changes should sales and marketing professionals in really be preparing for especially if they want to keep inspiring their buyers in the next five years.

Speaker: Speaker 1

Yeah, well, I enjoyed Mark Scheer latest book, how AI is changing your customers. Matt, you've probably read it as well, I'm guessing, or so I liked some of his points of view. I've witnessed that myself and even my own behavior very often. I was buying a pair of boots, and I was leveraging chatgpt to help me buy boots. And it was really hilarious. I already had a pair of boots, and I uploaded it into chatgpt, and I'm like, going, should I buy these boots and chat? GPT said, Well, you could. But if you want to be a progressive, you know, you know, contemporary, maybe a little bit older, but, but yet a little bit wiser, you know, CEO type person, I'd only recommend wearing those boots on the weekend, perhaps walking your dog. I already bought these things, and it just cracked me up. But I think I tell that story, but I believe a lot of people are starting to lean more more heavily on AI as part of that buying journey and getting points of view. So, you know, how can we show up better in AI to support, you know, the AI as buyer or the agent to the buyer? How do we support that agent and getting the right information to feed back into that buying committee? So I think that's one, one extremely hot topic, both today, for for kind of first movers, but for even for laggards, that's going to be a big issue moving forward in the world of consumer MD, to be sales and marketing. I think the other, the other exciting thing that I see is how AI is really helping sellers do a better job of understanding their customer and showing up, ready. The bigger concept behind that, I think, is Respect, respect for the buyer and service to the buyer. How can I do more on my end, to make life easier for my buyer. And I think AI really supports that, that philosophy. How can I, how can I create the best buying experience possible, to help them in their buying journaling internally, which is incredibly daunting. How can I help them do that? And then, how can I just, you know, make sure you know where the vendor of choice, if it's a good fit and and have that mindset, but AI can really help connect the dots in that way and for everybody, brilliant. So, Matt, did you have point of view on that as well? That was just mine. I know you think a lot about the future too, yes. So, I mean, I got a couple Jasmine

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson

yourself. I think the I love you, I love it. Sort of talking about coming up being more prepared. Our podcast is sponsored by humantic Ai, who sort of create both, sort of accounts intelligence and buyer intelligence. So one it can allow you to really go out and better understand the big trends that are impacting the business as a whole. So you can have that, you see, so you've got a better chance of tailoring your value narrative, actually to the business and and its problems that are happening right now and then, and then also being able to understand who's in the room and what kind of personality profiles you've got. So you're actually able to then look at all of those different buyers, you know, whether it's seven or 12, and be able to understand, especially if you can you know who you're meeting and who's in that group, being able to stand some of their personality types and then actually how to engage with them better. So that's one of the big things that I've really, really been espousing for recently. But I think it's all about connection. I think we connect the story and narrative. We connect by better knowing the the customers context, better, their problems better, and really being able to, as you said, sort of really, really respect them as much as part as possible and the problems that they have and and if you have the solution, then it's almost it's almost wrong if you don't manage to actually convey the value that you can give in the best possible way.

Speaker: Bruce Scheer

Yeah, yeah, no, I completely agree. I love your idea around connection as well. I've been speaking a lot about the charisma edge lately, and you and I have talked about that a bit. But you know, if I, if I get the right, or earn the right, to have a selling conversation with a potential buyer. You know, I've got a between a nanosecond and four seconds to show up with enough presence create a perception in their mind that this person is trustworthy and the person's, you know, smart, you know, they're going to help me. And how, you know, how can you do that so fast? And that's this charismatic effect that I'm actually trying to help. You know, B to B, sellers master more of and leaders who support them. How can they be more charismatic right out of the gate and then continue to earn that right based on the homework they did, the value that they can bring those subsequent conversations. But even out of the get go, how do we establish trust and credibility within four seconds? So I think, you know, funny enough, I think we, in the future, we need to upgrade our human operating system, is what I've been talking about. How can we how can we do a better job of connecting when we have these beautiful moments of truth? How can we connect better?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Absolutely, I think that's that's so important. I don't think relationship building will ever go away. That you know that if you can be a futurist, that I think is the foundation of all of this, but I think what's what's going to change is how quickly you can build that relationship,

Speaker: Bruce Scheer

yeah, yeah. And the man, yeah, just the imperative for that, you bet. Well, bet. Well, find one.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson

Thank you so much for today, Bruce, I've learned so much, and it's been, it's been brilliant having you on. Thank you so much for your time.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yeah, thank you sharing all your insights. We really appreciate it.

Speaker: Unknown Speaker

Yeah, thanks, Jasmine. My pleasure.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson

Brilliant. Thank you so much. Bruce, that was that was awesome.

Q&A

How do I simplify a 20-product biotech portfolio into something a scientist can follow?

Group products into 3–4 solution categories that map to a scientist’s workflow (e.g., “Sample Prep,” “Assay Optimization,” “Data Confidence,” “Throughput & Scale”). Give each category a clear, named promise. Lead with the buyer problem each category solves. Use one diagram and a one-line outcome per category. Link individual SKUs only after the narrative lands.

Switching costs feel insurmountable. How do I make a credible business case fast?

Quantify the status quo: rework rates, turnaround times, failed runs, headcount hours. Estimate the financial impact with simple, buyer-provided inputs, then show a 6–12 month payback scenario. Package it in a one-pager: problem metric → outcome metric → assumptions → sensitivity table → next step (pilot). Invite the CFO early with a 30-minute review.

How can marketing and sales align around one shared narrative next week?

Run a 90-minute workshop: agree on one named problem, one named outcome, and a three-step solution path. Draft a whiteboard sketch and a three-slide POS deck. Sales uses it on three calls; marketing rewrites the homepage hero to match. Debrief on recorded calls to refine wording. Ship v1 in seven days, then iterate.

What’s a low-budget way to add emotion without losing scientific credibility?

Anchor emotion to operational stakes your buyer feels daily: “trapped in reruns,” “stalled validation,” “audit risk.” Pair each with one proof metric (e.g., “28% reruns last quarter”). Use a customer quote or anonymized lab note to ground it. One image or whiteboard beats stock art—draw the current-to-future state and photograph it.

How do we show up in AI-mediated buying journeys?

Create an AI-ready brief: a 300–500 word summary that states the named problem, desired outcome, proof metrics, FAQs, and a simple ROI example. Publish it on your site and as structured FAQ markup. Ensure consistency across your deck, page, and sales one-pager so AI tools echo the same narrative when buyers ask.

Shownotes and transcript

Shownotes

If you think performance marketing is the whole game, you’re leaving money on the table. This conversation shows why brand is the force-multiplier that makes performance work.
For biotech startup marketers, we define “performance branding,” show how to measure it across the buyer journey, and share scrappy plays to build trust, loyalty, and revenue—because branding eats performance for breakfast.

Who it’s for: Biotech startup marketers, life science PMMs, founders wearing the marketing hat.

What we cover:

• What “performance branding” really means (it’s brand, tied directly to revenue, win rate, margins, LTV—not fluffy veneer)
• Why scientists aren’t “immune to brand” (trust, community, credible support)
• How to measure memory + money (share of search, branded search, repeat traffic, win rates, price realization, pipeline velocity)
• Human-centric buyer journeys in an AI era (omnichannel webs, consistent claims + proof)
• Consistency as competitive advantage (repeat the strongest claim, then repeat it again)
• Shoestring plays for scrappy teams (one killer app note, head-to-head data, meet personas where they are)
• Where AI helps (deep research, RAG, prompt libraries) without going robotic

What you will learn:

• How to define performance branding and align it to revenue, win rate, and LTV
• A practical metric stack that blends memory (brand) and money (business outcomes)
• How to design consistent claims + proof points scientists actually trust
• A lightweight plan to pilot performance branding on a small budget
• Where to use AI for research and content without losing authenticity
• How to build community and advocacy to accelerate pipeline velocity

Chapters:

[00:02] Sponsor + intro
[00:48] Why performance branding now
[01:58] Definition: brand tied to business outcomes
[03:46] Aggregating across channels, not single-touch
[04:32] Search behavior & brand recognition in B2B
[06:12] Are scientists immune to branding? (No.)
[11:19] Measuring memory + money
[14:21] Human-centric buyer journey (AI era)
[16:34] Consistent claims → competitive advantage
[20:00] Misconceptions early marketers inherit
[23:19] Shoestring performance branding for startups
[27:04] Using AI without losing your soul
[32:45] Prompt libraries & marketer “style” models
[37:13] Planning season: make room for performance branding

 

Transcript

In this episode, Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray unpack “performance branding” for life science companies—why brand drives performance, how to measure it across the buyer journey, and how biotech startups can apply it next week on a small budget.

Intro & Sponsor

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [00:02]

Hello and welcome to a splice of life science marketing. This episode is brought to you by Humantic AI. Imagine if you could close 22% more deals overnight using a buyer intelligence platform. Imagine slashing prep time by 70% and boosting close won deals by 37%. That's what customers the world over are achieving using Humantic AI's account and buyer intelligence system.

 

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [00:16]

Imagine, right in front of the steps, and moving slowly, of you, right there, step by step. That's the front of the world I hope you've heard of.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [00:29]

The platform arms you with firmographic and psychographic insights at scale. So every outreach hits the mark. Deals move faster and revenue grows. Scan the QR code or click the link in your show notes to claim your 10% discount. Now let's get on with the show.

Why Performance Branding

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [00:48]

Hi Matt! Good, good. I'm excited about this topic of performance branding.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [00:49]

Hi Jasmine, how are you doing today?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [00:59]

The way this came up is a couple of weeks ago, I inadvertently had written a blog post about performance marketing versus brand marketing. And my take was that it wasn't one or the other. It was an and. And then a few weeks later, you shared an article from MarketingProfs where they talked about performance branding, which is the perfect mashup from my blog post. So yeah, let's get on with it and have a chat about that.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [01:39]

So isn't it nice that MarketingProfs are reading your blogs? But I know that they talked about a paper from Kotler and Furch. And what do they actually mean by performance branding? And why isn't it just performance marketing with better manners?

Definition: Brand Tied to Business Outcomes

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [01:58]

Right. It's really simple the way they describe it. It's branding that's tied to business outcomes. So think about the way we do branding today. Nothing changes in this definition, but it's tied to things like revenue, win rate, margins, lifetime value of a customer, and so on.

The real caution that I would overlay on this concept that they didn't touch on was that people have to think about the business metrics for performance branding across the entire buyer's journey. So let me take a step back. What do I mean by this? So typically, we tend to attribute a single business metric to a single activity. An easy one is you go to a conference and how do you measure success of that conference? By the number of leads. Well, when you think about performance branding, you don't want to just take that one conference and tie it to a business metric. You want to look at the performance branding in aggregate over a campaign or multiple campaigns that focus on the brand in a particular way across the whole buyer's journey.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [03:38]

That's really interesting. So how do they propose to do that? To be able to look at that in aggregate, because that's quite a challenge.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [03:46]

Yes and no. I think the concept is that there's no one thing that you can tie to revenue. It's an aggregate of your conferences, your application notes, obviously your sales interaction and relationship, your application scientists' interaction and relationships—all of that together results in the sale. All of that together results in building that pipeline and pipeline velocity. I think it's a mind shift that we all need to start getting our heads around.

Search Behavior & Brand Recognition

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [04:32]

So it's really trying to actually look at things in an omni-channel holistic view. Kind of takes me back to something I wrote more than a decade ago, where I was looking at research that said 93% of the time B2B sales start with a Google search. And then it looked at what actually makes up those sales—the top 60 or 70 percent of clicks came from the top three links on the search engine results page. Those have changed dramatically over the past 10 years. But then what was really, really interesting is that when research was conducted into what drives people to select the links, it was actually: did people recognize the brand name?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [05:13]

I think that was really pretty.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [05:30]

So 87% of people would actually only click on links of companies that they already recognized. And you could argue that Google search in some ways—in its purest form—was a kind of performance marketing because at that point it was still very much the old black hat, before updates improved the search experience. So it really was a performance marketing approach back then. And that really did lead us to a point where brand’s still important.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [05:57]

I'm reading it.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [06:01]

In fact, brand is incredibly important, even in a space where people can choose their own adventure. So I thought that was really, really interesting.

Are Scientists Immune to Branding?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [06:12]

That is interesting and it sort of ties to my next question. I was always raised under the belief that scientists don't fall for branding. That's consumer world fluff and scientists are immune to branding. But then how do you explain brands like New England Biolabs or Oxford Nanopore or Cytiva, the former Pharmacia and GE Healthcare?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [06:52]

I really disagree that scientists are immune to branding. When you're pushing at the sum of all knowledge, you have to believe some things to be true. Being able to trust and believe in your results is an element of belief, because you're believing in your results. And we do that by believing we can trust results that come from certain brands.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [07:09]

—

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [07:21]

Branding is in some ways more important. I've seen arguments between proponents of Agilent and Waters for HPLC-MS systems that are more impassioned than Apple vs. Android debates. This week I wrote a blog on using AI to study what people were saying about brands—doing deep research across the likes of ResearchGate and Reddit and places where scientists talk. You can get an awful lot of information about what people are talking about. Word of mouth marketing—certainly word of mouth marketing—

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [07:22]

Enough. Okay.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [07:43]

Thank you.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [07:49]

Thank you.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [07:50]

—in digital space now, using AI, that you couldn't do before. You can see why they really like those brands. Not only sentiment analysis, but thematic analysis of what's being said, breaking it down into discrete quotes. For example, NEB’s following just loves human, credible contact—when they pick up the phone with a question, there's a scientist who understands them. Oxford Nanopore has built a whole field-support system online, a community support model. While maybe they don't rank as highly as NEB for phone support, they've built a community where people problem-solve together.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [08:18]

It becomes a way of asking: how do we build memorable experiences that people talk about—or dominate some online spaces? Cytiva has taken a different approach in some ways, using a rebrand to signal their focus after different shifts in ownership and brands. They’ve focused on branding in their culture as a risk-reduction strategy—signaling trust. It's not just pretty logos and iconography—those are important because they're what we tie emotions to—but they’ve understood that emotion is a core part of what scientists and human beings need to identify with a brand.

Measuring Memory + Money

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [10:19]

What I like in the examples is the tie between emotions and creating community. You can't have a community without brand awareness and trust. That common purpose is part of performance branding.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [10:59]

If performance branding is designed to strengthen relationships, loyalty and trust, what should we measure to see if we’re moving the needle?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [11:19]

We need to measure a combination of two words: memory and money (or business). All of these companies are in business to be profitable. How do you go about measuring these two things? Branded search, share of search, and share of voice are part of memory. Repeat traffic on your website from target accounts starts joining the dots between memory and money. Then more concrete business metrics like pipeline velocity, win rates where there was prior brand exposure, and price realization versus discounting trends—especially with repeat customers. Those are things you can measure in a coming quarter to start aligning to performance branding.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [12:56]

Doesn't that get complicated across so many channels?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [13:09]

It can be. You need a plan and sales-marketing-finance alignment. I'm a big fan of starting small. Think big but start small. Maybe pipeline velocity is too complex right now—go to something more concrete like win rate, then work toward pipeline velocity.

Human-Centric Buyer Journey (AI Era)

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [14:09]

What does human-centric look like in a lab buyer's journey?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [14:21]

It's changing all the time thanks to AI. McKinsey’s data showed buyers want to interact everywhere, any time. Funnels have become webs of interaction, and buyers jump around as they move through their journey—often starting in those webs before they're even in a buying journey.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [15:16]

We have to make really consistent claims with compelling proof across every touch—app notes, webinars, calculators, trials. Scientists are the most skeptical audience in the world. They test hypotheses: “If I go down this route, can I improve X by Y percent?” So we need consistent claims and proof points—and ensure there’s a line to a human they can trust. Keep a human in the loop across those interactions.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [16:15]

What’s the fastest path from brand awareness to competitive advantage?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [16:34]

Pull on “consistent claims.” Pick your strongest claim versus competitors—e.g., “My technology detects 30% lower-abundance proteins without any extra steps.” Repeat that claim across channels with the strongest data and evidence. Consistency plus proof builds the path from share of mind to share of wallet and competitive advantage.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [18:23]

So brand is linked to clarity of message and credibility that’s consistent across communications.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [18:38]

We get tired of our own messages and switch too soon. The audience isn’t tired. Studies show you need to repeat a message up to seven times before someone internalizes it. Don’t be afraid of repetition—it’s your friend and part of performance branding.

Misconceptions & 360° Experience

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [19:46]

In your experience, what misconceptions do early career marketers inherit about brand?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [20:00]

Thinking branding is “one and done”—logos, color palettes, tone of voice. Strong brands like NEB, ONT, Illumina have identifiable, consistent elements you can hang emotions on, but they also build a culture of engagement. Products must be great. And the true test is when something goes wrong—do they make it easy, do you feel heard? Early marketers often miss that brand is the entire customer experience. As Warren Buffett says, it takes years to build a reputation and seconds to destroy it.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [22:13]

So important and so undervalued. Every employee is a brand ambassador—front of house or back of house—part of the customer experience. We could go down the rabbit hole on CX—maybe for a separate podcast.

Shoestring Performance Branding

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [22:53]

How would a scrappy startup run performance branding on a shoestring?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [23:19]

Think in three questions. Who am I talking to (persona and ICP)? What are you going to say (consistent claim)? Where will you meet them (channels they actually use—LinkedIn, ASHG, etc.)? Start small: one application note—e.g., head-to-head comparison data versus a competitor. Describe setup, outcome, and most importantly what the outcome means. With something like that (gated or not), you tug on memory by repeating a narrative, show proof to the skeptical audience, and pull on empathy because the experiment resonates with your target.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [25:43]

Find that killer application that appeals to enough of your ICP to move the needle across a segment.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [26:04]

That goes back to product management and PMM early in development—build applications as the product is built. We are not an industry of “we will build it and they will come.”

Using AI Without Losing Your Soul

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [26:40]

AI can feel like a field of dreams. How do we use AI without making our brand feel robotic or unauthentic?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [27:04]

As models improve, generic outputs stay generic—unless we give specific inputs and guidance. Andy Crestodina says AI can be “average information.” But AI gives phenomenal abilities to research customers. Once we identify ICPs, AI helps expand lists, build better personas, and do deep research—what are they actually talking about online? Forums beyond the obvious. What are they saying about my brand? What problems are they highlighting?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [28:22]

Use it to spot risks and enable advocates. Then use RAG systems to guide outputs—what to say and what to emphasize. AI connects datasets the human brain struggles to connect. Keep the human at the heart and solve real human problems. Creation still works best as collaboration: human tasks, augmented tasks, and agentic automated tasks—aim for symbiosis in the augmented zone.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [30:05]

I often get soulless responses. I’ll reprompt for more empathy—for the user’s struggle in an experiment. How do you approach it when you get a soulless response?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [30:50]

Exactly that—guidance in prompting and reprompting. If it’s a task you do a lot, once you get a good output, ask the AI: “Based on this, how should I have prompted you to start?” Save that in a prompt library. If it’s frequent, create a custom GPT or Claude project. I’m a fan of Mark Schaefer’s “Markbot”—discussing ideas there often makes outputs more empathetic. It’s like collaborating with a synthetic version of a marketing hero.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [32:45]

Two take-homes: build a prompt library—even an Excel file with tabs (performance branding, competitor analysis, etc.). And pick a marketer whose style resonates; prompt the AI to use that style or debate in that style. It helps you grow faster than doing it alone.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [34:02]

That prompt library suggestion is gold. Mine grew from scattered notes to a big Google Doc—one of the documents I’d be most upset to lose.

Lessons from Leading Brands & Close

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [34:44]

What can early career marketers learn from brands that are really talked about—NEB, Oxford Nanopore, Cytiva?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [35:06]

Remember the feeling. Our audience is often scientists who pivoted to marketing. I remember using NEB products—detailed instructions, thoughtful human support when issues arose, not robotic answers. I remember events where speakers really understood my problems and helped connect the dots. Find a brand you respect and emulate how they created that feeling, loyalty, and trust.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [37:13]

I love that—branding is about the feeling. Great note to end on.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [37:23]

One encouragement: we're in strategic planning season. I strongly encourage you to think about how performance branding will fit into your business in 2026.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [37:50]

Excellent. Thank you so much.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [37:52]

Thank you. This was a fun discussion.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [37:58]

Looking forward to seeing you again on the next episode of a splice of life science marketing.

Q&A

How do I pilot performance branding next week with one scientist persona?

Pick one ICP role (e.g., proteomics core lead). Draft a single, strongest claim (e.g., “Detect 30% lower-abundance proteins without extra steps”). Create one proof asset: a one-page app note with setup, data, and what the outcome means. Post a plain-language teaser on LinkedIn, DM five relevant scientists, and email five existing contacts. Measure branded search, page views from target accounts, and replies over 7–10 days.

What metrics should I track first if I can only set up three?

Start with: (1) Branded search volume (memory proxy), (2) Win rate where prior brand touch is logged (money proxy), (3) Repeat traffic from target accounts (bridge metric). Instrument with Google Search Console, simple CRM campaign tags, and an account list in your analytics. Review weekly; log baselines and deltas to see if your claim + proof shift behavior.

How do I create consistent claims without sounding repetitive?

Keep the core claim identical, vary the wrapper. Use a 1×3 matrix: one claim, three proof formats (app note, short demo clip, customer quote). Rotate channels your persona actually uses (LinkedIn post, relevant community thread, conference follow-up email). Every asset ends with the same one-sentence claim and a single CTA to the app note or demo.

Where should I show up if my audience is small and niche?

Audit where your 25-account wishlist engages: LinkedIn posts, specific subreddits, ResearchGate questions, ASHG/SLAS sessions. Choose one digital venue and one event. Commit to a 2-week sprint: comment helpfully on five posts/threads, publish one practical tip tied to your claim, and offer the app note to those who engage. Quality beats volume in niche science.

How can I use AI without making content feel robotic?

Use AI for deep research and structuring, not final tone. Build a prompt library with your brand voice and persona pains. Feed AI your app note data and have it draft a summary; you add the human layer: context, empathy, and concrete next steps. Run outputs through a “scientist sanity check” list: does it cite data, acknowledge limitations, and offer a clear experiment-next step?

Shownotes and transcript

Shownotes

Most professionals think they need to post daily on LinkedIn to stay relevant, but they're burning out and seeing terrible engagement. There's a smarter way to build your professional presence without sounding like a walking sales pitch.

This episode is for life science marketers and scientists who want to grow their LinkedIn presence without the daily grind of content creation. Jasmine Gruia-Gray and Matt Wilkinson interview social media strategist Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez, who reveals why reposts only reach 1% of your audience, how strategic commenting can increase your profile views by 300-500%, and why posting multiple times per day kills your reach. The key insight: How do you actually grow on LinkedIn without posting daily or sounding salesy?

What you will learn:

• Why reposts and links dramatically reduce your LinkedIn reach
• The 3x3x5 commenting strategy that boosts profile views by 300-500%
• How to structure posts using "broetry" formatting for maximum engagement
• Why the first hour after posting is critical for algorithm success
• How to turn conference attendance into weeks of authentic content
• The notification bell strategy for staying top-of-mind with existing customers

Keywords: LinkedIn marketing, social media strategy, professional networking, content strategy, LinkedIn algorithm, biotech marketing, life science marketing, social media engagement, personal branding, LinkedIn growth, B2B marketing, scientific marketing

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence without the daily posting pressure? Watch this episode, subscribe for more practical marketing strategies, and visit our website for additional LinkedIn resources and templates.

Transcript

In this episode of 'a splice of Life Science marketing', hosts Jasmine Gruia-Gray and Matt Wilkinson interview social media strategist Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez about LinkedIn growth strategies that don't require daily posting or salesy content. Valentina shares insights on algorithm behavior, strategic commenting, and how life science professionals can build authentic connections on the platform.

Introduction and LinkedIn Myths

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Welcome to a splice of Life Science marketing. I am Jasmine Gruia-Gray, and today Matt Wilkinson and I have the great pleasure of chatting with our friend Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez. Welcome Valentina.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

Everyone excited to join you guys today.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Just a little bit of an intro for Valentina. She's a seasoned marketer, social media strategist, serial learner, speaker and marketing educator. She specialises in helping individuals and their businesses build authentic connections to their social media channels to boost customer relations and create a strong, purposeful community online. She also deeply understands digital content, social media platforms, social listening practices and digital marketing strategies. With over 10 years of experience in the world of social media, she is a co-author of this fabulous book with a fabulous title, the most amazing marketing book ever. And she collaborated with over 35 fellow marketers to share their combined top strategies. It is a must read, and I encourage our audience to get that book. She's been featured in multiple podcasts, which are available on her website, and has won several prestigious awards throughout her marketing career. Wow, amazing, amazing background. We're so glad to have to be able to host you. Valentina, welcome again.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

Thank you. And I might add that if you prefer the audible version, you have different countries represented, so you hear 10 different accents. So it's gonna be so much fun if you do listen to the book, your audible.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

All right, so let's kick it off today with what are the three LinkedIn myths you wish people would stop repeating, and what actually matters in the first hour after posting?

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

Thank you for asking that question. I love the stuff that we're going to be talking today. It's going to be a very spicy discussion on LinkedIn for everyone that second guesses themselves and says, What am I doing wrong? I'm glad you asked that question. So one thing that I think a lot of people do that is probably wrong is reposting. I don't know if you know this Matt and Jasmine, but for every time you repost someone else's post, it only reaches 1% of your audience, and if you add your blurb or caption above the repost, it only gets 0.5% so here everyone's like, let me just repost someone else's stuff, or let me repost something from an organisation or association and that is a problem. No one's going to be seeing that. So that's one thing. The second thing is adding links. When you add a link, it reduces reach by 50% so if you're trying to tell people, hey, go to this link and I'm going to direct you outside of LinkedIn, that is going to reduce the reach. And finally, over posting, some of us might be a little bit guilty about this. We think that we have to post every day to be relevant. So those are the three things that I believe that might be hindering you with your LinkedIn strategy.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Wow. I had no idea that reposting reduces your reach that significantly.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

Yeah. So a lot of people think that and I only do that if we're trying to be nice to someone or try to get brownie points. So if I repost your post, you'd be like, Oh my goodness, Valentina reposted my thing. That's so sweet of her, when I actually know that only 1% of my audience is going to see that post. You might not know that Jasmine, but you're like, Oh, she's so sweet to repost my post for the day.

Engagement Metrics and Dwell Time

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

So just as a follow up, how do saves or comments or likes or dwell time play from what you've seen?

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

So I want to focus on dwell time. So when you post something on LinkedIn, I try to put the juicy or the hook, something that's going to be about one liner at the very beginning of the post. So then it compels people to click on that button that says, See More. So this is something that I heard Richard Bliss discuss, and he's the expert. He knows all the stuff about LinkedIn. He talks something about broetry. So when you write something, you're putting something and it's one line, it's a hook, a good line, and then you put a space, and then you put another line, and then you do another space and another line. It kind of looks like a haiku. So you just go, space, line, space, and discuss something in detail. So that's why I think dwell time is something that you should think about putting something very good at the very beginning of the post, and people are compelled to press See More, and then you get certain points based on the algorithm, based on that.

Video Content and Content Variety

Matt Wilkinson

If LinkedIn hid likes for a month and reposts, what would you post and how would you drive success?

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

I'm not a good writer. I've always admitted that writing comes, it's hard for me to put my words into just putting it in a sentence or in a paragraph. To me, if I could just cheat my way through LinkedIn, I would do video. Video to me is so much more easier. I can just hop on something and just say what I need to say, and I'm done for the day. That's what I would do if I could. But I know video has got a lot of reduction in reach lately, and I think another thing that people do is they post. Someone was telling me yesterday, oh, I'm going to batch all these videos out. I'm going to have video, video, video. And I didn't tell her, I didn't want to seem too opinionated, but I didn't want to tell her. But if you do the same content, type of content all the time, so to say you do picture, picture, picture or link, link, link or video, video, video, it reduces reach by 30% so you're trying to switch up your strategy. So don't just always do videos, switch it up and do a link or a post or a picture or text only. Text only gets a lot of reach on LinkedIn.

Key Metrics to Watch

Matt Wilkinson

What two metrics would you really be watching on LinkedIn?

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

The big thing for me is the comments. If I can drive the comments, that would be ideal. I love to see what people are saying when you post something on LinkedIn, it gets 1/10 the reach. If you comment, it gets 1/3 the reach. So this is super important. So I'm always seeing if people are leaving me comments and then replying back to their comments in that first hour when you post something on LinkedIn, it gets 10% reach, so it's pushing it out there. So you don't want to post and go, so you don't want to be like, Okay, I'm going to post, I'm going to get up, I'm done for the day. You want to be close to your phone or your computer and monitor the comments. That's so important, so just keep that post up and relevant.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I love that no posting and going. I think that also speaks to the engagement that LinkedIn is focused on.

Strategy for Life Science Companies

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

You just joined a 10 person life science tools startup company. 90 days to create a pipeline from LinkedIn. What does that look like? What's your weekly plan across different personal profiles and the company page?

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

I want to go back and ask you more details about the audience. I want to understand what makes them tick. What are they looking into? What is a typical day in their life? To understand what type of posts or strategy I found for them. So give me a little bit more substance about the audience.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

So the audience is typically scientists. They may post once a week, maybe even less frequently. The types of posts they may do is on their research itself. It could be a sharing of a recent publication, for example.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

Most of the scientists that I know, they're always behind the scenes. They don't post. If they do post, they post maybe once a year, because they were forced to do it. So that's I always like to get that perspective. But when you're thinking about that, the strategy, I would say, just to make it simple and concise here, is maybe have the company page, post the publication and they share it. Because the thing is, these folks are so busy, they just need the quick fix. They just need to share something very quickly from the company page. So it looks official. I know from fact that the people that I know that are scientists don't like to toot their horn. So I don't know if that makes sense across the pond, but they don't like to talk about the amazing stuff that they're doing. So we need to be realistic. They are going to struggle posting about their publication. Right? Is that right? Jasmine, Matt, what do you think?

Matt Wilkinson

I think you're right. I think there's also the concern that if I say something that's just a little bit off or a little bit off company line, I might get embroiled in something. We know how toxic social media can get these days. So I think there's often a little bit of reluctance to promote themselves too much, because, honestly, they don't want or need the kickback.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I agree. I think that there's also another segment of the audience that may be earlier on in their career. They may be a technician type, or they may be in the process of getting a degree, and they're much more comfortable with social media. And they look to social media to stay on top of what companies are doing, new launches and that sort of thing.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

And I want to pause and acknowledge those people that are doing that. That's great. But what about the Gen Xers? What about the elder millennials? I have a feeling that they need the nudge, and I think this would be a good time to pause and maybe Jasmine, you can say you need to do this. You need to do this for your career to be relevant in this age of AI, if you're not seeing yourself out there.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Couldn't agree with you more. Personal Branding doesn't have an age limit. Doesn't have a career limit. I actually recently wrote a blog about personal branding and how it changes over the course of your career and who you are and what you represent and what your values and ideals are, can change throughout the course of the year. And I think LinkedIn is a really strong professional social media platform to engage with.

Matt Wilkinson

I think there are other social media networks, like there's a lot of scientists to go on X or Blue Sky, but also places like Research Gate. So there are these other platforms where scientific discourse happens. But I think that HR, when you're going for that next role, they so often want to actually get to know who you are and what you're doing professionally via LinkedIn, rather than necessarily thinking about looking at ResearchGate or those other social media networks. So I think it really is important to have that presence there on LinkedIn, because it is more than just a glorified CV, but it becomes incredibly important for your personal brand.

The Power of Strategic Commenting

Matt Wilkinson

If you were banned from posting on social media for 90 days, how would you still grow and book meetings if you could only comment on other people's posts?

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

I kind of alluded to that earlier in our discussion. It's all about the comments. One of the things that Richard Bliss promotes is if you comment three times a day on three different people's posts for three to five days, it's going to increase your profile views by 300 to 500% increase. So let me repeat that again, because I'm from Miami and I talk fast. So you're gonna comment on people's posts three times a day. So breakfast, you go on, you have your cup of tea, your cup of coffee, and you're gonna look at LinkedIn. Then at lunchtime, you're gonna do this again. And then when you're doing your Netflix and chilling, you're gonna do this again. So you do this three times a day for three different people for five days, and that's going to increase your profile views from 300 to 500%.

And when we're thinking about comments, we're not going to be like, let's say you were at that event that you went to last week. I'm not going to just be like, Oh, that's so great that you were in the DC area. I am so happy that you were at this event. I actually attended that event two times in Boston when I was in college, and I got so much out of that event, and I only had access to the trade show ticket, so I like to get the people that are eavesdropping that comments showing up on their feed, they're gonna be like, Oh, that's so interesting. That Valentina went to that prestigious event when she was in college and she went to Boston. So there's so much substance behind that comment. You're not going to just say, hey, that's great that you went to that event. You're going to put some meaning.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

So sharing the point of view, I think, is trying to say, to add value in that comment.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

Yeah, because the comment might show up in a network outside of yours. So people are like, how does she know that person? So if you put that context, that is going to provide some input for that audience, and people eavesdropping the conversation by looking at the comments they have some substance behind that relationship that that person has with you.

High-Performing Content Strategy

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Can you break down your highest performing post and what part of that post was the true driver? Earlier you spoke about the hook and sort of the formatting of the post, if you can sort of give us an insight into when Valentina is putting the posts together.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

I love this because you both have been with me to the Mark Schaefer uprising event, and I've gone to several of the uprisings. This is one of the examples, my favourite example. I posted a recap of the uprising, and I put a carousel. So this is when you do a visual, you upload it as a PDF, and people are swiping through it. So for the visual people like myself, I put images of each of the speakers and a takeaway. One line takeaway. So I'm taking a selfie at the barbecue place. I'm taking a selfie right before they're about to speak, or when I'm at the breakfast, because that's what I do. I take advantage and I just sit with someone at breakfast. So I took a selfie then, and then I put a one liner saying what I learned from that person.

So that was the most viral post I've done. I put a blurb talking about what the uprising is, and then each visual was a selfie with that person and what I learned from that person. So the secret was, we had just attended Richard Bliss's presentation on LinkedIn, and we learned that if you tag someone, if that person does not respond, you get penalised if they don't respond quickly. So what I did is I tagged a couple of people, not everyone, and I secretly messaged them on LinkedIn, saying, Hey, I just posted, can you please like and comment? So I went out, I specifically was trying to be mindful of the fact, what is the best time to get the good comments, not the ones saying, hey, that's great that I saw you. When do people have the time to give me a good, juicy comment? On the weekends, when they're cycling, right before they go cycling, on Saturday mornings, when do they have more time to give me a really thoughtful comment? So that's what I did. I specifically posted that post on the weekend when someone could have more time to give me a good, substantial comment.

Conference Content Strategy

Matt Wilkinson

Conferences are content gold, as you've just mentioned, how would you turn a sales and marketing team present at the conference into 30 days of posts without sounding too salesy?

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

I love this question, and I was marinating on this question, and I was thinking about you, Matt, so let's take a couple of steps back. So when you post on LinkedIn, if you post every day, let's say you post multiple times in a day. So you post one time, let's say at nine o'clock in the morning. Let's say you post again at 11. You went to one session, then you went to another one. You found it very insightful, every time you post. So you post in the morning and you post maybe at lunch time, it hides subsequent posts by 99%. Let me repeat that. When you post on LinkedIn, if you post more than several times in a day, it hides the second posts 99%.

So when I'm posting on LinkedIn, I don't post every day. I post maybe once or twice a week. I'm not like you both, that you both are exceptional writers. I have that one post and I let it stay there, I let it marinate and let it cook in there a little longer. I try not to post too often, because I want that post that I did two days ago to get more traction before I decide to post again two days later. So when it comes to not being salesy, we have to go back to the psychology. The people that we're talking to today that are listening to this podcast, don't toot their horn as much. So you have to get past that imposter syndrome that you have to promote this event that you just attended, milk this conference. You have to take advantage of this conference and really amplify it once you get past that.

Let's talk the strategy. So we're going to share the fact that we're at this event where you take the picture with that awkward sign that says 2025, whatever conference you take that I've arrived, then you're going to attend a couple of events. I think that you shouldn't post every time you attend a session. I think people will appreciate what I do, which is the recap. You just post that one thing per day and you show off multiple speakers. People love that. Again, a lot of people are visual. So they're swiping and seeing who you saw, what you saw, what you learned. 30 days of content. That's 30 posts from you, Matt, I don't know if I want to see 30 days worth of content.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I think also people want the quick, salient facts and then they've moved on, right? To a degree, we all have a little bit of ADHD. So give me everything all in one go or in two goes, and then move on. What else have you got to say?

Customer Retention Through Social Media

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

So this is something for the sales people, because I feel like I do marketing, but I'm a salesperson at heart. This is something that I've read from Forbes a couple years ago, it basically gave me like a panic attack. It says that 50 to 60% your business is from current customers, while 5 to 12% are new people. So here we are trying to engage all these new people. We just need to cultivate our current customers or current relationships.

So what does that mean? How do you translate that to social media? So what I do is, if a person becomes a customer, how do I not miss anything? I turn on the notifications. So on the person's profile, once you're connected to them, there's a little bell icon, turn on the bell icon, and that way I get notified immediately if that person posts. So right now, as I'm talking to you, I'm looking that way, and it's notifying me on my home screen, on my phone, that so and so has posted something on LinkedIn. So I have to, after this call, I'm going to jump in and start engaging with their posts. What does that mean? That means that makes me top of mind. So when they post, I see it, I comment, and they're like, at one point, my customers know this trick already. And they're like, Valentina, why haven't you commented? Because I'm on a podcast or I'm in a meeting with someone else. I can't stop what I'm doing to attend your post, but they expect it immediately.

Optimal Posting Times and Strategies

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

When I publish my LinkedIn newsletters, I try to do it on Sunday because I feel like people are just relaxing. They're having that nice brunch with their family, and they're just checking up on their phone. So my favourite day to post is Sundays for that reason.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

And any time of day.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

So according to Richard, he says Tuesdays and Thursdays, 8 to 11am your local time is probably the best time to post something on LinkedIn. But I feel like when is the best time that people actually have time to comment so that I kind of reverse the question back to you, it makes you think about that as well.

Matt Wilkinson

It's really interesting, especially when you work across multiple time zones. So I tend to try and get the late lunch crew. So people when they're coming back from lunch in the UK, try to hit them then, which means it should be around coffee break time on the east coast, but people are maybe getting up in the West Coast. You're trying to hit a convenient time zone for everybody, but it's really hard.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

So you can repost your own post, those people like you that have the multiple time zones. So let's say you post at eight o'clock your time, and then you cater to the people in the other time zone, four hours away, or whatever it is. And then you can also repost your posts two days later to get even more reach. So all you need to do is just press the repost button, and two days later you can get even more reach by doing that, because maybe earlier in the week it was busy.

Matt Wilkinson

And you don't get any penalty for reposting your own posts.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

Not that I know of. And one more thing, reposts don't count against your daily post. So when you repost something from someone else, it doesn't count as your daily post. Remember, we were talking about the fact that if you post more than several times a day, it hides subsequent posts by 99% the only thing is, reposts don't count towards your daily post.

Key Takeaways

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

So as we sort of wind down this amazing discussion, what are the three take homes you'd like to leave our audience with?

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

I feel like we went in so many directions today, right? I feel like we were all over the place today. If anyone was tuning in today, I really hope you had that cup of coffee or tea before jumping in. But the thing is, I want people to, I really want to harp on this. I really want you to put yourself out there. I want you to be intentional about what you're posting. And if you don't like posting, maybe you're going to be more comfortable commenting and you say, Okay, I'm going to stop being a lurker. I'm going to stop looking at people's posts and actually take the time to comment. Because I heard about the value of commenting. I think that's one. Put yourself out there, stop lurking and start commenting.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

And if people want to get in touch with you, Valentina, how can they reach you?

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

The best way to find me is going to my website, beyond hyphen engagement.com, as you can see, I'm glad to talk. I talk a lot. I'm glad to help you and push you if you need that push, or someone that give you that perspective that no one else can give you. I'm here for you. I'm here for my clients.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Oh my gosh. Valentina, thank you so much for sharing your marketing wisdom, your personal branding wisdom, and certainly the LinkedIn experiences. Most of all, thanks for helping to keep things spicy, as you like to say, and being part of a splice of life, science marketing community.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez

I'm excited to be here. And again, you guys, whoever is listening to this, I believe in you. I know you're doing great things, and just need to put yourself out there. You need to stand out and put yourself out there. And even if it's just commenting. You don't have to post, but just commenting and just putting yourself out there, that's so helpful right now.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Thank you so much.

Matt Wilkinson

Thank you.

Q&A

How can I grow my LinkedIn presence without posting every day?

Focus on strategic commenting using the 3x3x5 method: comment on three different people's posts, three times per day (morning, lunch, evening), for five days straight. According to Valentina's experience, this can increase your profile views by 300-500%. Make your comments substantive by adding personal context and insights that provide value to others reading the conversation.

What should I avoid doing on LinkedIn that kills my reach?

Stop reposting others' content (reaches only 1% of your audience), adding direct links (reduces reach by 50%), and posting multiple times per day (subsequent posts get 99% less reach). Also avoid posting the same content type repeatedly - vary between text, images, videos, and links to maintain algorithm favour and audience interest.

How do I make my posts more engaging for scientists who don't typically engage much?

Use the "broetry" format: start with a compelling one-liner hook, then space out your content line by line to encourage people to click "See More." Focus on sharing insights and learnings rather than self-promotion. Consider having your company page post publications and research, then share from there to make it feel more official and less like personal bragging.

What's the most important thing to do in the first hour after posting?

Stay near your phone or computer and actively monitor comments. Posts get 10% of their total reach in the first hour, so this is critical time. Respond to every comment quickly and meaningfully. If you're tagging people, message them beforehand asking them to engage quickly, as LinkedIn penalises posts where tagged people don't respond promptly.

How can I turn one conference into weeks of content without being salesy?

Create recap posts with carousel formats showing selfies with speakers and one-line key takeaways from each. Post once or twice per week maximum, letting each post "marinate" for several days. Focus on what you learned rather than promoting your company. Use the weekend for posting when people have more time to give thoughtful comments, and avoid posting every session attendance in real-time.

Shownotes and transcript

Shownotes

Most sales teams are drowning prospects in generic emails and cold calls, contributing to what Rohit calls "the Dust Bowl effect" of over-farming buyer attention. There's a smarter way to sell that focuses on buyer experience rather than seller productivity.

This episode is for biotech startup marketers and sales leaders who want to move beyond spray and pray tactics to build genuine connections with prospects. Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray interview Rohit Veerajapa, Chief of Staff at humantic AI, about how buyer intelligence and account research can transform your outreach strategy. The key insight: move beyond spray and pray outreach with account and buyer intelligence to truly connect with customers and prospects.

What you will learn:

• Why buyer mindshare, not seller productivity, is the real bottleneck in B2B sales
• How personality intelligence helps you "speak Japanese" to native Japanese buyers
• The buying committee magic quadrant: friendlies, sceptics, crusaders, and neutrals
• Why AI-powered account intelligence saves 30 hours of research in 30 seconds
• How to move from vanity metrics (volume) to value metrics (personalisation)
• Real customer stories showing 49% to 151% pipeline improvements

Keywords: buyer intelligence, account intelligence, B2B sales, personality AI, sales personalisation, humantic AI, biotech sales, life science marketing, buyer experience, sales enablement, buying committee analysis, prospect research

Ready to transform your outreach from spray and pray to strategic intelligence? Watch this episode, subscribe for more B2B sales insights, and visit our website for additional resources on buyer intelligence tools and strategies.

Resources & Links

• Humantic AI: www.humantic.ai

• Connect with Rohit:   / rohithveerajappa  
• Connect with Matt   / mattwilkinson  
• Connect with Jasmine   / jasmine-gruia-gray-3a656a   

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.

Q&A

How do I start using buyer intelligence without a big budget?

Begin by researching your top 5 prospects manually using LinkedIn, company websites, and recent news. Look for personality indicators in their posts and communication style. Note whether they prefer direct, data-driven messages (D-type) or relationship-building approaches (I-type). Even basic personality awareness can improve your outreach effectiveness before investing in AI tools like humantic.

What's the Japanese buyer analogy Rohit mentioned?

If you could speak Japanese to a native Japanese buyer, wouldn't you? Most salespeople say yes. So why don't we "speak" in our prospect's personality style instead of our own? This means adapting your communication - D-types want crisp, direct messages while I-types prefer warmer, relationship-focused approaches. It's about matching their preferred communication style, not forcing your own.

How can I identify the buying committee without expensive tools?

Start by asking your champion who else will be involved in the decision. Map them into four categories: friendlies (responsive), sceptics (can kill deals), crusaders (will fight for you), and neutrals (won't influence much). Begin conversations with friendlies, provide data to sceptics, and focus on proving impact to potential crusaders. This framework works even with basic LinkedIn research.

What vanity metrics should I stop tracking first?

Stop obsessing over email volume, call quantities, and total outreach numbers. These create the "Dust Bowl effect" of over-farming prospects. Instead, track personalised touchpoints - how many emails reference specific company challenges, recent achievements, or personality-matched communication styles. Quality engagement metrics matter more than quantity in complex B2B sales cycles.

How do I personalise emails for scientific audiences specifically?

Research their recent publications, conference presentations, or LinkedIn posts about research challenges. Reference specific technical problems they're facing, but adapt your communication style to their personality. D-type scientists want direct impact statements, while C-type researchers prefer detailed methodology. Always lead with how your solution advances their specific research goals, not generic benefits.

Shownotes and transcript

Shownotes

Most marketing personas are beautiful documents that get created once and forgotten forever. They focus on demographics like age and hobbies instead of what actually drives buying decisions.

This episode is for biotech startup marketers who want to create personas that actually get used by sales, marketing, and customer service teams. Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray reveal how to transform static persona documents into interactive AI tools that help you practice sales calls, test messaging, and understand buyer motivations. The key insight: how to craft ICPs and personas that work - and that they ARE NOT the same thing.

What you will learn:

• Why traditional persona templates focused on demographics miss the mark completely
• How to use AI deep research tools to build detailed personas in 15-20 minutes
• The five rings of buying insight that actually matter for B2B decisions
• How to create "persona AI" for ongoing role-playing and message testing
• Why personas should focus on jobs to be done, not personal characteristics
• How to keep personas alive by adding customer interview transcripts to AI models

Keywords: buyer personas, customer personas, jobs to be done, AI marketing tools, persona development, B2B personas, life science marketing, biotech marketing, customer research, buying behaviour, persona AI, custom GPT, sales enablement

Transform your dusty persona documents into powerful AI tools that your entire team actually uses. Watch this episode, subscribe for more actionable life science marketing tactics, and visit our website for persona templates and AI tools.

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.

Q&A:

How do I create "persona AI" using tools like ChatGPT?

Start by gathering LinkedIn profiles and job descriptions of people who match your target persona. Use AI deep research tools to analyse these profiles and create a comprehensive persona document. Then upload this data to a custom GPT or AI assistant, training it to respond as that persona. You can then ask it questions, test messaging, or even practice sales conversations with this AI version of your customer.

What are the five rings of buying insight I should focus on?

According to Adele Revella, focus on priority initiatives (what triggered them to look for solutions), success factors (what outcomes they need), perceived barriers (what concerns they have), buyer's journey (their decision-making process), and decision criteria (how they evaluate options). These insights matter far more than demographic data like age or hobbies when creating B2B personas.

How do I prevent my personas from becoming forgotten documents on a hard drive?

Transform them into interactive AI tools that your team can actually use daily. Create custom GPTs trained on your persona data for message testing, role-playing, and strategy discussions. Make personas part of campaign planning by starting every campaign with "which persona is this for?" Use them in sales training for conversation practice and objection handling scenarios.

Should I interview people who didn't choose my solution when building personas?

Absolutely. Interview prospects who chose competitors, went with internal solutions, or decided not to buy at all. This reveals crucial insights about your positioning gaps, unmet needs, and decision criteria you might be missing. Add these interview transcripts to your AI persona models to create more realistic and comprehensive customer representations that account for different buying scenarios.

How many personas should I create for my biotech startup?

Start with about five personas per ideal customer profile segment, covering key buying group roles: the problem recogniser/initiator, champion, end users, procurement, and finance. With AI tools, you can create more personas efficiently, but focus on quality over quantity. Make sure each persona represents a genuinely different set of needs, motivations, and decision criteria that require distinct messaging approaches.

Shownotes and transcript

Shownotes

Most life science marketers confuse ideal customer profiles with personas, costing them 37% of their marketing budget according to Gartner. These are fundamentally different tools that serve different purposes.

This episode is for biotech startup marketers who want to stop wasting budget on the wrong audiences and start targeting with precision. Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray break down the critical difference between ICPs and personas, then share a practical five-step process for crafting both effectively. The key insight: how to craft ICPs and personas that work - and that they ARE NOT the same thing.

What you will learn:

• Why ICPs are about companies and personas are about people within those companies
• Philip Kotler's five requirements for effective market segmentation
• How to use AI tools for deep persona research in 15-20 minutes
• The iterative process between segmentation, ICPs, and persona development
• Why this must be a cross-functional team effort involving sales, marketing, and field applications
• How to create "persona AI" for ongoing message validation and strategy

Keywords: ideal customer profile, customer personas, market segmentation, biotech marketing, life science marketing, customer research, account based marketing, buying groups, firmographic data, persona development, customer targeting, marketing segmentation

Stop targeting the wrong customers and start maximising your marketing ROI. Watch this episode, subscribe for more life science marketing strategies, and visit our website for additional segmentation resources.

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.

Q&A:

What's the actual difference between an ICP and a persona?

An ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) describes the company or organisation - the "brick and mortar" as Jasmine calls it. It includes firmographics like company size, industry, and behaviours. A persona describes the individual people within that ICP - their roles, motivations, pain points, and how they make decisions. You need both: ICPs tell you which companies to target, personas tell you how to talk to the people inside those companies.

How do I start if I don't have enough customer data for segmentation?

Start with hypotheses about your ideal segments and ICPs, then test them by talking directly to customers and prospects. Use the scientific method: form a hypothesis about who your best customers might be, then validate through interviews and small experiments. Even with limited data, you can run small pay-per-click tests on LinkedIn or Google to see which segments respond best to your messaging.

What AI tools can help me research personas in 15-20 minutes?

Use OpenAI or Gemini to research LinkedIn profiles of people who match your persona criteria. Feed the AI job descriptions and LinkedIn profiles to build detailed persona profiles based on publicly available information. You can then create "persona AI" - custom GPTs trained on this data to help validate messaging, brainstorm campaigns, and answer questions about how these personas would respond to different approaches.

How often should I update my ICPs and personas?

Treat this as an iterative, cyclical process rather than a one-time exercise. For most biotech companies, review and update every 6-12 months, but also run continuous small experiments to test assumptions. Set up regular touchpoints between sales and marketing to share insights from customer interactions. As you gather more data from campaigns and sales conversations, feed this back into refining your ICPs and personas.

How do I avoid wasting 37% of my budget like the Gartner study showed?

Build experimentation into your annual marketing plan from the start. List all the assumptions underlying your targeting and messaging, then design small tests to validate each assumption before committing large budgets. Use pay-per-click platforms to test different audience segments and messages with small budgets first. Maintain close alignment between sales and marketing teams to quickly identify when targeting is missing the mark.

Shownotes and transcript

Shownotes

Transcript

Matt Wilkinson

Welcome to a splice of Life Science marketing. The show for scientists who've stepped out of the lab and into marketing, learning the ropes as they go. I'm Matt Wilkinson, a recovering scientist with a PhD in chemistry that moved into journalism and then marketing. I now help companies fuse AI story and strategy to deliver pipeline and profit.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

An i'm Jasmine Gruia-Gray, a marketing leader with a PhD in molecular biology that moved into technical support, then product marketing. Now I help companies fine tune their positioning and accelerate their path to market growth. Each week, we unpack One big challenge, like getting positioning right for emerging tech, building trust with story led messaging, or knowing when to double down on brand versus performance marketing, it's 20 minutes of sharp insight, no fluff and tactics you can use straight away.

Matt Wilkinson

Let's splice things up. This week, we're going to be talking about customer needs and Jasmine. I think we're going to start today with a definition that you've found for us.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yes. So customer need analysis is the process of identifying and understanding what customers truly require, functionally, emotionally and contextually to solve a problem or achieve a goal. It's about going beyond superficial wants to uncover the core jobs, pain points or motivators and desired outcomes that drive decision making. It's basically answering the question, why should I care?

Learning from Steve Jobs and Clay Christensen

Matt Wilkinson

That's great. I found a quote from Steve Jobs who said, Get closer than ever to your customers, so close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves. I think it's so aspirational, and yet so often, we don't even know what they want in the first place, let alone being able to guide where they're going to want to go.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I think that's true when you're talking about novel products, where there may not be an obvious competitor out there, but in many cases where you're talking about line extensions, for example, or follow on products, I think Clay Christensen probably has something that's relevant, and what He says is customers hire products to do a job. If you understand the job, you can design and market a product that's perfectly suited to it.

The Role of Ethnographic Research

Matt Wilkinson

I like that. It's really interesting when you start looking at the different ways that companies go about trying to understand customer needs, and very often there is an assumption that we know what it is already, and yet they don't actually go away and identify the real customer needs that they're trying to solve. And that can lead to a whole host of challenges, both from product development all the way through to not being able to get clarity on actually, how to then message. How have you seen that work both good and bad?

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I think where there's a lot of opportunity for improvement is where marketing is isolated from product management which is isolated from R&D and there's not a strong, cohesive working group to not only listen to what the customer needs, but observe what the customer needs. And that brings up the whole concept of ethnography.

Matt Wilkinson

It's almost like you brought up one of my favourite subjects. I've done quite a few ethnography projects, looking at how do you bring in the elements of psychology and ethnography, and really being able to study customers in the wild, so to speak, trying to understand what it is that they use, and understand how do they use products themselves, and actually, what are the differences between how they explain what they're doing and how they use a product, and actually the reality that they actually do. And there's often a cognitive dissonance that really helps describe what Keith Goffin, my professor of innovation during my MBA, would always call a hidden need, and I think that's such a powerful way of being able to really understand what is it that customers are really trying to achieve when they're using things.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yes, I think that's a really important point. It's that hidden need. It's what is that life changing value that this product uncovers and sort of teases out what I think Steve Jobs meant when he said, you stay so close that you tell them what they need. You're so good at observing that you almost understand that life changing value before they do.

Case Study: E-commerce Transformation

Matt Wilkinson

Absolutely. I was involved in a big e-commerce transformation project, and the company had been very acquisitive, customers from lots of different segments. We were bringing together maybe 12 plus websites, differing e-commerce capabilities from different sites. Some had none. Some had others. Some had tools that would be right in one geography but wrong in another. It was a bit of a mess, but we went off and one of the big things that project started off with was actually getting really up close and personal with customers and trying to understand, one, how are they using the products, and then two, how are they buying them? And there was a lot of complexity in the products, particularly when you're talking about biological products, where there's a lot of complexity in the naming, maybe you're even defining how the codes of the oligonucleotides themselves. And so going to that level of detail, and then studying the steps that people had to go through and understand what it was that caused them stress and challenge.

So in some organisations, it was just down to the fact that, if we weren't tied into their procurement system, then being able to place an order would involve requesting a quote, then generating a purchase order, which would take 24 hours or more, because they'd have to send it off to another team, generate the purchase order, send that back, then the back and forth and the endless approval processes internally, and then communication would take maybe four or five days to actually be able to place an order. Now, of course, they weren't working that whole time, but it was still something that they had to think about and worry about getting that order placed before we even started talking about manufacturing and shipping.

So that was quite a big eye opener that when we then were able to tap into their systems and automate and play with their systems, those would take maybe, you know, you'd get that turned around in less than a day, maybe an hour. If people were sat at their computers and able to just click the button straight away to approve, and we were told, we'll never sell a piece of capital equipment through this, the first order was a six figure capital equipment purchase, because it was so much easier to transact. Now, was the sale already made? Were they already going to place it one way or another? Absolutely. But did we help reduce transactional friction massively?

And then we had other customers that would be placing orders, and they'd be copying complicated DNA code, or oligonucleotides from one spreadsheet into an order placement, copying this across placing orders. And their fear was that if they got one letter wrong, the whole order wouldn't work. And then, if it took them a while before they spotted that, that was a lot of time and effort wasted, and that would really stress out the people placing the orders. And of course, once we implemented something where they could easily reorder, that removed all of that completely. So, two different use cases, two different companies, but really being able to understand what is it that the products, and this was an e-commerce platform that we were developing. So it wasn't the product itself, but it was part of the product actually developing that was really powerful, and the stress that caused certain people was real. They really didn't like placing those orders, so the transactional friction actually put them off placing orders.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

What I really like about your examples are it helps marketers pull up, zoom out, and think about the product and the jobs to be done, not strictly from just at the bench, that interaction with that instrument or the interaction with that reagent, but think bigger picture about the full experience, including ordering.

Beyond the Core Product

Matt Wilkinson

Absolutely. And I think that we often also forget delivery, because delivery could be installation. Delivery, installation. The challenge of, if you've got complicated lists, how are you going to let people know what's in the box? Are you going to send a CD every time and get that phone away? That's not going to work anymore, because nobody has CD. Nobody has CD player. So how are you going to let people know what's in it? Is it a paper packing list that clearly, people don't want to receive tons and tons of paper? So there's a whole myriad of challenges around how do we let people know, how do we make it easy for people to not just buy the products and use it, and get to that product in use, but streamline that whole process, if it's something that people use a lot, could we even get it to the point where we're using those big bits of capital equipment to then help us place orders themselves, reorder, a bit like many of the printers that we all love to hate at home, but they tell us when they're getting low on paper, and they tell us when they're getting low on ink. These days, they're actually also starting to help us place, reorder the ink, at least.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I completely agree. If we back up for just a second and we think about products that are on market, what are some of the problems that they can see that leads to a need to rethink, redo, the needs analysis?

Case Study: LCMS Remote Monitoring

Matt Wilkinson

I think it's really interesting in the sciences, because so often products start from a need to do, to take a specific measurement or understand a specific problem. So whether that is an LCMS system or simply a reagent challenge, and solving a specific reagent challenge, there's a very obvious job to be done from the scientific perspective. But then I think that very often we forget that beyond the research and making sure that it gets validated, reproducible results. Once we go beyond that, we often forget about, what are the pain points of people really using this every day.

I think a great example of this is, I did a project with a big manufacturer of LCMS instruments, one of the world leaders. And we were looking, this was more than a decade ago, probably 15 years ago. But we were looking at whether adding a certain set of capabilities would solve a problem. These were having the ability to connect remotely to an instrument and look at how it was working. And actually what we identified is, yes, it would help somebody identify remotely if something was working or not. But for most people, that actually just created another problem, because you could see that if you saw that it wasn't working, then that meant that you might have to go back into the office, restart things, get things going, and actually you'd lose a night's sleep. And if you knew about it and hadn't done anything about it, you'd lose a night's sleep. And if you went into the office and dealt with it, you'd lose a night's sleep. So it didn't actually solve the problem with the fact that the thing wasn't working overnight.

So it was either better not to know or to know and be able to remotely do everything that you needed to fix. And so there was almost a case of not knowing was maybe a better option in that specific instance, unless you could take a number of other actions. And so I think it's really interesting to understand, well, what are the real jobs that need to be done right here and there, and so in some labs, it's not an issue at all. Maybe if you're running samples overnight, system goes down, you just get in the next day and you run it again. But if that's continuous production, or something like that, then actually it's really quite important for you to be able to restart the thing remotely, and that's probably the bigger thing to go and do you want to be constantly thinking about checking it or not if there's a problem? Or do you want a notification when something stops working? And so there's all of these things where actually you might try and be helpful with a product addition. But actually, is that solving a problem, or does it just create or move a problem somewhere else?

Case Study: Miniaturised ELISA System

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

The example I have is a miniaturised ELISA system. That was originally positioned for sample prep up front of MALDI mass spectrometry. And the instrument did okay at the time of launch, but there really wasn't any continued growth of that instrument and increased installed base in the marketplace, which resulted in the teams, the marketing, product management and R&D teams, retrenching and looking at what were the instruments being bought for, what applications were they being bought for? And as it turned out, a small handful of customers were using the instruments to do PKPD analysis on in pre clinical on mouse samples, because this system could take such small volumes of sample, and the outcome was a fully vetted ELISA analysis. So that's what helped the team do much deeper ethnographic research and understand, really, what are the jobs to be done, and what is a much more solid application for this platform.

Matt Wilkinson

And how did that then transform the sales once you were able to reposition it?

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

That word is exactly right, transform. It absolutely did transform the platform. The platform is now being used for all sorts of bioanalytical analyses, including in the cell and gene therapy arena. So that was the tipping point to rethinking and relooking at all the application opportunities for this instrument.

Product Market Fit and Customer Discovery

Matt Wilkinson

Fantastic. It really shows that nailing product market fit is just so important. I think it's so often within breakthrough innovations that almost go to market without necessarily a clear, defined use case, that we almost leave it up to our customers to then find them. And often, I think we can assume they're either everybody's doing the same thing or at least it's a consistent set of problems that people are solving. And I think it's really interesting having seen, certainly over the last 20, 30 years, seeing the way that a certain set of techniques, such as mass spec or whatever, would start off as very much one size fits all, and nowadays they become very niche and that even if the base instrument is similar, the augmented product, whether that be the automation or the software has become so much more we're going to help you solve this problem. And I think that's really refreshing to see people do that. It has happened the same in robotics, particularly in lab robotics and all sorts of places where you're really starting to see very much we're actually looking at solving the real jobs that need to be done, rather than just looking at the holistic picture and going, here's a technology play with it.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Completely agree. I think the key word for me is matching. I think as marketers, we need to continue to challenge ourselves to match the features of your technology with the unmet needs, match what you've got with what you're solving so that the current and future customers really can resonate with why I should care.

The Kano Model: Basic, Performance, and Excitement Needs

Matt Wilkinson

Absolutely there's a really helpful model that innovation theory looks at, developed by a gentleman called Kano, and it talks about three different types of needs. So you have those basic needs that everybody, every product in that space, needs to have. And then you have performance needs. Probably best to use the analogy of a laptop. So for many of them you might look at, any of the basic needs you need to turn it on, it needs to have a battery, a screen, a keyboard and some memory. The performance needs are those ones that you can easily benchmark against each other. So the speed. The processor, the quality the display. And then you have those things that are maybe a little bit more difficult to describe, but those things that are excitement needs. So those things that excite the population. So when people started introducing touch screens to laptops, all of a sudden, that was exciting. Having a fingerprint sensor a way of not having to type a password every time, could be exciting. And so you look at those excitement needs. But over time, of course, those excitement needs just become standard. Everybody copies them, and they become performance.

And I think it's really interesting how, even today, we're maybe seeing in certain areas, there are tools that people use, that are routine, like a PCR thermocycler, where there are still people coming up with new excitement needs that allow us to get excited about it. Even if you take the humble hot plate stirrer, once there was almost no differentiation for the temperature control and the magnet, how fast you could spin the magnet and how strong that was, all of a sudden, people did it with design, and so you could excite people by having funky designs or making them more robust against the typical spills that happened in the lab.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I completely agree. I think, to add to all of that, I think it's marketing's job to pull through. What is that life changing value.

Matt Wilkinson

I completely agree there, and I think once you start getting into that you also start seeing that products stop being singular, and you start needing to actually create a little bit of differentiation within your own portfolio, to actually start meeting those different needs, because you start segmenting your customer base slightly differently.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I think that brings us into a whole different area, around customer segmentation, around the ideal customer profile and customer personas, but maybe that's a podcast for a different time.

Key Takeaways

Matt Wilkinson

I think so.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

So what the three things I got out of today's chat with you, Matt was the importance of ethnography to do as much watching as listening to think about hidden needs and to put yourself in the customer's shoes and understand what that life changing value would be for them.

Matt Wilkinson

I think your story about the mass spec product that was used in a completely different way really resonated with me, and that whole story about product market fit and really understanding the customer, because the product was good, but the messaging didn't allow the right customers to find it. And I think that when we take that approach of being able to really help the customers find the solutions that they're looking for. I think we can feel that we're doing good in the world, and I think that that's what we all want to do.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Well, thank you all for joining us on a splice of Life Science marketing, and we look forward to having you join us and share your stories again next time. Thank you.

Matt Wilkinson

Thank you.

 

Q&A

How can I start doing ethnographic research with my limited budget as a startup?

Start by shadowing 3-5 existing customers during their normal workflow for 2-3 hours each. Focus on observing what they actually do versus what they say they do. Use your phone to record notes about friction points, workarounds, and moments of frustration. This costs nothing but travel time and reveals hidden needs that surveys miss completely.

What should I look for when observing customers in their work environment?

Watch for workarounds, repeated actions, moments of stress or frustration, and time spent on tasks that seem inefficient. Pay attention to the gap between what customers tell you they need and what their behaviour actually shows. Look for steps in their process that cause delays, errors, or require manual intervention that could be automated.

How do I identify if my product has the wrong positioning like the ELISA example?

Track which customers are actually buying and using your product versus who you think should be. Survey your existing customers about their specific use cases and compare this to your marketing messages. If there's a mismatch, or if growth is stagnant despite good product performance, it's time to investigate the real jobs customers are hiring your product to do.

What's the quickest way to understand transactional friction in my sales process?

Map every step a customer takes from initial interest to product delivery and use. Time each step and identify where customers drop off or express frustration. Interview 3-4 customers who recently purchased and ask them to walk through their buying journey, highlighting pain points. Focus on procurement processes, approval workflows, and technical implementation hurdles.

How do I convince my team that we need to invest time in customer observation?

Start with one quick ethnographic study showing clear actionable insights that could impact revenue. Document specific examples of hidden needs you discovered that surveys would have missed. Present this as risk mitigation - understanding customers prevents expensive product pivots later. Frame it as competitive advantage through deeper customer intimacy that competitors likely lack.