Shownotes and raw transcript

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Transcript

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? Yeah,

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 specializes 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. That's a great tip. Thanks. Yeah.

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? Well,

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 on 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 point 5% so here everyone's like, let me just repost someone else's stuff, or let me repost something from an organization or association with 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 hosting, some of us might some of us might be a little bit guilty about reposting. We think that we have to post every day to be relevant. So that's 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 that's 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 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. Yeah.

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 wanna focus on dwell time. So when you post something on LinkedIn. I try to put the juicy or the hook, but 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. It 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 reading 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

Matt Wilkinson  
Excellent thank you so much. Now, if LinkedIn hid likes for a month and reposts, what would you post and how would you drive success? So I I'm

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
not a good writer. I've always admitted that writing comes it's hard for me to put my words into like just putting it like they're 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 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, you know, seem to opinionated by 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, make switch it up and do a link or, you know, a post or a picture or text only. Text only gets a lot of reach on LinkedIn.

Matt Wilkinson  
Fantastic. What? 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. Wow, 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 or your computer and monitor the comments. That's so important, so just keep that post up and relevant. Excellent. Thank you so much.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
I excite. I love that no posting and going. That's that. I think that also speaks to the engagement that that LinkedIn is focused on.

Speaker 1  
Yeah, yeah. So,

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
um, you just joined a 10 person life science tools startup company. Okay, 90 days to create a pipeline from LinkedIn. What? What does that look like? What's your weekly plan across different personal profiles and the company

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
page? 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 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, okay, yeah,

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 that perspective. But So 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, 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 it's 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, if that makes sense across the pond, but they don't like to, you know, 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, you know, if I say something that's just a little bit off or a little bit off or a little bit of 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, you know, a little bit of reluctance to to, you know, to promote themselves too much, because, you know, honestly, they don't want, want or need the

Speaker 1  
kickback. And Jasmine, what do you think?

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
I agree. I think that there's also another segment of the audience that 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 for social media, look to social media to stay on top of what companies are doing, new launches

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
and that sort of thing. Yeah, 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 make baby mad. 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 will

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  
yeah, I think there's, yeah, I was gonna say, just to add to that, I think that there's, you know, that 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's, there are these other platforms where scientific discourse happens. But I think that, I think 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, all those other social media networks. So I think it really is important to have that presence there, you know, on LinkedIn, because it is, you know, it's more than just a glorified CV, but it becomes incredibly important for your personal brand.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
Yeah, and I wanted to highlight something that I was looking into a couple of your past episodes. I think it was like the first episode where you both voted a Steve Jobs and understanding the customer firsthand. I don't know how these individuals that maybe follow this podcast, how committed they are to selling themselves in the sales side of things, if they're working one on one with the customers. I just wanted to highlight that it's so important when you're posting thinking about that end user, thinking about your customers. And that quote, do you remember what it was Matt, the one from Steve Jobs, about getting to know your customer really closely.

Matt Wilkinson  
Oh yeah, that's a good test. I think actually, now I can't remember it,

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
but it's something about really understanding your customer. What about you, Jasmine, do you remember enough the tip of your tongue?

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
Apparently, the tip of my tongue is a little tongue tied. I don't remember it either, but we can have it injected post packaging of this podcast.

Matt Wilkinson  
So if you were to, 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. It's all about the comments. One of the things that Richard list promotes is if you post, if you comment three times a day on three different people's posts for three to five days, it's going to increase your reach your profile view, so people are going to be looking at your profile by 300 to 500% increase. So let me repeat that again, because I'm from Miami and I talk fast. So you're gonna you're gonna post and you're gonna comment on people's posts three times a day for, you know, so three times a day, three different times each time. So breakfast, you go on your 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 of news 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. The both of you, I'm not going to just be like, Oh, that's so great that you were in the DC area. I'm gonna and you saw what I left in the comment, 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 is that that comments showing up on their feet, they're gonna be like, Oh, that's so interesting. That Valentina went to that prestigious event where she was in college and she went to Boston. So there's so much substance behind that comma. You're not going to just say, hey, that's great that you went to that event. You're going to put some meaning. If someone's celebrating a work anniversary, you're going to be like, I'm so happy that you celebrated that work anniversary, based on the fact that we both were part of the Marketing Committee, I can see that you bring a lot of value to this organization. So people that are looking at that comment on their newsfeed that might not be connected to me, they should that shows up on their feet like, Oh, that's so interesting. That Valentina was in that committee with, with, with that person.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
Okay, 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 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 how eavesdropping the conversation by looking at the comments they have some substance behind that relationship that that person has with you,

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
makes sense. So 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 of the post, yeah. So if you can sort of give us an insight into when Valentina is putting the posts together.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
Okay, so this is, 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 favorite 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 you people are swiping, 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 at, you know, right before they're about to speak, or when I'm crashing, or 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, like I said, was a selfie with that person and what I learned from that person. So the secret was, we had just attended Richard bliss presentation on LinkedIn, and we learned that if you tag someone, if that person does not respond, you get penalized 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 can you please like and comment? So I went out, I went and I specifically was trying to be mindful the fact, what is the best time to get the good comments, not the sissy 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 right Max, 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. And that thing, I don't have the numbers with me, but that was the most, biggest engagement, biggest viral post, and it was fun, because people typically see the boring conference pictures, but this time it was selfies with me and then the one liners that I learned from them.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
Christ, Who do people have to comment before you get dinged? So

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
that's the thing you have, that one hour that their hope that that that post is getting 10% of that reach in your audience. So that's super important to make sure that if you are going to post, you notify the people you're that are in the picture ahead of time. Hey, I comment. I posted something about you. So I was messaging several people that were in the picture, saying, I just

Speaker 1  
check it out. Yeah. Thank you.

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, you know, 30 days of posts without sounding too salesy?

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
Okay, I love this question, and I like I got these questions, and I was marinating on this question, and I was thinking about you, Matt, so let's talk about let's take a couple of steps back. So when you post on LinkedIn, if you post every day, let's see post multiple times in a day. So you post one time, let's say at nine o'clock in the morning. Let's see 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 in the lunch time, it hides subsequent posts by 99% Wow. Let me repeat that. Remember, I'm from Miami, and I talk fast and loud, so let me repeat this for the people in the back that didn't hear this. When you post on LinkedIn, if you post more than several times in a day, it hides the secret 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 salesy and marketing thing, 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 see them. You show off multiple speakers. People love that. Again, a lot of people are visual word. 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 like I love you and everything. You're amazing. I love the accent and everything. You're such a sweetheart. I love your dog in the background. But I don't know if I want to see 30 days worth of content. What about you, Jasmine? What do you think? Am I getting too spicy here?

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
No, I think it's your opinion. Go for it. I think also people want the, the quick, salient facts and then, and then they, they've moved it on, right? Yeah, 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

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
got to say? Exactly? What about you? Matt? I feel like I put

Matt Wilkinson  
you on the spot. That's all right, I'm here to be taking punches at No, no, I'm just joking. I think one of the things that I've been, you know, I've definitely seen that, that posting too frequently that actually harms you. One of the other things that I've seen is that a number of posts seem to keep re repair, reappearing maybe two weeks later. Yeah, and there seems to almost be this 14 day kind of flip back. So it's almost like you don't want to to post on the same day. So you don't want to post necessarily every Thursday, which is when I post my my blogs, and, you know, put out a LinkedIn newsletter, because actually almost posting that on the same day every, you know, every week, every two weeks, one of those

Speaker 1  
is going to get hidden. Yeah, yeah.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
And it's funny that you mentioned that, because during the summer months, at beginning of the summer this year, they changed the algorithm. So you're seeing things from two weeks ago. It's so irritating, because you like you every time I post, at least, as I said, I don't post this often. It's like, I put that baby out there. I put so much of effort, and, you know, emotion, so much into that one post, and then I know you're not going to see it for two weeks. The only thing that gets a lot of traction immediately are the birthdays and anniversaries. Those things do get posted as soon as that happens. So be mindful of that. But yeah, it's going to take two weeks for that post to show up. And it's so irritating to me, because I'm like, I put so much work into those posts.

Matt Wilkinson  
Yeah, it's, it's, it's crazy the way that's happening, and I find it so confusing as well now, because I look at somebody's post that turns up two weeks later, and I look at this great post, oh, I've already liked and commented, so show me stuff I've already engaged with. Why?

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
Yeah, so, so this is something for the sales people, because I feel like I do marketing. I happen to 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 five to 12% are new people. So here we are trying to get engage all these new people. We just need to cultivate our current customers or current relationships. So what? What does that mean? You're like, Okay, that's great. Valentina, so I guess I just need to send, you know, a birthday card or handwritten card to someone from customers. 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 tell turn on the notifications. So on the person's profile, once you're connected to them. There's a little bell

Speaker 1  
icon, turn on a bell icon, and that way I get

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
notified immediately if that person 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 talk of fine. So when they post, I see it, I comment, I and they're like, at one point, my customers know this trick already. And like, Valentina, why haven't you commented? Because I'm on a podcast or I'm gonna beat it with someone else. I can't stop what I'm doing to attend your post, but they expect it immediately. Like Valentina, where's your comment?

Matt Wilkinson  
I love that, and I love that. They expect the you to comment straight away as well.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
No, it's very intimidating.

Matt Wilkinson  
There's no days off.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
There's never a day off, especially in the weekends when they know I'm going to give them the good comment, not the 61

Matt Wilkinson  
Yeah, well, I'm going to make sure I tag you on every Saturday morning from now on, yeah, before you're just go cycling. Yeah, I just go cycling, but I'll do it. I'll maybe do it on a Sunday when I've got back from a cycle, rather than beforehand, because otherwise it's going to be too early for you, and I'll miss that one hour window

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 favorite day to post is Sundays. That reason.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
Great tip, and any time of day.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
So according to Richard, he says Tuesdays and Thursdays, eight 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  
Yeah, it's really interesting, especially when you work across multiple time zones. So you actually have to, so I tend to try and get the late lunch crew. So people in the you know, when they're coming back from lunch in the UK, try to hit them then, which, which then, means it should be around Coffee Break. Yeah, most Coffee Break time on the on the east coast, but people are maybe getting up in the West Coast. You're trying to hit a a convenient time zone for everybody, but it's really, 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, you know, at eight o'clock your time, and then, you know, you cater to the people in the other time zone, you know, 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 weeks when it was busy. Right now, we're recording this on a week at a long holiday weekend. So I know a lot of people might not see the

Matt Wilkinson  
post, and you don't get any penalty for reposting your own posts.

Speaker 1  
Not that I know of that's interesting. Wow.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
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 some sequence quotes by 99% the only thing is, repost. Me. Reposting other people's stuff doesn't count during towards your daily post.

Speaker 1  
What a great tip. Yes.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
So I feel like you're writing all these things. I feel like you want to ask me something, but you're also writing and picking up here. This is

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
so much fun. It is tons of fun. I mean, these are huge, full nuggets. So I think what I'm learning from you is, although reposting only reaches 1% of your audience, okay, you've reposted once. That's That's one tranche of the 1% you can repost another time that's going to be a totally different tranche of the 1%

Speaker 1  
that fair. Yeah, again, I

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
only repost, let's say someone posts about me. I repost that, that and or maybe I might repost your stuff, because it's so amazing. But no one knows you didn't know that until earlier this in this conversation, that that doesn't get much, so much reach for me, so, but I'm doing it as a kind you know, again, again across the planet. If you understand, when I say brownie points, I'm trying to get in your favoritism view. So, yeah,

Matt Wilkinson  
oh, we have brownie points here too. Don't you worry. Okay, you do. Okay.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
Yeah, for me, it's not so much brownie points as being supportive of my friends and of their business and and wanting to show that support more actively on

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
social and that might be for the people that are watching this, that have the imposter syndrome, or maybe don't like to toot their own horn, maybe they're a little bit more comfortable just sharing other people's posts that way. They're still putting themselves out there in a sort of, in a way, or, you know, just putting themselves out there in a way, or or I can't even talk today, but just putting themselves out there

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
makes, makes perfect sense. So as we sort of wind down this amazing discussion, what are the three take homes you'd like to leave our audience

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
with? Oh, that's a really good question, because I feel like we went in so many directions today, right? I feel like we were, we're 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, I think 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 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  
Fantastic, fantastic. And if people want to get in touch with you, Valentina,

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
how can they reach you? 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  
Fantastic. 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,

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
science marketing community. Yeah, 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, that's so helpful

Speaker 1  
right now. Thank you so much. You Thanks. Okay, oh my gosh.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez  
Alexina, you accept the record by dynamic, I want to take a picture with you guys. Do we take the picture or do.

Shownotes and raw transcript

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Tired of “spray & pray” outreach that falls flat with scientists and clinicians? In this episode of A Splice of Life Science Marketing, Matt and Jasmine sit down with Rohit Veerajapa, Chief of Staff at Humantic AI, to unpack how buyer intelligence (people + account insights) beats brute-force productivity tools — especially in high-ACV, complex life science sales. You’ll learn: Why buyer mindshare is the real bottleneck — and how to win it How Personality AI (DISC-driven) upgrades cold emails, calls, LinkedIn, and meetings The Buying Committee Map (Friendlies, Skeptics, Crusaders, Neutrals) and how to work each quadrant What to stop measuring (vanity volume) and what to start measuring (value-driven personalization) Privacy, ethics & compliance: public data only, opt-out, GDPR, SOC 2 Where AI is actually taking sales in the next 2–3 years (hint: more human, not more spam) Resources & Links Humantic AI: www.humantic.ai Connect with Rohit:   / rohithveerajappa   Connect with Matt   / mattwilkinson   Connect with Jasmine   / jasmine-gruia-gray-3a656a   

Transcript

Matt Wilkinson  
And yeah, they'll then hit record, and we'll get going.

Oh, and welcome to a splice of life, science marketing. Jasmine and I are here today with Rohith vrajapa The now I've got to start again. So excuse me, it was like the Chief of Staff, and they got tongue tied over that. So 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 is an AI is a personality, buyer, intelligence tool, and I've been a big fan of their work for the last few years. Every time every meeting or 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 RO, and apparently, he's a thorough evaluator. He's rigorous and demanding and he's precise and practical. They are. He's less concerned about the product and more about its potential impact, and they put a lot of effort into ensuring personal success. So I'm really excited to welcome ro onto the show today.

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

Matt Wilkinson  
Excellent. Well, I'm looking forward, 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, you know, had my education in computer science, then started my career as a software developer, right? But I realized 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 upheca. 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 roles is to take care of the customer success and partnership teams. Right? Matt, you asked, what is the API that I'm really obsessing about right now that would be delivering value to customers? Right? So, of course, that are, you know, lagging indicators like NPS and CSAT that you can measure them with, or reading indicators like product adoption and usage itself, right? So that's what I'm currently obsessing about. I know demand is a great product. It can really help people achieve great results. So I'm extremely passionate about big people realize the value of the same. So that's what I'm trying to do right now.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
Thank you. Hi, Ro, 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 dirt 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 mind share. So that is what we help solve. We help solve the buyer's mindshare. We are a buyer experience too, right? So we believe that there are two parts to every theme, right? One part is what the buyer wants. Second part is what the organization needs, primarily because we're a pwd sales tool, right? To understand the buyers wants, I again ask a simple question. I'm like, I usually ask people that if you have a client who the native Japanese speaking plant, 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 realize, 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 organization. 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 you know the impact of not achieving those goals for that organization, 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. You have any questions further? I'm happy to double down on that. Fantastic. Thank you.

Matt Wilkinson  
Now, I was fortunate enough to meet ama Preet, the founder of and CEO of humantic, and it was three years ago at a Sandler sales and Leadership Summit in in Florida. And I was curious how humantic started, because I've only ever experienced humantic as a, you know, as a, you know, 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 sort of 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  
Oh, well, that's quite a bit of a story, right? You know, the story begins with this one mad man that we could call amarpreet, and this mad opposition to humanize the internet, right? And one sliver of it is what you see today, which is trying to humanize things. But of course, Matt, you got us that we did not start with the serious use case. Initially we started with the HR use case, right? We felt that, hey, understand 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 paid, 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 realized that, you know, typically the buyers mindshare or the experience the bigger and more acute problem, and we've definitely seen more retraction 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 serious use case.

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. Well,

Rohit Veerajapa  
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 two components, right? You know you're selling to an individual or a bunch of individuals, it's very important to understand what takes them right, because we it'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 file at the starting of the show, it said that, no, 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, you know, who is the seller? I really don't care so much about relationships in a sterling persona, in a selling equation context, but in real life, I really care about no relationships and everything. So that is where every individual is different. Every individual in the Status context is different. That's why we have the people intelligence to understand the individual that they're dealing with and how to tell 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 car, 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 organization. So the organization itself is an entity, and it has its own needs and challenges. That is what we cover with the accounted within part of the product. So that is where to answer your question. In short, it is the individual and organization that we typically try to cater to.

Matt Wilkinson  
Right. Excellent. Thank you. Is there a feature that you think sort of first time users of humantic, perhaps overlook, but could really help them in their, you know, in their day to day job as a salesperson?

Rohit Veerajapa  
Yes. So typically, we have a bunch of features, right? You know, we, of course, show the buyer insights. We we tell them how to personalize their cold calls. We tell how to be, in fact, personalize 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 personalize LinkedIn connection requests and mails, etc, etc, right? These are features that get very easily used. But one feature that anybody who uses vouchers for but tell them gets used because it's a slightly different use case, is what we call the buying committee. Now, okay, so till now, we were talking about we personalize it for an individual, right? But more than often, especially in a mid market and above you know sales use case you are selling to not an individual or 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 fine comedy 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 company map, we go ahead and divide the buying committee or the people into four quadrants. We call them the friendlies, the skeptics, the Crusaders and the neutrals. Neutrals are people who may or may not sway the deal towards you or away from you. You know, skeptics 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 skeptics and to the Crusaders. Don't try to make a pick your Crusader. They're never going to do that. So keep their skepticism 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 I have one user who told us that she got a deal, a million dollar deal, back from the Tech 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 dream. But of course, it comes in large fields, and not when you're prospecting, etc, etc. So it spend them, gets used. It's extremely effective. And anybody who uses it watches by it.

Matt Wilkinson  
I have to say, it's definitely one of my favorite features, especially when you're selling online. Because one, you know, it's great to know who you're split 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, you know, because there 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 what, you know, where do they sit in that group? So it's definitely been one of my favorite, favorite tools since I've since I've started using it. So I, yeah, definitely recommend anybody that's, you know, getting to 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. You know, 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. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you.

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 humanity, 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, blood, Ro, 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 be to fit that is your competitive edge? First of all, if you're not even using chat GBD 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 humanity 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 be spoke, or, you know, personalize 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. I think

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
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, you know the that value proposition between The bot, 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? You know, we have a client called RO, and I was showcasing the product to him, and then he was like, Hey, why don't you write a cold email to me from your mandate? So we pulled out the product, and I just went ahead and give it a template where I'm giving my pain points and usual, I'm sorry, my selling points and usual pain points that a client would have. And what humanit 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 RO, 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 1015 minutes even, even if you're very fast, it would take you 1015 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 clapping 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 clapping that's happening by going ahead and personalizing and even just add. It's just not personalizing it based on the data that's available in the internet. It's also personalizing based on their personality, right? Like Roth, 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 to would like to email to be extremely crisp. Let's take an eye type personality, that type of personality might be willing to read along with the 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 data. Person is like, get to the point that's where every personality has a different way of reading the email, and he and kumantic goes ahead and it does that end of email personalization for you, so that's where you cut through the darkness. You cater it to the way that they want to receive it.

Matt Wilkinson  
Excellent. Thank you. You've already talked about a couple of customer examples and proof points that have shown real impact. Do you have any other favorite stories of, of where, 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 ro CEOs of different organizations talking about the impact that could cause for them. A few that you know, if I may say, is we work with a publicly listed company in a 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 150 1% for the other group. Wow, right? So that is where sometimes we say that these numbers sound so too true, too good to be true, right? Because, of course, on paper, it looks it looks outlandish, right? But that's where we have all of this data. Over there, we have these people claiming it themselves, so I really encourage any of your listeners, so I just to go ahead and check that out. And we also work with another publicly listed company called Domo right, and they are PDO Mohammed, after measured the measured and reported that they they saw a 37% improvement in their build rates by using humanity. Right. So there are, I think you know, Jeevan Fox, who's the RO of a studio, said that the conversion rate was around 15% but after using humantic, it moved to 40 or two 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. Fantastic. Thank you.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
Yeah, maybe we can pull on that red red a little bit. The audience for our podcast is mostly focused on what has been called the most skeptical 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, you know, people, etc, etc, because we are an AI company. And what does an AI model need are 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. You know 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 public 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, you know, refine our predictions. Or if there's no other data available, just use that to make the prediction.

Matt Wilkinson  
So one I've shown a few people sort of humanity, 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, you know, unpack, you know, unpacking that whole sort of AI, privacy, ethics and compliance and, you know, humantic stance on that, because obviously, yeah, you're analyzing people in a way that maybe is, could be uncomfortable,

Rohit Veerajapa  
be totally curious, right? And that is where we are extremely prudent about data privacy ethics, clients, 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 analyze whatever we are advising about an individual. So for any good reason, let us say that they are happy or uncomfortable with the analysis, right and they do not want us to analyze them. Then we have a simple opt out option where they can go to our website and 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'll see feedback, we develop internally, try to think and work towards making sure that you know it's a safer place for everyone.

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. Okay, see the future of sales in the next to the 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 organization, right? It's a future that we are seeing is that nine out of 10 tools today are about sellers, productivity, right? Helping you send more emails, helping you make more phone calls, helping you automate. You know, LinkedIn, email campaign, etc, etc, but that is where we've taken. The contrary view we've take we've gone to the other side, and we are saying, Hey, we are going to solve the buyers mindshare. We are going to humanize selling. We are going to ensure that, you know, 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, hey, I know the general audience is going to get more done, but we want to get things done better, right? So that that's that's what our spidey senses tell us, and that's the future that we are trying to create, right? Because, you know, 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. Here, 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 why 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 board came right? You have to send so many emails. You have to sell so many times. So wherever the sales cycle is longer, right, where it would typically, it's 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 team, there is where people do want to leave any stones unturned to ensure that they are doing everything in their strength make a sale happen. Those are the type of people who can appreciate this better. And you know, 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 they try to sell

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
to. Yeah, so just wanted to interject for our listeners. RO 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 for that sales and marketing cycle

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

Rohit Veerajapa  
maybe I wouldn't limit to a single metric, but I would get continued 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 any media measured on how many you know these is reaching out to, how many contacts is he reaching out to? How many emails is sending? How many calls is he or she making? Right very similarly, with ease, how many accounts are they handling? You know, what is the, you know, entire pipeline in which your 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 personalized emails or personalized 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 all you know collectively, how they behave? Do you know what is the needs of the entire organization? Gone are the days where you you just Google out 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 has a very good analogy out here, right? He usually speaks about something called the touch ball 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 Window division. And today, with the incoming of AI, they could have that same dust ball effect where people are selling too much, too many outreach and that 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.

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 are dull and not on point. So if I had to explain the value of humantic AI to a skeptical 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, 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, you know, try and sell to the person, to the person, and not only the person. So maybe that is how you could explain it to

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
them, right? Thank you.

Matt Wilkinson  
That was brilliant. Ro, so many, 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 him 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. Yeah, thanks

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
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 know you've been great hosts, and I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Shownotes and raw transcript

Shownotes

Transcript

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

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
and I'm Jasmine Greer gray. Hi, Matt. How you doing today? Good, good. It's a little bit steamy here in Northern Virginia,

Matt Wilkinson  
quite warm here in the 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 sort of Persona, it's probably worth starting with, well, what actually do we mean by and a persona is a really, 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 typical, typically have people that are, you know, our primary buyer, and then we have users, and then we have those that are also in, you know, involved in the buying decision. So that could be procurement, finance, health and safety, quality, whoever it is there's, there's often quite a few other people that are involved in that buying, you know, the buying group itself, and we can create across our ideal, you know, different groups of ideal customer profiles, we can create persona. And those persona are these sort of aggregated views of who they are. And so we can start off by thinking about trying to humanize 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 later, 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.

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, you know, 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 color. We're living in a world where anything goes, where, you know, 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 but behaviors. What? 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  
No, I absolutely agree. I think there's, there's another thing that's really important about persona is that once we've created them, they can be a real pillar of sort of coherence between sales, marketing, customer support, about around how are we going to ensure that our interactions with this, you know, with this group of people that we, you know, we're tying up together as a present, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 organizational 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, 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 organization, and it's, it's really, 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 the same by potential buyers with a very similar message, and a message that you've tested, that you know is going to resonate with them.

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 up as owner 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 You know, seek to speak to clients, and you know, they the sales team, are doing really, 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 it as like us as well. And so then, by creating persona around procurement, understand what is it that we're not 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 this some there's some really simple sales enablement messaging that allows us to be to continue to have a message, you know, have messaging that resonates with that persona. So I think it's 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 going, you know, ahead, you know, taking that forward, rather than just taking the very vacuous kind of approach of, well, they're going to be, you know, this old and be, you know, 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.

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, you know, in detail, who your key and you know, who are key people you need to influence, and really digging into making sure that we're, you know, we're creating, you know, we've got messaging for maybe, typically, there are five roles with any but with any buying group, you know, we sort of listed them out earlier, sort of the initiator, the user, The initiate is kind of the problem that recognizes the problem. You have a champion, who's, 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, 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 organizations are like. But you know, 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, really enthused, and they're agreeing on things, getting these, the notes that come back sort of half formed. I. Um, people then go away do some desk research, spend hours kind of trying to 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. And so a deep research came out. I realized that rather than, 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 analyze 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, you know, those those conversations that you'd already had with with, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, that we're having to analyze and read through and go right, what was their you know, what was the 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, you know, as a knowledge base within, within you know, 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, you know, us ask the questions of the document. We can just go into the 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, you know, the whole gamut of the sorts of things where you can almost have a virtual a virtual customer at your desk all the time. And I think for me, that's been one of the real eye opening ways of you know 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

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
shareable. 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 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 operationalize that to an extent, as you say, in silico with a custom GPT or a gem, or whatever your favorite LLM is, you can now use that to create sales scripts, to create sales presentations, to really evaluate your website, to evaluate your your marketing tools and your sales tools to helping your your customer experience team, because now you're 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? Yeah,

Matt Wilkinson  
absolutely. And, you know, I think that you know, 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, across, you know, across the silos. And I think that's then really, really important. Now, of course, you know, one of the criticisms has always been a persona has always been that there are one and done. Yeah, 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 is, what does what we're telling it do within a website, but what actions do they actually take when we can recognize a specific persona? And then, if we're at that point, can we use, you know, can we use data collection to then enrich them? I'm sure that there's, there are ways to do that. I, you know, clever ways. I don't think there's a product out there that does that just yet. And I'm, you know, I'm sure that HubSpot and you know, Salesforce are probably working on this as I speak. But I'm sure there's ways to do that. I think there's also, um. 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 you know, to look at your customers and understand them better, but you can build those persona into you know, into a into to a voice, into a conversational AI, and then you can set up scenarios. So let's just imagine that we've built our AI, you know, we built our persona for a, you know, for a lab scientist. If I'm, if I'm a salesperson, I'm going into a, you know, a call with a 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 my you know 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, these, you know, these data sets, that we can start using them to to not just create better and more, but also to be better and more with them, to actually be able to to practice with them. And I think that's just one of the really exciting things that 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, you know, disc profiles or or Big Five personality traits. And you could look at those and go, Okay, so if we've got these big, you know, these big personnel, you know, 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, you know, 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 sort of practice their pitch, but but the 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 they often are. I think the the other point I want to pull on is that just because we can train llms to be a very good proxy for 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 be, you know, to walk in the buyer shoes for even if it's just a few meters or a few miles. But I think there's, there's something else we can do as part of that, if we're given permission, if we can record those those interviews, or we can at least take notes and add to them, we can add those verbatim quotes, those those transcripts, to 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, update these by, you know, simply by taking it, you know, adding extra data to them, whether you're updating the same file or just adding extra files to say, hey, hey, here's a, here's a couple of transcripts from interviews with this persona. You can, you can do all of that and really start to, you know, build out a wealth of, you know, real cut. Customer voice, and have that shining through in actually, the way that you 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. You know, 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 organization 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 mean, I use the word customer, but I think it's target, or, you know, potential customer, prospect, whatever we want to call them. I think that there's, there's absolutely that it's really important that we do get that, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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,

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, buyer, personas?

Matt Wilkinson  
So I think, I mean, 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 their that, you know, I've seen some beautiful persona being created, and then you know people are, you know, people aren't even using them when you know 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 a, you know, 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, 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, you know, the five rings of buying insight so powerful understanding what jobs to be done, you know, any of that insight that we can really get included? Yeah, there's things that are important about, you know, 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, really can be used by marketing, by sales, by service, and anybody else that's interacting with our, you know, with our customers and prospects.

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? Yeah,

Matt Wilkinson  
or even find that you've got to, you know, you've got a segment that you didn't realize 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, you know, 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, you know very much like in in science and in chemistry, you know, 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 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, on a basis where we're looking at hundreds of Persona potentially, but you're having to do the analysis, and kind of, you know, you or I are having to try and understand the difference between somebody in the same job role in two different companies. We, we wouldn't be able to necessarily do that. I think the subtlety of that's different. But within a, you know, within the AI, maybe actually within some of our most important accounts, it's worth us doing that. It might not be, you know, 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 Wilkinson  
Matt, and thank you, Jasmine, it's been great fun as always. And

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
thank all of you for joining us on a splice of Life Science marketing. Bye, for now. Bye. 

Shownotes and raw transcript

Shownotes

If you are a scientist-turned-marketer trying to stop scattergun outreach and start generating real revenue, this episode is for you. In 30 minutes we unpack segmentation, ideal customer profiles and why ICPs are not the same thing as personas. Practical, evidence led and ready to use. What you will learn Why segmentation must be measurable, sustainable, accessible and actionable. How to iterate between segments and ICPs instead of treating the process as linear. Why ICPs are about organisations and buying groups while personas are the people you influence. A 5-step, practical process to build personas that sales will actually use. How to run cheap experiments that stop you wasting almost 40% of your budget. Timestamps 0:00 Intro 0:30 Kotler on segmentation 2:10 Segments versus ICPs - best practice 6:00 ICPs, buying groups and personas explained 12:30 Persona AI and account intelligence tools 17:10 The practical 5-step playbook for personas 22:30 Gartner stat on wasted budget and what to do about it 26:00 Test, learn, repeat - experiments that pay back 29:00 Close Five practical steps to craft usable personas Gather account intelligence at the ICP level. Map procurement and the buying group roles. Validate hypotheses with sales and field applications. Create detailed persona profiles from public data and interviews. Convert personas into working AI agents or playbooks for sales. Key takeaways ICPs are about the organisation, not a single person. Personalisation requires understanding the buying group. Use fast, low-cost experiments to validate assumptions. Turn personas into living assets that update with new data.

Transcript

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
Matt, 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 persona,

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
right? So would I? 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. I'd

Matt Wilkinson  
fully agree. And I think you can take that even further to 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 and therefore how you market to them as well. So I think it's but it's a fantastic quote from from color, as per always, one of 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 sort of the end market uses. But I'm curious, Jasmine, what have you seen that sort of you know best practices in terms of segmentation that goes beyond, shall we say, that the end market

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, 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 behaviors on your website? Is it the the types of applications that they're involved in and the unmet needs that your customers, that that your products and services solve? So it's, it's, 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 behavioral,

Matt Wilkinson  
fantastic. And so I guess it also comes up to, could be a little bit down to the sort of the structure of the organizations 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.

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, you know, obviously there's a, there's a nice process where we say, let's get this, let's, let's, 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, sort of iterative process?

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
Yeah, I think that's a great question, and a great pitfall that many company 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 you know, company size, number of employees. Employees, the geography kind of thing, but, but your point is really well made and super important that it's an iterative thing. You 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, you know, 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 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, that that you put on in the term, 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. No,

Matt Wilkinson  
I think that's an incredibly important point. I've, you know, I've definitely had heated discussions when people have started describing their, you know, an 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, you know, 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 to almost segment your ICPs is actually making is, is by, you know, 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, you know, 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 with in a different way, in a more customized way, to really make sure that we we can have the impact that we want on. You know, both generating new customers into maximizing customer lifetime value.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
You know that that word personalized 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 personalization is to really understand those ICPs very deeply, and that means getting down to the level of the buying groups.

Matt Wilkinson  
Oh, absolutely, you know, I mean, I know you can get a lot from account intelligence and looking at what's going on. I think that's, you know, that's really important to understand the pressures that our individual, you know, organizations were selling to or under. But then it's really about getting beyond, you know, beyond the thermographics, 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, you know, accounts intelligence, sort of the research approach is just, that's just staggering. I mean, what you can pull out now compared with two years ago, you know, it's almost criminal if we're not using these tools when we're going through these processes, to be able to to be able to find out information that might be buried in, you know, in investor relations reports, or, you know what the investors are talking about, or then, you know, the other side of things that sort of looking at what's going on within the business. Are they having, are they having trouble recruiting? So all of these things, I think, can be such an incredibly powerful way to understand the pressures that are, you know, ICPs are

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
under. I think what these tools. Enable us to do is give more meaning to the question of what keeps you up at night. Yeah, 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 that company in that R and 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. Anybody

Matt Wilkinson  
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 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 their technical problem, but maybe build an offer that actually answers, you know, maybe a challenge with getting capex or OPEX, or whatever it is, build an offer that actually makes sense for them in that

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
moment, 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, as I said on a recent Sam's webinar, there's sort of five key, you know, 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, account intelligence. But you can also use deep research tools now to 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 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 organizations, 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, those sorts of 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 you know that in the field get, you know, 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 organizations? Who should we be having conversations with? Who do we know that is influencing the buying decision? But never you know, we don't get to see very often, and who are the key blockers? I think those sort of, those other bits are really, really important, because very often will. 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, absolutely take that approach, agree. You know, 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 open AI or Gemini to go off and search those LinkedIn profiles and build really, really detailed persona based on the. Sites 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, 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, 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 you know, rather than just having to read and try and find the right information, you know, from asking being able to ask some questions all the way through, to being able to brainstorm with them, to strategize with them, to 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 sort of we can, we can really use to to to better understand our our persona. But I think it's really crucial that we're we. 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 to rock, you know, to rust away on the hard drive somewhere. I think we really need to be able to turn these into, you know, essentially, in silico versions of reality that we can actually really, really use and extract maximum, maximum value for. The other thing I'll say is that the deep research approach, you know, in about 1520, minutes, you can get so much detail from a, from a you know, from from those, those those that date you know, from those, those searches that you wouldn't be able to get if you were doing that yourself. So in 1520, 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, 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, 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, you know, add into the end of those documents, you know, 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 what's important.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
There's so much there to unpack. You know, maybe if we start with your your point about not letting this information just rust on a hard drive somewhere. I actually believe that today, Persona and and using AI to develop personas and use that as a resource becomes part of your your marketing plan. Think about price promotion, product, place, processes, proof points and people is the sort of seven or seven PS, that seventh p on people, I think, has been underutilized and under thought about when, 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, that people part of the seven. PS.

Matt Wilkinson  
Now I'd agree. I think it's I do think it adds a layer, layer of complexity in the thinking and planning of campaigns, to some extent, but it gives but it also unlocks incredible ability to 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, you know, a segment LED campaign, but maybe you know segment, you know, micro segment, you know, based on the ICPs and then the persona in question, you know, it's just then creating forks in in sort of 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, big mess.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
Now I completely agree. I think a lot of these tools are now, um. 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 and brochures and other marketing materials more useful, more resonant with the the buyer persona you're targeting and and ultimately make the brand unforgettable.

Matt Wilkinson  
Absolutely, I think it's critical, and I think that we're 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 you know, how they interact with us, being able to then leverage that back into update those models. You know, whether you want to do that live, or do that sort of on, you know, on a fairly, you know, on a somewhat frequently, frequent basis. But being able to update those, you know, the models that we create of our customers based on not just the hypothesis and research that kind of happens, you know, sporadically, shall we say, but being able to do that on a on a really frequent basis, I think is a really exciting prospect for

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
me. You know, 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, you know, sort of the basic foundations of an agile marketing approach as well. But I do think the sort of the traditional desire to have a, you know, maybe a yearly, you know, marketing plan, if you will, with every, you know, with everything button 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 maximize every single, every single thing. And how can we figure out how to to test and learn before you know, 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 in, who are embedded in Lean called tri storming, go out and experiment and 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 it's experimenting with different personas and different messages for those person personas to to dial in the understanding of the pain points and the motivators. Now,

Matt Wilkinson  
absolutely. I mean, I think with the tools we now, you know, the tools we have now have available through, shall we say, some of the paper, you know, pay per click style advertising, you know, 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 that came up with the idea of, you know, 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 you know, had the best click throughs, you know, 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 night, you know, 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. Our approach on and look at, how can we test those and then, therefore test the market, you know, 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, some really big gains just by making sure that we test and learn. I

Jasmine Gruia-Gray  
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. Absolutely.

Matt Wilkinson  
Thank you very much for today, Jasmine, it's been 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. See you soon. You.

Shownotes and raw transcript

Shownotes

If you are a scientist-turned-marketer trying to stop scattergun outreach and start generating real revenue, this episode is for you. In 30 minutes we unpack segmentation, ideal customer profiles and why ICPs are not the same thing as personas. Practical, evidence led and ready to use. What you will learn Why segmentation must be measurable, sustainable, accessible and actionable. How to iterate between segments and ICPs instead of treating the process as linear. Why ICPs are about organisations and buying groups while personas are the people you influence. A 5-step, practical process to build personas that sales will actually use. How to run cheap experiments that stop you wasting almost 40% of your budget. Timestamps 0:00 Intro 0:30 Kotler on segmentation 2:10 Segments versus ICPs - best practice 6:00 ICPs, buying groups and personas explained 12:30 Persona AI and account intelligence tools 17:10 The practical 5-step playbook for personas 22:30 Gartner stat on wasted budget and what to do about it 26:00 Test, learn, repeat - experiments that pay back 29:00 Close Five practical steps to craft usable personas Gather account intelligence at the ICP level. Map procurement and the buying group roles. Validate hypotheses with sales and field applications. Create detailed persona profiles from public data and interviews. Convert personas into working AI agents or playbooks for sales. Key takeaways ICPs are about the organisation, not a single person. Personalisation requires understanding the buying group. Use fast, low-cost experiments to validate assumptions. Turn personas into living assets that update with new data.

Transcript