Future Proof Your Business by focusing on what you do, who you do it for, and why they should use you. Welcome. Jennifer, can you just start by introducing yourself? Sure. My name is Jennifer Montague and I'm currently the Senior Director of GoToMarket for Verdane. Verdane is a European-based investment firm that focuses on tech-enabled software and sustainability businesses. Before that, I've spent the last 10 years working in the Copenhagen startup scene, building up marketing functions predominantly in B2B, or I should say exclusively in B2B, so I am a true-blood B2B SaaS marketer. Nerd. Nerd. Massive marketing nerd. Exactly. That also means that you've been doing marketing for, or marketing leadership at least, for quite a bit longer than I have. How come you find it interesting and sort of keep getting up every day and go to work or and just sort of remain excited about marketing? Yeah, I like to joke that when I'm not marketing, I'm thinking about marketing or I'm talking about marketing or writing about marketing because I also have a podcast. I do a lot of public speaking. My podcast is called Marketing Corner, so it's marketing-focused. I think what I love about marketing is it's a little bit of psychology, it's statistics, so you're kind of blending all these different functions in the brain of getting the right message across but making sure you're driving the right traffic and making sure you hit targets. So I find it very exciting to activate those two areas, the creative and the more analytical is something I find really exciting and I think it's always changing, it's always evolving. We have AI now, we have mid-journey, we have all these new ways of marketing and how do you constantly stand out and stand out amongst the noise I think is something really interesting to always tinker and test with. Is there like a particular problem that gets you really excited at sort of right now? I think the hill I'm going to die on is better collaboration across go-to-market functions, getting marketing, sales, CS, data, product, again with my background predominantly in sort of B2B, but I think this can apply anywhere, is getting all of those functions aligned, making sure they have the same targets, they have the same ambitions, they have the same incentives to do what's best for the business, not just hit their targets, it's how do we do what's best for the business and making, bringing back, from a growth at all costs phase, which kind of ended a couple of years ago to like common sense. Let's just do things that make sense rather than looking at who hit their targets. Yeah, without getting too deep into this sort of particulars about marketing organization, what is needed in terms of like C-level management to make that work. I think so much of the silos that exist across the GTM teams, inherently sort of are there because they each have a person on the management team. What can you do as a management group to sort of foster that collaboration? I think we need, if I could wave a magic wand, I would want everyone focused on revenue targets rather than individual MQL targets or closed one targets. Because I think when you have those kind of focus areas, you get what you incentivize for. And if you incentivize me to get someone to sign up for a newsletter, then I'm going to make sure you get the most newsletter signups, because I need to hit that target. But is that really what's best for the business? So I think management need to break out of this legacy of attribution, who touched it first, who touched it last, I think we need to look at the end journey. And also remember that the funnel doesn't stop when the customer buys the product or signs the contract, the funnel keeps going, you know, we operate on a bowtie model. Where customer signs, but then you keep that customer or in the case of a B2C model, you get them to come back, they become a loyal customer, they come, you know, that's something that marketing can help with sales can help with and I hate one of the things that we say is, one of the things I like to talk about is this concept of NMFP, not my frickin problem. Right. And we have that that's, that's what reinforces those silos of marketing going, I hit my target, there you go, sales and sales go, well, these are terrible, but I've hit my target, there you go, CS. And, you know, and they're just passing the buck. I want management to look more holistically at how can all of these parts play their role the best way they can, but it's best for the business and kind of get out of the weeds a little bit and get a little bit more high level of what is best for your organization. Yeah, I think I have a thousand questions about that. A different episode. Yeah, yeah, definitely episode, but today we, we, we are here to talk about B2B and what B2C can learn from it and positioning. So if you sort of suppose I'm, or imagine that I'm a head of marketing for an e-commerce business. I'm supporting the business with relevant traffic. I'm working together with a head of e-commerce or VP e-commerce to sort of make an e-commerce business or online store successful. Why should they care about positioning if they're not already familiar with the concept? Kind of what, what is it actually? And why should they care? So maybe I'll answer your question with kind of what is it first and why it matters. And so again, from a B2B perspective, we sell to committees. We sell to people, decision makers between six to eight. The average B2B deal has six to eight decision makers. That's sales cycle can be up to 18 months long. That is an interesting challenge, right? For B2B marketers of how do you stay top of mind? How do you keep these people engaged? How do you make sure that they still want your product over everything else? And the thing that B2C do that I see a lot is they focus on the product or the price. That's what they're kind of showcasing. If we did that in B2B, we'd lose every time. Because if you focus on price, you're only getting people who are worried about pricing and they're going to go for the next, you know, anyone else offers them a 10% discount, they're gone. There's no loyalty there. So we need to build. And that's where your positioning comes in. You need to build this loyalty. And the definition of positioning is how you define the why. Why should someone, why is your product the best thing for your ideal customer? Why should they buy from you and no one else? And if the answer to that is price, then they will always go to someone cheaper. And that's where you lose out to the Timoos of the world or the Alibabas of the world. And so that's why I think the definition of the positioning is, you know, defining why you are the best option for solving the problem that your ideal customer has. The reason it matters is because that is how you're going to stand out. That's how you're going to build loyalty. And that kind of trickles down into your messaging, how you talk about your product, how you advertise your product, and who you advertise it to. And so it all trickles down from there. And I think that's how you get your edge. In a very crowded marketplace. Yeah. I've heard you say that it's not about what you sell, but it's why they buy. Exactly. And I kind of feel that if we just repeated that a hundred times right now, then that would be a very valuable conversation for a lot of... We'll just say that over and over again for the whole episode. Yeah, for sure. Something like that. In e-commerce, you do typically see the marketing function being quite focused again on traffic and sort of managing the conversion on the online store. And they're really focused on a lot of the logistics around running an online store or e-commerce business in terms of reducing returns or making sure that they keep track of inventory management. And there's a bunch of sort of very practical things that they care a lot about. But you're talking about turning that whole sort of focus around or introducing a completely different focus maybe. Talk more about that transition from focusing on the products you have that you want to sell and why their shoppers are buying stuff. Yes. Maybe before that, I have another just on your point of focusing on traffic and things like that is traffic sources are changing. Right. We're seeing AI search now. HubSpot lost 80% of its search because people aren't using Google anymore. They're using AI to find things. So if you rely solely on that to run your business, it's shifting all the time. Right? So again, the advantage of building a brand and people knowing your brand is, I'm going to your website. I know who you are. I trust you. And that's where this... So I just kind of wanted to maybe put that in the why it matters bucket is it kind of future proofs you to these technological developments. If you have a brand that people recognize and people aren't Googling you, but they are putting it in a browser, that's going to be a lot cheaper and a lot more future proof than relying on the traffic that's always happened. But how people start it, I think there's sort of different stages. And I'm not suggesting doing this with your customers. I'm saying do this internally as sort of an organization. But the first thing is changing your mindset to some people call it customer obsession, which sounds a little, maybe a little scary sometimes. But being customer centric. And what customer centric is not, the customer is always right. And we put customers first. That's not what we mean by that. We mean deeply understanding them. How they talk, what they do, what they don't like, what they like, where they hang out. That's understanding your customer. Being customer centric is understanding your core customer and the pains that they have. Once you understand that customer, then we go into a framework, which is called jobs to be done. So think of your product, not as a product, but as someone hiring that product to do something for them. And that's a different lens of looking at your product. So I, you know, when I bought this blazer, I didn't go, I need a blazer. I said, I want to look like a boss bitch at work. That was my job to be done. And then the blazer was hired to do that for me, you know, and I feel good in it. And that's the emotional connection. And that's the job to be done. One of the examples we talked about before the record, right? I don't want to search for a light baby stroller. I want to make traveling easy and stress-free with my kids. That's the job to be done. And now I'm hiring a product to do that. So that's the shift, not only a mindset, but then how you look at the problem. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. So what, what, if you're an e-commerce business with a lot of brands and a lot of different types of products, I can imagine that it would be quite difficult to sort of invent the, the, the content, in commerce story for every single product is just not really feasible. So you have to sort of look at what are the more overarching problems that their shoppers have. How would you approach that with your B2B experience? And you, if you were sort of walking into an e-commerce business with a ton of different products, ton of different categories, and you were to lead marketing for it? I would probably start with, um, again, why are people shopping from you? In B2B, we use the three whys. Why this? Why now? Why us? Think about that. So it's not necessarily the individual items like use boost. For example, boost is a expert in back to company. So we'll talk a little bit about boost. That is a kind of an online department store with a lot of different products, right? Similar to what you said. So they position themselves, they position themselves as a Nordic department store online. Yeah. And they highlight their differentiation with, um, being able to try clothes on at home, having problem-free or hassle-free returns. So it's not necessarily about the products themselves, but it's about the experience. And that again, comes from understanding the customer. If I'm coming to a boost, a Zalando, I'm not there. Maybe I need a product, but I can get that product anywhere. Why am I getting it from you? What is the differentiation? What is your USP that makes you interesting versus team? Yeah. And that's, so I would bring it up a level away from the products, but actually the experience. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Are you seeing any like a B2C commerce businesses that are, um, taking that advice seriously, or have you seen examples of that where, um, B2C focused online stores got it right in, in the hat learn from, from B2B? Well, I thought aside from the, the boost example, I think one of the things we're seeing a lot in our portfolio companies is, um, the emergence of pop-up stores. So it was tapping into a customer's need to touch things and to feel things, you know, and, and one specific example, they sell cycle helmets and they're light and they're durable. They meet all these regulations. They can be used by, you know, helicopter rescue and your everyday cyclist. It's a great USP, but I can't get that from online. So they've answered the customer need to touch and feel. So they do these pop-up stores to, to kind of capitalize on this shift in buyer behavior from, uh, maybe I don't want to go into a store all the time, but I want to see stuff online and, oh, you're nearby. They're not paying for the real estate. They're, you know, they're kind of learning from Corona. They're not paying the rent. They're having a quick pop-up, come touch, feel, order online. So there's different ways that people are kind of adapting to this new way of buying. But I think, um, the, the big players who you see doing things well are the people who have built a brand and you build a brand by offering something no one else can offer. And by offering the thing that matters most to the consumer. So when we talk about boost, I don't like the fact that when I shop online, sizes are different everywhere you go, you know, a size 10 in one store is not the size 10 in another. So I don't trust that. I want to feel it. I want to touch it. I want to make sure it looks good on me. I want that in-store experience, but I can't really, I can't be bothered to go into the store. These are the things that the good companies have capitalized on. So now I can try at home. I can return things. I get my money back. I get that experience. Um, and so I'm not buying a pair of pants. I'm buying confidence. I'm buying control. I'm buying trust. So the people who tap into that, not only are they getting loyalty, but they're getting free traffic because I'm going to your website. I'm not searching for you on Google because I know you exist and I know I trust you. Yeah. Some types of B2C products, um, essentially have a bit of a committee buying them as well. Also called a family. Um, I mean, what if, um, what, what can you sort of, when you think about the buying committee in, in B2B, uh, could that apply to a family in, in B2C? And in terms of how would you sort of, um, convince an entire family that yes, this sofa is the right one or this very end of a car or what have you, would, would, would that apply? Definitely. So in a B2B context, right, we have different buyer personas, probably very similar to your family. Right. And so the, if we're selling, for example, you used to work at Dixa. Dixa is a customer support software. The person who is going to be our champion and say, we need this is not the person signing the contract. It's the champion versus the, the buyer. Right. And so we have to appeal to the champion and say, this is how your life is going to be made easier. But then we probably have to appeal to their boss and say, well, and this is how your life will be easier because this person is more efficient. And then their boss is maybe the CFO. I mean, you know, one of the things we say a lot in B2B is the real decision maker is the CFO, right? Are they going to pay for this or not? Um, and they care about something else. So our content and our ways of positioning ourselves have to tick all of those different boxes. And when you're just focusing on features, that's not going to resonate to the CFO. He doesn't care about your features. He cares about what are we going to get? You know, what's the ROI on this? And so how do you, the easiest way to communicate that is to have a position where you can rise above product and features and actually value what the value is and what that value means to the end user, to the middle management and to the decision maker. Yeah. You mentioned Timo, for example, and sort of competing on price. Let's talk about how to compete against Chinese marketplaces. That's certainly something that's really top of mind for a lot of e-commerce businesses. Yeah. Also at different stages of growth. They're sort of all feeling the heat from, from, from that side and have been, uh, facing that for a couple of years, um, now. So what, what, what's your advice to, uh, the e-commerce businesses that are either struggling with fighting against the Chinese marketplaces or at least sort of facing really strong competition? Uh, well, Warren Buffett once said, how do you beat the chess prodigy? Bobby Fischer. You play him at anything but chess, right? Yeah. You can't beat the Chinese on price. You can't. Their unit economics, their supply chain economics. And, you know, let's not forget, they also don't have the same standards of safety and compliance that, that the EU would have, for example. So there's just no way you can compete on price. So don't compete on price. But there's a lot of things that Timo can't do that, say a local or an EU vendor can do. One is, um, the quality, you know, you have, there's a reason people say, this is as if I bought this off Timo, you know, and, and because Timo is known for terrible quality, the wrong size, you know, it doesn't look like the picture. Everyone knows that's a problem. So you can capitalize on trust, local, uh, fulfillments. You can capitalize on free returns. You know, there's things that you can do, great customer service that the Chinese can't do. And us here in the EU, we have tariffs, right? If, if something's coming from China, I know if I order something, from China, one, it's probably going to take two to three weeks to get here. Two is probably going to get stuck in customs and I'm going to have to pay to have it released. And then probably maybe 30, 40% of it isn't exactly as I thought it was going to be. Um, so you can capitalize on that. Don't play that game, play the local fulfillment. So you don't have to worry about long delivery times. You don't have to worry about, um, customs and excise taxes, um, to trust its brands, you trust its brands, you know, and you boost, for example, they market themselves as the Nordic brands, right? I trust Nordic brands. I understand the Nordic mentality and culture. I trust that more than maybe something coming from overseas. So there's different levers you can pull to stand out amongst Timu. And one of the things, you know, we were again, talking off air when I did order something off of Timu. Sorry, I'm part of the problem. Um, yeah, again, it took three weeks to get here. And I think 60% of the stuff I didn't, didn't last, you know, they broke as soon as I started using it. Well, in tough economic times, I would rather pay a little bit more for something that will last. Something that I trust, then buying something to have a break. So I think when you're going up against China, I'm not saying it's easy by any means. Um, and I think that's one advantage we have in a B2B, especially in a tech software space is that we can do that here. Right. Unless you have a physical component, but you can do software here. So that's one thing, one challenge we don't necessarily have. We still have competition. We still have to stand out from the competition. And so applying what we learned in that is don't play that game. If you can't be on price, be find their weakness and capitalize on that. And that's part of your position. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, I mean, maybe, um, this is, or this is obviously changing now, but, um, one of the, the big hacks that, uh, Timu were sort of, um, applying to, uh, e-commerce in, in Europe was just to flood the search, the search traffic completely, uh, take over. Over a lot of the keywords that, um, European, uh, B2C e-commerce businesses were really relying on to get relevant, uh, traffic. Um, so, um, to the extent that that still happens for all of the consumers that are not using chat GPT to search for, um, products, uh, yet, um, what, uh, what can those businesses do? To compete and still drive the volume of relevant traffic to their sites? That's a tough one. That is really tough. And I've seen that also in B2B. Um, I worked with a portfolio company and they told me they had something called Operation Bully, where they would flood, um, they would, you know, crank up their budgets to flood out competition. And it is something that's done a lot. Um, we also do a lot of, um, bidding on competitors. You know, that's one thing you could do is start bidding on Timu. So if someone searched Timu, you can say better than Timu. Right. And that's something we see a lot, especially in B2B. If you Google one software, it'll say when you're ready for something better. So that's one, maybe more tactical thing you could try to do. But I think, um, again, it's Timu will win on price every time. And that's what they're flogging is, is price. And that's, people are becoming more and more wise. And I think you could also capitalize on this trend, you know, of, of, I bought this Christmas tree off Timu, you know, and it was this big. And there's, there's a lot of those videos. Maybe you could be creative and play on that to kind of poke fun at the fact that Timu is crap quality and everyone knows it's crap when you're ready for durability, when you're ready for reliability, you know? So, so again, it's, how do you position yourself to go against Timu in those cases? And I think you're not, again, you're not going to stop them on price and they have the ability, you know, I've worked against, I won't say their name, but there was another software company we competed with and they, they were funded by a household name. I couldn't compete with them. So I had to find my niche. I had to find the thing that stood out from, from me. And that's how we managed to go head to head with these household names. Yeah. I think we, in B2B, we often talk about loyalty, as you've also mentioned, and sort of building some sort of a community. I think to some or many e-commerce marketers, that's a relatively sort of abstract concept. Can you maybe sort of get that down to earth for an e-commerce marketer that, sort of wants to build a community that wants to have that loyalty and retention, but don't quite know how to get there? What can they learn from, from B2B marketing? I would say getting a community up and running is very difficult. I think a great case study is Glossier. For anyone who knows, they have done a brilliant job of creating a community using user-generated content. And user-generated UGC, it has multiple uses. Because one, you're activating people who, so, you know, they're, you know, they do makeup and we ladies love doing makeup tutorials. Not so much me, but, you know, so, so it's like, I'm using this, I'm using that, putting that out there into the world. So if you can incentivize people to do that, say, Hey, leave us a video. One of the things we do all the time is we have, you know, review sites like G2 and Capterra, and they have video reviews and those video reviews help you rank higher. So we will say, Hey, we'll give you a month free. We'll give you a discount or whatever it is. If you give us a video review, you could do something like that with your users to entice them to share with people what they got from you and, and share it with the world. So that's kind of one, it's free content. Well, free. I mean, if you give a freebie, maybe it's not free, but it's people going out there and talking. So that is authentic. People are going to listen to that a lot more than they're going to listen to an ad because it's real. It's human beings showing you. And that's why influencers are a very popular channel for B2B and B2C. B2C invented it. We're trying to, we're trying to adapt a different episode probably. But, um, and then the other thing to remember is that UGC is gold for AI discoverability. That's what people, that's what the AI wants to see is other people talking about you. So it kills so many birds with so few stones. If you can activate your community, so you can do that with loyalty programs. You can do that with referrals. You can do that with, um, you know, if you buy, if you come back to us three times, four times, and I know that's something you can do with data. And that's something B2C do so damn well is welcome back. Here's what you bought last time. Maybe you want this. Maybe you'd like that, you know, personalizing that shopping experience and then incentivizing them to engage with you on social media somehow is I think a really great way to activate the community. But you also, you have to have, um, that trust, right? If you're a crap brand with crap products, the last thing you want are customers going on line and talking about a terrible experience they've had. So you also have to walk the talk. And so that's, again, when it comes to that mind shift, um, that mindset of customer centric, what do they want? What do they like? What do they love? What's going to get them to go on TikTok and say, this was a really great experience. Everyone needs to try this. Yeah. You mentioned personalization. Um, so we've all been talking about personalization for, I don't know, two decades now or something like that. And there are still businesses that are questioning whether it's actually possible to do hyper-personalization in a way where the online store experience is truly, uh, sort of perceived as super relevant. And yes, the store is actually surfacing just the right kinds of products. From, from your perspective as a B2B marketer, where, where do we stand now? Uh, maybe if you just look at your own online store experiences, how bad is it? How good has it become by, by now? I think it's become very, very good. And I'll say dangerous and air quotes because it's great for the retailer because it does entice you to buy things. You know, you bought this, we think it would, you bought this shirt and we think it'd look really good with these pants or other people. I like, I also often see, you know, people who bought this also bought that. So I, I, I like that curated, um, information that curated style. I don't, if it's, if it is relevant to me, I don't mind being reached out to, you know, if it's something that you know, if I left a shopping cart empty and all of a sudden now there's a 10% discount on that shopping cart. All right. Like now we're talking. Right. Um, so I think it's actually getting a lot better. I don't necessarily feel this spam in the same way that we do at B2B. I feel sometimes we're very spammy. Sorry B2B, but we are, um, when people are buying, you know, mission critical software, they don't need four emails a week about it. Um, but if you're buying shoes or watches or, you know, more kind of, um, goods, if you're a consumer, if it's relevant, I think it's great. But I think the thing that companies do get wrong is personalization at scale. If it's not done well is hollow. It feels hollow. It's not just slapping my name on an email and then telling me something that's completely irrelevant to me. Um, or sharing it, you know, giving, serving me an ad, you know, I get a lot of ads for like dating over 60. What the hell is that supposed to mean? How am I supposed to take that? So it's, how do you make sure that it's hyper personalized? It's not just your name, but it's thing. It's understanding what you're interested in. And B2C, I think is in a very interesting position because you have a lot more data to work with. In B2B, we have, if we're lucky, you know, 20 deals a month, that's all we have. But B2C, that's an hour, you know, that depending on how big your store is. So you have so many data points to collect and pull together and use clever AI and clever tools to personalize that experience to make people, one, feel that you get me, you understand me, because that's a big part, again, of if we go back to the jobs to be done and knowing your customer, okay, you understand me. And one of the other frameworks we talk about is the before after bridge. So this is what life is like before I have you. This is where I want to be. So this is point A, this is point B, and the bridge, you're the bridge, you're going to get me from where I am to where I want to be. And that is something I think B2B have the the data and the, excuse me, B2C has the data and the ability to do in a really, really interesting way. Yeah. I also wanted to talk about how to be found on the new AI tools. There's a lot of talk about that. And there's a lot of sort of unease and uncertainty about moving from SEO to being found in the LLMs or the chatbots. I know that's a topic of interest for you as well. So sort of, can you sort of talk us through how to get started on that journey of being found effectively through chat GPT or perplexity or any of the other AI tools? Yeah, I think this is huge. This is super, super important. As I mentioned earlier, HubSpot has seen an 80% decline in their Google traffic and they're not alone. I'm sure there's a lot of companies out there like that. And to counter that, prices are going up. And so, you know, advertisers who are not optimizing for AI search are paying way more than they ever did to have less traffic because people are not just, they're just not using it. I want to say first, this is an area that I support our portfolio companies in, mostly B2B, but I've also done some work with B2C companies, getting them ready for AI, the transition into AI search. The first thing I want to emphasize is SEO is not dead. It's just shifting a little bit. So a lot of the SEO elements that we've been using will remain such as tech specs of fast website loading, making sure that you have headers and the schema in the backend and all of that is still very important. So I get asked a lot of times, should we just stop with SEO? Don't stop, but things are going to shift. We're no longer looking at keywords. So that keyword stuffing that you would do usually isn't going to work anymore. It's not, you should stop optimizing for how you label things and start thinking about how people are using AI to find things. So for example, people are not going into AI saying, I would like a hydration solution for my face or whatever, you know, like the clinically proven hydration. No one's doing that. They're going, why is my face dry? How can I help? How do I stop dry skin? How do, that's what they're searching. So when you, the, the first kind of low hanging fruit that I tell all our portfolio companies is to do an FAQ. But instead of labeling it clinically proven hydration, say, how do I stop dry skin? Put your FAQ in a way that are the way that people will ask these questions on an AI, an LLM. That's the first step you need to do. The second thing I would do is immediately do an audit of all the content you have out there. This is a little easier for B2B because we have blogs and stuff like that, but B2C, you also have product reviews and product descriptions and things like that. Go into your AI tools, go into chat, go into Propexity, go into Claw, Gemini, whatever it is, all of them, if you can. And think of customer centric. What is your customer looking for? And then ask AI, where do I find really good jackets for minus 10? And if you are not showing up, why? Who is showing up? So we say conduct an audit, go on all these tools, find the questions that your ideal buyer would probably ask and ask it. And it will recommend things. And if you're not being recommended, newsflash, ask AI why? Say, hey, company A showed up and we didn't. What could we do better? And it will tell you, well, company A does this and this and this and this and this and this, and you're not doing that. And that's the first step. I mean, it's actually using AI to tell you how to be found. And it's going to be user generated content. As we mentioned earlier, it's going to be YouTube videos with transcripts because it can scrape transcripts. So it's making sure you have reviews out there and product descriptions and things written in a way that is intent-based rather than keyword-based. Yeah. ChatTPT just started using the memory across all of the threads or the discussions you've had with it recently, which sort of translates into the AI chat experience becoming a lot more personalized. And I've seen a lot of people sort of, you know, copy-paste answers from Claude or perplexity about a certain product or a service and sort of showing it to each other saying, oh, we're not being recommended all of a sudden by this AI tool. But in fact, it's just personalizing the hell out of the answer by now. So I suspect that a lot of people are finding it terribly difficult. I suspect that a lot of people are able to figure out what responses from the AI systems can they rely on. And there aren't really, as far as I know anyway, any aggregating tools that will sort of surface in aggregate what the AIs think about your service or your products. How do you see that evolving over the next year or so? I think that's a really good point. Because of my role, I have to turn the memory off because it doesn't want your memory being saved if you're looking up something confidential. So that's something I haven't actually had the problem with. But in my personal one, I did actually have an incident where I had asked, I'm painting my daughter's room, for example. And I was like, okay, based on the surface area, how much paint do you think I would need? And it was like, let's get ready to paint Tilda's room. And I was like, how do you know my daughter's name? So it's a little creepy that that happens. And I often find myself saying wipe your memory of our previous conversation and give me a new idea. But you're absolutely right. People generally aren't really doing that. And there are tools HubSpot AI grader, which I believe is free, and that can tell you where you show up. So you can use that kind of to aggregate across all the different profiles. There's also Peak AI, which is a tool we got to demo, which was very cool. And they will do the same thing. So you can put in your company name, and it'll show you where you show up and where you don't show up. And but in terms of optimizing for that, I think it is, it's kind of like SEO, right? Because if this SEO worked in a very similar way, the more people who came to a website, the higher it ranked because it was seen as an authority. And then they got that top spot, and it pushed you down. And the way you would get over that is better content that resonates with what people were searching for. So I think if you double down on being super relevant, getting that UGC, getting people to talk about you, it's AI, it doesn't think, it's not a strategist, it is literally just scraping from all the sources. So the more mentions you can get, the more you're going to show up in those searches, as long as it matches the way the person is searching for you. And I think that's the trick is, again, it comes back, know your customer, what are their pains? What are they searching for? What are they trying to solve? And if you tailor your content and your reviews to that, hopefully that will get AI to show you more than these other people. Yeah. Another side of AI right now is obviously generating content. And e-commerce businesses are certainly also experimenting with that on many different levels, whether it's like the product descriptions or the stories around types of products or problems that their shoppers are facing or dynamic newsletters and a bunch of different sort of marketing touchpoints that they can create faster and sort of the potential areas that they can be better personalized. But it also, as we all know by now, sounds terribly robotic often and you can see all of those examples of, okay, this is clearly AI written and I'm not really interested in that. What's your sort of advice for B2C e-commerce businesses that are trying to make the most of these new tools and still want to retain their brand and DNA? I think that's, it's kind of, yeah, the irony of AI is that it's making us create generic bland content, but AI discoverability wants authentic content. So we're pumping into the world bland AI generated content. So we're pumping into the world bland AI generated content, but that's actually not what AI is optimizing for, you know, searching for, it's looking for authentic authoritative expertise. So it's kind of ironic. I find that in order to show up, you have to not sound like AI to make sure you show up in AI. But I think that's, that's exactly, again, when we, I'm going to keep coming back to positioning, but that is also the, the topic of our chat. But if you don't have a strong position, and you're a little bit wishy-washy and you're just kind of doing the generic thing, then AI is just going to help you do more generic bland content faster. Big deal, right? That's not what we should be doing. So I think if you have a position, if you, if you can be authoritative, it's hard to do it at scale. But again, if you know your customer and you can put things and frame things in a way that resonates with them and makes them think you get me, that's going to stand out in a sea of bland, blah, synergize, synergize, game-changing, em-dash. Like we can all spot it now. So to stand out, to stand out, you have to be more authentic, more human sounding. And to do that, you need to have a position that you can lean into that makes you stand out from the bland sea. Yeah. Do you find it that it's, it's possible to get the Gen AI, Gen AI tools to write in a, in a way that, that honestly does feel authentic? I've done some experiments myself. Where I would just sort of use ChatGPT to brief Claude, for example. And then the results were for me indistinguishable from what a human being would write in the end. But only if I sort of knew the AI tools really well and build a bit of a workflow between them and stuff like that. It's, it's getting better. Definitely. I think that you can see it's almost every week there's a new AI or LLM with a new language model that is just mind blowing. And I saw actually a demo of the new Gemini. My camera, I don't know if you saw this where a woman was walking and she was pointing to like a lamp pole and she was like, why is this skinny building here? And it's like, that's not a building. That's a lamppost, you know? So it's starting to really understand your questions and it's becoming very, very smart. So, um, some of the tricks that I've used is I've created my own custom GPTs and I find that really helpful. Um, so I do one, for example, where I put in the instructions, do not sound like AI, do not use things like synergy, alignment, game changer. Don't use emoji. So I have a list of things that I don't want you to do. I also specifically tell my custom GPTs to don't just agree with me. I want you to construct, you know, provide me with critical feedback. Do not agree with the, if your research suggests that I'm wrong, I need you to tell me I'm wrong. So I have, and you can look these up online, um, pretty easily to find these prompts, but I put that in my instructions to instruct it, not to sound like AI. Sometimes it goes a little too far. The other direction where I'll ask it something. It's like, hell yeah, girl. And I'm like, oh, don't, no, don't, don't talk like that. You know, that's not how I sound. I hope that's not how I sound. So it's, sometimes it goes a little too much, um, in the over-friendly side, but that's one of the tricks that I use is I tell it. And the other thing that I have done that I found really successful, and I would love people to steal this is I've created digital twins of buyers. And that's something I've created a digital twin of my boss. And in order to do that, I uploaded, um, samples of his writing, emails, chats, um, video transcripts, uh, from video calls and things like that. Again, this is not for the public. This is for me. So it, and keeping his, his, his stuff private, but this is, so if I have an idea and I want to bounce it off him, I bounce it off his digital twin. And I say, you know, constructive feedback in his style. And then it's like, oh, well, he'll ask about this and he'll ask about that. And that's how I can craft things, hopefully knowing that it'll get approved by him a lot faster. And we advise a lot of our poor hosts to do this with your ICP. So take your ICP. What is your ideal buyer and test things on that? Um, is it going to be a perfect a hundred percent of the time? No. But again, if you know your user so well, and you can say, what do you think about this product? What do you think about this new service option? That digital twin should hopefully be able to construct it and give you feedback to help you a little bit more. And it's doing stuff that you used to pay thousands of dollars and lots of time doing focus groups, right? Everyone B2B do it, B2C do it. You don't have to do that anymore. Yeah. I think that, um, if we sort of tie that together with what we talked about around problem, problem, problem led narrative, um, uh, the, the B2C online stores are looking for the ways that they can do this at scale. And, um, I can imagine that that would be one way to sort of formulate, uh, more problem focused, um, sort of research. Reasons for buying or sort of aligning to the, the, the reasons that, um, that shoppers are interested in, in products, but sort of scaling that up to do it with many products, with many types of, of categories of products. Even, um, do you think that's possible right now? Or is that sort of, or are we not quite there? I think that's the tough part, right? Um, you could make thousands of digital twins of people who might buy every single product. Um, that's possible. I don't know if there's a tool that can help you do that at scale. So I think it's a very manual process right now. Um, but again, I think if you were to pull it back to your positioning again of like, okay, maybe if I run a camping store, I don't need a digital twin for the sleeping bags and then the tent. And then, but like, who would buy camping gear? Who would buy a cookware? Who would, you know, you, maybe you can pull it up a level and, um, you know, the, in B2B we have the luxury of, we sell one thing, right. To a lot of different people, but I have a customer support software. That's it. So I want people, I need to make persona for the different buyers, but I'm doing one product. B2C, obviously it's a little bit different. And now you have marketplaces and you have other areas that make this more dynamic. So I think that's the challenge right now is if you get stuck in the weeds, you could make thousands of digital twins and ask them thousands of questions over, you know, hours, hours of time. Um, I would say again, to start at the top, start with the, the why of that particular kind of category of product. And then maybe you can get more granular as you go on. That would be my advice. If I were running a B2C marketing team, I would say, let's start with the low hanging fruit. Let's start. Sorry. I use that phrase a lot. It's very corporate jargony, but let's start with the quick wins, the easy win, and then work our way down from there is what I would advise. I think that's a great place to end this conversation. If, um, listeners were just to sort of remember one thing from, from this whole chat we've had, well, what would you like that to be? I would like that to be to future-proof your business by focusing on what you do, who you do it for and why they should use you. Definitely know your customers so well and know them inside and out, and then you can build from there, but you need to get your position down. That's the thing that's going to help you beat China. It's going to help you navigate and survive market turmoil. It's going to help you survive technological advances in AI. If you know who you are and why you do and who you do it for, then hopefully you can build that brand and then you don't have to rely on all of these other technologies and, and, and situations to be in your favor because they're not always going to be in your favor. Excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Great.