Unlocking The Modern Buyer's Journey In The Age Of AI

Kailey Raymond: Today's B2B marketing landscape demands a refresh. The traditional strategies are being overtaken by new ways of thinking aimed at engaging customers in the way that they like to buy. By engaging clients earlier in the funnel and figuring out where marketing dollars add the most value, we can make more meaningful connections and smarter channel choices that ultimately lead to happier customers. I'm joined by Antonia Wade to discuss how today's marketer should adapt in the world of AI when it comes to defining their buyer journey. From spotting the disconnects and customer journey mapping to strategizing on how to efficiently move your prospects from awareness to decision, today, you'll get several steps closer to understanding your buyers better.

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Kailey Raymond: Welcome to Good Data, Better Marketing, the podcast where we speak with influential marketers and digital innovators and learn their tricks of the trade. They help us understand exactly what good data is and share stories about how they create digital experiences that stick. I'm Kailey Raymond and I lead campaigns and ABM here at Twilio Segment, and I'm your host. And with me today for this special CDP Live edition, I have Antonia Wade, the global CMO of PwC and the author of the book, Transforming the B2B Buying Journey. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

Antonia Wade: Well, thanks Kailey, I'm excited about the discussion. Thank you for having me on.

Kailey Raymond: We have a lot to talk about. And I wanted to start off by getting to know you and your career journey a little bit more deeply. As I understand it, prior to PwC, you've held leadership roles at some incredible companies like Capita and Thomson Reuters and Accenture. So really curious to hear about all those experiences have helped shape the way that you think about driving best in class customer engagement. How did you get to where you're today?

Antonia Wade: Well, that's a good question, actually. I started off studying architecture, so quite often people say to me, "How did you get from architecture to marketing?" Although, actually, I think there's quite a lot of synergies because in architecture you're looking at a combination of creativity, practicality, and of course you're always trying to design buildings that people wanna be in and use and that help them to do whatever they're doing in the building. So maybe not such an unnatural place to start. But, yeah, as you said, I kinda began my career, did various other things in a startup environment and in government. But really my marketing career really started at Accenture. I spent about 10 years there and it's a great place to go if you want to learn your craft as a marketer. They invest well in marketing, they hold it in high regard. I think that they really kind of invented account-based marketing, you mentioned that's part of your remits. And I was there at a really exciting time for Accenture where they really shifted strategy. They brought a new CMO into that role.

Antonia Wade: And I did a number of different jobs there. I started advising clients, then I moved into the UK marketing team, where it was all about raising the profile of the brand in the UK market. And then I moved into a global team where I was supporting the really big mega bids, the client loyalty programs through things like account-based marketing and looking at raising our brand profile around the world. So the whole systems integration, technology and outsourcing space. I also led marketing for several acquisitions and did internal communications for 50,000 odd people globally. So really expansive role, great career journey. And then I felt like I really wanted to do something that I wouldn't be able to do at Accenture. So I joined Thomson Reuters at a point at which they were really, their marketing team was basically a cost function and they were really looking to bring somebody in who could really transform how to think about marketing and how to do it. And I'm really proud of the work that we did there. We took it from being a cost to a real revenue generator for that company, first of all in Europe and then in global roles.

Antonia Wade: And that was a very exciting time where we were really using the technology to be able to understand the commercial impact of the work that we were doing. And so that was, yeah, a great time to be at Thomson Reuters. I then moved into Capita, which is a UK professional services firm, kind of laughably now 'cause I actually wanted, I've got two small children and I wanted to be in the UK more and I was traveling a lot in that global role in Thomson Reuters. But of course Covid came along. So I could've carried on doing a global role and been at home anyway. But yeah, that was a very interesting environment because they'd been on a big inorganic growth strategy. They'd bought a lot of companies, and so it's really about rebranding, repositioning the brand, integrating all of these acquired companies. And, again, a very digital technology-led transformation where we were looking to come onto a single CRM, we re-platform the website and, again, really looking to marketing as a driver for growth, again, with account-based marketing being a core part of that. And then to PwC. And it's a wonderful company to work in, PwC, and I have a really exciting role here. So I look after what I believe is one of the world's greatest brands. So that's strategies positioning, but it's also governance and guidelines around how we think about our brands, helping to manage our reputation as well as kind of commercial side of brand.

Antonia Wade: We look after the global campaigns that support our priorities. So things like transformation, climate, trust. So, again, very exciting. We produce a lot of excellent thought leadership. So strategy and business, for example, is a PwC publication, is one of the world's leading business publications. So that's a great thing that the team does. CEO survey, which we've just put out, which we might come and talk a little bit about in a minute. I look after the business requirements into our technology stack, so that's into our CRM system and our dot com platform. And then I also have a team of people who are looking at driving best practice across sales and marketing. For example, I just launched a marketing academy last year, which touches all of our marketers around the world. So exciting, expansive role, I get to see a lot of the world. I get to see a lot of different ways in which cultures and organizations respond to and react to marketing. And, yeah, I'm pretty proud of the work that we're already doing as part of the, driving PwC's growth.

Kailey Raymond: That's really exciting. We're incredibly lucky to have you here with your wealth of experience and PwC's really unique visibility into some of the trends that the C-suite is paying attention to. I wanna start there, as you mentioned, which is, I wanna get your take on this year 2023, a bit of a tricky year, efficiency was kind of a top priority for most businesses, really, like the global debut of AI, if you will, is like a household name, and let's say like a confusing economy [chuckle] at times. I wanted you to comment about some of the macro trends that are impacting marketing and customer engagement.

Antonia Wade: Yeah, thanks. So PwC does an annual CEO survey, we just released it. And it's a really great source of data about how the world's CEOs are seeing various trends. I guess one of the key headlines that we took away from it was, 45% of CEOs don't think that their current business model will survive the next decade. And that's trending upwards from where it was a couple of years ago. So that means that radical business model reinvention is on everybody's minds. And of course AI is an enabler of that. So we spoke to CEOs about how they're looking at AI, at the moment it sort of seems to be more in that kind of productivity, kind of supplementing humans type space. But, certainly, some of the more progressive CEOs that I speak to are really starting to try and be less incremental about how they're seeing it and less about productivity or, yes, it's about productivity, but it's also about being able to drive a different level of innovation and creativity, which is quite exciting. As you say, a bit more of a blended picture in terms of the economic outlook. And it really depends on where people are in the world. I mean, just come back off Davos, last year's Davos, we had a war in Europe and it felt quite negative, was a bit more positive this year.

Antonia Wade: However, clearly in some parts of the world, the economy is shrinking and we are seeing some of our clients, in fact some of our competitors starting to look at their headcounts and where they're allocating resources. So I think that'll be an ongoing trend. So radical transformation, really looking at productivity, thinking about AI. And then of course climate, always climate. We are in a world that is a planet that is heating up and that will impact all businesses, whether they are immediately affected by that or affected by in a more downstream way. And when we think about it in PwC, we think about this turbulence that's happening in the world today. One of the things that really underpins it, it's quite interesting to see that this was actually the theme of Davos this year, is trust. So who do you trust? How do you grow a business in a way that engenders trust? How do you go above and beyond what's expected in order for customers or investors to feel like they can trust your business to do what it says it's doing?

Kailey Raymond: That makes perfect sense to me. That that was the theme of the year, especially with AI coming into the forefront and people really not necessarily knowing exactly where it fits into the picture. I like this idea, this very provocative idea that you're bringing to the table, that businesses may not be viable in the next decade if they keep running the way that they're running. And you are saying it really boils down to this idea of efficiency at the end of the day. We've seen that here at Segment a little bit too. We just released a report, it's called a CDP report, and one of the findings was that there's been this rise in destination adoption, which initially might feel like it's the exact opposite of the point that I wanna make, but actually these two things come together really well. So it has to do with how businesses are navigating digital transformation.

Kailey Raymond: So while they have this whole suite of applications that are catering to these specialized needs, there's also this push towards integrating these disparate systems into a cohesive ecosystem to build that trusted data center. And so we're obviously one example of how you do that, but at the end of the day, seamlessly bringing together all of these different applications into one single place, helps improve and drive a lot of that efficiency and reduce that complexity, which at the end of the day seems like the C-suite is saying, less silos that's making businesses not viable. That's really interesting. Beyond macro, I want your comments on B2B trends. What do you wanna take note of this year?

Antonia Wade: Yeah, so there are some things that have been going on a while and are accelerating and then I think some new things. So for a long time, B2B marketers, I think, have been wrestling with what I think is an unhelpful trade-off between brand and sort of demand generation. As I talk about in the book, and we might talk about a bit later, these two things are the same and certainly in professional services, brand is as important at point of decision as it is right at the outset. And so this sort of arbitrary handoff and really working through the sales and marketing dynamic, and how does that work in a world where customers are more and more judging the quality of what they're gonna get from a company by the experience that they get across all the channels. So this multiple channel approach, that will continue, account-based marketing has always been important in B2B, particularly, if you are selling things that are expensive and complicated, there's probably not that many people who are gonna buy them. And so really being thoughtful about how do you bring your message to a small number of people. And I continue to challenge some of the ways in which both the timeframes and the types of metrics that B2B marketers are trying to use to signify success, which is not very helpful because they're based on volume, which is more of a consumer marketing way of seeing the world.

Antonia Wade: So those things were always happening, they'll continue to happen, I think, as people are starting to look at costs, to being able to tell a strong story about return on investment over a short and long-term will continue to be really important for B2B marketers. But then, of course, we've got this wonderful opportunity in GenAI and in digital and data across the board. So if you think about digital and data, I mean, suddenly, I feel like the marketing platforms, dot coms for example, are holding a huge amount of insights into clients and prospects that was always thought about as being in the preserve of sales or account management. And that's just no longer true because people are choosing to engage digitally throughout their whole client life cycle. And I think it's something like 75% of senior buyers are now millennials. So the whole channel choice has changed and marketers have just not really, B2B marketers has not really yet unlocked that power of really having that insight. And then, of course, we are all, even irrespective of what size business I've worked in and the clients I speak to, no one ever feels like they've got enough money for marketing because you're having to market to groups of people in a consistent way over a long period of time.

Antonia Wade: And those groups of people are playing multiple different roles as they're making decisions about who they want to choose to supply them with services or goods. And that involves tremendous amount of output in a marketing in order to be able to service all of those needs. That's been impossible. At the beginning of my career, that was not possible. Now I get very excited about the potential of AI to really be able to scale and bring relevance to individuals and at client level, at the point at which they are engaging with your materials. So that is all wide open space, I think, for us.

Kailey Raymond: There's a lot here to unpack. I like this idea that you're bringing to the table about what has really been this tension between brand and demand generation and really how these two things are the same and need to work together in a really cohesive way. Also, this idea that you're pulling through of the way that B2C has really changed the way that we think about B2B in terms of some of the metrics that we look at, like the rise of digital really propelled this, with businesses obviously increasing their online presence, really creating that demand for us to create those really cohesive omni-channel journeys. Just the way that consumer brands do. And the complexity of the idea of the buying committee where, what is it? Like, 12 to 15 people need to purchase something, there's no one person that's purchasing. And that stat that you said that that's gonna be in my brain forever of 75% of buyers are now millennials. I think a couple of jaws might have just dropped to the floor when you said that. So there's a lot, a lot here we're gonna talk about. What I want is your unique take on this B2B funnel. You wrote the book on this. What is the B2B funnel? What is it not? Tell me a little bit more about the work that you've been doing with your book.

Antonia Wade: Yeah, so we talked a little bit about some of the metrics, but, actually, I find the concept of the funnel not very helpful in B2B, because it implies a kind of single. Well, you wanna get out to a big volume market and push people into the hands of sales to the point of purchase as fast as possible. You're looking at things like conversion rates, velocity. And that I find to be for the types of services that PwC, Accenture, Thomson Reuters sell, that isn't a really very helpful way of looking at the world. And if you think about the types of... Some of the things that we sell can take many years, honestly. And to your point, you've got 15 people involved in a buying cycle, that's not a funnel momentum, which then pushes you towards this idea of short-termness, velocity, costly return. Now, you have to be commercial and you have to get return on investment. That's just not how buyers buy. That's how sales or organizations want us to sell. And so when I wrote the book, I just took on a little bit this idea of the unhelpfulness of the funnel because it leads to a short-termism, it leads to this disconnect between sales and marketing. In my opinion, it leads to a focus on moving the buyer at the rate of your business as opposed to meeting them where they are for the needs that they have.

Antonia Wade: So what I talk about instead, is the buyer journey. And I try and think about, well, at each stage of the journey, what are these groups of people trying to do? Are they the same at each part of the journey? Probably not. How do you think about your target addressable market at each point of the journey, so you can make sure that the data that you have, that you're collecting, and a way in which your marketing and the choices of channel are right for where people are in their process. And how do you maintain a level of being, of marketing, being there to service the needs of the buyer as opposed to service the need of sales. So it's a different way of thinking about B2B. It also takes into account account-based marketing. And what I talk about there is, that what happens when, to that buyer journey if somebody already knows you and how does it change or not as a result of that. And two different elements of account-based marketing one, which is about driving loyalty. The other which is about expanding share of wallets and them not being quite the same thing because you would do something different in order to achieve each of the objectives. So what I'm trying to do in the book is to say that, against each stage of the buyer journey, let's reframe what we think the objectives are. Let's have a different conversation with our businesses about how long people are likely to spend in each phase.

Antonia Wade: Let's use what we know about the buyers to target them better and more precisely without thinking about volume and velocity, but instead thinking about meaningful connections with people who really matter at that point in the process and making the right channel choices around that. And then managing expectations around, how do you think about return on investment linked to the buyer's process as opposed to sales annual compensation.

Kailey Raymond: Really insightful. And really what you're doing is you're taking a user-centered approach to building the buyer's journey, which I think is, absolutely spot on. You're speaking a lot of the language that I like to speak every day to my team. I'm wondering, practically, how does one go about doing that? If I'm sitting here and I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna build my own journey and make sure that I'm getting the buy-in from my cross-functional stakeholders." what are some of those steps? What endeavor does one need to take in order to make their buying journey their own here?

Antonia Wade: Yeah, so the first thing you need to do is to create it with your business. So you need to really understand from sales, account teams, product teams, whoever it is, like what do you think is going on and what are the decisions you think the clients are making? And then you should validate and test that with clients and ask them about their process and who was involved and why do they get involved at this stage. And let me give you an example from a previous role, we thought when we were looking at scoring leads for example, we looked at seniority and we sort of equated a high level of seniority to a higher propensity to buy. Actually, when we started to test it with clients, what we found was that it was senior people who instigated the project, but they then delegated it to their teams in order to do the research and to come up with a recommendation. So, actually, a shift from a more senior buyer to a more junior buyer was actually a better indicator that they were actually getting ready to buy something. So you have to be prepared to challenge your preconceptions around some of these things and really like take that insight from the clients and your internal teams around what's actually happening here? What's going on? Must be the first thing to do.

Antonia Wade: The second thing to do then is to agree, what does somebody look like when they're at each phase? And when do we think that they're moving from one phase to the next? What types of behaviors would we see? And I wouldn't restrict that to marketing, like just, it's quite an open and expansive conversation, but then do a bit of a thought around, well, huh, that's interesting. So if we are saying that people are more likely to look for this type of information, if they're in this phase and in this phase, then actually if they then come and ask for a fact sheet or go to a webinar that's about this, they're probably here, not here. So it kind of allows you to assess your marketing activities and tactics against a framework that feels like it's about the buyer and asking people, what information are you looking for? At what point of the decision process? The last thing to do is to really allow yourself some time and space to go on a transformation journey. 'Cause probably, and as I said in the book, probably a large percentage of your budget is being spent for you. It'll be that event that we always go to, it'll be, we need to update this because that's the time of year. And so how much of the work is actually in service of the buyer and have you really critically thought about versus you do it because you've always done it.

Antonia Wade: And that is a quite a challenging conversation to have. So I recommend, you've sort of articulated the buyer process first, and what's the real problem that you wanna spend your marketing dollars solving? And if you are trying to create a new market, you have to allow time and space for that. And the channels you would use is really different. Then you might say, "Actually, this year we've just got a load of pent-up locked pipeline." you would do something very different. So trying to figure out, what is the buyer trying to do? What does your business actually need to spend marketing dollars on and be prepared to have no sacred cows in that.

Kailey Raymond: Nothing is precious, that makes perfect sense. That insight that you're talking about with the buyer. We typically score somebody with a higher seniority title a little bit higher than we would a manager, that's really interesting. And it also ties back to that idea of demand generation and brand where a brand might hit somebody more of the C-suite and then demand generation, the more tactical and the weird stuff might hit somebody more of a manager title and both things are working together in tandem. So that's really interesting for me personally to think about today. We've mentioned AI a couple of different times. So this buzzword of AI, how does this get inserted into the B2B journey? I know we talk about AI chatbots, sometimes that seems to be the one that everybody seems to be adopting at the very least these days, we've talked about predictive audiences, there's generative content, where does this fit into your B2B journey? Where should we be testing AI? Any good use cases for us to look to?

Antonia Wade: Yeah, so for the type of business I'm in, it's more about generating content, because if you think about, you've got this buying group, let's say there's 12 people in a buying group, and say it takes you two years to engage them from beginning to end. Let's make numbers easy. And then you've got to say, "Okay, well, they're also playing three different roles." So you've got Kailey who's the representative of your business, so that's the brand element. You've also got your job as the member of the buying group and you're an individual. You happen to prefer digital content, I happen to prefer something different. Like all of these things. So you are catering to people at three different levels over a long time period and each of them is playing a different functional role as well as being different individuals. It's really challenging for any marketing organization to be able to scale into that, just is, it's just there's too much. And, actually, the more tools that we put in around marketing automation, really immersive digital experiences always on media, that is a really hungry, endeavor.

Antonia Wade: And typically if you have small teams producing really high value content, they simply just don't have enough time to be able to do it in all the different formats, to be testing different personality styles through it, to be trying it in different lengths and time. So all of that stuff. I get very excited about AI and the role that AI can play in helping you to scale your message, make it more relevant and meet your clients where they're.

Kailey Raymond: That makes perfect sense. Generative content, I think, is really an interesting place for us to think about. And what we've seen is, in their growth report from last year, marketers were saying that they were going to spend more on AI driven campaigns in the next 12 months, that's no surprise. I think it was like over over half the people saying that they were going to be investing in this, which is just a recipe for a lot of experimentation this year, which is really exciting. But I might put myself on the side of more of like the AI caution, the alarm bells kind of ring in my mind, especially, it's an election year here in the states. Generative AI can be a double-edged sword allowing us to personalize content in seconds. But also these factories exist that are creating a whole lot of noise with AI content that's entering the marketing hoard. So, I guess, I'm wondering, going back to this idea of trust that you brought up at the very beginning of this conversation, and really future proofing your marketing engine to be able to cut through some of that digital noise and build those real relationships with customers. Really long-winded way of asking, but are there any pitfalls that we should avoid in the B2B journey, AI or otherwise?

Antonia Wade: Well, I think there's a few things. So firstly, on the point around AI, I think we all need to be quite careful about how we're thinking about and talking about AI to our businesses, because if you only put it in as a productivity enhancer, what you're basically doing is asking for a cost reduction. And I think that that is not a helpful conversation. And I remember, 'cause I'm kind of old, when all the digital and social came in and everyone was like, "Oh great, that's really cheap. And so therefore we can cut marketing budgets." Actually, that's not to [0:26:00.4] ____.

Kailey Raymond: There is a lot money to do that.

Antonia Wade: It was quite hard, it was quite hard to do it and it's still, you still need the strategic thinking and the creativity and the rest of it. So that's one thing to think about. I do think, I agree with you, you need to be very mindful of how you're getting to people and making sure that you're not kind of creepy. We are very, very careful about who we put our brand and logo next to because we really, we believe that that has a real value to it and integrity. So I'd encourage all of you to just be really thoughtful about who you are gifting your brand equity to. When I think about the B2B, the question more broadly, I think there's a few pitfalls. First of all, not having really good contracting with your sales organization around, what does a lead actually look like? What does a ready lead look like? Are we clearer enough about that? And if we're gonna play around with and test different scenario types in that, let's contract for that and know that we're testing that. But rather than getting to this whole like, "Oh, marketing just gives us terrible leads and then marketing, like sales never follows up on our leads." and we've all been there.

Antonia Wade: So that's the first thing to say and I think you really need to contract quite closely with that. I also think having shared KPIs, again, I talk about this in the book, like what are the things that marketing can give to sales in terms of KPI commitment and vice versa? So at Thomson Reuters for example, I took a target, but I could also give forgiveness on commission if people were doing thought leadership, taking part in events in different ways. So...

Kailey Raymond: Smart.

Antonia Wade: Thinking about that and how you can kind of have joint incentives, I think, is pretty important too. Doing what you've always done is a really big pitfall in B2B and really taking that time to challenge yourself about whether this really is the thing that's gonna move the needle for you commercially. That's the thing I see over and over again whenever I take on new teams, honestly, they're doing the same plan that they've done for the last five years. And you can just get so much more growth if you just challenge yourself to do something different, but you're having to have some tough conversations. So I guess those would be some of the things, oh sorry, one last one actually, trying to think of that end to end. Don't just think of a piece of it. 'Cause if you only think of a piece of it and you haven't thought about what you want clients to do next, you haven't thought about what the next stage of the buyer journey is and you have a broken journey, you are just gonna waste all of that money, 'cause you're just gonna lose all the interest. And sometimes if you do that, you might not get them back and that's where your competitors will come in and take them from you.

Kailey Raymond: It's also intentional what you're talking about. As somebody that has worked in both sales and marketing, I can really empathize with this idea of making sure that you have collaborative goals, what's that handshake? Where are you meeting each other in the middle and really speaking the same language, because you and I both know we could change the definition of a lead over and over and over again and that's not gonna really get us anywhere unless we're speaking the exact same language and know what quality. And at the end of the day, it's the dollars that matter. What I'm really interested to learn more about here is, at each stage of the funnel, you're creating this really intentional journey that's unique to you and your business. And with that you're really intentionally mapping channels, you're really intentionally mapping, costs different stages and the ability to do this is, the foundation is data, building accurate audiences, tracking those funnel conversions, it all really has to do with the ability to have really quality data to track the results. So namesake of the show, Antonia, how would you define good data?

Antonia Wade: Well, I think that good data is, it sounds so obvious, it's accurate data. There are not that many people in the world who can buy some of the types of services that PwC sells. So there's no real excuse for not knowing exactly who they're and getting some real insight into them. And so that's the first thing. And you're putting a lot of your investment against trying to reach a very senior but quite predictable audience in terms of who you're trying to get in front of. So good data for me looks like it represents where you're gonna get your, make your money and it needs to be accurate. If you don't have accurate data, then it's worth spending money on thinking about how you get accurate data. Let me give you an example of how we did that in marketing. Thomson Reuters is a good one. So there was a piece of regulation that was coming in. We knew that everyone would've to comply with this regulation, but they didn't know how ready they were. So we built this digital diagnostic tool, which is very helpful to our clients and prospects as they were trying to figure out their strategy around what they needed to do to comply with this regulation. But they had to give us a lot of information in order to get that diagnostic and that gave a very insightful lead to both marketing and sales.

Antonia Wade: So that's what I mean, like you should be using. And so if you don't have good data, you should use the marketing channels and creativity you have to get very good pure data, good insight and intelligent, not just, "Oh, I know that Antonia Wade is their global CMO." but like what do you really know about me? And how do you use some of the channels and assets that you've got in order to extract that insight in a meaningful way. So that's the first thing. The second thing you need, I think, is good data around your metrics. So being clear about what are you measuring? What does success look like? How are you measuring attribution? How are you talking about what's a marketing supported lead or whatever the narrative is around it? Because if you can't talk about the commercial impact that you are having through numbers, you will lose the confidence of the board and you will therefore get a cut in your budget. So those are the two different types of data sources that I think about. One is, really, will help you to get much more insight, precision through your paid media spend, good insights in terms of content worth spending money on marketing to get good information. And the second is, how are you getting good data on the other side of it to show that you've got that return on investment and you did what you said that you would do.

Kailey Raymond: I wanna learn about the input side of things a little bit more. I'm wondering if you have any examples of a tactic or a program that's leveraging some of these rich insights and this good data to develop and to bring somebody closer to a purchase for you.

Antonia Wade: Yeah, so there's a few ways we think about it. So sometimes we're building digital diagnostics where there's a bit of an exchange of information. So you give clients something and they in return, they're giving you kind of a sense of what they're interested in, and industry they're in or whatever it is, and that seems like a reasonable value exchange. Another way of doing it is, often as we are doing kind of data and thought leadership, we then provide an additional level of insight in order to be able to have a conversation or be able to engage them with a secondary piece of content, and get their input into that, so then to create the next piece of content. 'Cause what that does is it brings that relationship building much sooner than actually engaging with your human beings. So that's another way of doing it. We work hard in our account-based marketing efforts to really deeply understand the clients at an individual and at a company level. We use that to inform the creative that we bring, so for example, there was something we did recently where the CEO of one of our clients had come in from the fashion retail sector, and so even though that wasn't the sector that our client was in, we created this beautiful fashion like looking magazine as a way of capturing her attention and engaging with her in a different way.

Antonia Wade: So I think there are a number of ways you can do it, but for us, it's all about thinking through how can we use the insight to give more value to clients, to attract their attention in a different way in order to build that relationship and start that relationship building as higher, as soon as we can in the journey.

Kailey Raymond: I love that insight. And the creativity that the data can lend of actually building something that's really unique to that individual that would really speak to them, that's ABM at its absolute best.

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Kailey Raymond: As we kick off 2024, at the beginning of the show you were saying that nearly half of CEOs are basically saying, "We can't keep running this way, it's not sustainable." so we're kind of in this year of reinvention, it's the year of the dragon, growth, progress. So where are you focusing your teams on this year? What's new for 2024?

Antonia Wade: Well, I'm giving away my age by telling you that the year of the dragon is my year, so I have a very special place in my heart for this year. So there's a few areas that my team is looking at. Firstly, how do we drive greater relevance, consistency, and coherence through what we do across channels? So how are we thinking about that as a series of client or market conversations through a multichannel experience of being kind of end to end, not just in terms of how we're engaging with clients, but also in terms of how we're thinking about the various different channels to market. The second is, continuing to do AB testing or even ABC testing, test and learn is just the way forward. This idea that, you know how, whether something is gonna work and how it's gonna work just isn't true and particularly in this very transformational environment. So you kind of have to be always on and always testing in order to be able to show progress and to keep up with the times. We are definitely indexing into digital, so strategy and business, I just mentioned before, that was a paper-based kind of magazine, we've brought that all online. That means that we get great insights into what our clients like reading about, but it also gives a really great digital experience for them and meets them where they are.

Antonia Wade: So continuing to really challenge ourselves with like, are we meeting our clients where they want us to be and are we digitally and technology enabled? And then, of course, always trying to stay close to what's happening in the market. And as we're talking about these kind of big topics and issues around sustainability, for example, how do we do that in a way that feels like it has optimism and boldness associated with it and not fall into that trope of like the doom and gloom and despair of the world today. So how do we remain optimistic and positive about the future of the planet and of this 50%? So.

Kailey Raymond: I appreciate you doing that because it can be tough to sometimes look at the headlines and continue to feel optimistic. So thank you, Antonia, for your work there.

Antonia Wade: You're welcome.

Kailey Raymond: I'm wondering if you have anybody that you look to for inspiration. Who do you think is doing it right and building really great customer journeys and customer engagement?

Antonia Wade: I think there are lots of companies that are doing it right in both B2C and in B2B, a lot to even mention. If I try and sort of aggregate the trends of those that I think are doing a really good job, I definitely see those that are looking to bring an emotional response to the stuff that they're doing. You talked before about, all of this stuff that's in the market and those that really are striving to create some sort of emotional connection, whether that's at a brand level, whether it's at an asset level, something that give me a solicit, a kind of, I don't know, emotional response. I think that those are pretty successful. I like to see brands that are really looking at the experience across all of the channels and giving me predictable as well as a relevant experience across channels. It's always disappointing, isn't it? Where you feel like you've had one experience through, I don't know, advertising and then you actually get into the store or whatever and it's a completely different experience. And so I think that there's something about, how do you bring a sense of uniformity across the experience and we see some of the world's best companies doing that exceptionally well.

Antonia Wade: So something about the emotional elements, something about that kind of relevance but also predictability in this uncertain world, it's reassuring that some brands just can consistently deliver for you. And then I think the last thing that I would say is that, and again it speaks to this idea of like there's so much going on, really challenging yourself, like brands are really challenging themselves to have a very different point of view on things, even if it's in tone right around optimism. There's something about that that I think good brands do extremely successfully.

Kailey Raymond: That's really great. And one of the things when I talk to, especially, B2B marketers that always comes through is, just that idea of emotion, that idea of bringing humanity back to a lot of the work that you're doing every single day. I think that for a long time, perhaps, we index a little bit too far into the jargon business language and hopefully now we're realizing that at the end of the day, those 12 to 15 to whoever many buyers there are, are just humans and they wanna make sure that they're connecting emotionally with your brand as well. Last question before I let you off the hook today. What's the best piece of advice that you would give to somebody that's looking to uplevel their customer engagement strategies?

Antonia Wade: I would say, of course, insights goes without saying. But really I think I would say be brave. You are gonna get the same thing you always got if you just continue doing what you're doing. And most companies have pretty aggressive growth targets, most companies that I speak to, and you're gonna have to do something different. You can't do what you did for the last 10 years if you're gonna achieve that. And so I would just say be brave, challenge everything we talked about, no sacred cows, being commercial, using insights, but do that in service of being prepared to make a difference and do something else. Yeah, I would really encourage you, if you feel like you're rinsing or repeating on the plan from last year, just to take a moment and really challenge yourself, that that's gonna give you the satisfaction that you all probably deserve from the thing that you spend most of your day doing. So that's how I would be, be brave.

Kailey Raymond: That's my motto going into Q1, I'm bringing it back to my team, be brave from one B2B marketer to another. Antonia, thank you so much from being here, I learned a ton and I love your ideas around kind of the future of B2B marketing and how you're installing that at PwC, thank you.

Antonia Wade: Thank you for having me.

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