3 Ways A.I. Can Help

Speaker A: Hey there, it's Paul with the right way. And welcome to the latest episode of uh, B2B marketing, how to Stand Out. Um, it's a podcast that uh, focuses on proven strategies from the 15 plus years that we've spent helping tech companies, uh, stand out and win. Ah, today we're going to speak to Frank, uh, Arundell. Um, he's a, uh, fractional CMO and also an AI strategist. Um, we talked to Frank about a couple of really interesting topics. Um, number one, how do you know that um, your company is AI ready? Uh, number two, M, how can we use AI to help us with our go to market messaging? And number three, um, you know, how can we apply AI to um, the critical area of customer support? So you're a pretty interesting guy. Uh, on your LinkedIn profile, you know, it says know CMO and also chief, you know, AI officer. And you know, kind of what I wanted to um, talk to you a little about, a little bit about, and you know, a lot of the um, the marketing leaders that I'm kind of talking to now, you know, everybody's talking about, you know, how, how can we get AI, uh, into our marketing program to kind of make it more automated, more efficient, you know, to sort of take, take away or take out a lot of the um, kind of the, you know, this shovel and spade work, if you want to use that term, that the heavy lift, um, of our marketing campaigns, you know, you know, how can we uh, how can we use AI to do that? Um, I was kind of hoping to get your uh, perspective on that. Of course you're, you're also focusing a little bit on the customer service side as well, which you know, I wanted to talk to you, ask you about that, but just kind of as a general question, um, you know, what are your thoughts on right now? Um, you know, everybody's talking about AI companies are trying to uh, kind of get it implemented, uh, in kind of what I would call fits and starts. You know, nobody seems to uh, have really, uh, the company, at least the companies and the leaders that I've spoken with, nobody seems to have really nailed it yet. Um, and then you've got, you know, some of these great tools that are coming along.

Speaker B: Do you have the talent would be maybe, uh, it's a stupid questions, but I think it's interesting to know that the second thing is easy organizations set up for uh, AI readiness. Because I say that because if you want to do, uh, if you want to leverage AI automations, you are going to use OpenAI you are going to use cloud and you are going to have the data flowing away. But I can benchmark you against your industry. I can tell you if you are doing better or um, not doing better than your industry. In addition, I can calculate your return on investment for the next three years based on the data. And I can tell you if your customer lifetime value is going to grow, if your churn rate is going to reduce. Yeah, what going to go. So I, uh, and I leverage AI to do that.

Speaker A: So this, that is the first thing. Yeah, so this is really big, you know, ah, at least you know, with, with a lot of the clients that, you know, that I've worked with, uh, who are in the SaaS industry. Uh, you know, I see different churn rates. You know, it could be 2 or 3%, it could be as high as 5% depending on, you know, the company. And, and this is, you know, like, uh, you know, monthly, you know, five, four, five would be a little bit on the high end. You know, maybe two, two or three would be. This was, this was, you know, these were companies that, you know, um, kind of I worked with in the last few years. Uh, but give me, give me your perspective on, on, um, you know, I think the way I like to look at marketing, um, and actually, um, you know, I like to kind of pull back a little bit and try to look at kind of the bigger picture of like the three key systems of a, of a, of a company and an organization and taking a look at like the lead generation, you know, the marketing piece, you know, uh, the sales piece and then the customer support piece. You know, how well are we bringing in customers? How well are we, you know, making offers and um, you know, uh, I should say bringing in prospects. And then how well are we making offers to actually bring in customers? And then how, how well are we keeping those customers by satisfying and to use a HubSpot term, delighting them? Um, but to me, so all of those things are kind of linked together. But, um, when you start looking at churn, um, it's really, um, a lot of it has to do with the onboarding process, I think. And are they fully onboarded and just different steps, you know, after you actually sign, um, the contract. But um, you know, how do you look at AI helping out with, you know, reducing churn? What are some things that you see AI being able to do, uh, that will help companies, you know, from the, you know, the onboarding to customer support and just kind of, you know, uh, keeping customers engaged, you know, week to Week. I find that a lot of the companies that I talk with who, um, tend to have a problem with churn, They're. They're not, um, perhaps there's not enough, uh, they're not enough touch points with the customers, you know, week to week or, you know, even multiple times a week. And they're kind of just letting. Kind of letting these relations sort of get away from them a little bit. Uh, you know, keeping the customers engaged, I think, is a really key point there. But, you know, how do you, how do you see AI as kind of helping with this, you know, in just a few bullet points?

Speaker B: So, uh, if I take. I'm going to take two, uh, future. I'm going to take the acquisition process.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So AI, uh, AI can be used to optimize your conversion rate and scale your advertising. So when I was talking about lead generation. Yes, for lead generation. I'm talking first for lead generation. So you can reduce the investment of marketing you spend and make it more efficient with AI by doing more personalization. That's one thing. And, uh, I can go in detail, but let's move to the retention that you talk about. If you know about your retention churn, you need to identify where is the churn? Where do you bleed? Do you bleed on onboarding or do you bleed on your ongoing communications? Which means does the churn is because your customer leave after six months or do they leave after 12 months? Because the churn is related to customer lifetime value. And, uh, AI allow you to analyze all the touch points and it allow you to qualify the engagement at every touch point.

Speaker A: Uh-huh.

Speaker B: And it allow you to quantify the risk of losing your customers. And this is where AI come in. And after it. It really depends on the organizations and on your business. But how do you communicate with your customers? What channel do you use? And, um, if you have a clear map between channel content and you can measure the, and quantify, uh, the data, you know exactly where to act and what to do. Yeah. Because you will have the ability to. And AI can do that.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And, uh, what I think is interesting with AI is uh, it can pinpoint with immediate win. And I think this is, um, what I share with you, the system I develop. Really identify in your business first between acquisition, retention, customer support. Hm. Which area are you really, uh, suffering? The second aspect is for each area you can go deeper in detail about where are you bleeding in customer support? Uh, is it because you spend too much time? That's one amazing, um, output, by the way you look at Customer support and uh, the cost of a ticket is about let's say $150 per customers. And you discover that not only you take multiple call to resolve an issue, but you spend too much time on it. And implementing a very smart chatbot as an assistant can resolve 70% of these problems. And that has been demonstrated with uh, agent Salesforce by the way.

Speaker A: So the main idea is to kind of get some of this low hanging fruit out of the way. You know the questions that can be answered fairly quickly and get an AI on board to sort of handle a lot of the kind of the low hanging fruit customer support questions that um, you don't really need to tie up an agent's time. And then if it needs to be escalated, if it's a more advanced concern, um, you can escalate from there. But is that the general idea?

Speaker B: If you can do things like that in parallel when you know about the foundation, the architecture of an organization.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You know how you are going to implement a chatbot if you are going to be able to do it. So as an example, how do you integrate AI platform on their server? So I'm going to take one uh, platform called N8N or DeFi. Very powerful platform to do, uh, chatbot.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Can the system, can the organizations um, be embracing this technology? Do the organization have a CDP customer data platform, uh, that gives you the data that you need in order to monitor your personalization in real time. Uh, there's a lot of uh, things that you have to find some parameter. But I think the first thing is really to understand where do you stand with your performance and how does it look like for the next three years. And when you get that you go after on acquisition, retention, customer support, world of math and you discover something very interesting. Like a lot of uh, your clients are doing is m the repeat business. Maybe they are suffering because they don't have a strategy for retentions. They don't have a product strategy. You are selling a CRM. When do you do after that? Mhm. Which in your strategy if you increase retentions by 15% over the year, maybe your, your revenue are going to grow by 20% because your customer lifetime value is going to grow. You are. So there's a lot of things like that that can be monitors.

Speaker A: Well keeping, I mean keeping a customer can, can be actually way more impactful on a business than, than um, sometimes trying to get a new customer. In some ways it is if you can also, you know, it's, it's you keeping that book of business but then also you can do you know, you can do different upsells or um, you know your customer that when you deliver results for that customer, you know they're, they're, you become a little bit more of kind of a proven, a proven uh, resource uh versus you know somebody who's just starting with you who might um, you know, might not uh, might kind of pick you know just an entry level program at first or what have you. Whereas somebody where you get them in, you get them in, you show some results, you know, um, then you can start, you know, you can upsell and you can increase the, you can do like a 90 day or, or a six month boot camp program and then you can upsell them into something else. So, so you know that, that's actually um, crazy important right now because it's, you've established that trust with that existing customer. And I found so many, so many companies, they have good marketing or they have a good product or they have good sales team. Uh, but they don't um, they don't keep the customer engaged. Uh, that's just kind of what I've seen. And so um, you know it sounds like AI is one way of kind of keeping, keeping your existing customers engaged

Speaker B: in AI is like um. The big failure of organization is uh. They start thinking about technology and AI but they have to think about process and orchestration first. Which means based on your issue, uh, or uh root cause of the problem you need to analyze the process. And after analyzing the process this is where you look at um, how your technology or structure of foundation are there in order to support the development that you're looking for. Because you are going to need data, you are going to need to um, process uh, email or etc. Etc. So a lot of company fail because they do the implementation of the applications before understanding they can do it. Yeah, that's why um, you have to work on MVP process and as soon as you get um. One thing easy to do is to understand the Martech and attack configurations and as soon as you have that you know right away what you are going to be able to do. Especially if you also understand the policy of governance of data governance or um, things like that.

Speaker A: You know I think you, I think you raised a really. I just before we, we move on I, I think you touched on a really important point is um, A lot of times you know the data, you know it hasn't been cleaned up. There isn't clarity on, on business strategy. I, I'm a big believer in so, so I Mostly focus on you know, helping companies with like their go to market messaging. And when I kind of dig into it, I, I tend to kind of go upstream. When I see that the messaging is not clear, I kind of go upstream and I see that, okay, maybe the business strategy isn't clear. Um, they have, they don't have a detailed icp, they haven't done the positioning and the differentiation, uh, steps. So I kind of see that. And so I always feel like everything kind of flows from clarity upstream. Um, and I kind of wanted to just get your thoughts on that. I mean before you just kind of go wild and implement AI. Um, I mean you've got to kind of get the fundamentals nailed, right? I mean you've got to have some, some systems that are already working. And the way I look at it is AI is almost kind of pouring gasoline on the fire. But you know, if you don't have a fire, boom, you don't, you don't have a fire. You got to light the fire first, right?

Speaker B: AI is an assistant. That's it. AI doesn't do the job and doesn't replace. AI is there to assist you perform better. And uh, uh I think with AI and if you are in a branding strategy, it's amazing for you because you can do uh, multivariate testing, you can do a b testing uh, like a crazy and you can do uh, 10 times better than what you used to do uh, 10 years ago. Maybe one at a time better. So AI can be, can be measured at every level of your marketing strategy. It's not only uh yeah, we talk about uh, we, we talk about, about lead pipeline, we talk about mql. But um, everything sync as a puzzle. Like uh, for instance I can do a super good job in leveraging AI, but I'm doing a marketing campaign right now and I can figure, I can think about the messaging is not going to important to be important and I'm going to talk about the product. Mhm. However, if you think about the leader, they don't care about the tools. They care about profit, growth and revenue. So if I talk about, hey, I have an amazing tools. All right. Tools. No, the messaging should be around. Yeah, I can help you grow, perform and generate the revenue for the next three years. So you can move from 1 billion to 5 billion. It's an example but it's. So the messaging is still important.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's more about that, but it's more about. You're saying it's more about the result than the tool, so to speak. I mean you have to focus a little bit more on what, you know, what result you can get and what efficiency you can get out of AI versus just focusing on. Because I know we get, you know, I'm on LinkedIn and you know everybody wants to talk about the newest, greatest and latest and greatest AI tool. Um, but you know it's not always, it's not always the way to look at it. It's better to focus more on the process and the results.

Speaker B: No, uh, if you talk about customer experience and you uh, come back to your CEO and you say, um, I'm going to cut your uh, customer support ticket by 70% and increase the customer satisfactions by 25%, does he care about the tools? No, he's going to ask you how you're going to do it. And this is where you say, well I'm going to use AI to be connected, to engage with the tone and the voice of the ticket, to understand the customer, to connect the customer with uh, the answers and also to understand what needs to be escalated right away or not, etc. Etc. So this is where AI becomes your enabler to be a phone.

Speaker A: Yeah. And yeah, we like to talk you know, with our clients, we about you know, how to stand out with their messaging. That, that's a big idea that we talk about because we, we see so much you know, generic uh, messaging and people using this, saying the same things, using the same phrases. So what we do is we kind of help companies learn how to better stand out uh, from their, their competitors by using um, you know, non generic messaging. Uh, but do you feel like, you know, AI is, is one way to um, you know, how do you think use, using AI will help you stand out as a company just at least, um, you know, looking at it internally is, is there a way for you to stand out from your competitors, um, by using AI?

Speaker B: I think if you uh, if you use AI and you benchmark what's going on on the market and how. So let's say your ICP is a SaaS business and your audience is CFO. Uh, uh, AI can help you understand what is the priority of the CFO today for SaaS organizations.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And based on this uh, information to see how you are going to craft your messaging, how you are going to approach them. So AI will be used to improve, uh, uh, right away instead for you to test, uh, you will go straight to uh, the point of making the right messaging. Um, I'm going to. A year ago I decided to create blog writing automations. So I created an application. Why I say that is because every Tuesday morning I ask my applications to tell me what are the most five impacting article that has been performing on the market and perplexity come with it. And after I do another analysis with Claude and based on different analysis, I write the blog with my assistant. And uh, this is how I increase the reach. This is how I became the top writer 2025 for CMS Wire. And the reason is I got the topic that is of interest. I know exactly what to talk about. I know what the audience is willing to hear that. And um, when I write the copy, I write the copy to be SEO geo, um, compliant. Not uh, only uh, search engine can find me, but also um, uh, engine for uh, like ChatGPT complexity cloud can also find me. So it's an example, uh, it's like, yeah, you can figure out about how you can use AI in your job to make your creativity better, um, and make the quality of your delivery better. And uh, I think you should use AI to um, back up what you propose to your customers. And uh, in fact you have a good way to quantify your creativity.

Speaker A: Good. Well that sounds great. Um, you know, appreciate you sharing that. Uh, what is there? We uh, only have a couple minutes left, but what, what else do we need to cover?

Speaker B: No, I think I um, mean, I don't know why, uh, women, we ask questions together to say uh, do we need to meet? So I think based, um, on the question I have maybe is you are on the uh, branding aspect of marketing.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's branding. It's, it's uh, it's. It's more, you know, kind of strategic, uh, messaging and then, you know, tying that, tying that, that messaging, the go to market messaging, tying that to business strategy. So, so, you know, the way we, the way we talk about it with our clients is, is let's not skip the business strategy fundamentals. You know, let's take a little bit of time to make sure number one, we have a really detailed icp, uh, we have our, our positioning nailed, uh, which it doesn't have to be, um, you know, elaborate but you know, you don't have to spend, you know, weeks and weeks on this. But um, you know, you do need to have at least a basic, uh, understanding of what your competitors are saying. Uh, because we actually find that there's what we call white space that exists, uh, where you could own a certain problem, a customer problem or a customer challenge, uh, and your competitors aren't talking about it on their websites because they're mostly using generic messaging like industry leading and state, state, you know, state of the art customer support and this and that. These are generic phrases that are, um, glossed over and skipped over by prospects. So you can find, um, certain specific angles and niches that you can kind of own, uh, by looking at that, um, and then, you know. Yeah, planning out the content. Kind of like you're saying, you know, I actually, um, you know, liked what you just laid out a minute ago. Because we have a content planning worksheet as well that we, uh, use with our clients that kind of, of helps them to, to narrow into more specific topics that, that relate to, um, their, their customer's actual situation. Because we just find that so many of these companies are just writing like product category articles or five tips to do this or that. That, that stuff might have worked in like 2015 or 2017. Uh, but, but it doesn't really work now. And you, you need to be much more specific, um, you know, uh, with your audience and like you said, the problems they're, they're really actually facing in the, in the real world. Um, ah, rather than talking about products or features or even, even the benefits, I mean, it has to, you know, I found that it all has to be, uh, it all has to be focused on acknowledging the pain point, focusing on that and then, and then looking at a process or a result after that. You know, don't start with the result or the benefit or the product. You know, start with the pain point and go from there.