Marketing in the Age of AI: Peter Mullen's Approach to Growth and Retention

Hey, it’s great to be here today. Happy to talk about AI marketing and everything else.

I am a story that is meant for creative types to listen to and feel hopefully inspired and see some opportunities. My background is from the East Coast as a writer. I was a journalist when I got out of college. I worked in Washington, D. C. on the Capitol Hill. I worked for some large global news agencies.

I moved out to Silicon Valley for my wife getting a job at Stanford. She’s a physician. I happened to arrive here. At potentially, I think one of the most important quarters in the history of technology. I got here the quarter that Netscape went public, and that is the company that launched the browser revolution.

Mark Andreessen was the founder of it, and of course, everything has been built off of that over the past 25 plus years. This was back in the late second half of the nineties. So. My fortune truly was that I got into Silicon Valley at the moment that a change was taking place that was a forever change. I came as a journalist.

I recognized earlier than most of my peers that I needed to move laterally or perhaps vertically into a different type of industry because journalism was not going to be a growth sector. I used the talents of writing and of communicating stories to move into marketing. So my first job Was a marketing role at a small startup boutique consulting firm that worked with Microsoft services.

I started to pattern recognize and understand how, how does all of this technology works? I really had very little background in that. That sounds quaint in 2024 when you and I are talking, but back then there were the majority of people, the majority of people I knew. Did not know much about technology.

I joined Gartner group and became part of the analyst team that was describing what technology was all about. I use that to then jump to a couple of different startups. And that’s what you do, of course, in Silicon Valley over the past several decades. I’ve carved out a space that’s enabled me to have what I like to say is a vector of impact between the creativity and then the practical application of that.

So that startup journey included a tremendous wins and exciting journey, mini journeys. I was part of the original team at Netflix for a while. I ran the small corporate communications organization that was there. I was there when we hit the first million subscribers, when we, I convinced a million people to take a piece of plastic, a DVD, and put it in the mail, and a couple days later get a better DVD back.

I convinced them to become part of this ocean wave that ultimately put Blockbuster and most of Hollywood on notice. And in many ways changed forever how they communicate and how they run their businesses. I use Netflix. to then jump to a series of other companies. Many of them you will have never heard of because they never made it.

In Silicon Valley with the type of journey I took, you move from company to company to company. But other exciting things, or you mentioned Park, that’s the Palo Alto Research Corporation. It is the granddaddy of technology innovation in Silicon Valley. It’s the building up in the hills of Palo Alto.

Where Steve Jobs famously in the 70s or perhaps earlier, yeah, 70s, went there on a tour, saw the mouse, ran out of the building and created Apple. He saw graphical user interface at the same time. It was a place where the laser printer was created, where Ethernet became real. In that little organization, we had a startup.

That combined I. P. And we ultimately built the world’s first personalized Wi Fi. We ultimately sold that to Comcast. And so that went from a company where this is such a great Silicon Valley story that at one point we had 11 people that would sit around a table trying to build this idea and dream and of them.

At home, 10 different languages were spoken. And then that to me is the essence of Silicon Valley. Coming, people coming from around the world, taking a small little flame, building it into a bonfire, and then ultimately selling it, in this case to Comcast. And the end of that story is that we were able to now be the backbone of Silicon Valley.

Of the Internet connectivity for Comcast entire North American, even global infrastructure system. Now, to kind of bring that story all around because I have been to a lot of different places, I used that at Comcast to really focus on a second vector of impact. Taking that creativity into productivity was the first one.

How could I write messages and storytelling that moved people to understand? What a product was to then taking that movement and saying, how do we take brand new ideas that you and I have never heard of and translate them into excitement and translate that excitement into ultimately business growth.

So I loved working with Comcast customers and said, aha, the hardest thing in technology right now is having all these great new ideas. Combining them, but making the average person understand how valuable they can be to her life. So I became the global head of one of the top 15 largest contact centers, BPOs in the world.

Wonderful, incredible experience to 45, 000 employees ran the marketing to do exactly that. When your new technology would come in or mine would come into a large enterprise, how do you train those legions of agents around the world to explain it to millions of people? Around the world. So the tool can be successful.

And then subsequently I find myself here at interactions doing conversational AI. So it’s the same thing that I’ve been doing at Comcast at the BPO, et cetera. But now it’s, how do we use technology to do that for us? Gotcha.

Absolutely. And now we can speed up the storytelling too a little bit because there’s cadences to all this and metaphorically, conversational AI is a quicker cadence. Interactions. delivers front end of customer support to the world’s leading brands. We’re a white glove solution. So we have a good percentage of the fortune 100 inside our portfolio.

And when you call or engage with one of these major retail brands, typically, or it can be financial services in banking, it can be utilities. You will say, help my electricity has gone out. There’s a storm outside. What do I do? That’s pretty complex. Conversation to have with an audit, with a, with a bot.

Well, we’re able to understand that generative AI can do part of that conversational AI, the more traditional approach has LLMs that have been established already understanding why you would be calling in. And, you know, it’s a little bit more narrow, but the generative AI, plus the conversational AI becomes a supercar for all of these businesses.

The ultimate goal is to solve. Quickly and efficiently what you’re trying to do. But a company like interactions is not just doing off the shelf solutions. What we’re doing is trying to say to the brands what matters most when you’re talking to the customers. Let’s make sure we’re communicating in your voice in your expressions.

And ultimately, what I want you to do is get off the phone or get off your chat with us and say, Oh, my God, that company just solved it for me. Why? Authenticity, loyalty, continued service. If the moment you start talking about a good experience at your party, you know, at a dinner party, good experience with customer support makes everybody stop and say, wait, what are you talking about?

Because customer support has so many challenges.

Yeah, so this is such an important question for all of us right now and the world that I live in which is AI in the contact center space Arguably is one of the most disrupted in the world right now since November 2022, when generative AI came out, arguably also marketing is so I’m in marketing inside contact center where we have AI inside the first five words of our company description.

Here’s what’s working. There’s but let me set context for you. As recently as about five years ago, there might have been 20 players in my space. Today, according to Gartner, there are more than 2, 000 who have AI generative or conversational or predictive inside their boiler plates. The world has collapsed and it is in this category and it’s incredibly hard for buyer to understand who offers something real, who is just smoke and mirrors, who has a future vision.

Of the company. So if I’m going to buy the solution, it’s going to be protecting me for the next five, 10 years. This is an incredibly chaotic, difficult market right now, which means. It has incredible opportunities for the people who can figure out what to do. Here’s what I think the playbook must be to get through this noise.

Believe it or not, I think the playbook at this time is a one to few strategy. And what I mean by that is that I can use all the digital tools in the world. To try to sell at scale. I can be as individualized as I want via SEO, via all of the modern day techniques that we think about. But what I really need to do is get past the noise.
So one of our deployment strategies over the past 18 months has been to send our executives to smaller events in person events where. They have an opportunity to meet a prospective buyer, not once, but twice, but three times. And I’m not talking about Las Vegas event where there might be 5, 000 people.

I’m talking about more of a small room event where there might be 150. But those 150 people have a VP title. That’s one strategy that has actually worked above everything else. We go to a meeting like that, we engage positively. I have one of my PhD scientists speak, rather than a salesperson, of course.

Build the authenticity. That’s We roll out of an event like that and are able to set up a meetings. And typically what we’re starting to do to build loyalty and authenticity, we are not pitching these individuals right away. We, and you know, this as well, because I know this is part of your business thought thoughtfulness.

What can I give you for free that adds value? And so in my case, that looks like a cadence of trying to have some of our PhDs, some of our experts in conversational design, Do half day workshops at the leading brands around the world. There’s no expectation we get business, but we’re building connections and that’s going to, that does lead to growth.

I would say 2024, that’s the most unique strategy that we got going right now.

Yeah, and you’re referring to the marketing side of it or the business side of it I mean i’m referring to the marketing side of things Yeah, it’s the, it’s a really interesting time right now to think about the power of vertical marketing.

And I’m of two minds of this vertical, of course, being by category. So I mentioned our strong categories are in the financial services sector, particularly around banking. When you lose a credit card let’s say you’re traveling into another country and someone steals your wallet during dinner and you call one of the top three.

Banking brands in the world. I’m able to calm you down, manage the situation, protect your assets and get you a new credit card within the next 24 hours at your hotel, I can do all of that with conversational AI tools without you ever having to talk to a human being and that’s one vertical that we’re good in, but as I mentioned utilities earlier, how do we think about.

I would call it both the segmentation, but also the broad marketing categories. What we’re doing, and I don’t think that this is particularly unique, is that we’re specializing hard in these verticals. That story I just told you with financial services is a great example. We are looking at emerging opportunities.

Inside those verticals where there might be some laggers in this space. And this is really important part. I think for marketers to be thinking about, we, most of us have solutions that are pretty cutting edge. Most of our jobs, even though there’s not a bullet point, you do not have a bullet point on your job or my job that says you are training the buyer to understand the value of your product in a rapidly changing world, but you are every single day, we all know this.

Market laggards, or even folks who are just keeping pace with the market, I believe represent a tremendous sub specialty inside of a verticals. I can go out and build a lot of channel marketing to the leading innovative companies in the world, but I’m really interested right now in the companies that are terrified that they did not upgrade in the last five, 10 years, and now they are looking to a trusted vendor like me to come in and say, how do I get From one side of the canyon to the other, help me be the bridge.

So I don’t know if that answers the question, but it, there’s a lot of psychology right now. That’s pretty basic in how we want to be thinking about the buyer and how she is struggling so much with all of that noise. That’s coming in, how she is differentiating between a crappy product and an awesome product because it’s really hard to tell if the marketers are good on both sides and how she can build the trust because let’s be honest, my solution starts at several, often at several hundred thousand dollars just to get started.

It often has. A several month ramp period of building an elegant solution. There’s a ton of value on this. My, the design team we have is about two dozen individuals and they come in and they work one on one with a brand. But that takes a lot of effort and a lot of work to sort out. We’re when we think about the buyer.

And she’s facing a decision like buying me or buying something off of the shelf. I’ll tell you what, there’s a strong bias right now for the buyer to do nothing and just wait another 18 months. You probably, you probably have heard this before that if you are financial. stock advisor, you never get fired by buying the S& P 500 because everybody is buying it.

So this psychology of following the herd, you have to crack in, right? I’ve said a lot there in a lot of different ways, but it all comes back to us as marketers thinking about the psychology of the buyer in this new market. Rapidly changing times. Many of the old tricks won’t work unless we’re applying the approach of today and nuancing it in the right way.

This is, this is an, thank you for the question. It’s an awesome thing that interactions does. And we really have a moment right now. Here’s why. Interactions was started about 20 years ago.

AI was, it certainly was not in its infancy, but it’s not what it was today. So the moment we began, we always had a conversational AI approach, which means we would build out the LLMs, the large language models for a specific brand, and When you would be calling into one of your favorite brands, and let’s say your accent was strong, there was noise in the background, or you would utter something that didn’t make sense to the library, typically you would run into a roadblock, and you could not go forward.

With us, we elegantly built. Years ago, a human in the loop solution. So in our solution, when you would run into a brick wall and you couldn’t move forward on your self service automated conversation, a human somewhere in the world at an agent center, a contact center. He would hear a small snippet of what you just said.

He would say, Oh, they’re asking to change their airline reservation. And he would nudge that conversation forward for you, the user. All you have is a slight delay. If you’ve ever been on the phone and you heard the clickety click, click, click of a top of a keyboard, that’s actually us. Now, fast forward 20 years with the same type of solution.

This solution, we have over 130 patents ourselves. We have licensed over 2, 200 that we have rights to. This is a very sophisticated type solution. And now you layer in generative AI. Couple of things, guardrails are real hallucinations are real, but once you discover a hallucination and you solve for it, it does not tend to come back.

There’s a lot of guidelines we all must have, but when you layer my solution of generative AI, conversational slash predictive AI, and you keep this human in the loop in a much more reduced capacity than a decade ago, it’s, we believe it’s the best, most elegant solution for just the bottom line, giving you an effortless experience.

One of the biggest trends in marketing in the past decade has been the evolution of a marketer having responsibility for revenue, ARR, and that’s very much a part of what we do here in my marketing department, and this is a change, and it’s been extremely exciting.

Today, I have 70 percent of the marketing department focused on lead generation. In fact, when we give company updates, my first slide is a pie chart, reminding people that we are 70 percent lead generation, 20 percent brand, 10 percent everything else, super simple formula, but really radical in concept. So what that means in practicality is that we partner super closely with our great sales team.

I’ve. Every marketers, I believe one of their top three priorities is to have a phenomenal relationship with the head of sales. Another top priorities have a phenomenal relationship with the chief financial, financial officer. If you solve for those two relationships, your business is going to be fantastic and they should be thinking the same way.

So we partner with the chief revenue officer. Every single day. I’m talking to him multiple times per day. We hold hands with the sales directors. There’s not a typical traditional handoff in my marketing department where we say, here’s this week’s leads. Let us know how they do instead. We have marketers.

In fact, Product marketers in my case, walk hand in hand with our sales directors. And as a relationship develops, they work on the decks together. They inform back and forth. They become in a sense, they’re, they’re co pilots on a lot of this journey. And what it means is that we also do a lot of what I’m calling enhanced nurturing.

So marketing typically has a whole nurturing cohort. Like I, today I have hundreds of companies inside my active nurturing bucket. But, and that’s typically ABM, right? There’s an extra nuance of a, a, a con, a, call it a prospect who was being actively developed that a sales role has typically supervised. In this case, in marketing case, we don’t do that.

We do it all together. So that means. End result, the sales guy is having a lot more modernized tools, a lot more digital tools. He’s being challenged to build roundtables, to co host webinars, to think outside of the box, to have his emails being reviewed, and also to build a halo strategy. A sailor typically is a sniper.

He’s looking or she’s looking at one single target. And trying to build out the relationship in today’s modern buying, you’ve got more than a dozen stakeholders and influencers. And here in this 2024 year, post COVID, many of those stakeholders and influencers have never met each other. So as a marketer, the opportunity is to say, what are the things information do I equip the sales team with that is going to help solve for the fact that everyone’s trying to make a decision in a turbulent space.

So that, you know, that’s how I look at executing, how I’m trying to do it differently, how I’m trying to zig when others are zagging. And then that’s the 70%. The 20 percent of brand focus. We do not have a large discretionary budget. Like most companies were incredibly thoughtful about every single dollar.

I grew up in the Midwest in, in Indiana, where you thought about every dollar that you spent, where times had been tough, where times are always going to get better. And I take that philosophy to how I applied dollars to marketing. So on the brand side, we don’t do broad marketing campaigns. you are not going to see an advertisement unless you are inside my ICP cohort.

And in, if you do see one, I’m trying to look a hundred percent different from every other person. In my competitive space. So the, you know, the end of that story is if you see a interactions ad somewhere, you typically will see a very funny ad. You’ll see a frowning old lady wearing modern art deco glasses.

You will see an 18 year old influencer or a female who looks like a diva, who is pissed off because we screwed up her concert tickets and now we’re going to solve it for her. And that captures your attention. So those two combined are how, you know, I practically think about that pie chart and delivering the value.

Yeah, so the again, customer retention side by that, you’re, you’re thinking once somebody becomes a customer in their insider ecosystem. Yeah. Yeah, it’s the, first. You know, over the past decade, you and I and all of our professional cohorts who are marketers have been really thoughtful about ABM account based marketing and that rose up as the one thing, the one shiny object that would help solve all of our marketing challenges.

That works really well in an accelerating way. Easy, simple market. But that’s not the market today. Most companies have had layoffs over the past couple years. Most companies are tightening regardless of what the stock market has been doing, although it’s had a rough couple days when you and I are talking the Nurturing side of things, I believe, goes back to a couple of the themes I talked about.

Marketing, engaging with sales for that advanced nurturing experience. Very different from the digital marketing experience that we’ve been doing with ABM. Continuing to keep score of the people who are moving through the pipeline and watching how they engage. We, Have been shifting. I think in the past year, I’ve shifted twice the point scoring because the market is changing so rapidly.

And I would encourage anybody listening to this to think about their ABM scoring if they have not adjusted it or at least looked at it. It’s time to do it because things have been changing. And it’s horrible to always look backwards and say, Oh, here’s when it happened. You know, you can’t see a recession until after the recession has already started.

Same concept here. So. When, once we get a customer marketing should not stop mine, it does for most of us marketing should actually accelerate because you were talking about customer retention just this quarter, I hired a full time contract or a contractor, excuse me, who has 20 years of customer success marketing.

So it’s a talent that we have not had inside the marketing organization. But what that tells you is how much of a premium I’m putting on. White glove treating our customers. So we’re building. Brand new assets for this retention that are newsletters that are going out. Newsletters are easy. One of the hacks is I’ve done this in my last three companies create on page one, a graph of how that particular client has been doing over the last month or the last quarter, but against it.

Put an aggregate graph of how all of the other companies in your portfolio are doing and then put a third line that says what the optimum experience is almost always that individual client is going to be below the line of optimum that immediately engages the conversation of how do we improve together?

Simple, simple tool. But Advancing that, that then gives the nurturing concept a whole new meaning for the account managers of the client portfolio. I believe that they don’t just need to be enabled on the new tools. They need to be trained. They need to become marketers in their own right. This is very hard for them, but account managers tend to be very.

nurturing. It’s the nature of the job is to be accommodating and thoughtful. We also want to make them proactive and get out of their comfort zones a little bit. How do you add value in your, your own modality, but in a way that can develop add on business and additional revenue. So I’d mentioned psychology before very much nurturing for ABM, for client success and client growth is around psychology because you want these strong relationships to form.

And then you apply many of the same digital tools that you apply to your inbound prospects or, you know, even your outbound prospects.

Yeah, it’s the In my space, customer experience first, every single one of us in the world knows what this is, even if you’ve never been in a contact center, you know what it is like to miss your airplane flight and be on hold trying to solve it. You know what it’s like to show up at a hotel and the room.

Is gone or it you received a package in the mail and it’s broken and you’re trying to get in touch with customer service You know, we all have these frustrations Number one way to have a built community at a dinner party with strangers is talk about a crappy customer experience today customer experience globally is at a 23 year low last year.

It was at a 22 year low two years ago. Was that a 21 year low? What happened 23 years ago? It was 9 11. We are at a moment in time where we are at the depths of customer satisfaction. This looks like it’s a trend that’s going to continue because the personalization that you and I have, we’ve been trained to expect is inside our pockets or in our purse.

It’s our phone and with generative AI and all the incredible, beautiful things that are being created. We are getting even greater expectations. So when we have a traditional customer frustration, we no longer have the patience to put up with it. Most of the businesses, both in North America and globally are not prepared for that.

Traditionally, the trend in customer support is to not spend money in customer support. When. Your large business has financial trouble. The first thing to cut often is customer support. And I’ll give you a crazy story, but this actually helps explain some of the frustrate why so many of us feel frustration.

When I worked for a contact centers, we made a point to not make our lobbies look good. If we made our lobbies look too fancy, a. Partner, a client would come in, you know, fortune 10 brand and say, why are you wasting money on a beautiful 15, 000 lobby desk? Why do you have these beautiful leather couches?

I want you putting your money into having better agents. That’s the traditional mentality. And that’s one reason bad experiences have continued. Last year, I ran a survey. And this is a real trend. That’s even worse this year, 38 percent of us said we would rather plunge a toilet than have to talk to a customer service agent.

That’s pretty darn extreme, right? So that is the overwhelming trend for all of us that we’re trying to fight. And then. Inside the marketplace for us marketers are some of the things that I talked about before 2000 competitors when less than a decade ago. It was under a hundred Technology moving so quickly that if I buy today I might be outdated in six months or a year and a half.

So shouldn’t I just wait? The answer is probably yes. So how do we overcome that? Those are some of the most stunning trends the neat thing that is going to happen Is here’s what you can expect when it starts to work you can expect Omni channel communications. That means your ability to work off of voice, off of chat, off of website, off of any modality that the business answers, making it asynchronous.

These are buzzwords and our analyst firm started telling us just in the past couple of months, stop using those buzzwords, talk about unified communications because it’s happening so quickly that you can start a chat. On your phone, you can realize you forgot to pick your kid up from school. So you run into the car, you run, drive across town, you pause that conversation, you come back to the house and you can get on your computer and the conversation can continue.

Maybe you move to phone because you’re now at soccer practice watching your kid. It can move back over to phone. And this type of unification is how you live your life today. Contact centers are going to catch up. That’s a really neat consumer trend that is starting to happen.

We you and I had a chance to talk a little bit about how much the digital marketplace is changing. And I’m in a massive refresh of our website right now, looking at how do we think about SEO in a new way? How do we think about EAT? How do we think about the authority that the generative AI search engines are capturing right now?

And how does that get pushed back into the ecosystem? This is a crazy moment in time. You know, it arguably, let’s be paranoid for a second. Let’s say eight out of 10 of our best blog posts are of 2022 are now not being picked up by the generative search engines because they’re discovering other pieces of content.

I think that paranoia is kind of real. So how do we understand that? Capture that? How do we? Expand into generative AI mentality ourselves. So we’re producing the right content, thinking a lot about that from a digital ecosystem. And we all got to plant our flag at some point as a marketer, I would love to wait another two or three quarters, see how things are shaking out.

But guess what? When I do that, then it’s going to be another two or three quarters. We’re putting the flag down right now. New website, new SEO, new thought processes of how this has to roll out. Everybody should be doing this right now.

Right. I love that you found that when you were doing a little bit of research about me, because this is really important for how I am as a manager. And I think it’s been really successful in the last three companies I’ve been at. I call it, you know, lean forward in your chair. And the concept is, is this, it remains a turbulent time for many of us, post COVID changes that we’ve been talking about during this conversation.

There’s a lot going on. I am Not a great manager with folks that are doing relatively mechanical jobs. Instead, I believe that the focus and the emphasis of where I want to put my energy are inside of teams that want to lean forward and find their careers. My background is as an athlete. I was a swimmer.

I swam in college. I had the opportunity to swim professionally as a marathon swimmer after I got out of university. And it’s a really big, really big part of my life. I wrote a book about Olympians and what the journey was like. I’m not an Olympian myself, but I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with a lot of them.

I look for the athlete mentality where every day a person wakes up and they lean forward in their chair and they say, how can I do a little bit more? So what I try to do is create an environment where those individuals Constantly get to do new things and they get to stretch their limits. Makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But when we find the right folks, you get two or three in a group and suddenly everybody looks at them and says, I can do that too. And so another phrase that I use is the rung on your ladder. And the phrase of the rung on your ladder. It is one that I overtly talk about. What am I doing to help you take the next career step to walk up the ladder one more rung and how do I make you better?

So we talk about this in meetings. Here’s what you need to do that you’ve never done before. You just came to me with a brand new idea with no subject matter expertise. Let’s build our solutions together. Let’s see what we can do and create startup mentality. That’s what we do in our marketing group.

Well, it’s easy It’s linkedin. I wake up.

Looking at linkedin as My news source right now. I’m one of these folks who sometimes needs to turn off traditional media because I get overwhelmed by it. LinkedIn, when you build your follower or you follow list the right way is offering you an MBA class Every day.

work?

Oh, that is a one out of left field. Let me think a little bit about this. I’m not gonna have a good answer on it. I. I’ve had a wonderful incredible experience when our little product at Out of Park that had the nine people grew into Comcast and I was on the beach in New Jersey and watched an airplane fly by with one of those long trailing messages that was my product.

Oh you know what? I strongly believe in this ability to be at the height of our creativity when we’re not in a normal space. I have had incredible marketing ideas on a beach when I’m not thinking about the marketing ideas.

I have a niche website that I work with some family members that’s become fairly successful. That That idea, that concept for it came about on a long bike ride in a place I had never been before where I didn’t have cell phone service.

Wow, I have we have some gaps in the marketing department as every marketing leader should say every time they’re asking a question like this. I would fill those gaps because I have a ton of folks right now that are doing one plus jobs and always the moment we can fill that with experts. You become exponential.

Get the right person sitting next to you. Everybody benefits.

Oh gosh, that’s easy. I would swap it with one of the human understanding agents that we have somewhere in the world.

One of these amazing people who is hearing the snippet of conversation and understanding what you’re trying to do. I love the dopamine hit of Solving somebody’s problem quickly.

I appreciate it too. Thank you