And now for something completely different...

What happens to your conference notes when you get home? Do you re-read them, file them, share them with colleagues? I'm a compulsive note taker, it helps me listen and think. But then those notes often grow dusty in my notebooks.

So after last week's PM Forum Conference I thought I'd do something radically different. Firstly I typed up my notes so I could share them.

Then I wondered what would happen if I got AI to turn my notes into a 'deep dive' conversation, complete with cheesy hosts and American accents. ??

So this week's newsletter comes with audio and visual options. If you're up for a bit of fun, you can listen to MCL Deep Dive - an AI-powered chat show summary of my conference notes...

?? Click here to listen to the MCL Deep Dive ??

To be clear, the AI took my notes and created the script and the hosts - they sound real, but they're not!

If that's a bit too sci-fi, or you just prefer reading to listening, here's what Paul the human took from the conference:

2024 PM Forum conference - AI & Automation

Things I didn’t know I didn’t know

• There is a World Uncertainty Index - how often the word ‘uncertain’ is used in Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) country reports
• Champagne ages faster underwater - due to the increased barometric pressure
• You can have diverse and epistemic curiosity - one broadens and one deepens your understanding

TL;DR - top take-aways and the speakers who inspired them

Stay curious, ask questions you don't know the answer to - Eleanor Winton

Don't be afraid to ask an open question - Joanna Hunter

Look at how other industries are managing and evolving customer relationships; and validate whether your products are still fit for purpose - Amir Hussain

Getting the 'hygiene factors' right, gives you the permission to take relationships to the next level - Maria McDonagh

Use data as the evidence to push back on work that doesn't align with team priorities - Sadie Baron

Look for ways to automate and scale high value processes that take a long time to do manually - Matt Allen

Reduce the fear of feedback by shifting the culture from compliance to a shared ownership of the client experience - Shaendel Hallett

Recent grads want to learn real world soft skills, as they've just spent years learning facts at uni - Emily Edwards

Disruption - it's happening to the supply and demand side

Supply-side disruption - businesses find new ways to unlock value by leaning into different value levers. Professional services firms should keep challenging themselves to find new ways to deliver client value, or risk being disrupted by new alternatives.

• Eleanor Winton shared ‘Who gives a crap’ case study. They changed how design, story, materials and business models were used in the toilet paper industry. However they too now face disruption from start-ups focusing on bidets and reducing the need and demand for toilet paper.
• AI is starting to disrupt the supply-side of professional services as firms experiment with ways to improve the speed, consistency or scale of work they can deliver. As yet, not disrupting demand-side, but may happen as clients get more comfortable using it for low risk or repetitive work.

Demand-side disruption - businesses redirecting demand to new types of product, not just new competitors. Professional service firms should look for ways to redirect demand by delivering something distinctively different.

• Eleanor Winton shared the ‘Whisky Aging Stick’ case study. They are creating new demand for whisky by enabling people to quickly and creatively enhance the flavour of cheap whisky (potentially creating new demand for whisky as a category and also redirecting some existing demand away from traditional premium-priced whisky).
• Joanna Hunter from Piglets Pantry talked about how increased demand disrupted her business model, which has gone from an intended small business to one employing over 100 people and delivering food to most major football stadiums. As a result, what her business needs from professional services firms is changing.

Encouraging curiosity

Eleanor Winton talked about the importance of remaining curious and hence alert to disruption. She talked about children having much higher curiosity, always asking ‘why’ to learn what they don’t know (and also to wind up their parents!). In contrast adults tend to ask closed questions, or open questions designed to confirm what they already think they know. She encouraged people to have:

• Diverse Curiosity - curiosity that broadens your view and understanding
• Epistemic Curiosity - curiosity that deepens your view and understanding
• Both of these also require empathy, and an openness to understand others

Ask open questions

For professional services firms, curiosity is demonstrated by how they ask questions. Specifically, the importance of asking open questions was a recurring theme.

• During her ‘Rock your CX’ Workshop, Shaendel Hallett shared the success and impact of Grant Thornton’s client listening programme, which includes asking open questions across both interview and online survey formats. These open questions provide the evidence that helps overcome a common industry challenge - relationship holders being reluctant to include their clients in a feedback programme because they believe ‘I know my clients, they wouldn’t tell you anything different to what they tell me’.
• During the CMO Executive Panel, Amir Hussain encouraged us to ask what other industries are doing to engage their customers and build customer relationships. It's easy to assume these examples aren't relevant, but we must remember that Netflix, Amazon and YouTube are all delivering services to the same individuals that go to work and use professional services firms.
• During the Future Leaders panel, Emily Edwards and Rita Baptista Martins highlighted the importance of bringing this same mindset to team development. As business leaders we can’t assume that all ‘young people’ want and need the same thing. If we want to get the best out of our teams, we have to ask our colleagues open questions and not assume how they want to work and learn.
• During our Client Panel, Joanna Hunter shared the power of asking even a single open question. By asking how the new Brighton stadium was going to source its food, she discovered an opportunity to supply them with pies - an opportunity that skyrocketed Piglets Pantry as further open-minded questions led to growing sales volumes, a need for bigger premises and demand from 100s of other stadiums! All from asking one open question…
• My ‘one tip to leave the audience with’ at the end of our discussion was to ask more open questions. Seeking to understand the client’s perspective and expectations rather than trying to confirm the firm’s assumptions, is key to developing a client listening programme that drives continuous improvement.

Stay alert to the signals of disruption

Eleanor Winton shared 4 questions that firms should regularly be asking themselves:

• Are you delivering ‘good enough’ because delivering ‘great’ feels too risky?
• Have you disconnected from your customer because ‘we know what’s good for them’?
• Are you ignoring new entrants because you can’t believe they’ll be successful?
• Do you truly understand how and where your business delivers value?

CMO Executive Panel

Featuring Sadie Baron from Reed Smith, Maria McDonagh from Grant Thornton, Amir Hussain from Mercer Group and Matt Allen from Bidwells.

Panel discussion - what clients value most

First get the basics of client service right - quality, responsiveness, transparency of fees.?Only then do you have the permission to take the relationship to the next level. If you don’t get the hygiene factors right, you don’t have permission to go to the next level - it’s about making authentic promises. Learn how you show up on your best days, and how that aligns with your brand pillars, and then seek to replicate that level of service.

Supercharging relationships and adding more value comes from having data-driven conversations - using the relationships to understand what the firm does well and then amplifying it back to them. That means having smarter conversations, listening to what clients say and then following up. For example, making sure that promises made in pitches are delivered. Clients also want firms to use their expertise to horizon scan, and to look round corners for them. Firms don’t always appreciate the value this creates for clients.

To understand emerging client needs, look outside the sector. What client’s want varies across industries, some lead others follow. Build relationships and use ABM (Account based Marketing) to understand your target markets.

Professional services as a sector struggles to keep up with the pace of innovation and adaption in other industries. Stakeholders don’t want to take risks and tend to follow competitors. So look to other industries and how they are managing customer relationships. Netflix, Amazon and YouTube are all using customer data and algorithms to understand how best to engage with their customers, evolve products and build customer relationships.?

Panel discussion - how firms are using data & AI

Data, not content, is now king! Analysing data is a powerful way to understand what the firm can be doing better and hence is the foundation of innovation. Data gives Marketing teams the evidence they need to demonstrate how their work aligns to business goals and enables growth. AI enables teams to work more efficiently and quickly, getting to a first draft fast. But it is an enabler not a replacement for the human experts, so in applying AI it is important to stay focused on why you are doing things, to provide context for applying AI.

Bidwells have been using AI tools to transcribe client interviews and then quickly create draft case studies using algorithms tuned to mimic the firms style and tone of voice. This is enabling them to produce quality content at a far higher scale than they achieved by doing the whole process manually.

A good AI strategy relies on having a good data strategy - you need good data that is “real-time clean”. Good data means it is clean, accurate and enabling the personalisation of communications and content delivered to clients.

Use data as evidence to say no to ideas that don’t align with business and marketing priorities. Use the data to prioritise the team’s work and to demonstrate what the team brings to the firm - such as active leads and pipeline. Applying this idea, Sadie’s team implemented an RoI report to review all major spend. One benefit of this has been boosting the follow-up that happens after event attendance.

Panel discussion - people and stakeholders

The industry is experiencing a rapid level of skills change and relentless demand. The uncertainty is influencing partner and team behaviour. Firms have been using various forms of AI for many years - it’s not new - and hence the human piece remains important. AI is still just an enabler not a replacement. But seeing the need for new skills within the marketing team to keep up,?like data analytics and coding.

Continuous feedback is important to validate the products and services a firm offers and to help review whether they are still fit for purpose. Firms need to be brave and bold about the questions they ask clients and the business stakeholders. They can’t afford to assume that they still have a great product that meets evolving client needs. Instead they must challenge where on the maturity curve each product is and where it needs to evolve to.

An example of firms thinking about the human piece first, is Grant Thornton reframing a CRM project as a behaviour change project not just a tech project. This includes focusing on a shared vision for how people work (not just how the tech works) and identifying any skills gaps that exist around tech and automation.

To maintain job satisfaction, sales and marketing teams need to be in control of their priorities and focus, rather than being told what to focus on by other parts of the business. Firms need to task their marketing teams with delivering the best business outcomes and then let them work on delivering them - which means teams need to be able to show how they contribute to the overall strategy. Stakeholders need to work together to enable teams to focus on what’s important.