Marketing as Sales’ Intelligence Engine: How Naviant Built 978 Personas With AI

0:00Mike Campana: Rather than me going into Claude Code and saying, hey, I want to build this thing, I want to do this thing, talking to Claude, Claude would give me what to give to Claude Code. And I would take what Claude gave me, and rather than me vibe coding, I had Claude vibe coding Claude Code, not me vibe coding.

0:22Welcome to the award-winning Health Tech Marketing Show. I'm Adam Cherenis. first thank you to you for listening if you enjoy the show and you're not already doing so please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and you can dig into a library of all close to 150 episodes on health tech marketing sales and growth and all that kind of stuff a big thank you to our sponsor healthcare now radio the 24 7 radio network dedicated entirely to all things healthcare. And they also have a podcast syndication network, which we hugely benefit from. It's put this podcast in front of thousands and thousands of people.

1:08Special shout out to Carol and Roberta for all your support. We really appreciate you. Today, I'm thrilled to welcome back my great friend, Michael Campagna, who is the chief marketing officer at Naviant. A year ago, I'd have called Mike a bit of a skeptic when it came to AI. But then a couple of months ago, he showed me something that he and his team have built, which really blew me away. It's called Resonance. It's an MVP. But over the last six or seven months, in partnership with salespeople and subject matter experts. He's developed an application that has churned out close to a thousand personas across multiple vertical markets, healthcare being a core one, but they do operate in other markets as well.

2:04But more importantly, what it's done is it's turned it into a tool that connects to Salesforce and HubSpot and empowers the salespeople and the BDRs so that before they pick up the phone or before they meet with a salesperson, the salespeople are much better informed about the people that they're talking to, what's important to them, and how to move a deal along with them. And here's the part I really love. Mike isn't a developer. He planned it in Claude and had Claude, direct Claude code, how to build it. And he'll tell you all about it and a really funny story about how Claude and Claude code get on.

2:52And so if you want to see where marketing and sales are heading, where AI ties them together, this episode's for you. So with that, let's get into it and meet Mike.

3:04Mike Campana: Mike, so great to have you back on the show. I always love talking to you. And I think we could probably spend about three hours talking about the English Premier League, but I think for the benefit of the listeners, we will focus more on what you guys are doing from an AI perspective. I want to kind of go back a little bit. So we've been talking about a lot of stuff, for AI for a while. And I think we were talking about a year ago, I think I would have described you as somewhat more skeptical about the impact that it's going to have. And I was really surprised and blown away when you were telling me and showing me what you were doing a couple of months ago.

3:47So what's changed? Tell us a bit about the journey over the last year. Yeah.

3:52Mike Campana: I mean, I think the first time I ever got exposed to AI tools was really around generative AI to create content. We were using Jasper for a long time. And then I started getting into perplexity. And the reason I started getting into perplexity was because you introduced me to a gentleman by the name of Casey Meehan. I'm a big fan of Casey Meehan and I actually became a Patreon of his. I actually give him money every month because I love what he was doing. And I started watching more and more videos. It would be embarrassing probably if you looked at my YouTube history and see how much time I have spent in YouTube watching videos on using AI tools for things other than generative things, Like how I improve workflows, how do I create artifacts and tools and connect to other systems and bring things in?

4:45Mike Campana: And I started playing and playing and playing with it, watching more and more videos, especially stuff from Casey. And I started realizing I can actually leverage this thing to become a more valuable asset to my number one customer, which is the sales team, right? And I see it. I think we talked about this a couple of weeks ago when we were on one of our Friday calls that you do a couple of times a month. I think my first reaction was, I think people are looking at AI as a tool through blinders and they're not looking what else can be done with this outside of how do I sequence emails and generate leads and then analyze performance of marketing.

5:27Mike Campana: It's so much more that you can do to become a more valuable asset to the company that you work for, as well as your number one customer, which is sales. Yeah, absolutely. And so tell us a little bit about sort of what the key things that you focused on. What are sort of the primary use cases? Yeah, for me, the real primary use case is developing deeper knowledge about who we are selling to and how we can create an understanding, deeper understanding for the sales team so that they can go into meetings and conversations and be far more educated about who they're talking to and why they're talking to them.

6:15Mike Campana: And that goes beyond the persona stuff that goes into my rep is going to be meeting with XYZ Hospital. How can I provide them information about XYZ Hospital that looks at all these different data elements, things like clinical information and statistics that that hospital has going on, financial metrics, facility metrics, revenue metrics, things that show the health of an organization positively and negatively, and then map that into the solutions that we provide and how those solutions can bear down on those challenges hospitals have and provide them with a roadmap on how they can improve a situation.

7:04Mike Campana: If you look at something like HCAP scores or something like that, what can we provide them to improve the patient experience? Because we know that they're having an issue with HCAP scores. and then take it a step further and say, all right, so who in that hospital cares about HCAP scores? If they were to embark on a project to improve patient experience, who would be involved in that conversation from a buyer journey map? Then what are the things based on what those people do? What are the things that we should ask them and things that we should tell them about our products, our solutions, our approach in a logical way that makes sense and resonates with those people as an individual with what they care about, what their challenges are.

7:49So if I paraphrase it, it's essentially arming the salesperson before they go, you know, go meet with the healthcare system, whether it's on site or via Zoom with really precise information, not just about the healthcare system and how that their issues align with what you do, but very specific information about the individuals and some of the issues that they might be dealing with.

8:15Mike Campana: Exactly. And we could do that as a one-off. We have tools internally that we have developed to do those as a one-off. So we have XYZ prospect that we're going after. Yeah. It may be an existing customer that we're trying to maybe a larger share of wallet or we're doing a regular quarterly business review with them. And we want to go in there and talk about other things that may be important to them, or it may be something a little bit more at scale. So let's say that we have a bespoke meeting that we're going to be doing, a roundtable. We know these 15 organizations are going to be sitting in the roundtable.

8:45Mike Campana: We know the title of the people that are going to be in that roundtable. Let's provide a tool for the reps that takes everyone at that roundtable, every organization, and does that research at scale and provides it into a tool that is shared as an HTML file, a live artifact that allows them to view that information, sort that information. So when they go and sit at that round table, they already know every single individual there, the challenges their organization has, and the conversations and questions I should ask them at that round table as it applies to whatever the topic is that we're going to be meeting about.

9:22So break down a bit how you built this system, because this is not just a repeatable chord prompt. There's a lot that goes into this.

9:32Mike Campana: Yeah, but it all starts with personas, right? Persona understanding. But I mean, you've had some hit or miss experience, right? In sort of using this for personas, right? Yeah, and I think most companies have more of a miss experience with it. I think for a lot of companies, persona development is a checkbox, right? All right, who do we sell this product for? Are we going to take it at the C-suite level? Let's understand all the C-suite. Let's say that our primary buyers are the CFO and the COO, right? So we're going to build out this profile, a little bit of three or four bullets about what they care about, what's important, what their language is, and that's it.

10:08Mike Campana: And I've been guilty of that. I've done that in the past and created that checkbox. But nobody goes back to that. It's a checkbox. No one goes back and looks at it. Plus, the information you're putting in there is kind of meaningless, three or four bullets. So about a year and a half ago, I decided to go a little bit deeper. So we went into educational background. What is the role in the buying process? What are their watering holes that they would go to to get information? And what are the care abouts? What are the eight or nine big, you know, high level items that they really care about? And why do they care about that and develop that information?

10:45Mike Campana: That's really great. But we still have the same problem. It was a checkbox, right? Nobody was going back and looking to it. I mean, it's supposed to guide how you create content and how you do things in an organization. but it really didn't do that. And then I started thinking a little bit more about it. One of the big problems in addition to that is that today's buyer, you know, if you go into a hospital, you're going to sell maybe a system for provider credentialing to improve provider credentialing, that they're going to make that purchase. It's not going to be an individual that does it. It's a buying group, right?

11:17Mike Campana: There is a buying group that has eight or nine people in it that's north and south of the economic buyer that you really need to understand. And you can't build a messaging framework around one individual and think it's going to resonate with everyone within that buying group. So what we did is we went on a very long, deep exercise where we went to each of our vertical markets. And we work in more than one vertical. Like, Q-Care is one of our big primary vertical markets, but we also work in the sled world. So state, county, city, government we do education we have manufacturing we you know a big vertical for us is not just health care payers but also property and casualty stuff like that so the thing is really big so we took all these different vertical markets and we went to claude and said hey listen what are if i looked at let's take acute care if i look the acute care market what are all the primary common titles from manager level all the way up to the board of director.

12:21Mike Campana: What are all those titles that we should know about? And then we got a bunch of information. That was great, but you know what? There's a lot of uncommon titles too. So go through and figure out what other titles exist that are maybe not so common. Maybe they're emerging titles like chief AI officer maybe might be one. So it went through and we probably doubled the amount of titles that we had as the common titles with the uncommon titles. We ended up in healthcare alone from a manager level to the board, 212 just in acute care titles that were important. Oh my God. We had a framework of what we needed in information for those titles.

13:07Mike Campana: So over about a six to seven month period of time for all these different vertical markets, we did that same exercise for all of our vertical markets. So how many personas did you build out? We built 978 personas total. Wow. And not only did we do it, we actually extended out the kind of content we grabbed from those titles. So not only did we do those, the care abouts and watering holes and educational background, but we also went north and south of the organization. So the CIO, who do they typically report to? Because it's not always the same. Some hospitals, the CIO reports to the CEO. Sometimes the CIO reports to the COO, right?

13:46Mike Campana: So who are the different titles that they could potentially report to? And what are all the titles that report to them? So we map that out as well. So we have this giant corpus now of all these titles. And by the way, every stage of this process, there was a human in the loop. So we have our SMEs involved in it. So they reviewed all the titles and they could comment. And I would never sell. That doesn't exist. We still built those. but we knew what was things that were important to them, what weren't important to them. So they were the human in the loop on that. We started building out the framework for the content we want to track.

14:25Mike Campana: Human in the loop reviewed that. So we start mapping out, building out those personas. Again, this is like a six month. It wasn't like, let's run it in a day, let Claude create it. It was, let's build out this department. and so you might focus on operations or something and then the human loop review that stuff validates the stuff did you do was this a project or a skill or both what are the mechanics behind it from a cloud perspective it was a project and there are skills behind that project so we built out a build a persona skill build out there was a build out our part of the persona of thing is that an assets we have asset skill we have an ongoing skill so we have all these different skills that are behind all this stuff but there it is a project that we have it's a persona project actually right and if you look at that project on my computer is massive i bet so we filled out we end up building 978 of these things and they're mapped to different vertical markets and different then there's a department method messaging so it consolidated departments and built the overarching message so it wasn't just hey we have operations here's all these thousands of operations and we have all the messaging to it, but now let's roll that up into the operations department.

15:39Mike Campana: So if I'm going to build an ABM campaign, right? I'm going to do an ABM campaign, we're going to do it to operations. I don't want to necessarily do it. I'm not going to do that ABM campaign to just a COO. I'm going to do it to the people within operations. So I have to build a messaging framework to operations, which consolidates all the different care abouts from operations and finds a commonality and builds that up. So is that another, is that part of the project or is that a separate? No, that's built in the project. Part of the project. Yeah. Okay. So that's impressive. So you've built a thousand personas.

16:13You've built a way of creating a messaging framework for individual or groups of clusters of personas. How is that getting used? What do you now do with it? Yeah.

16:23Mike Campana: So it's a beta thing right now. It's not 100 % live across the organization. We have a beta test. We have people looking at it, playing with it, evaluating it. And we've learned a lot by doing that. So there's been a lot of changes to it since I last showed it to you. I think August, I was like, hey, look at this cool tool I created, Adam. It's changed a lot. I mean, we found problems in the corpus of the personas. We found problems in the workflow. And those beta users have banging on it, have come up with changes that we've had to build into the system. So we wanted to make sure. Are you using the, in terms of feeding the beast, are you using the Claude corpus or do you have additional information?

17:03How do you feed the beast to create these personas? Are you uploading assets? Are you connecting it? Do you have an MCP server or something? How are you doing that?

17:12Mike Campana: Yeah. So we wrote the application in Python using Claude, right? So we had Claude code, write the application that it was built on. And then we took all that data that we created for the personas and created different JSON files that became part of the application we wrote. So all that stuff lives now in the application. And the application is an AI-enabled application, so it actually calls Claude from the application. So when they use it, it's actually using Claude as a tool to run out and grab all the stuff and build out the messaging. And is it, so where's the application set? Is it sort of like a web-based application?

17:53Mike Campana: It's a web-based applications of people could, and you can actually get to it on your phone if you want it to even. Oh, cool. And who's the they who are using it? So right now it's got some beta users within our leadership in sales. Marketing team is playing with it and using it. So we have marketing specific functions like the ABM tool, the department tool, and they're just banging on it, not necessarily using it, but our BDRs as well. which is the primary user that it was originally targeted to was BDRs. And we can get into that if you want. Yeah, we'll go deeper on that. Yeah, but the main goal right now is to figure out what are the challenges with the application and get it to a point where we can make it a little bit more as a GA product.

18:37Mike Campana: Right now, it's an MVP, right? It's an MVP product. We want to get it to a GA kind of tool and then start building out all the other phases that we have mapped out the things that we want to build into. There's a lot. I think I shared a list with you. There's a lot of things that we have targeted for this tool as use cases and how we can leverage it. The other thing that we do with it today, too, so it's got an API built into it. We designed it from ground with API, so we can build an MCP and link it to other things. But the way we originally intended to use it with the MCP is not how it's actually going to be used at MCP.

19:10Mike Campana: So the original thought was, hey, we have people in our sales force and our HubSpot that have titles. those titles then can be mapped to this tool for the careabouts and load that into Salesforce. And, you know, you're in Salesforce and looking at it. But the way we look at it and the way a lot of how we use Claude is as a single, I look at Claude as a go-to tool for accessing other things. So I, for example, I talked to you about like Salesforce. I no longer go into Salesforce or HubSpot. Rarely do you see me going into it. Claude is how I access HubSpot. Claude is how I access Salesforce. So when I do these deep research tools and building out my room brief, my live artifacts, that is going out and connecting to Salesforce.

19:59Mike Campana: It's going out and connecting to HubSpot. It's also going out and connecting to the persona tool, which is what we call, it's called Resonance. It's, you know, how we create, you know, messaging that resonates. Resonance. Lovely. connects out to residents and pulls all that information into the tool. So it analyzes where we've done, where we might've worked with a customer in Salesforce. We're going to meet with them in the room. Here's their title. What is the messaging framework that needs to be pulled over? The discovery questions that you pulled over, things like that. And how do we address that as a single view?

20:32So what's it pulling out of Salesforce? Is it pulling out sort of

20:35Mike Campana: notes on communications or exactly that it pulls out notes it pulls out deals one deals loss deals in flight yeah what product we're recommending what product we're selling what is the action items that individuals have so it knows if i'm gonna do a room brief and this person's in the room and the rep looks at it it will tell the rep hey keith has a meeting with these people in two weeks, they're talking about this. It's pulling all that stuff into Salesforce into a live artifact that's built out of Claude, pulling in discovery questions from residents, pulling in prospects up, pulling in information from HubSpot on whether or not they're engaging in content that we may have been putting into market.

21:17Mike Campana: So it pulls all that information in so you have really deep knowledge when you go into a meeting with somebody, what's happening, what's going on, what are the action items and where we're interacting with them already. That's impressive. We mentioned BDRs. I think BDRs to me is like particularly ABM. There's very simple terms. The way I think about it is that there's kind of three steps to a sales. There's the marketing step, which is about finding people out there who might be interested in getting them, bringing them to the front door. And then the BDRs role is to get them into the house for the salesperson to sit down at the table and close the deal.

21:54BDRs is often where it sort of falls apart. It sounds like this has a lot of value to the BDRs based on what you were saying. How does it fit that?

22:04Mike Campana: Yeah. Well, the challenge with BDRs is that BDRs, they're not necessarily experts in the vertical markets that they're having conversations with. Particularly in your case, where there's lots of markets, right? Yeah, exactly. And so we may bring a BDR on that maybe knows commercial, but he needs to follow up on some intense signals that we have for maybe an asset we put into market, or maybe we had a webinar and these 10 people ask questions and they seem to really engage in the webinar. I want my BDR to follow up with them. This person is a CFL maybe, or maybe they're the director of revenue cycle or they're an HIM person in our organization.

22:43Mike Campana: I'm going to call them up. How do I have a conversation with them in a way that is persona aware, right? I want to, We have the assets loaded in there. They know the assets and maybe the webinar asset, maybe a white paper. How do I then have the conversation with that director of HIM way that talks about an asset, talks about a webinar that they were in and talks about it in a way that is important to someone who works in HIM? I mean, the person who works at HIM has care abouts, needs, wants, desires, and challenges that are very different from the COO of an organization or the director of patient access.

23:24Mike Campana: They all have different care abouts, different needs, and the conversation can be navigated in a way to the BDR. The other cool thing is, in addition to the conversations that you can have, that it feeds that conversation to them and ranks the conversations all there because it looked at all the care abouts, it ranks these conversations, but then it provides a dictionary to that person as well. So maybe the conversations guiding them through might have something to do with HCAP scores, right? Yep. Well, if I don't know anything about healthcare and I see the abbreviation for HCAP, I may say, oh, H-C-A-P-H-S, you know, or something like that.

24:01Mike Campana: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a tell that you don't know what you're talking about. So the dictionary. Great example. What is an HCAP score? And by the way, how do you say HCAP to the person? What's the phonetics that you have to say? So he knows not to say HCAP. He says, pronounce HCAP, right? It tells them that right on the screen as he's talking to the person. That's incredible. It guides them through that. It also tells them what not to say. Don't talk about this. Don't talk about that. You know, it gives them that. You really paint a picture there of how you can prep the BDR to have a much better informed call, so a more successful call.

24:39Have you been able to use it so that they can do the other really hard part, which is actually getting somebody, you know, you can say, you know, You see a signal, right, that healthcare system X is highly engaged and there's multiple people. And we think that this person who's the head of applications is very actively looking at us right now, but we've got to get them on the phone. And does it help with that, that sort of conversion moment?

25:07Mike Campana: No, that's not going to really help get the person on the phone. That's still a BDR craft where that has to happen. Yeah. It's more about how, once I get them on the phone, how can I have a meaningful conversation that is persona aware? It's not going to help get that person on the phone. I think that, is that your question? Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's sort of like the, does it help them write better emails? Does it help them? It does. Does it help them leave better voice emails? There is email sequencing. There is prep work can be done. So there's all messaging sandbox that's built into the tool.

25:42Mike Campana: And that messaging sandbox works two ways, right? It could be that it helps you build out an email sequencing piece to it, but it can also work in reverse. So let's say that I am a rep and I want to start doing my own blog here. I want to write something on LinkedIn about something. I want to make sure that it's written in a way that CFOs care about. I can write out this blog, drop all the content that I create into the messaging sandbox of the tool, and it will inform you whether or not it's going to resonate with your target audience and make suggestions on how you can modify the content so it resonates more with the audience you're trying to get at.

26:22Mike Campana: Same thing with email sequences. It could be advertising headers. It could be landing pages for website. And you choose what you want in the sandbox. This is the type of content it'll either write it for you, make it persona-aware, or take what you've written elsewhere, drop it in there and modify it to make it persona aware. I see. I see. So it basically gives them the tools to personalize every single touch point. And the evidence is that the more personalized what you send or what you use to outreach, the greater the likelihood is that you're going to get a conversion. So I can get that from here on that.

27:02It's really impressive. Adam here, quick break. We'll get back to Mike. in a minute, but first a question for you. How much of the pipeline your marketing team generates actually turns into sales conversations? For a lot of health tech companies, the gap between marketing and sales is exactly where pipeline leaks. Leads go cold, BDRs don't have the context they need, messaging doesn't land with the full buying group. And that's one of the things that we can help you fix at Health Launchpad. So we help health tech companies build go-to-market strategies that connect marketing and sales around the same buyers, the same signals, the same messages, so pipeline grows and converts.

27:49If your pipeline isn't keeping pace with your growth goals, let's have a conversation. You can visit healthlaunchpad.com to start the conversation and to learn more about us. So with that, let's get back to hear what Mike has to say.

28:05Mike Campana: Okay, now, obviously, you're an advantage because you're a well-known software developer with a PhD in computer science and you have a team of 50 software developers, right? Yes, I'm all those things. I mean, seriously though, you're not a software developer. No. So how do you do? Okay, so it is a little intimidating, right? But you're building this in, are you using Cloud Code? Are you using code? What are you doing? Yeah, well, I use Cloud Code. And part of it is knowledge I gathered from watching people like Casey Meehan who introduced me to Cloud Code and other things I've watched on Cloud Code.

28:44Mike Campana: So part of it is them guiding me and making me a little more confident that this is something I could do on my own. But I also lucked into how I did it, how I'd recommend people, if they were ever going to write something in Cloud Code, the approach you take really matters. I think a lot of people and a lot of the influencers that you watch on LinkedIn, the way they use cloud code is not how I would do it. They go into cloud code and they describe what they want to build and start building it. And then they iterate in cloud code and changing cloud code. That's not how I, and luckily I accidentally went into a different process and that process is what I would recommend.

29:19Mike Campana: And what I, what happened with me is I knew I wanted to go and do something in cloud code, but I didn't start at cloud code. I started with just Claude, create a project in Claude, and started talking about what I wanted to do. And Claude said, don't go into Claude code, do that, start with me. And it walked me through creating my environment on my computer, how to set up my C drive. It walked me through a bunch of different things that had to happen. How do I set up Claude? Because it's going to have an API on it, right? So I had to actually set up a Claude administration panel, which is different than Claude.

29:52Mike Campana: It's done outside of Claude. So I have an administrative panel that I built in Claude to actually, you know, has to test, has to run calls to Claude 5.5. So how does that happen? There is a cost to that that's outside of your usage of Claude. So that was part of it. But the cool thing was, is that as I started to approach building this, rather than me going into Claude code and saying, hey, I want to build this thing, I want to do this thing, talking to Claude, Claude would give me what to give to Claude Code. And I would take what Claude gave me, and rather than me vibe coding, I had Claude vibe coding Claude Code, not me vibe coding.

30:27Mike Campana: So it was great, which is really fun. Oh, that is brilliant. That's absolutely brilliant, yeah. And as Claude Code responded and built things, every time I built something, it gives you an icon to copy. I would copy what it built, go back to Claude, paste that in there, and Claude would evaluate what Claude Code did, and then give me the next thing to do. And he knew, Claude knew what I was trying to build, what the game plan was, what was my end game, what the other phases I was going to do. And he ideated with me and took that ideation and fed that to Claude Code constantly. And Claude Code responded, fed back to Claude.

31:06Mike Campana: What was really funny was, and I don't think a lot of people have appreciated, Claude and Claude Code will argue with each other. And they will argue with each other in front of me about me, which was just absolutely hilarious. It's like Claude will do something or will say something. I give that to Claude Codes. That's not what you want. And I would pass that back to Claude. He goes, yeah. No, that's exactly what Mike wants. You'll do what I tell you, basically. And we'll do this. Fine. I'll do it. And I would do this thing. I put it back. No, you did it wrong. That's not what Mike wants. Do this instead.

31:43Mike Campana: and I'm just sitting in the middle, sitting back, watching these two tools argue with each other. And it was actually pretty humorous. That is hilarious. It's so funny. It makes me think that I had something on a podcast today. I can't remember which one. I've listened to so many damn podcasts. But where there's this argument going on about whether you can hurt Claude's feelings. And if you're being rude to Claude, should it be a company policy that you shouldn't be rude and abusive to Claude because we should be treating Claude and valuing Claude like it's an employee? And I thought, this is insane.

32:25But they won't listen to what you just described. I said, oh yeah, I can see why that would make sense.

32:31Mike Campana: That's remarkable. That's really funny. I always follow. He needed to tell the story, you know, it's not me, it's them. And then he goes, oh, it's not me, it's him. So I love the man. This is a, you've been on an amazing journey with this, with you and your team, you know, for people listening to this who are, you know, probably dabbling or sort of, you know, or somewhere on the same sort of journey as you are. What have you learned that you'd say, if you want a short circuit, here are one or two things that I really recommend that you would do. Yeah. I think the first one is, I mean, for me, this was kind of a skunk work project.

33:05Mike Campana: You know, I didn't have the conversation outside of the marketing department, but this is something I was doing and building. Even the salespeople who are working on the personas as we're building them, they were the human in the loop for building out this corpus of 978 personas, didn't know that the end game was this tool, the resonance tool. And that was a mistake. I think you need to bring people along, especially your IT. They have to be on board with it. You know, we actually created a center of excellence within our organization that looks at tools and things like that. They're trying to minimize the amount of tools that we have and make sure that everything is implemented logically.

33:47Mike Campana: And this kind of threw a wrench in it for them a little bit. So you need to have IT and other people on board with what your goal is. Make sure your vision makes sense to the company. Just because a vision makes sense to you and, oh, this is a great idea, doesn't necessarily mean that it makes sense to the organization. So bring them on board. The other thing I would say is important to do is exactly what I stumbled into, what we just talked about. Start with Claude before you go to Claude. If you're going to develop a tool and application, let Claude set the stuff up for you. Tell you how to create your folder structure, how to use other things like, does it make sense to have a GitHub account or not for this stuff?

34:27Mike Campana: And, you know, it evaluates that stuff really, really well, sets you up really, really well. And everything that I do in the tool gets backed up into the application. For example, a user manual, a schema map that we do. Every time Cloud changes that stuff, the nice thing about having everything done through Cloud is Cloud says, hey, that schema has changed. Let me maintain that schema map for you. Hey, the usage functionality of this has changed. Here's a user manual. It gets changed over here. It's not going to happen in Cloud Code, right? So if you start in Cloud and have it set up as a project, all that stuff is going to land in the same folder.

35:06Mike Campana: It's going to be maintained by Cloud. You don't have to think about it. It maintains all that stuff for you. And I think that's really important. Mike, first of all, congratulations on what you've accomplished. I know it's still an MVP, but it's a really remarkable, essentially a thousand personas. But most importantly, you've activated those 1 ,000 personas and you've built them into the workflow and you've connected it to systems, which puts you in the sort of top tier of teams that are in our industry who are using AI to really improve the quality and efficiency of what they do. So congratulations to you on that.

35:46And thank you for sharing.

35:48Mike Campana: I think the other phases of the tool are where it really was shined. So there's a lot of stuff we have projected in the future for this. There's so much value to understanding the personas and how those personas play into everything that you're doing that you can create other things off of those personas. I mean, our use case for this tool is about 30 lines long. and so we're only scratching the surface of what this application can and should do yeah yeah i think the other theme that comes through loud and clear and i've heard this in other interviews and discussions that we've had is that one of the one of the really positive things that's happening out of marketing's use of ai is it's connecting marketing and sales much more closely together because it's helping to join up the workflow, the sales workflow, the buyer journey, if you like.

36:47Mike Campana: It's really important too, because as I always reiterate with my team, our customer, marketing's number one customer is that sales team. And that relationship is really important that you are in sync with them on so many things. But this is a tool that brings the two of those organizations much closer together. Mike, thank you so much for sharing everything that you've shared today. I have learned so much. I've got, you've got my brain whirring and I know anybody listening to this is going to be like really excited. By the way, Casey Meehan, we're both fans of Casey and there'll be information down below in the show notes so that if you want to learn more about Casey Meehan and what he does, you can find out more about him.

37:31Awesome. Thanks. Appreciate the time. What a conversation with Mike. I'm so grateful to him for opening up the hood and sharing what he's been up to in detail and in a way which I thought was just great storytelling. So Mike's a great person to speak with. I've got several key takeaways from this thing. So number one, AI is pulling marketing and sales together. Mike's tool takes everything marketing knows about buyers and drops it directly into the sales workflow. So room briefs, BDR call guidance and email sequences, things like that. As he puts it, marketing's number one customer is the sales team and AI is making that relationship tighter than ever.

38:20Number two, personas only create value once they're activated. Most persona work is a checkbox nobody revisits. Mike's team went deep, mapped out entire buying groups north and south of the economic buyer, and then built those personas into tools people are using every day. Number three, arm BDRs for the conversation, not just the dial. Persona-aware talk tracks, a built-in dictionary, and guidance on what not to say help BDRs sound credible in markets they don't know well. Takeaway four, start in Claude before you go to Claude Code. Plan and set up your environment in Claude and let it direct Claude Code and let it maintain your documentation as you build.

39:12And finally, number five, bring IT and the business along early. A skunkworks project can move fast, but a vision that makes sense to you still needs to make sense to the rest of the organization. By the way, if you want to learn more about Casey Meehan, who inspired a lot of Mike's journey and mentored me quite early on in my AI journey, you'll find a link in the show notes to information about Casey. If you got value from this episode, please follow or subscribe and leave us a review. And hey, even share it with a colleague who's thinking about how to use AI more effectively. Thanks again to Healthcare Now Radio and to Roberta and Carol.

39:56And if you'd like help building a go-to-market engine that turns marketing into pipeline, take a look at healthlaunchpad.com. I'm Adam Cherenis. Thanks for listening to the Health Tech Marketing Show see you next time