Episode 566 of Marketing Smarts is all about making the little moments count.

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“All these moments, especially when there's data transfer or information transfer that suddenly feels to somebody like, 'I already did this.' Every time you lose those little moments, it eats away at your credibility, eats away at your brand experience,” says episode guest Kristen Habacht, CRO at Typeform.

A customer journey can be seen as a series of micro-moments, and every one of those has to have an engaging, human quality to it—or you risk losing the customer. Even if the rest of your campaign is flawless, that one moment—whether a phrase clearly written by AI or a request for information the person has already given—can kill the whole thing.

“You spend all this money and investment on brand, and then you drop somebody into some generic something,” says Kristen. “Make sure that whether it's your first half mile or your last half mile, there is never a gap where it suddenly feels like I got dropped into the 1990s website development form.”

That’s where the friction happens. Because customers can sense when you don’t care enough to fix it.

“People want to know that you have thought through these things; even if they don't think it subconsciously, they feel it just organically through the interaction,” says Kristen. “I think that there are small ways to delight people every day with different interactions, whether that's through your form, whether that's through your salesperson having done one little bit of extra research, whatever piece it is.”

Listen to the entire show from the link above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode.

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This episode brought to you by Typeform.

Typeform is a refreshingly different form builder. We help over 150,000 businesses collect the data they need with forms, surveys, and quizzes that people enjoy. Designed to look striking and feel effortless to fill out, Typeform drives 500 million responses every year—and integrates with essential tools like Slack, Zapier, and HubSpot. For more information, visit www.typeform.com.

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"Marketing Smarts" theme music composed by Juanito Pascual of Signature Tones.

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Full Transcript: How B2B Marketers Can Create Human-Like Interactions in an Increasingly Digital World

George B. Thomas: We're talking about human-like interactions in an increasingly digital world, AI, B2B marketers, and what's fun is I'm talking to Kristen Habacht, revenue officer from Typeform. We're going to talk about the major ways that we as B2B marketers might be jacking up these human-like interactions, hurdles, success, and we're even going to talk about how Kristen was delighted when filling out a form and how she found it engaging, and what that meant for her career path. We're going to talk about tips, tricks, templates, hacks, hurdles, all sorts of fun things, and of course we're going to get to those words of wisdom.

Before we do that, if you don't know, Kristen Habacht has nearly two decades of experience growing and scaling revenue organizations, especially in the PLG and sales-assisted space. She currently serves as chief revenue officer at Typeform and previously served at Shogun as president and COO, scaling the PLG motion and raising the Series C. Prior to Shogun, she had leadership positions at Atlassian, running the AMER and APAC enterprise sales team, and later building out a new global team, she was also the VP of sales and first revenue hire at Trello, leading them through their acquisition by Atlassian. She sits on the board of GuideCX, Passion.io, and Refined. This is going to be an amazing conversation.

I'm super excited because, if you've known me for any length of time, you know I love this idea of humans. Today, we're going to talk about human-like interactions in an increasingly digital world for you, the B2B marketers. I'm also excited because we have Kristen Habacht here today, who is going to be the person who is putting some things in our brain that we might not be thinking about that we probably should be thinking around B2B marketers, tools, human-like interactions, all the good stuff.

Kristen, let's start from the very beginning. As the chief revenue officer of Typeform, what do you spend a lot of your day thinking about when it comes to B2B marketing or your B2B marketing customers?

Kristen Habacht: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I think a lot about attribution, which I'm sure everyone does, especially as things are becoming more complex and there are more channels and more ways for folks to find you, really nailing that down and understanding how to measure all of that from beginning to end. Then also thinking about how as a brand we're coming across, how as a team we're coming across, how we're thinking about the customer journey.

Typeform, obviously, is a tool used by marketers, so as a marketing team ourselves, we think a lot about we're our customer and our customer is us. We try to tie those things together as much as possible and take that lens through everything that we do, not just through the first marketing interactions, but through all of the other pieces of what we do as a go-to market engine.

George: I love this idea of the customer journey. I also love the mindset of we're our own customer, which leads into this idea of empathy, which leads into this idea of being human and human-like interactions. I just want to dive to the crux of something that has been on my brain since we said we were going to do this interview. Is there a major way that B2B marketing, and dare I just even say marketing teams, are fundamentally messing up around the topic that we're talking about today, human-like interactions in this complex digital world?

Kristen: The funny thing about humans is that the closer you get to a human-like interaction, the more you realize what's not human about it. It's like watching a CGI movie where it's like you look almost human, it's like the uncanny valley. So, I think when you think about those interactions, where I think the missteps come in is being inauthentic to the brand or inauthentic to the story you're telling, being overly dramatic or being overly sincere, too. It's like this isn't how a person talks, this isn't how people process information, it has that level of inauthenticity or saccharineness to it where you're like, something is just slightly off about this interaction. It's hard to describe, but when you see it, you know it, you're like this doesn't ring true to me, and it's that uncanny valley of this just isn't how it works.

George: I love that. As B2B marketers, we've all probably run into that on somebody's almost amazing personalization in the subject lines of emails. I'm just going to throw that out there. That's probably a place where we're like, they're messing it up.

One of the things that I like to do is I love to level-set. We're going to have a good conversation today, but I want the listeners to know exactly what we mean, because one word could mean something to somebody and totally something else to somebody else. Let's align everything here. When you say human-like interactions, what the heck do we mean?

Kristen: For me, I think it encompasses a number of pieces. Whether it's an email, whether it's in a form that you're engaging with, whether it's in a webinar or something that you're watching, I think about people talk, how people engage, what people actually look at. Going back to the inauthenticity point, which is do you ever just meet somebody and say, "I noticed a press release about your company the other day." That's just not how we speak and how we interact. I think about those pieces when I think human-like.

For example, when I'm engaging, I would expect something to be a question and then an answer, and then a question and an answer. For something, whether it's a cold email or not, to have a little bit of knowledge of who I am and customize those pieces around me. If I'm getting an email from a company, I wouldn't expect there to be a link there where I have to provide my email again because it's like, you knew who I was. You don't ask me to say my name to you again after I've said my name to you before.

Those pieces for me are the human-like, which is how can we make it feel like there is a level of intelligence and interaction that feels like it could be a person working with me on this.

George: I love this idea of level of intelligence, because we've all probably had that moment where we're talking to somebody and they go, "Who are you again," and you're like, this is not giving me the warm fuzzies. Where my brain goes is this idea of paying attention to normal human communication and mirroring that quality communication through the digital actions that are happening. Speaking of that, what I want to dive into next is are there more important, and I might say top two or three, however many tops you have, are there more important human-like interactions we should be focusing on as B2B marketers?

Kristen: I think there are a few places that I think about for sure that humanity element comes to. I think one is people are trying to push to use AI in as many places as possible, from an uncanny valley perspective. We use it as well, but a lot of the common uses are AI for content, because as a marketing team we're constantly trying to push out good, interesting, thoughtful content, so it's like, we should use AI for this, it's natural for it.

I think there is a huge benefit to how you can use it, but it's kind of like the rule of personalization, which is you want to personalize enough that it feels personalized, but not so much that you've either spent too much time or you've wasted the materials. Same with the AI element of this, which is when you read a piece that was fully crafted by AI, you're like, I can tell this was an AI-generated content piece. There's just something about the structure of it.

But if you use AI to take something that a person wrote and change elements of it, maybe change it for a specific industry, or whatever it might be, to plug in different use cases, all of a sudden now you've maximized what your team can do without it coming across as, this feels weird, like they put this through a word salad and created content based off of it. So, it's a quantity and quality conversation.

I also think the way social channels work, chat is a big one. If you've ever used a customer experience chat where you think someone is going to help you with something, and suddenly you realize I'm just on a thing that's going to feed me FAQ questions and this is totally not a human on the other end, I think there's elements there as well. So, I think it's the content that we give out to people from a B2B perspective, when they come to our landing pages or come to us through some channel where there is a back and forth engagement that it feels really sincere there as well.

Also, who we reach out to and what we say to them. So, whether it's how we target or segment our customer base, being intelligent and putting a human lens on that so it's not like 50 employees, this bucket. What else would you have looked at? How else can we think about what would resonate for these people?

I don't know if that was three. I feel like maybe I jumbled them together for you, but I tried.

George: It was actually really good. I love this idea of a human lens. I love that you dove into specificity. My brain even went to pace, tone, things like that, when you were talking about the messaging. There's a difference between using one or two personalization tokens, just like there is a difference between using one or two emojis versus 32 emojis. You can just start to tell something went wrong in the system.

Speaking of that, you mentioned AI, and I'm super curious. If we think about creating these human-like interactions in a digital world, are there a couple of tools that maybe you guys use or other B2B marketers should be adding to their toolbelt to help enable these human-like interactions?

Kristen: Absolutely. We are using AI for some of this. I think there are a number of different tools for content. There's Writer.ai and a few other things along those lines that allow especially smaller teams to leverage this. I'm also an advisor for a couple companies, I'm on the board of a couple companies, and this is something that especially when folks are maybe seed Series A or Series B, they don't have a big marketing team investment. They tend to be generalists at that point, you don't necessarily have your content people and your demand people. Leveraging tools like this at that point can be real game changers for those people. Again, as long as you put a layer of someone looks through it to make sure it sounds how a person would sound when they speak.

It's interesting. We're using this tool right now called Scalestack. There are other tools that are similar to this, but basically going back to my segmentation conversation, to say we're a PLG company, we have a lot of customers that we don't talk to. In fact, the majority are folks that we don't talk to. That means we have a lot of data. Having AI go through with us guiding it with some criteria to help us from a segmentation perspective, which then we can put into our lifecycle marketing and what's our best next use case for this person, our best next step for this person, using that tooling at the database layer. It also then helps your sales teams to be able to send better quality leads over, leads that have been Marketing-qualified in a way that has more of a layer of intelligence than just they hit three whitepapers in the last 12 months.

Then the basics, which I think most folks have, in terms of a CRM tool, whether it's HubSpot or whatever, something that's really allowing you to collect a lot of that information and pull it all together. Those are a handful of them.

George: I love that you're adding value and you're dropping names of tools. I have to be honest with you, the fact that you weren't like now we get to talk about Typeform, but I am going to push a little bit because you do work for a company that provides tools or a tool. How does Typeform help B2B marketers create human-like interactions in an increasingly complex conversion conversation digital world?

Kristen: I had previously been at Trello. If anybody is familiar with Trello, I think one of the things that people loved about Trello from a human-like interaction is you could relate to the concept of picking up a sticky note and moving it along the line on a board, it felt like how you work, it felt like how a human functions. I had known Typeform for years even when we were at Trello, and I was always so delighted when a Typeform was what I was asked to fill out because it felt like I was talking to somebody, it felt fun, it felt part of a brand. One question comes up, I answer it, maybe a little image pops up or the next question comes up, and it felt like it was engaging.

When I was looking for my next opportunity, those parts really resonated with me as a revenue leader because it was something I could get behind and I could really feel that we could help people like myself make sure my brand—you spend all this money and investment on brand, and then you drop somebody into some generic something, generic form or whatever. It's like that last half mile is the most important. You did all this work, and then you just trash it. Showing up at that level and saying this is a fun brand, this is a high-end brand, this is whatever, here's six questions for you to answer, it's like going to my doctor's office all of a sudden.

I think we help people show up how they want to, but engage as well. Make sure that whether it's your first half mile or your last half mile, there is never a gap where it suddenly feels like I got dropped into the 1990s website development form kind of feel. That's a big part of it, I think.

George: I love this so much. Marketing Smarts listeners, I have to ask you to probably rewind and listen to Kristen's words again to hear her say, "I was delighted when I was asked to fill out a form," and also to hear the words, "it was engaging." Marketing Smarts listeners, be honest with yourself, is that how your customers feel with your current conversion opportunities? Maybe. Maybe not. It's definitely something to think about.

Kristen, one of the things that I love is I'm a big nerd when it comes to Mythbusters, the show, I could sit and watch that for hours and hours. So, one of the things that I love to do on the Marketing Smarts Podcast is just bust some myths. In this conversation that we're having around human-like interactions, is there a common myth about creating a better human-centric user experience that you want to debunk here?

Kristen: Maybe it's not a common myth, but I feel like what I've been hearing is the way we're going to get human-like is with AI, that's how we're going to engage, we're going to use AI. I don't know if people even fully know what that means. I think everyone is just like, "What was the question? Oh, it's AI." I think that's one of the things that I've been hearing.

It's a valid question, we're asking, too, "How can AI help?" I think there's a level of we just remember on all of these things, whether it's AI or design, or whatever it might be, it's still not a human. Maybe this is now the salesperson and the marketer in me coming together, which is to say there's still a place for human interaction. Humans are still the empathy engine, the creative engine, you can't program enough, I don't think at least, to take into account all of those things.

I think for me the myth is that we're all going to get replaced by AI, it will do human-like enough, or that we can replace our team by using AI, whichever lens you want to take it from. I think that goes back to, to me, the reality is we have to remember that the human part has to remain part of the human-centric approach, and that has to be at the center of what we do. Tools can help us with that, but they can't ever fully replace that.

George: I love that answer so much. One of the things we love to do on this show, too, is we love to be actionable, give people something that they listen to the podcast and they can take one or two takeaways and run with it. I'm super curious, are there any tips, tricks, templates, hacks that B2B marketers can use when trying to create more human-like interactions in their organization?

Kristen: I think I've seen a stat somewhere that said 40%, something like that, it was a high number of consumer experiences are negative when they go in to engage with a brand. I think it's a really interesting point to say there's a ton of opportunity here that's sitting out.

I would say as much as possible to automate the pieces that you can, the part where the human element is not as important. Like I was talking about the data research element, stuff like that. Don't spend as much time on the places where you can leverage technology, and then put your human touch into the places that give you the biggest bang for your buck.

Then look at the places where you feel like that last half mile is being dropped. Again, for example, the form. Obviously, I'll push on that. But it's not just that. The automation from a Marketo or a HubSpot or whatever as well so that these pieces just flow as much as possible without a human having to be part of that, so that you free up the human resource to get on the phone and talk to the customer, or to actually personalize out the email as much as possible.

To really look and say what's working. If I know how to do a case study, if that's my template, then I do the same case study. I think it goes to that maximum of personalization, which is the format is still this, this, and this, but it's like a Mad Libs, you pull these pieces in. Content can still feel fresh and new, but you're not at scratch every single time that you do it.

I don't know if they're tips, tricks, or templates, but I always look to say, "What's the part that a human can't replace?" That's why when sales teams, for example, take an MQL and they put it in the sales team drip, which is a marketing drip that they've made themselves, it's like, I could have done that with marketing. You're the human, I want you doing the human part of this interaction. So, it's all about thinking about the place where a human's perspective is the best. Everything else you should automate, you should try to leverage the tools for that as much as possible.

George: I love that so much. It's funny because we almost are trying to automate or make everything automatic or automagical along the way, and sometimes you just have to do the work that needs to be done, you just have to have the conversation that needs to be had.

You've mentioned a couple of times, and I want to dig into this a little bit, that half a mile where we kind of just drop it. I want to ask the question that I kind of asked at the beginning, but it's a little bit different. We all run into the potholes of life, in this case we'll call them hurdles, we're running a race to try to reach success.

What are some hurdles you've seen B2B marketers face when trying to create this better user experience? You used the world flow a little bit, something that just flows along. What are the hurdles you've seen marketers facing when trying to create these human-like interactions in this experience or flow for the potential prospects, leads, and customers?

Kristen: I feel like I could talk on this forever because there are so many pieces. If you think about the funnel, every time you make a transition point, think of the funnel as you are taking a bucket and handing it to the next person, and the bucket has to get into the house. Every time you move the bucket, a little bit of water comes spilling out, unless you're being thoughtful about it. These are the friction points in the process.

Think about, you've just watched a webinar with us and now there's a contact us or next steps form. What's that interaction? Does the form ask stuff that I already knew because you registered for the webinar? How does that feel? Does that feel inauthentic? I fill out that form, I say what I want to talk to a rep about. This then gets lead-scored and sent over to a rep, but I haven't passed through that piece of information, or the rep doesn't look at it, or whatever it is. Now, all of a sudden, what do you do? You get a cold email from a rep that probably says, "I saw you attended our webinar and wanted more information. What can I do?" I already told you what I wanted on the previous form. Oh, by the way, the webinar was on a topic. Maybe reference what the topic was. That's probably the thing that I want to talk to you about.

All these moments, especially when there's data transfer or information transfer that suddenly feels to somebody like I already did this. It's like a million little papercuts where all of a sudden you feel like I don't feel like, I don't think this brand is thinking about me or listening to me, almost like they're trying to filter me out. How many times have you heard somebody say, "I felt like I had to work so hard to talk to your team to respond to me." People feel that way because they feel like you put all these hurdles along the way in that, to your point.

I don't know if I rambled on that. The point is there are these little moments, and I think people spend a lot of time to think about, how does the water get from the well to the house, and they don't think about how the water gets from the person here that has to hand the bucket to the person here. Every time you lose those little moments, it eats away at your credibility, eats away at your brand experience.

George: So good. As I was listening to you talk, I go to this phrase that I absolutely love. It's like Kristen is talking about buyer repellant. How can you just completely jack up this opportunity where people want to actually buy from you, but you've made it difficult?

On the flip side, because we talked about the hurdles, I want to talk about success. What does success look like, how do we know that we've made the digital world that we're all in, the buyer's journey that we all go through just a little bit better with these human-like interactions and creating a better experience? How do we know we're hitting it out of the park and we're successful?

Kristen: The revenue person in me says people are buying and engaging, that's a huge one. I think the other is it comes down to a combination of NPS, not just around a product, but how people feel about the brand. Where are people in your funnel coming from? Typeform, Trello, and Atlassian, where I had also been, the things that I universally love about these businesses is that they have an extremely high viral rate.

I'm sure anybody listening can experience this. There's a million products that you've probably enjoyed that you love the product, but the company experience is so miserable that you just don't want to engage anymore. Or you love the company experience so much that you wish the product was a little bit better. Those two things need to hand in hand.

To get a true viral motion, I feel like it means your company is doing both of those things right. The product is in a good place, it's solving a real problem. Every time you recommend something to somebody, it's a very personal moment. You're kind of putting your own self out, because what if they have a horrible experience and it's like Kristen's judgment is so weird that she thinks everybody should fly Cheapo Airlines. I didn't want to say any specific airline on that, but you know what I mean. It's like suddenly somebody thinks not only worse of the brand, but worse of you for that recommendation.

The hurdle to get a viral response is really high. I think people do that because they feel like the brand that they're about to recommend also reflects positively on them. That again means that I feel like, "Hey, other CRO / CMO, I know your time is worth a lot, I know how busy you are, because I'm busy too. I wouldn't recommend somebody who is going to waste your time filling out the same information 15 times or if they don't know how to speak to your pain point." So, I think the virality element, the NPS element, the revenue element are also pieces. Also, other similar companies saying, "We should do stuff together, we should leverage our brands together," so co-marketing.

Those are all big signals of those things for me.

George: So good. Speaking of success, you mentioned earlier, "I was delighted to fill out a form." I would call delight a success metric. You even mentioned engagement. Engagement is definitely a thing. So, I do want to circle back around. You mentioned Atlassian and you mentioned Trello, but of course you're at Typeform now. I want to circle back around and just ask the question for the B2B marketers that when I asked the question earlier of are your forms creating that kind of experience, I know there's someone out there thinking, "I'm in trouble." How does Typeform help its users create a better user experience along the way?

Kristen: I think ultimately we really help make it feel like a cohesive brand experience moment, which you might not give that much credit to, but there's a reason why if you think about a high-end experience, you're not just buying a fancy purse from Louis Vuitton. You're buying the experience of it's in a beautiful box, it has a beautiful ribbon, it comes in a nice high-quality bag. There's an element of you're about to ask somebody to spend $50,000, $100,000, $10,000, whatever it is in an annual contract, to commit to all these things. People want to know that you have thought through these things, even if they don't think is subconsciously, they feel it just organically through the interaction.

Typeform helps bring that level of brand consistency through the process. I think it also helps build lasting relationships in terms of people feel like those interactions are pleasant, it's engaging. Subconsciously, I think there is a level of it doesn't feel like going to the doctor's office where you have a really ugly PowerPoint style form. I just got this recently from my doctor's office where I was transferring something over and I was like, "Why does this look like I'm filling out a form that my kid made?" It's subconscious, but you feel it.

Then I think there are other elements, too. Typeform has another product called VideoAsk that allows you to put up a video and engage with it. We use that for recruiting, we use that from a human-like experience, if you want more information.

The other thing about humans, not to bounce around, is that we process data in different ways. Some people read. Some people want to talk through it. Some people are visual. I think the beauty of Typeform is you can add the visual elements to it, you can add the content elements to it, you can use VideoAsk to add that, so it kind of meets you where you need to be.

So, there's a number of ways, I think.

George: Very cool. I love this idea. I know we're not on here talking about VideoAsk, but ladies and gentlemen, if you are sitting here thinking we could probably create a better experience with video, you definitely need to check out VideoAsk.com and then, of course, check out Typeform. Kristen, this has been an absolutely amazing interview. There's a bunch of things that people can take away and maybe a new mindset they might have to these human-like interactions that we need to create in the digital world that we are all riding through.

One of the last questions that I love to ask, because you've been on a journey, Atlassian, Typeform, Trello, just life in general, we're all on this journey, and we gain these little nuggets that I love to call words of wisdom. When you think about the audience, B2B marketers, the Marketing Smarts and MarketingProfs community, what are the words of wisdom that you would want to share with them? It could be about marketing in a digital world, creating human-like interactions, or it could be about life itself. What are your words of wisdom?

Kristen: One of the things that I think about is that it doesn't matter what size company you are, you can still create beautiful, thoughtful, meaningful engagement digitally and personally, whatever it is, without having to make these giant investments. I think that's something I hear a lot, which is, "But we're small," or, "We're too big," or whatever it is. I think that there are small ways to delight people every day with different interactions, whether that's through your form, whether that's through your salesperson having done one little bit of extra research, whatever piece it is.

So, I think I would say just think about customers like they're humans on the other end of the phone or the other end of the email. What would delight you? What would delight them? People tend to buy and engage with people they like and the brands they like, even if it's not always the best thing out there. So, try to be the likable kid in the class.

There you go. Maybe that's life and business all together.

George: Marketing Smarts listeners, did you take lots of notes? I have to ask, what is your one thing, your number one execution opportunity after this podcast episode? Make sure you reach out and let us know in my inbox or on Twitter using the hashtag #MPB2B.

I also have to ask are you a free member of the MarketingProfs community yet? If not, head over to Mprofs.com/mptoday. You won't regret the additional B2B marketing education that you'll be adding to your life.

We'd like it if you could leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app, but we'd love it if you would share this episode with a coworker or friend. Until we meet in the next episode of the Marketing Smarts Podcast where we talk with Joey Coleman about unlocking the power of employee engagement, strategies and remarkable experiences, and effective onboarding, I hope you do just a couple of things. One, reach out and let us know what conversation you'd like to listen in on next. Two, focus on getting 1% better at your craft each and every day. Finally, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble B2B marketing human. We'll see you in the next episode of the Marketing Smarts Podcast.

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Published on October 5, 2023