B2B Research Reinvented: Matt Powell Talks Trust and Tech

In this episode of the GreenBook Podcast, Lenny Murphy chats with Matt Powell, Managing Director of North America at B2B International. With over 20 years at the company, Matt shares his journey from phone-room interviewer to senior leadership and offers an insider’s perspective on the evolving world of B2B market research.

The conversation dives deep into how emotional drivers have overtaken rational ones in B2B decision-making, the rising demand for trustworthy data, and the role of synthetic data and AI in delivering faster insights. Matt also discusses how B2B International’s integration into Dentsu and the launch of Dentsu B2B is reshaping end-to-end research, strategy, and execution. For anyone navigating the intersection of business insights and innovation, this is a must-listen.

Key Discussion Points:

• Matt Powell’s 20-year career journey at B2B International and lessons from the phone room
• How emotion and trust are now leading drivers in B2B decision-making
• The role of AI, synthetic data, and rapid insights in modern B2B research
• Importance of data quality and human validation in high-stakes B2B studies
• Dentsu B2B’s integrated model: combining media, creative, CX, and insights

Resources & Links:

• B2B International
• Merkle (Dentsu)
• GreenBook GRIT Report

You can reach out to Matt Powell on LinkedIn.

Many thanks to Matt Powell for being our guest. Thanks also to our production team and our editor at Big Bad Audio.

Transcript

Lenny: Hello, everybody. It’s Lenny Murphy with another edition of the Greenbook Podcast. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to spend it with myself and my guest. And today I am joined by Matthew Powell, Managing Director of North America for B2B International. Matt, welcome.

Matt: Thank you, Lenny. Great to be here.

Lenny: It’s good to have you. Often… you know, I end up talking to people that I know, and I look forward to times when I’m talking to somebody that I don’t. And you and I had never met until just a few weeks ago, so who knows where this is going to go, right? [laugh]. Now, with that being said, obviously I can’t give you a big introduction because I don’t know all of your background, so why don’t you tell our audience kind of your origin story? You know, how did you wind up in this role? Give us that comic book origin.

Matt: Absolutely. Thanks. Lenny. Well, yeah, really, really pleased to be here. So, I first started my career just over 20 years ago, now. I joined B2B International straight out of university. I started in the phone unit in the [unintelligible 00:01:16] center there in Manchester in the UK. I remember my first project was interviewing buyers of corrugated boxes around the US. So, in a matter of weeks, I became an expert on corrugated packaging and those kind of companies in the US. That kind of hooked me, I think. About a year later, I joined the analyst team, and then have been with the company ever since. So, I moved down to London in 2011 to open our London office. Spent ten years there. Had a quick pit stop in China at our Beijing office in 2008, and then four years ago, moved over to the US. So, I’m speaking to you now from LA in California, and I head up our North American team here. 20 years, it’s a long time [laugh]. Every, sort of, three years or so, it’s felt like something transformative has happened which has kind of kept things really interesting and exciting. The biggest one, I think was 2018, we were acquired by Dentsu. So, now our team sits within Merkle, one of Dentsu’s main brands. And that was really exciting for me because I’m really passionate about the impacts that research can make. And at that point, we started working really closely with the creative strategists within Dentsu and the media teams and starting to develop ways in which we can develop research solutions that we’ve got a sort of standalone primary projects, but then also ties into the work that those teams are doing. So yes, here in LA now. The—yeah, the 20 year journey has brought me here.

Lenny: You know, I’ve got to say this, actually, even though you’ve been in the same place for 20 years, that’s a very cool story nowadays because most folks don’t do that. So, to start in the phone room, work your way up, now managing director of North America. So, I guess you’re doing something, right?

Matt: Absolutely, yeah [laugh].

Lenny: [laugh]. So, far so good, huh? Well, you and I can relate. We talked about that when we did our kind of pre-call of my first job of research was managing a phone room. And, yeah, it does hook you, doesn’t it?

Matt: It does. It does. And again, I think that’s another reason why—I’m sure it’s the same with all researchers after 20 years, every day is a school day, essentially. Every project you work on, you’re learning something new, solving a new problem, you’re designing something in a slightly different way. So, yeah, it definitely keeps it interesting.

Lenny: Well, especially for B2B, right? My background was also focused on B2B research for a long time, and I always thought it was the most interesting challenges. Even things as fundamental as just sample, right? We had to rethink that. Sometimes the relevant sample is ten people. Like, that really is—[laugh] that’s it, and that is quantitative because the universe is only 20 people. So yeah, so interesting. Well, let’s talk about that because there may be this perception that B2B is a little more dry or technical, but I think obviously our shared experience is that’s not the case. So, how have you brought that focus on the human, on the importance of decision-making within the business, and especially as you connected them into Merkle and then Dentsu with this larger integration outside of the research component into, actually, strategy and execution. So, give us a sense of what that’s been like.

Matt: Yeah, that’s a great question. Actually, it’s the—that time in the phone unit is good context for this, I think, because those conversations that you have with people—using that example, you know, buying corrugated boxes that are used in factories—doesn’t sound very emotional, but when you’re speaking to the person that’s involved in that decision and you’re hearing them talk about their day and the decisions that they have to make, the kind of risks that they have in choosing a new provider and the emotive impact that can have on them, you understand the human element of B2B decisions. So, even from right back then, you know, you understand that there’s a human element to this. We’ve over the—obviously, B2B is having a renaissance. It has been having a renaissance for the last few years, B2B marketing in general, and everyone’s talking about emotion in B2B and connecting with individuals. It’s not dry, it’s not boring, it’s actually pretty exciting. We, over the past, I guess, maybe ten years, have been doing our own thought leadership research to understand what drives decisions and the role of emotions. It started off as a small survey, I think in maybe, like, 2011, and now it is the biggest survey of B2B decision-making globally. So, this year—well, I think we’ve got 36,000 experiences that are measured over the last few years—and this year, it was the first time that we saw that personal factors actually fully outweigh the business decision-making drivers, now. They’ve always been really important, and we’ve always seen that they can often be the make or break factors, you know, the sort of emotive trust elements, but this year, it was the first—we measured 30 different attributes it was the first time that those emotive attributes outweighed the professional buying attributes.

Lenny: Now, that’s really interesting. Because GRIT is effectively a B2B survey, right? And, you know, it was always for, like, these battery of questions on buying decision-making, right, the drivers. And it’s all cheaper, faster, better quality, yadda, yadda, yadda. But last year, for the first time, we saw trust emerge as the paramount consideration, rather than maybe fourth tier down. And my hypothesis was—and we haven’t tested this, but it’s just my read, and maybe you can say whether I was right or wrong, intuitively—is in a period of disruption and upheaval, especially now, right, kind of all industries going through some level of disruption, having vendors, partners, that you trust to support you effectively becomes more important than anything else, even though they may be maybe a little more expensive or slower, whatever you know, these other parameters that they have to juggle in decision-making. Was that what you saw in your study?

Matt: Yeah. Trust is the number one driver, and we’ve seen that across industries. But, yeah, I think that’s a really good point with the GRIT survey. I mean, there’s obviously a lot of factors that play into that. I think obviously, at the moment, there’s been the issue with fraud in survey data, and you know, people wanting to know they can have absolute trust in the data that they’re putting in front of their organization and their C-suite. I was having a conversation yesterday, speaking to a partner who’s got an AI solution, and we were, you know, talking about synthetic data and what the role of synthetic data is going to be, and one thing I know, now—this will, for sure, change over time—but now, whenever we’re presenting research findings, particularly to, like, C-suite level people within a client, the biggest thing they fixate on is the sample slide. It’s like, have you spoken to exactly my customers or my prospects and can I really trust that you’ve spoken to a human that is important to our business? So that’s—

Lenny: And a human that actually is who they say they are [laugh].

Matt: Right, exactly. Exactly. So yeah, I think that just that shows the importance of trust. And particularly, you know, if big decisions are going to be made in research, and people have to really know that they can trust the data that they have and the insights that that’s delivering.

Lenny: So, we’re crafting the new quit—GRIT survey—I can’t speak—to go out soon, eminently, and it’s interesting, we did play a little bit with that concept of trust and disruption, especially in the era of AI, with exploring what some dimensions that may be, and I think one of them also is—one dimension of trust and reliability—is help us separate the signal from the noise. There’s lots of snake oil out there. We know—just so, if I’m a buyer, well, my God, there’s a million new solutions have emerged, [laugh] like, literally, right? And they’re all probably pretty good because they seem to do the same things. You know, they have different bells and whistles, but effectively, they’re leveraging AI to do different things to create efficiencies. And that’s great, but there’s so much more than just the capability, you know? There is the support, the understanding, the reliability components of that. So, is that something that you’re, kind of, factoring in these conversations that you’re having as well with your clients as well as your vendors, is—[cough] excuse me—is understanding what those deeper dimensions of trust as we go through a period of transformation, innovation.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, we’ve always had, like, a suite of partners that we use who are incredible, and we know their strengths and the areas that some of them, you know, for certain audiences, for example, there’s a partner who will be great for IT decision makers, but if we’re looking for, say, construction workers or chief financial officers, there will be very different partners that we use. So, we always say, like, thinking of sort of three main filters in terms of data quality, just at a broader sense, you’ve got the partners that we’re using and making sure that they can deliver great quality data, and there’s obviously lots of different checks that go into that and what could those partners do to make sure that we’re speaking to genuine people, that being the first filter. Then we’ve got, like, the screening questions to make sure we’ve got exactly the right kind of people in the survey who can talk knowledgeably about the complex business product that we’re going to be researching. And then the third phase being just various different data quality checks, automated different tools that we have, but always a human eye as well. Because, I mean, we’ve seen this in the past where you think, wow, that’s a juicy quote that we can see in this data, and it looks fantastic, and then the more you dig into it, you realize this isn’t a genuine quote. So, I think it always needs that human eye to be able to do the final sense checking data.

Lenny: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Have you seen this change over the years in the mechanisms to engage B2B audiences? So, for example, back in my Rockhopper days, right, the emergence of online research, B2B, and we were all hot and bothered to be able to sell everybody communities at—well, community panels. That’s the perfect thing, right? Why are you paying 100 bucks per, you know, every time we go to this population? Let’s just spend a million bucks up front and [laugh]—with us and, [laugh] you know, and build this ongoing group. Which never particularly worked because we know all the challenges of engagement with B2B populations, right? But so, have you seen some of those shifts? If you look at it today, is there a change happening in B2B research to build ongoing engagement with the specific populations so that you have them available for you or your clients or are we still kind of in the, you know, the ad hoc world overall?

Matt: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think, for our business and the way that we work, which is predominantly project-based and ad hoc, we do have some longitudinal work, but you know, the vast majority of the work we do is around a question that comes in, a strategic question, and then, like you were saying earlier, it may be that someone wants to do a big quantitative survey with an audience, and in practice, you can only do ten in-depth interviews with that particular audience. So, we’d always design the project from the ground up based around that particular ask. But yeah, in terms of how things have shifted, I think—well, when I first started was a big thing, actually speaking to people on the phone. I think it’s kind of come 360. Obviously, online is still a big part of what we do, but more and more we have some element of telephone involved. We’re actually speaking to someone. Now, that might be recruit to web, where someone’s calling someone up, recruiting, and talking them through the screener and then staying on the phone with them whilst they go through the survey. It could be expert networks to get really niche respondents. It could be our center that we’ve got in Manchester in the UK, which we tend to use when we’re doing, say, customer experience or in-depth interviews that require, like, specialist B2B interviewers. So, yeah, it feels like this, sort of, arc that’s come back where phone is—phone has always played a part, but it feels like it’s becoming one of those things where it just gives us that confidence in the data.

Lenny: I think even in consumer research, the advent of voice has come back around, right, now. And that’s just true about the technology, ubiquity of the technology, so no surprise. Although [laugh] I, just this week, saw a technology, an AI, that duplicates in real time, voice and face. And it’s like, man, we are in so much trouble in [laugh] as we go through this process. Like, we’ll go back to voice. That’s a great way to confirm, you know, and until AI clones the voice. So anyway, we don’t need to go more into that. That’s like the stubborn nightmares. But [laugh].

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s… the general trend is we’ve just got to keep… experimenting, seeing what’s out there. There’s new things every single day at the moment. And yeah, I think there’s going to be a lot of trial and error figuring out what works what doesn’t. But yeah, pace of change is crazy.

Lenny: Yeah. Well, as one of the leaders in B2B research, I think setting that pace of change in innovation, that’s, fortunately or unfortunately, it’s on your plate to do, so without giving away any secrets, what are the types of things that you’re excited about, that you guys either have implemented or experimenting with to keep driving those best practices forward?

Matt: Yeah. So, the biggest we’ve always had to innovate in the B2B world. Quite often, it’s been methodology innovation and, like, the way we design projects, thinking about, how do we track a brand when we can only speak to 15 people qualitatively? But I think those challenges have really helped sharpen our offering and the solutions that we have for clients. The thing I’m really excited about is—so as I mentioned earlier, we’re part of Merkle now. Merkle has got a lot of heritage and first-party data, experience management. There’s a team of, I think, 1000-plus analysts and data scientists who are developing new AI solutions every day, and we have the massive benefit of being able to tap into that which is fantastic. And I think, you know, if you play this out—I guess it’s difficult to say what three years time, five years time, is going to look like, but if you play these trends out, I could see a world where you know client side, you do have primary research still, I’m sure speaking to humans is still going to be a part of the suite of research tools, but that will be augmented with synthetic data, synthetic profiles. I’m sure there’ll still be presentations and workshops to clients about research findings, but I think clients will probably be interacting more frequently with chat bots. You know, “In our most recent survey, what did such and such think?” Or, “What’s the most important thing to network infrastructure architects?” That kind of thing. So, I just think—there’s obviously a lot of disruption coming, but I think this is going to be the biggest type of disruption to the research industry that we’ll have seen.

Lenny: I tend to agree. I think process will be disrupted significantly.

Matt: Yeah.

Lenny: Need not so much.

Matt: Mm-hm. Yep.

Lenny: Actually, I think need is only going to increase, but how we do it, we’re going to be pretty darn flexible about that. Because needing to make smart decisions isn’t going to go away. So, I think you’re bullish on the future, as am I. I’m just not bullish; I’m glad I don’t own a tab house.

Matt: Yes.

Lenny: Right [laugh]? Something [laugh], you know, coding. Glad I’m not a coder.

Matt: Yes, yes, yeah, absolutely. I think it’s always—again, going back to how we talk to our clients, we always say that we were in a business of delivering research that delivers impact. So, the tools that we have, or the tools that we employ to deliver that have always changed, and would change from project to project for clients as well. So that, I think that will always remain, delivering insight that drives impacts and outcomes for the client. The tool set that we have to do it is just going to continue to evolve, but it’s just going to evolve at a way rapider a pace than it has done previously.

Lenny: Yeah. Yeah, I absolutely agree. Fundamentally, that doesn’t change. So, clients need an answer to a business question to make a business decision. Those who win on the supplier side are the ones who help them achieve that best. That’s the movie target piece, right? That’s the flexibility piece is that definition of best. But now, that said, there certainly are nuances. Are you seeing any shifts in the in client needs or expectations changing during all of this disruptive period that we’re in?

Matt: Do you mean in terms of the questions that they’re asking, or…

Lenny: Uh, a little bit of both. So, are there trends that you see in the type of issues they’re trying to figure out? Certainly that would be interesting. And outside of the trust issue we already talked about, are there some other expectations that are emerging that are maybe surprising for how the engagements have gone in the past?

Matt: Yes, we’re getting asked questions about, “Hey, could we do something synthetic with this?” You know, I think people have always been—have asked about the latest trend, like, what could we do? Is there a way to do something like that on our particular project or on our tracker? So, we get asked questions about that. We’ve been able to say yes to things more that we wouldn’t have been able to say yes to in the past. So, you know, let’s take a project that would typically have taken seven to eight weeks, and, you know, there’s really no way to shorten it. We could maybe shave a week off, if let’s say, it’s a core project and the client’s like, we really need some kind of insights at week three, that would just, like, not have been possible in the past, whereas now we can use AI to get summaries of transcripts, views of themes, indicative quotes to share, quick-turn insights. We still do the thorough analysis at the back end, but it means that there’s the ability to share more insights earlier on. And I think that’s going to be one of the key things with AI and synthetic versus, like, online, telephone is that trade-off. So, like, yes, I need something quick. I know it’s not going to be perfect, but it’ll give me some insights early on.

Lenny: So, tell me it you—the way I’ve thought about this, I just haven’t thought about it specifically for B2B, but I suspect it will follow the same path as consumer, my bet is that we’re going to get to a place where early-stage ideation, testing, hypothesis testing, you know, those type of things, I think that will go synthetic, when it is not important to quantify, but to have, you know, reliable direction, right? Better than a thumb in the air. So, then build off of that. Now, we need to test hypothesis, you know, with a real audience. And yes, we’ll do that faster and probably in a much more interactive way than currently, than we do. And that whole promise that we had of agile research, remember, that was just the buzz term, you know, years ago, we will be there. It will be very agile, by its very nature of that rapid turnaround of information, even though the data collection may take us longer.

Matt: Yes.

Lenny: But the turnaround will make that much more agile and iterative, which should drive better outcomes. So, does that—I think that—certainly if you think about the CPG world, it’s pretty clear that we’re heading that direction for consumer. Is that what you’re seeing in B2B as well? Is that kind of what you’re thinking?

Matt: I think exactly that, yeah. You could imagine with, you know, in like, a classic old segmentation study that would have had, like, a qual phase up front to, like, flesh out the inputs to the segmentation, you can see that will be done with synthetic in, you know, a day or two, and then you move into some kind of measurement. You may then have the segments you might be tying those to first-party data or other types of data to be able to target them and enrich them and so on.

Lenny: So, go back to, I’m sure that you’ve experimented with this, as have I, in just off-the-shelf AI, you know, you are the decision maker in a, you know, Fortune 100 CPG company in the insights space, right? [duht duht duht duht duht], right, and create this persona, just to test out some, you know, BS idea that I have. What’s missing in any of that is that human element, though. So, it’s probably easy enough to, okay, scour LinkedIn and, you know, okay, here’s those things. So, do you think that as we go into that world where the ability to do those type of things from a profile information will be pretty easy, but that decision-making component, that human element that drives the decision-making will still be a critical piece of IP that the companies like B2B International, even Merkle and Dentsu, will be leaning into to make that—that’s where the impact will come from is through that understand the emotional component of that.

Matt: Yeah, exactly. And you’re just building on that concept development example you used earlier. Obviously AI is just going to get smarter and smarter, so what I might be about to say could be redundant in a matter of days, I don’t know, [laugh] but—

Lenny: Right, right.

Matt: —you imagine you’ve got synthetic panel, it knows your target audience and what drives their decision, the kind of things they’re looking for from a product. You place in front of them two or three concepts and the features resonate with this synthetic audience. Or, you know, there’s, like, a percentage uptake that if we launch this, it will go into market. What that might be missing—and might be missing—is the real truth of, like, well, could I shift the incumbent with this particular offer, you know? Is that person really going to take the risk to try and convince their C-suite on the software, which might be 20% better than the solution that they already have, but the headaches are changing, or the risk to them, professionally, personally, for making the wrong decision, is that kind of thing going to be factored into that type of synthetic research? I’m sure yes, eventually, but I think having a human element is always going to be really important.

Lenny: Now, being part of Merkle that does have a lot of first-party data assets, have you been synthesizing those to build out broader profiles to have more of what used to be, sort of, secondary research, but to really flesh out these things, that it’s not just what we’ve asked but it’s what we know already on these populations through other—the IT decision maker, maybe you’re working with a router company, but you know, we also have lots of buying behavior on their other IT purchases and—

Matt: Yes. Exactly that, yeah. So, there’s things we can do, like, loads of data points about media consumption habits and things like that where you can extrapolate that out across a whole buying universe. We might have only spoken to a sample of it, but we’ve got the data for, like, a large proportion of that audience. And so, yeah, the synthesis of primary research data with first-party data, that’s just going to keep growing and growing. It does also mean most instances that can then be targetable through media as well. In the consumer space, so obviously, we need to be specialists, but there’s also consumer research that we do. We have the ability to tie together some of the really big consumer panels to that first-party data so we can actually conduct the research with those panels and then stitch the data together, and it just enriches the insights that we have.

Lenny: Okay. Cool. So, you kind of, in fact, will have your own DSP and… yeah.

Matt: And kind of restricted to the US at the moment as well, you know, because of data protection laws and so on. Not the kind of thing that could be possible in Europe.

Lenny: Oh sorry, European listeners [laugh]. That’s… yeah, you know, it used to be, remember the movie, Minority Report—

Matt: Yeah.

Lenny: —with Tom Cruise, and the scene of him walking through the mall, and there’s all the very personalized advertising that was occurring?

Matt: Yes, yeah.

Lenny: I used to use as example of, well, that’d be called a big data, right? It’s like, that’s the, you know, here’s where we’re going is to that world where we are delivering the right message to the right person at the right time, based upon this hoovering up of all of the available data, without realizing that there had to be some type of technology to actually make that happen. And that’s what AI has done. While also knowing—but only in the US—not necessarily in the UK, [laugh] and maybe not in California, but in, Kentucky, you know [laugh]—

Matt: And probably most states eventually, you know, it’s rolling out state by state, isn’t it?

Lenny: Yeah. Which it’s just interesting to think, purely philosophically think, boy, things change so fast, and I didn’t see that coming, but then you step back from us, but Minority Report’s 20 years old, right? So, we did see it coming. These were foreseeable… ev—well, not events, but a progression. We just didn’t know exactly how that was going to manifest. And I still hope we don’t get to the psychics that are, you know, the pre-crime thing.

Matt: The focus group of the future, perhaps.

Lenny: Yeah [laugh]. I do have flying cars, though. So anyway, so does that, as a leader in the business, how do you deal with that, with knowing, okay, there’s a reasonable set of paths that we can imagine where these things are going to go—variables—but we don’t know exactly how that’s going to play out. How do you manage that as a leader?

Matt: I think it kind of goes back to what I was mentioning earlier, which is this kind of, to some extent, trial and error, but it’s more about just being really open minded and leaning into the change. I think, as an industry, there’s always been innovators and disruptors in our industry, but I think historically, on the whole, companies have maybe tried to play it safe. It kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier, with the trust factor. It’s like, I know if I design this project in this way that we’ve done in the past, and we can reach these people, is going to deliver the results that this client wants. So, you know, let’s not add risk to it. But disruption is happening so fast we have to lean into it. And it feels like it’s at the point where you know, if you can imagine, like, what would be the ideal way that a client will be consuming, like, gathering and consuming insights? You could brainstorm a number of ideas, and all of them will probably be possible, you know? As long as they’re within the law, there will be some way of making that possible. So, I think it’s just a case of leaning into it, trying things. We’re working with lots of different partners who have really smart ideas, seeing how we can apply that to B2B research. So, yeah, daunting, but exciting.

Lenny: What’s one of the challenges that you’ve had to deal with? And not Covid because we all got that one, right? Set that aside. So, another challenge, from a leader standpoint, where something is occurs, like, “Oh, crap, I didn’t see that coming,” and how you’ve adapted through that. Because you didn’t know what to lean into until it happened, right?

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Do you mean, like, a technology challenge or any kind of challenge.

Lenny: Just anything. So, we’re kind of segueing into kind of you as a leader, and sharing that with other listeners or leaders that are going, “What do I do? Things are changing so fast,” right? So, this is the wisdom-imparting part of the conversation, Matt.

Matt: Yeah, I think… um, one of the challenges we’ve—I think the same with any company—one of the challenges we’ve often faced is there’s just certain markets and certain types of clients where—obviously this was exacerbated in Covid, but where the work just disappears. You know, we might have work that’s about to start, or that’s in progress, and there might be something that affects a particular industry, and the work just completely dries up. We’ve been really, really lucky with the fact that we focus on B2B, and B2B goes across all verticals, and so whenever we’ve seen that with a certain industry, we’ve tended to see an uptick in another industry. You know, the tech industry goes in cycles where sometimes it will be boom, sometimes it will be really, really tough. So, that’s always a bit of a challenge, particularly in a project-based industry. It’s… yeah, that’s actually quite a challenge. You know, in three months time, what projects will we have? And that has been a constant headache for however many years. Thankfully, they all come in, but, yeah, we don’t know what we’re going to be working on in three, four, five months’ time, so making sure our proposition is up to date, that we deliver great work for clients, that they trust the work that we do because if we don’t do that, then those projects will stop coming in.

Lenny: Yeah. Well, and, you know, resource allocation appropriately to that. Rockhopper—now we’re just going to share war stories for a second—you know, we did most of the B2B research, and our specialization sector was financial services. And it was great. We were kicking ass and taking names, until… the great recession hit. And what the eye opening experience for me was, you know, yay, I’m the CEO of this cool startup company, you know, we’re online B2B research, and we’re just doing all these cool things. And we’re growing like crazy, until the recession hit. And so, we were at 4 million in 2007, right? 1.5 million in 2008. Same exact number of projects. You know that—so commiserating with you, right? That’s an additional in a ad hoc business, and at that point, very people-driven, effectively. That’s when I realized, well, this doesn’t make sense [laugh]. There’s something wrong. I want to be a tech CEO [laugh]. But we’re a technology, so is that how you—down to my point—are you experien—recognizing—not recognizing. Are you enabling, now, technology as a benefit to help even out some of those challenges, when we still have a very ad hoc, also very people-driven, but the process now we’re not carrying as much overhead, it’s easier to navigate some of those things, just more agility and flexibility organizationally to deal with some of those peaks and valleys?

Matt: Yeah, the tech that we have, we’ve always sought to evolve that and the tools that team have. And again, on the topic of AI, that’s just going to keep increasing. There are enterprise licenses to the big AI tools, and what that does for being able to interrogate data, for being able to get, like, the first draft of reports together. And again, still coming back to the fact we want to have a human eye on that. One thing that we’ve really, like, prided ourselves on in a company throughout the entirety of—like, from when I first started, is giving younger team members, newer team members, the chance to really stretch themselves and push themselves. And that’s something that we’ve always done, we still continue to do. We’ve got a really long tenure of staff within our organization, and I think that’s going to be increasingly important, particularly with the tools that teams are going to have available because if you just rely on AI, you’re not sharpening your critical thinking. It’s like I always say to our team, if you want to sharpen your point of view on something, write something about it because you really have to think through what you understand about it, what your point of view is on it, how you articulate it. So, if you just draft something in ChatGPT, you’re not going through that process of being the critical thinking and you’ve sharpening up your point of view. So yes, that kind of stuff is really going to help speed things up, but we’ve got to make sure that people are still using their brains, essentially.

Lenny: Yes, did you see the study that came out recently of they—

Matt: I did, yeah. The IQ drop.

Lenny: —yeah, it’s pretty scary. Yeah, the one that’s making us dimmer [laugh]. Yeah. Now, so you brought up a good point. Let’s kind of go to that as we move into the closing parts here. In the beginning, as you were telling your story, I said how interesting that is for somebody to be with the same company of 20 years. Now, you’ve just mentioned that tenure is not necessarily unusual. So, what are the cultural elements that built that because that is unusual to hear people staying in organizations that long? So, how have you built a culture that retains people while giving them—obviously, you’re an example of that. You started, you know, as a lowly interviewer, [laugh] right? What’s that like?

Matt: I think it comes down to—it sounds a bit cheesy this—but just empowering the team to do really good work. So, if someone feels like—they might be a research analyst, but if they feel like they’ve they can really get on their feet and present a few sections of, know, a debrief to a client, and they feel comfortable, then let’s give them the opportunity to do that, and so they can strengthen that muscle and develop. Yeah, pushing people, but giving the platform to stretch themselves, I think has been that’s what’s really helped me in my career, and the leaders who, you know, I worked underneath at the start of my career. And then I think the, like, small cultural things, like, whenever we would have a training session within the team, we’d usually get some of the junior team members to do the training session. So, they’d work with one of the senior teams to craft the materials, but then they would present that to the team. And we’ve always historically had a really kind of flat structure culture, rather than a hierarchical one. Yeah, I think those are probably the main factors where they just giving people a platform to do really good work. There’s just obviously with the long tenures, everybody knows each other really well as well. Yeah, I think that’s probably it.

Lenny: Looking now into the future and retaining that cultural foundation that you’ve talked about, what do you think is the dominant skill or trait that will help drive overall success in, you know, the era of, you know, robotic overlords, [laugh] or hopefully colleagues, you know, versus overloads, but you know… yes.

Matt: I think critical thinking, I think adaptability, and I think curiosity perhaps is the biggest one, thinking about it. You know, the ability to ask the right questions, the ability to, yeah, think about ways in which we can do things differently. Yeah, I’d say those three things are probably going to be the most important.

Lenny: Okay. Yeah, I would tend to agree. All right, what has you most excited for the future? What can you—let’s say the remainder of the year, now that we’re kind of midway through? So…

Matt: Yeah, so I guess I’ve already spoken a bit about the stuff that’s going on with B2B International and Merkle, you know, the fact we can tap into the data scientists there, and we’ve spoken a lot about AI. One thing that I’m really excited about, we have, so when we were first brought into Dentsu, it was because Dentsu was building out a, kind of, B2B powerhouse as it were, you know, end to end. And we’ve launched the next evolution of that this year, Dentsu B2B. And it kind of brings together: media, creative, insight, CXM, all B2B specialists, so all people who, like, live and breathe B2B who are passionate about it. And yeah, that’s really exciting for me because, as with all researchers, the biggest kick you get out of research is when it makes an impact. And with that sort of end-to-end Dentsu B2B proposition, our research gets to make a direct impact on things like an experience transformation program or measuring the impact of media, or a new brand architecture that the creative team are working on. So yeah, just really excited that there’s lots going on about B2B at the moment, and it kind of chimes with our passion here.

Lenny: Very cool. So, it is integrated? It’s not kind of the… you know, we’ve seen these models in the past looking back, like, well, but they never meshed. They were not really integrated. It was just a holding company, effectively. So, Dentsu has learned from that experience, and is like, nope, we’re going to unlock value. You’re part of the team?

Matt: Yeah, and it’s kind of evolved over the last few years and been refined. But yes, it’s global. There’s teams all over the world, here in North America, EMEA, APAC, in Japan, and we work together all the time. So, we have weekly calls with our colleagues who are in those different practices. We’re all B2B specialists. We work on joint thought leadership. We work on new, kind of, joined up B2B solutions. So yeah, that’s—and that’s kind of why it’s quite exciting as well, like, stitching research in with that.

Lenny: Okay. All right, very cool. So, that’s—now what keeps you up at night?

Matt: Um, it kind of goes back to what we were talking about, what we’ve been talking about for most of it is what is the impact of AI going to be in five years’ time? I think we know what it—you can kind of get a sense of what it’s going to look like in terms of how research is done, or the tools that we’ll have and how clients will use that, but what will the agency model look like for research in five years’ time, if that is the case? And yeah, that’s just something we have to keep thinking about and seeing how that evolves with the adoption of all these tools and processes.

Lenny: Yeah, yeah. There’s a model. I’ll send you a link afterwards, and for the audience, look up Service as Software. It is a framework developed by… I forget the name. One of the consultancies, right? But it’s a really interesting framework that I think actually is probably pretty applicable to where we wind up overall. And like we’ve been talking about, if it’s process-driven, kind of, low value-add, but it’s necessary to create something, that’s probably going to, you know, go the way of the dodo, right? But anything requires expertise, creativity, intuition, critical thinking, imagination, which is usually, if—kind of boil it down to anything that’s kind of the ‘what’ aspect of things, yeah, that’s going to be AI, ‘so what’ that’s, obviously, we start getting into these human element components that are necessary, but more importantly, the ‘now what.’ That’s probably going to be a hybrid, in my view, right? There’s certainly going to be AI that can give us predictive information, but we have to be able to really trust our guts, I think, on that. So, isn’t that interesting? I guess, my bottom line view—see if you agree with this—is that increasingly, the human element is going to be more intuitive in many ways. That magical thing that happens as we’re processing information and thinking and making decisions, right, while our AI collaborators are going to be kind of the backup to make sure that we’re not being totally stupid, that you know, there’s information to validate it.

Matt: And there’s the paradox as well, Lenny, which is, in ten years’ time, what will that intuition look like if everybody has been using AI tools throughout their entire career?

Lenny: Yes. Yeah, and it’s a good point because I’m not sure how I feel about that. As a father, I don’t mind saying, I have not allowed my kids to utilize AI tools, very purposely. And even I resisted for a while because of my own concerns for staying sharp.

Matt: Yep.

Lenny: So, I get that. And I think that that’s a social issue we have not figured out, let alone a business issue. It’ll be nice as we navigate that. Thoughts? Do you have children? Are you, are you—

Matt: I do not, no. So, I don’t have that concern at the moment, but—

Lenny: Okay, all right, all right.

Matt: I’ve been using AI a lot myself, so maybe I’m making myself dumber. But—

Lenny: [laugh]. I don’t think so, based on this conversation, Matt, at all.

Matt: That’s very good.

Lenny: I suspect that you will have a client come forward at some point, maybe in the ed tech space, wanting to do research on understanding, you know, yeah, [laugh] where are we going with all this? So, Matt, what have we not covered that you wanted to cover? Is there anything that you wanted to make sure that we talked about or bring up that we just didn’t get to naturally in this conversation?

Matt: I think we’ve pretty much covered the key points, Lenny, yeah. I think the hot topics we’ve spoken about, of course. And yeah, we’ve spoken a lot about B2B, something I’m very passionate about, you know, as a wider marketing discipline as well as the organization. Yeah, it’s been a great conversation.

Lenny: For me as well. I can’t think of a better way to wrap up a Friday afternoon. So, I appreciate you taking time, even though you’re still midday and I’m at the end of the day, still.

Matt: I’ve still got a little way to go yet [laugh].

Lenny: Yeah, yeah. Where can people find you?

Matt: I’m on LinkedIn. That’s probably the best place.

Lenny: Okay. All right. And any parting thoughts? Anything else you want to just get out there before we call today?

Matt: I think that’s it from my side, yeah. Nothing I can think of. Maybe it’s that Friday afternoon fog starting to drift in [laugh].

Lenny: [laugh]. All right. Matt, thank you. I enjoyed this conversation very much as well, hopefully our listeners did too, as we dived into the depths of B2B research. Thank you so much. Best of luck, continued success, in—

Matt: Thank you.

Lenny: —all that you do. And with that, I think we will wrap. I want to give a shout out to Brigette, our producer, to Big Bad Audio, our mixers and to make us all sound good, and to our sponsors. And that’s it for this edition of the Greenbook Podcast. Everybody, be well. Take care. Bye-bye.