Smart Conversations by Ian Howells: A Must-Read Book on Where B2B Marketing Strategy Meets Generative AI

I first met Ian Howells in London long ago, as fellow footsoldiers in the early relational database wars. While you had to be pretty technical to do product marketing in those days, Ian was technical with a capital T, having just sprung from university with a PhD in distributed databases. We fought together on the losing side of the database wars [1], shared many of the same scars from the experience, learned many of the same lessons, and — I’m reasonably sure — both decided to aim our careers towards marketing to understand the dark and mysterious magic that was said to have been responsible for our misfortune [2].

I kept in loose touch with Ian over the years as he went to Documentum (content management) [3], SeeBeyond (supply chain), Alfresco (content management), and eventually to Intacct (accounting), later called Sage/Intacct after their subsequent acquisition by Sage.

So when I heard Ian wrote a book on how to use generative AI to improve marketing, I was intrigued. When I learned he was so excited about generative AI’s potential that he took a year off from work to dedicate all his time to the task, I was hooked. Whatever he produced, I was going to read it.

What he produced was a book called Smart Conversations, Revolutionizing B2B Marketing with the Generative AI Playbook. And in this post, I’ll share my conclusions based on a pretty in-depth reading of his book.

Here they are:

• Anyone in B2B marketing with an interest in strategy should read this book.
• This book isn’t what I expected. I feared the book might be full of prompts for generating content marketing (aka, AI slop), copy for marketing campaigns, presentations, or infographics.
• Instead, Ian has produced an elegant work that teaches B2B marketing strategy while showing how to use generative AI to define and implement it. I’m not 100% sure what I was expecting, but this sure wasn’t it. It’s way, way better.
• The book is both theoretical and applied. One page he’s explaining why you should target what I’d call sub-segments (that he calls micro-verticals). Five pages later he’s walking you through the prompts he uses to to build lists of them, right down to their NAICS codes.
• On one page he’s talking about the definitions of ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and improved Geoffrey Moore positioning templates. A few pages later he’s got you in the prompts for getting ChatGPT to generate them. One minute he’s talking theoretically about the opportunities created by market discontinuities and, boom, several pages later, he’s back in the prompts showing you how to use ChatGPT to discover them.
• What’s even more fun is how he shows what it used to take to do some of these exercises. Like building messaging by doing deep customer interviews, transcribing your notes, printing them, and then spreading them over a conference room for days so you can spot patterns. And then contrasting that to just how fast you can do it today.
• This wonderful pattern repeats, through competitive analysis, all-in-one positioning, power messaging, and “wall of sound” campaigns [4]. Each time, the theory and then the ChatGPT practice.
• Ian concludes with measurement. That section comes complete with a lesson on the benefits of becoming a market leader (that we both learned from the sting of Oracle’s lash), with lessons quite similar to what I describe in The Market Leader Play.

Congratulations to Ian on writing such a great book and sharing it with us. I’m glad you took the year off to write it! Now, every B2B marketing leader should go read it. Kindle version here.

Notes

[1] It’s not every day you find one of your company’s anti-competitor documents in the Computer History Museum!

[2] The company, by the way, was called Ingres. But since few have heard of Ingres today, I remind people they’ve almost certainly heard of its offspring: Postgres, which stood for Post-Ingres, an open source and extensible version of the system that achieved enormous popularity. I often say that “Postgres is corn” in the sense of The Omnivore’s Dilemma (i.e., it’s in everything) or quip that Postgres is Stonebraker’s revenge. While Larry Ellison made all the money, Stonebraker did win a Turing Award, create several new classes of database systems (e.g., column-oriented), and build Postgres which while ranking fourth on db-engines is generally acknowledged to have a higher market share than Oracle, in part due its open source heritage.

[3] And one of the original case studies in Geoffrey Moore’s classic, Crossing The Chasm.

[4] I’m not capable of typing the words “wall of sound” without referencing the Grateful Dead’s amazing and utterly impractical public address system. What Ian’s describing is what I call a backfire or surround-sound campaign, the goal being the economic buyer at your target can’t stop hearing about you from all sides. Regardless of the name, it’s a great idea, and a much more realistic goal on a limited budget than making “everyone” hear about you (e.g., super bowl ads).