Peep Laja

CEO @ Wynter. 3x Founder. Insights over assumptions. Host of How to Win podcast.

Most of your future revenues are gonna come from future customers. 

If you knew *exactly* what your target customers

think about your category (and your company in particular),
what their top priorities and very big problems are,
what unsaturated channels they use to learn about solutions, 

this is what'd happen to your business:

- you'd nail your messaging, speaking exactly to their pain points
- your conversion rates would go up because your pitch resonates better,
- your CAC would go down as you'd use the right channels with the right message,
- you'd create more meaningful content that moves the dial,
- you'd be more deliberate and accurate in providing more value at every touch point,
- you'd know how to price your products to maximize willingness to pay,
- you'd know how to differentiate,
- you'd know where your go-to-market strategy is off, and could fix it. 
 
The beautiful thing?

You can know all of this with Wynter in under 48 hours.

Everyone is doubling down on AI. And most everyone hates the results.

We used Wynter to survey 50 B2B mid-market marketing leaders. 56% are increasing their AI budget in Q1.

But when you read the fine print, the mood isn't excitement. It’s frustration.

Actual quotes from the survey:

"Often AI turns out slop."
"My team is just bumbling through it."
"It's all garbage."

The disconnect is massive.

We have AI SDRs sending robot emails. AI content that sophisticated buyers smell instantly. AI ad variations that are uninspiring.

The problem isn't the technology. The problem is that we are trying to automate the thinking instead of the grunt work.

B2B buyers have excellent BS detectors. Your AI-generated email might save you 20 minutes. But if it costs you the deal, you optimized for the wrong thing.

Efficiency at the cost of effectiveness is just a faster way to fail.

Use AI to execute. Do not use it to think for you.

AI can't buy your software.

AI can't feel the pain of a broken workflow. It can't sit in a budget meeting and fight for your deal. It can't get burned by a competitor and carry that grudge into the next vendor search.

A human does all of that. And humans are weird.

An example: We surveyed 101 CMOs and VPs of Marketing on how they buy software, here are some things we learned:

Most CMOs still prefer buying through a sales rep. Not self-serve. Not a chatbot. They want a human to walk them through it. 

When a vendor leads with AI in their messaging, many buyers are less interested. They see it as hype. One marketing director told us flat out: "slightly less likely to consider them, sounds like hype, makes them doubt it all." 

A CMO at a PE-backed company told us their investment firm says "No one should be adding more people because AI is gonna deliver that extra capacity we need. I'm watching my budget get slashed while pipeline targets go up." 

That's not a sentiment you get from a synthetic persona. That's frustration with a very specific power dynamic.

A field marketing director shared that small roundtables are outperforming their big signature events and webinars. People want intimate, shorter, smaller. That's a nuance shaped by what happened in their org last quarter, not a general market truth an AI could infer.

This is the thing about B2B buyers.

Their decisions are shaped by internal politics, past vendor trauma, budget timing, org structure changes, what their CEO read on LinkedIn last week. 

An LLM doesn't have access to any of that. It can give you a plausible average. It can't give you the actual answer.

Use AI to analyze responses faster. Use it to write better survey questions. Use it to find patterns in data.

But when you want to know what your buyers actually think? Ask them.

A real buyer can tell you what you didn't expect. And the stuff you didn't expect is where the actual insight lives.

We surveyed 100 CFOs and VPs of Finance on how they buy software.

The first question: where do you START the vendor search?

→ 38% ask peers / their network 
→ 26% go to LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) 
→ 20% Google it 
→ 9% hit review/analyst platforms (G2, Gartner)
→ 7% go to known vendors directly 

Finance people trust their peers above everything else. LLMs have overtaken Google as the #2 starting point for software vendor search.

Here are examples of what the CFOs told us on how they use LLMs:

"When we are looking for a vendor, first I usually ask Gemini or ChatGPT to give me an overview of the available vendors, pros and cons."

"I would describe to a LLM the nature of my business, desired outcome, and experience in attempting to solve the problem to date and inquire for suggested solutions."

"Use LLM to produce a paper on options, feedback and cost. LLM will also help team to produce a tender pack."

These aren't early adopters. These are CFOs running the buying process.

What this means if you sell to the finance function:

1. Peers still dominate. Customer advocacy and CFO community presence aren't "nice to haves", they're your primary discovery engine.

2. Your SEO strategy alone won't cut it anymore. LLM visibility is now a parallel channel you need to win.

Cold outreach? Not even on this chart. Zero respondents said "I start by looking at my inbox." Zero.

The buying process is bifurcating:

Trust channels (peers, network) → for shortlisting 
AI channels (LLMs) → for market mapping 
Google → still there but no longer alone

Ecosystem Growth Strategy | GTM Activation | Author | Psychology Today Contributor | Powered By Espresso

I’d like to be able to tell you that I planned all along to help B2B companies tell better stories but that would be a lie.

Well, not exactly a lie but not the full truth.

I started out as an engineer in Silicon Valley at a time when we were building the “information superhighway.”

Yeah, I’m a Gen-X Silicon Valley native who thought that “if you build it, they will come.”

That turned out to be a lie and it took me the better part of 20 years to figure out the truth.

Product is democratized. The best story wins.

The transition to B2B Storyteller starts like all good stories do – I met a girl.

Rather a woman who later became my wife and who also died of leukemia at the age of 36.

Yes, it’s as horrible as it sounds.

The reason I now do B2B Marketing is because I had to run her company, JSY PR & Marketing while she was sick.

It turned out that I was pretty good at it. It surprised me (and her) for sure.

So now, I teach people how to tell better stories so they can rise above the noise to build businesses that consistently grow.

Some of the things I have worked on include:

Message & Positioning for complex B2B brands that want to accelerate brand awareness and generate leads in industries like financial services, maritime intelligence, and cybersecurity. 📶 

Portfolio Rationalization for several private equity roll-ups to align to a solutions focus rather than a product focus. 📶 

Semiconductor DNA sequencing chips that enabled desktop sequencing of the human genome for <$1,000 and in half a day at Ion Torrent. 🧬 

I have found that clear, concise, and compelling writing is the cornerstone of a solid strategy.

A brief description of some of my recent books:

Story-Driven B2B Marketing: Grow your business by telling better stories. 📗

Story-Driven Decks: 3x your chances of getting the next meeting by creating a deck that tells a fantastic story 📗 

Story-Driven Outreach: 2x or more your email response rates by telling clear, concise, and compelling stories. 📗 

The Entrepreneur Ethos: How to build a more ethical, inclusive, and resilient world through entrepreneurship. 📗 

As the (on hiatus) host of The Entrepreneur Ethos Podcast, I enjoy talking to all sorts of entrepreneurs about their journey and what they have found useful that might help others. 🎤 

https://theentrepreneurethos.com/

Domains: B2B SaaS | B2B Growth Strategies | Sales Enablement | B2B Storytelling | Smart Devices | Digital Health | Semiconductors | DTC

Happy to connect with like-minded people.

Contact Me

jarie@getstorydriven.com 📩
https://jariebolander.com 🌐

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