INBOX INSIGHTS, October 30, 2024: Undoing Toxic Cultures, AI-Powered Buyer Journeys - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

INBOX INSIGHTS: Undoing Toxic Cultures, AI-Powered Buyer Journeys (10/30) :: View in browser

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How Can We Undo a Toxic Culture?

We’ve all been there. We’ve shown up to jobs that are just a paycheck. They don’t care about us, and we don’t care about them. We do our thing and then get out as fast as possible. Sometimes, there is an added layer of toxicity that is created by our coworkers. People are afraid to fail. Team members get reamed out for not delivering on expectations. There are more tears than cheers.

It’s shocking to believe that this is still a part of corporate culture in 2024, but here we are. Let’s say you’ve managed to get rid of the problematic team members, the ones creating the toxic culture. How do you rebuild trust and turn it around?

Pause

Take a breath. Literally. Give people a moment to breathe. I used to have a manager who would openly yell at me in meetings in front of the rest of the team. It didn’t matter if what he was angry about had anything to do with me. To him, that was irrelevant; I was the best person to take the blame. Once the company decided to let him go, I needed some time. I was no longer going to get my butt handed to me in meetings for no reason. It took a few weeks to feel like I could actually relax and speak up again. If the rest of the management team had moved too fast to make changes or replace his role, I never would have recovered from that experience. Give your people time to readjust.

Listen

You may have team members who aren’t used to speaking up. The toxic environment may have made them feel like it wasn’t safe to do so. When you’re rebuilding, make time to listen to those who lost their voice. But really listen. And let them do it in their own time, in their own way. Give options to set up team meetings or one-on-ones. Don’t force the conversation. There is a lot of healing that happens when someone has the chance to sit in silence without expectation.

Acknowledge

The people who lived through the toxic situations need to know that they didn’t imagine it. Develop communication that acknowledges the situation did, in fact, happen, and that we want to learn and grow from it. Personally, I would stay away from phrases like “move on” because it indicates that we want to pretend it didn’t happen. Your team wants to know that you have their backs and will work with them to create a more open and positive culture. Not that you’re just going to ignore past mistakes.

Patience

Rebuilding your culture, which is rebuilding trust, takes time. Not everyone will suddenly show up with a smile. Allow people to process the situation at their pace. Some team members may decide that it’s no longer a good fit, despite removing the toxic people. It’s hard, but it happens. Those who stay, those who want to work with you to create a better culture, will become your champions.

As you move into 2025, I would encourage you to take a break from your planning to take stock of how people are feeling around you. Are your teams happy? Are they afraid to speak up? Do they feel motivated and excited? Auditing your culture is as important as auditing your marketing. A toxic culture doesn’t happen overnight. It’s gradual and, at times, hard to notice. Those who tend to create a toxic culture can be good at hiding that they are the cause. Make your people part of your planning. Add in tactics that allow you to check in often. As the saying goes, you’ll catch more flies with honey. If you’re only putting out vinegar, you’re going to have a difficult time getting things done.

How are you checking in on your people? Reach out and tell me, or come join the conversation in our free Slack Group, Analytics for Marketers.

– Katie Robbert, CEO

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In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss the new RAPPEL framework for AI prompting, designed to simplify and improve your interactions with AI. Discover why priming the model is crucial for accurate results and how this framework helps you avoid common pitfalls. Learn how RAPPEL streamlines the process of creating effective prompts and how to use it to scale your use of AI. Unlock the secret to repeatable AI success by learning from each interaction and building better prompts for future use.

Watch/listen to this episode of In-Ear Insights here »

Last time on So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Livestream, we did a deep dive into competitive analysis. Catch the episode replay here!

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👉 New: Generative AI for Hospitality

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s take a step back and think for a second. What are generative AI tools like large language models really good at? Language, of course. They’re superb at processing language.

What are they not good at? Well, math, for one thing, because they do absolutely no form of computation. To the extent that any LLM-based tool does math, it’s because [a] the model had a lot of math in its training data or [b] it’s been taught to recognize math and then write code (a language problem) to solve the math. When you see ChatGPT do its “analyzing” of any kind of tabular data, that’s what’s going on.

So in the context of analytics, what does this mean? Fundamentally, it means that language-based AI tools shouldn’t be used for math. Instead, they should be handling language and have the math already processed and handed to them.

Let’s look at a real world scenario. Suppose we have a high value prospective customer, or an actual customer who is a high value customer. We have lots and lots of data about this customer’s interactions with us from our CRM, like so:

Last page seen  https://www.trustinsights.ai/expertise/services/artificial-intelligence-consulting/ 8/21/2024 at 9:58 AM EDT
Last referring site https://www.trustinsights.ai/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/The-Trust-Insights-Generative-AI-Cheat-Sheet-Kit.pdf    8/21/2024 at 9:58 AM EDT
Last page seen  https://www.trustinsights.ai/insights/webinars-events/the-marketing-singularity-large-language-models-end-of-marketing/"https://www.trustinsights.ai/rappel">Trust Insights RAPPEL AI Prompting Framework, we feed all the information about the customer into a large language model like Google Gemini or ChatGPT and get the following:

The customer’s journey appears to be primarily focused on open-source AI models and their practical application in marketing. They repeatedly visited resources highlighting the benefits of open models, such as data privacy, cost savings, and customization. This suggests potential concerns or limitations with closed models in their current role. Their downloads of cheat sheets and exploration of AI consulting services indicate a desire for practical guidance and potential support for implementation. Their revisitations and downloads may indicate that they either lost access to the downloaded material, had to redownload it, or was finding it very useful to have in a readily available location.

The lack of engagement with introductory content confirms they are not new to this space and seek more specialized information. Their focus on “managing people who manage AI” suggests leadership responsibilities and potential challenges in guiding their team through AI adoption. This further strengthens the narrative of a leader looking to leverage AI effectively within their organization. They may be working in an industry where data privacy and security are critical or they want to optimize resources and streamline workflows using open-source tools.

Now imagine pushing this data back into your CRM so that your sales executive managing this account knows exactly what the customer wants. That’s the power of using AI for what it’s good at.

The key takeaway here is to use the right tools for the right job. Analytics data, quantitative data, tells us what to prioritize. It tells us what happened. Qualitative data, data like language and content, lets us peek into the motivations and language inside our customers’ minds.

Critically important, we’re leveraging the data we already have. None of this information came from outside sources; everything was already in our Hubspot instance or on our website. As external marketing data gets harder to obtain, we need to rely more on the data we already have.

Here’s a roundup of who’s hiring, based on positions shared in the Analytics for Marketers Slack group and other communities.

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Imagine a world where your marketing strategies are supercharged by the most cutting-edge technology available – Generative AI. Generative AI has the potential to save you incredible amounts of time and money, and you have the opportunity to be at the forefront. Get up to speed on using generative AI in your business in a thoughtful way with our new offering, Generative AI for Marketers, which comes in two flavors, workshops and a course.

Workshops: Offer the Generative AI for Marketers half and full day workshops at your company. These hands-on sessions are packed with exercises, resources and practical tips that you can implement immediately.

👉 Click/tap here to book a workshop

Course: We’ve turned our most popular full-day workshop into a self-paced course, available now and updated as of April 2024!

👉 Click/tap here to register for the course

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