In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss how to unlock hidden value and maximize martech ROI from your existing technology using AI-powered “manuals on demand.” You will discover how targeted AI research can reveal unused features in your current software, transforming your existing tools into powerful solutions. You will learn to generate specific, actionable instructions that eliminate the need to buy new, expensive technologies. You will gain insights into leveraging advanced AI agents to provide precise, reliable information for your unique business challenges. You will find out how this strategy helps your team overcome common excuses and achieve measurable results by optimizing your current tech stack. Tune in to revolutionize how you approach your technology investments.
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Christopher S. Penn – 00:00
In this week’s In Ear Insights, let’s get a little bombastic and say, Katie, we’re gonna double everyone’s non-existent ROI on AI with the most unused—underused—feature that literally I’ve not seen anyone doing, and that is manuals on demand. A little while ago, in our AI for Market Gender VI use cases for marketers course and our mastering prompt engine for Marketers course and things like that, we were having a conversation internally with our team saying, hey, what else can we be doing to market these courses? One of the things that occurred to me as I was scrolling around our Thinkific system we used is there’s a lot of buttons in here. I don’t know what most of them do, and I wonder if I’m missing something.
Christopher S. Penn – 00:53
So, I commissioned a Deep Research report in Gemini saying, hey, this is the version of Thinkific we’re on. This is the plan we’re on. Go do research on the different ways that expert course creators market their courses with the features in Thinkific. It came back with a 28-page report that we then handed off to Kelsey on our team to say, hey, go read this report and see, because it contains step-by-step instructions for things that we could be doing in the system to upsell and cross-sell our courses. As I was thinking about it, going, wow, we should be doing this more often.
Christopher S. Penn – 01:28
Then a friend of mine just got a new phone, a Google Pixel phone, and is not skilled at using Google’s all the bells and whistles, but she has a very specific use case: she wants to record concert videos with it. So I said, okay, let’s create a manual for just what features of the Pixel phone are best for concerts. Create a step-by-step explanation for a non-technical user on how to get the most out of the new phone. This gets me thinking across the board with all these things that we’re already paying for: why aren’t more of us creating manuals to say, hey, rather than go buy yet another tool or piece of software, ask one of the great research agents, hey, what are we not using that we should be.
So, it sounds like a couple of different things. There’s because you’re asking the question, what are we not using that we could be, but then there’s an instruction manual. Those are kind of two different things. An instruction manual is meant to be that A to Z, here’s everything it does, versus what are we specifically not using. I feel like those are two different asks. So, I guess my first question to you is, doesn’t most software come with some kind of an instruction manual or user guide these days? Or is that just, it no longer does that.
Christopher S. Penn – 02:52
It does. There’s usually extensive documentation. I misspoke. I should have said manuals on demand specifically for the thing that you want. So yes, there’s a big old binder. If you were to print out the HubSpot CRM documentation, it’d be a 900-page document. No one’s going to read that. But I could use a Deep Research tool to say, how can I use just this feature more effectively? Given here’s who Trust Insights is, here’s how our marketing was. Here’s the other tools we use. How could I use this part of HubSpot better? Instead of getting all 900 pages of the manual, I get a manual of just that thing. That’s where I think, at least for me personally, the opportunity is for stuff that we’re already paying for.
Christopher S. Penn – 03:32
Why pay for yet another tool and complicate the Martech stack even more when there might be a feature that we’re already paying for that we just don’t even know is there.
It, I feel like, goes to a couple of things. One, the awareness of what you already have in front of you. So, we’re a smaller company, and so we have a really good handle on all of the tools in our tech stack. So, we have the luxury of being able to say these are the goals that we have for the business. Therefore, what can—how can we use what we already have? Whereas if you’re in a more enterprise-sized company or even a mid-sized company where things are a little bit more siloed off, that’s where those teams get into the, “well, I need to buy something to solve this problem.”
Even though the guy on the other side of the cubicle has the tech that I need because of the firewall that exists or is virtual, I can’t use it. So, I have to go buy something. And so, I feel like—I don’t know—I feel like “manual” is the wrong word. It sounds like what you’re hitting on is, “this is my ICP”, but maybe it’s a different version of an ICP. So, what we typically—how we structure ICPs—is how we can market to and sell to specific prospective customers based on their demographics, technographics, pain points, buying patterns, the indicators that a digital transformation is coming, those kinds of things.
It sounds like there’s a need for a different version of an ICP that has a very specific pain point tied to a specific piece of technology or a marketing campaign or something like that. I feel like that would be a good starting place. It kind of always starts with the five Ps: What is the problem you’re trying to solve? Who are the people? What is the process that you currently have or are looking to do? What is the platform that you have in front of you? And then what is your performance metric? I feel like that’s a good starting place to structure this thinking because I’m following what you’re saying, Chris, but it still feels very big and vague. So, what I’m trying to do is think through how do I break it down into something more consumable.
So for me, that always kind of starts with the five Ps. So, what you’re describing, for example, is the purpose: we want to market our courses more efficiently through our Thinkific system. The people are Kelsey, who leads a lot of that, you as the person who owns the system, and then our ICP, who’s going to buy the courses. Process: That’s what we’re trying to figure out is what are we missing. Platform: We already know it’s our Thinkific, but also the different marketing channels that we have. Performance would be increased core sales. Is that an accurate description of what you’re trying to do?
Christopher S. Penn – 06:42
It is. To refine the purpose even more, it’s, “what three features could we be using better?” So, I might even go in. In the process part, I might say, hey, I’m going to turn on a screen share and record my screen as I click through our Thinkific platform and hand that to a tool like Gemini and say, “what am I not using?” I don’t use a section, I use this section. Here’s what I’ve got in this section. I don’t know what this button does. And having it almost do an audit for us of, “yeah, there’s that whole bundle order bundles thing section here that you have no bundles in there.”
Christopher S. Penn – 07:20
But you could be creating bundles of your courses and selling a pack of courses and materials, or making deluxe versions, or making pre-registration versions. Whatever the thing is, another simple example would be if we follow the five Ps, Katie: you’ve got a comprehensive outline of the AI-Ready Marketing Strategy Kit Course slide deck in a doc. Your purpose is, “I want to get this slide deck done, but I don’t want to do it slide by slide.” You’re the people. The process right now is manually creating all 100x slides. The platform is Google Slides. The performance would be—if we could find a way to automate that somehow with Google Slides—the huge amount of time saved and possibly your sanity.
Christopher S. Penn – 08:16
Yeah. So, the question would be, “what are we missing?” What features are already there that we’re already paying for in our Google Workspace subscription that we could use now? We actually did this as an exercise ourselves. We found that, oh yeah, there’s Apps Script. It exists, and you can write code right in Google Slides. That would be another example, a very concrete example, of could we have a Deep Research agent take this specific problem, take the five Ps, and build us a manual on demand of just how to accomplish this task with the thing we’re already doing.
So, a couple more questions. One, why Deep Research and why not just a regular LLM like ChatGPT or just Gemini? Why the Deep Research specifically? And, let’s start there.
Christopher S. Penn – 09:14
Okay, why? The Deep Research is because it’s a research agent. It goes out, it finds a bunch of sources, reads the sources, applies our filtering criteria to those sources, and then compiles and synthesizes a report together. We call, it’s called a research agent, but really all it is, is an AI agent. So, you can give very specific instructions like, “write me a step-by-step manual for doing this thing, include samples of code,” and it will do those things well with lower hallucinations than just asking a regular model. It will produce the report exactly the way you want it. So, I might say, “I want a report to do exactly this.”
So, you’re saying that Deep Research hallucinates less than a regular LLM model. But, in theory—I’m just trying to understand all the pieces—you could ask a standard LLM model like Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT, go find all the best sources and write me a report, a manual if you will, on how to do this thing step-by-step. You could do that. I’m trying to understand why a Deep Research model is better than just doing that, because I don’t think a lot of people are using Deep Research. For you, what I know at least in the past month or so is that’s your default: let me go do a Deep Research report first. Not everybody functions that way. So, I’m just trying to understand why that should be done first.
Christopher S. Penn – 10:45
In this context, it’s getting the right sources. So, when you use a general LLM, it may or may not—unless you are super specific. Actually, this is true of everything. You have to be super specific as to what sources you want the model to consider. The difference is, with Deep Research, it uses the sources first, whereas in a regular model, it may be using its background information first rather than triggering a web search. Because web search is a tool use, and that’s extra compute that costs extra for the LLM provider. When you use Deep Research, you’re saying you must go out and get these sources. Do not rely on your internal data. You have to go out and find these sources.
Christopher S. Penn – 11:27
So for example, when I say, hey, I’m curious about the effects of fiber supplements, I would say you must only use sources that have DOI numbers, which is Document Object Indicator. It’s a number that’s assigned only after a paper has passed peer review. By saying that, we reject all the sources like, oh, Aunt Esther’s healing crystals blog. So, there’s probably not as much useful information there as there is in, say, something from The New England Journal of Medicine, which, its articles are peer-reviewed. So, that’s why I default to Deep Research, because I can be. When I look at the results, I am much more confident in them because I look at the sources it produces and sites and says, “this is what I asked for.”
Christopher S. Penn – 12:14
When I was doing this for a client not too long ago, I said, “build me a step-by-step set of instructions, a custom manual, to solve and troubleshoot this one problem they were having in their particular piece of software.” It did a phenomenal job. It did such a good job that I followed its instructions step-by-step and uncovered 48 things wrong in the client software. It was exactly right because I said you must only use the vendor’s documentation or other qualified sources. You may not use randos on Reddit or Twitter, or whatever we’re calling Twitter these days. That gave me even specifying it has to be this version of the software. So, for my friend, I said, “it has to be only sources that are about the Google Pixel 8 Pro.”
Christopher S. Penn – 13:03
Because that’s the model of phone she has. Don’t give me stuff about Pixel 9, don’t give me stuff about Samsung phones. Don’t give me stuff about iPhones, only this phone. The Deep Research agents, when they go out and they do their thing, reject stuff as part of the process of saying, “oh, I’ve checked this source and it doesn’t meet the criteria, out it goes.”
So, all right, so back to your question of why aren’t people building these instruction manuals? This is something. I mean, this is part of what we talk about with our ICPs: a lot of people don’t know what the problem is. So, they know that something’s not quite right, or they know that something is making them frustrated or uncomfortable, but that’s about where it stops. Oftentimes your emotions are not directly tied to what the actual physical problem is. So, I feel like that’s probably why more people aren’t doing what you’re specifying. So, for example, if we take the Thinkific example, if we were in a larger company, the conversation might look more like the CFO saying, “hey, we need more core sales.”
Rather than looking at the systems that we have to make promotion more efficient, your marketing team is probably going to scramble and be like, “oh, we need to come up with six more campaigns.” Then go to our experts and say, “you need four new versions of the course,” or “we need updates.” So, it would be a spiral. What’s interesting is how you get from “we want more course revenue” to “let me create a manual about the system that we’re using.” I feel like that’s the disconnect, because that’s not. It’s a logical step. It’s not an emotionally logical step. When people are like, “we need to make more money,” they don’t go, “well, how can we do more with the systems that we have?”
Christopher S. Penn – 15:31
It’s interesting because it actually came out of something you were saying just before we started this podcast, which was how tired you are of everybody ranting about AI on LinkedIn. And just all the looniness there and people yelling the ROI of AI. We talked about this in last week’s episode. If you’re not mentioning the ROI of what you’re doing beforehand, AI is certainly not going to help you with that, but it got me thinking. ROI is a financial measure: earn minus spent divided by spent. That’s the formula. If you want to improve ROI, one of the ways you can do so is by spending less.
Christopher S. Penn – 16:07
So, the logical jump that I made in terms of this whole Deep Research approach to custom-built manuals for specific problems is to say, “what if I don’t need to add more vendors? What if I don’t need?” This is something that has come up a lot in the Q&A, particularly for your session at the AI for B2B Summit. Someone said, “how many MarTech tools do we need? How many AI tools do we need? Our stack is already so full.” “Yeah, but are you using what you’ve already got really well?” And the answer to that is almost always no. I mean, it’s no for me, and I’m a reasonably technical person.
Christopher S. Penn – 16:43
So, my thinking along those lines was, then if we’re not getting the most out of what we’re already paying for, could we spend less by not adding more bills every month and earn more by using the features that are already there that maybe we just don’t know how to use? So, that’s how I make that leap: to think about, go from the problem and being on a fire to saying, “okay, if ROI is what we actually do care about in this case, how do we earn more and spend less? How do we use more of what we already have?” Hence, now make custom manuals for the problems that we have. A real simple example: when we were upgrading our marketing automation software two or three weeks ago, I ran into this ridiculous problem in migration.
Christopher S. Penn – 17:28
So, my first instinct was I could spend two and a half hours googling for it, or I could commission a Deep Research report with all the data that I have and say, “you tell me how to troubleshoot this problem.” It did. I was done in 15 minutes.
So, I feel like it’s a good opportunity. If you haven’t already gotten your Trust Insights AI-Ready Marketing Strategy Kit, templates and frameworks for measurable success, definitely get it. You can get it at Trust Insights AIkit. The reason I bring it up, for free—yes, for free—the course is in the works. The course will not be free. The reason I bring it up is because there are a couple of templates in this AI readiness kit that are relevant to the conversation that Chris and I are having today. So, one is the basic AI ROI projection calculator, which is, it’s basic, but it’s also fairly extensive because it goes through a lot of key points that you would want to factor into an ROI calculation.
But to Chris’s point, if you’re not calculating ROI now, calculating it out for what you’re going to save—how are you going to know that? So, that’s part one. The other thing that I think would be really helpful, that is along the lines of what you’re saying, Chris, is the Top Questions for AI Marketing Vendors Cheat Sheet. Ideally, it’s used to vet new vendors if you’re trying to bring on more software. But I also want to encourage people to look at it and use it as a way to audit what you already have. So, ask yourself the questions that you would be asking prospective vendors: “do we have this?” Because it really challenges you to think through, “what are the problems I’m trying to solve? Who’s going to use it?”
What about data privacy? What about data transformation? All of those things. It’s an opportunity to go, “do we already have this? Is this something that we’ve had all this time that we’re, to your point, Chris, that we’re paying for, that we’re just not using?” So, I would definitely encourage people to use the frameworks in that kit to audit your existing stuff. I mean, that’s really what it’s meant to do. It’s meant to give you a baseline of where you’re at and then how to get to the next step. Sometimes it doesn’t involve bringing on new stuff. Sometimes it’s working with exactly what you have. It makes me think of people who start new fitness things on January 1st. This is a very specific example.
So, on January 1st, we’re re-energized. We have our new goals, we have our resolutions, but in order to meet those goals, we also need new wardrobes, and we need new equipment, and we need new foods and supplements, and all kinds of expensive things. But if you really take a step back and say, “I want to start exercising,” guess what? Go walk outside. If it’s not nice outside, do laps around your house. You can do push-ups off your floor. If you can’t do a push-up, you can do a wall push-up. You don’t need anything net new. You don’t need to be wearing fancy workout gear. That’s actually not going to make you work out any better. It might be a more mental thing, a confidence thing.
But in all practicality, it’s not going to change a damn thing. You still have to do the work. So, if I’m going to show up in my ripped T-shirt and my shorts that I’ve been wearing since college, I’m likely going to get the same health benefits if I spent $5,500 on really flimsy-made Lululemon crap.
Christopher S. Penn – 21:17
I think that right there answers your question about why people don’t make that leap to build a custom manual to solve your problems. Because when you do that, you kind of take away the excuses. You no longer have an excuse. If you don’t need fancy fitness equipment and a gym membership and you’re saying, “I can just get fit within my own house with what I’m doing,” then I’m out of excuses.
But I think that’s a really interesting angle to take with it: by actually doing the work and getting the answers to the questions. You’re absolutely right. You’re out of excuses. To be fair, that’s a lot of what the AI kit is meant to do: to get rid of the excuses, but not so much the excuses if we can’t do it, but those barriers to why you don’t think you can move forward. So, if your leadership team is saying, “we have to do this now,” this kit has all the tools that you need to help you do this now. But in the example that you’re giving, Chris, of, “I have this thing, I don’t know how to use it, it must not be the right thing.” Let me go ahead and get something else that’s shinier and promises to solve the problem.
Well, now you’re spending money, so why not go back to your point: do the Deep Research, figure out, “can I solve the problem with what I have?” The answer might still be no. Then at least you’ve said, “okay, I’ve tried, I’ve done my due diligence, now I can move on and find something that does solve the problem.” I do like that way of thinking about it: it takes away the excuses.
Christopher S. Penn – 22:52
Yeah, it takes away excuses. That’s uncomfortable. Particularly if there are some people—it’s not none of us, but some people—who use that as a way to just not do work.
Christopher S. Penn – 23:07
You know who you are. You’re not listening to this podcast because.
Only motivated people—they don’t know who they are. They think they’re doing a lot of work. Yes, but that’s a topic for another day. But that’s exactly it. There’s a lot of just spinning and spinning and spinning. And there’s this—I don’t know exactly what to call it—perception, that the faster you’re spinning, the more productive you are.
Christopher S. Penn – 23:32
That’s. The more busy you are, the more meetings you attend, the more important you are. No, that’s just.
Nope, that is actually not how that works. But, yeah, no, I think that’s an interesting way to think about it, because we started this episode and I was skeptical of why are you doing it this way? But now talking it through, I’m like, “oh, that does make sense.” It does. It takes away the excuses of, “I can’t do it” or “I don’t have what I need to do it.” And the answer is, “yeah, you do.”
Christopher S. Penn – 24:04
Yep. Yeah, we do. These tools make it easier than ever to have a plan, because I know there are some people, and outside of my area’s expertise, I’m one of these people. I just want to be told what to do. Okay, you’re telling me to go bake some bread. I don’t know how to do that. Just tell me the steps to give me a recipe so I can follow it so I don’t screw it up and waste materials or waste time. Yeah. Now once I had, “okay, if I something I want to do,” then I do it. If it’s something I don’t want to do, then now I’m out of excuses.
I don’t know. I mean, for those of you listening, you couldn’t see the look on my face when Chris said, “I just want to be told what to do.” I was like, “since when?” Outside of.
Christopher S. Penn – 24:50
“My area of expertise” is the key phrase there.
I sort of. I call that my alpha and beta brain. So, at work, I have the alpha brain where I’m in charge. I set the course, and I’m the one who does the telling. But then there are those instances, when I go volunteer at the shelter, I shut off my alpha brain, and I’m like, “just tell me what to do.” This is not my. I am just here to help to sandwich, too. So, I totally understand that. I’m mostly just picking on you because it’s fun.
Christopher S. Penn – 25:21
All right, sort of wrapping up. It sounds like there’s a really good use case for using Deep Research on the technology you already have. Here’s the thing. You may not have a specific problem right now, but it’s probably not the worst idea to take a look at your tech stack and do some Deep Research reports on all of your different tools. Be like, “what does this do?” “Here’s our overall sales and marketing goals, here’s our overall business goals, and here’s the technology we have.” “Does it match up? Is there a big gap?” “What are we missing?” That’s not a bad exercise to do, especially as you think about now that we’re past the halfway point of the year. People are already thinking about annual planning for 2026. That’s a good exercise to do.
Christopher S. Penn – 26:12
It is. Maybe we should do that on a future live stream. Let’s audit, for example, our Modic marketing automation software. We use it. I know, for example, the campaign section with the little flow builder. We don’t use that at all. And I know there’s value in there. It’s that feature in HubSpot’s, an extra $800 a month. We have it for free in Modic, and we don’t use it. So, I think maybe some of us.
Have asked that it be used multiple times.
Christopher S. Penn – 26:42
So now, let’s make a manual for a specific campaign using what we know to do that so we can do that on an upcoming live stream.
Okay. All right. If you’ve got some—I said okay, cool.
Christopher S. Penn – 26:58
If you’ve got some use cases for Deep Research or for building manuals on demand that you have found work well for you, drop by our free slacker. Go to Trust Insights AI analytics for marketers, where you and over 4,000 other marketers are asking and answering each other’s questions every day about analytics, data science, and AI. Wherever it is you watch or listen to the show, if there’s a challenge you’d rather have it on. Instead, go to Trust Insights AI TI Podcast where you can find us in all the places great podcasts are served. Thanks for tuning in. I’ll talk to you on the next one.
Want to know more about Trust Insights? Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm specializing in leveraging data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to empower businesses with actionable insights. Founded in 2017 by Katie Robbert and Christopher S. Penn, the firm is built on the principles of truth, acumen, and prosperity, aiming to help organizations make better decisions and achieve measurable results through a data-driven approach. Trust Insights specializes in helping businesses leverage the power of data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to drive measurable marketing ROI. Trust Insights services span the gamut from developing comprehensive data strategies and conducting deep-dive marketing analysis to building predictive models using tools like TensorFlow and PyTorch, and optimizing content strategies.
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