In this episode of UX Leadership by Design, Mark Baldino talks with Chris Silvestri, founder and chief conversion copywriter at Conversion Alchemy. Chris brings a rare blend of backgrounds—software engineer, UX designer, and conversion copywriter—to tackle one of the toughest challenges in B2B: turning complex decision-making into clear, effective messaging. We dig into his AI-powered empathy framework, PATH, and explore how he uses customer research, simulated personas, and real language to help teams write content that connects. For anyone working in UX, product, or content, this is a masterclass in aligning messaging with how humans actually think, feel, and decide.
Key Takeaways
- Empathy can be “engineered” – Chris shares his AI-powered PATH framework (Prepare, Articulate, Test, Harmonize) to simulate customer personas and deepen user empathy.
- Conversion is a series of micro-decisions – It’s not just about a final click—every piece of copy should guide users through their decision-making process one step at a time.
- Vague messaging creates drop-off – If users can’t understand what you do, who it’s for, or why it’s different in a few seconds, they’ll bounce.
- Expectation-setting is everything – From homepage copy to “Book a Demo” CTAs, clear expectations can dramatically reduce friction and build trust.
- AI won’t replace writers—it augments them – Used correctly, LLMs can simulate customers, test ideas, and accelerate iteration—if humans remain in the loop.
- UX, sales, and copy need a shared foundation – Chris’s work helps unify these functions by anchoring messaging in customer research and decision psychology.
About Our Guest
After 10 years as a software engineer and with a background in UX research, Chris helps B2B SaaS companies find their message-market fit and convert more prospects into loyal customers. At Conversion Alchemy he turns words into gold, through the alchemy of copy, UX, and buyer psychology.
Resources & Links
- Conversion Alchemy Website, Newsletter, & Podcast
- Connect with Christopher Silvestri
- Connect with Mark Baldino on LinkedIn
- Fuzzy Math
Chapters
- 00:00 – From Engineering to Empathy
- 03:47 – Lessons from Dangerous Machines
- 06:02 – The Pyramid of Conversion
- 10:56 – Jobs to Be Done in B2B
- 13:47 – Selling to the Whole Buying Team
- 17:45 – Common Copy Mistakes
- 25:45 – AI and Empathy: The PATH Framework
- 31:00 – How Chris Uses AI Personas for Better Copy
- 33:51 – AI as an Accelerator, Not a Replacement
- 34:00 – From Copywriter to Conversion Architect
Tags
#UXPodcast, #ConversionCopywriting, #CustomerEmpathy, #AIinUX, #B2BMarketing, #ProductMessaging, #UXResearch, #EmpathyEngineering, #SaaSContentStrategy,
Transcript
Mark Baldino (00:02.51) Hello and welcome to UX Leadership by Design. I'm Mark Baldino, your host. I'm also a co-founder of Fuzzy Math. Fuzzy Math is the user experience design consultancy that brings consumer grade UX to business applications for B2B enterprise tools. And today I get to speak with Chris Silvestri, who is the founder and chief conversion copywriter at ConversionAlchemy. And ConversionAlchemy is exactly what Chris does. He works with a lot of B2B SaaS software companies. similar clients that we do at Fuzzy Math, but he's helping his clients convert potential customers. And his process is really robust in much the same way the UX process is. He's doing research with customers and stakeholders. He's synthesizing that. He's putting tests together. He's analyzing those tests, finalizing copy. But he's also really helping his clients understand the complex decision-making processes that their customers go through. And he's also helping them in a strategic way, he's helping his clients maybe get out of their way from a process perspective. And then we touch on his very specific, and I think really powerful way to utilize AI in this process. And he's helping his clients empathize with their customers. He's helping him and his team empathize with his clients' customers. And I think that framework that he uses is something a lot of you folks could apply in your daily life, whether you're in copyright, maybe you're in product management. maybe you're even in design. And so I just want to say thanks as always for listening and I hope you enjoy the episode. Mark Baldino (00:02.19) Chris, welcome to the podcast. Chris (00:04.383) Hey Mark, thanks so much for having me. Mark Baldino (00:07.118) Yeah, no, really appreciate you joining me as they do on most of the podcasts here. Would love for you to give the audience a bit of your background. And I think really interesting path to where you got now and kind of the type of customer you serve in these days. Chris (00:26.688) Yeah. Yeah. So I have a, so right now I am a messaging strategy consultant and conversion copywriter for B2B SaaS companies. But my background is quite different from most people that work in the industry now in marketing in general. I was a software engineer for 10 years in industrial automation back in Italy where I'm from. Now I live in the UK. So I did that for 10 years, kind of got sick of it after a while. And at the same time, I also had a band, I still play drums in a band, for 25 years. And at the time I wanted to tour more with my band, right? So what do you do? You go online and start looking for how to make money online because you want that flexible job, right? So I did a couple of things for a couple of years, right? Lots of different things, even an Amazon F... Mark Baldino (01:17.965) Yeah, right. Chris (01:23.883) fulfilled by Amazon business where I was selling yoga straps, like super weird stuff and SEO blogs, all of that, but nothing really stuck until I found copywriting and I was instantly hooked by the psychology behind it, the decision making process that you needed to understand to really have people take some kind of action through the words that you wrote. so I studied that on the side, evenings, weekends. for a couple of years and then in 2018, I decided to move full time, also moved to the UK as well. So it was a big change. And that brought me to where I am now. Also in between, I did a couple of years as a UX designer. So I'm trying to combine all of those different things in what I call conversion alchemy right now. And yeah, there's a lot of things that actually software engineering taught me that I actually applying now and we can talk about all of that. Mark Baldino (02:23.054) Yeah, no, that would be great. was going to ask like, what's the, what's the common thread? I mean, you know, I think I could, as a, as a designer, we get into that. I could probably understand some of the connect connecting those dots, but like, what's the thread between, you know, engineering and develop. Chris (02:39.379) Yeah, totally. So the type of, for people who are not familiar with industrial automation, so the type of software engineering that I was doing was basically very much logical programming based on pneumatic movement sensors, you had conditions that generated outputs and you needed to combine and automate these sequences for these machines that ended up in factories. automatic assembly of components, plastic components in our case. And a lot of it was designing the user experience for their HMI panels, so user machine interface panels, which were touch screen that the operators could use. So there was the logical component, but also, and most importantly, the aspect of putting yourself in the user's shoes and trying to think from their perspective. Also because... It was pretty dangerous because those machines were like, imagine robots, fast, pretty fast machines, complex machines. If someone ended up with an arm inside and you didn't put the necessary protections in place, they could have lost the limb, right? So this pretty, you needed to really be careful about the safety measures that you put in place, but also the logic sequence and also Mark Baldino (03:40.974) you Chris (04:00.575) making sure that when they created their own programs and recipes on those displays, you made it easy and also prevented any errors or negative consequences that you might expect to happen. So all of that actually taught me a lot about how people use and interact with interfaces in general. And I started applying it to the actual conversion aspect. So not really the... product usability, but more of the conversion side of things. So when people land on a website, what actions do they need to take in order to convert, to take some kind of action that you want them to take. yeah, all of that stuff has really been super helpful in actually shaping how we think about these things. Mark Baldino (04:47.456) Right. So it's really that human, human to robot, I guess in your past work life now, know, human to, I mean, different type of machine and computer, but that human computer interactions, we call it in the design space of putting yourself into the mind of the user, trying to understand and empathize with them and then help them, you know, make decisions, smarter decisions. And so what Chris (04:59.445) Yeah, yeah. Mark Baldino (05:17.602) What do you think from a content perspective and conversion perspective, what is your, I don't know, do you have any overarching principles of like, I assume conversion is different for different clients, right? Some people might be downloading information. If it's e-commerce, obviously we're trying to get them into a funnel and to make a decision, but there's lots of complex decision-making processes. Chris (05:33.727) Yeah. Chris (05:41.473) Mm. Mark Baldino (05:42.414) Do you have any general rules for like, okay, if I'm trying to empathize with the user, I'm trying to myself in their shoes, I'm trying to help them make a better decision and convert. And converts not a thing that as a user I think of, right? Like I don't necessarily care about conversion. I don't think in those terms. I think of making proper decisions. Like do have any best practices or principles? Chris (05:54.783) Hmm. Yeah, exactly. Chris (06:02.689) Yeah, so the way that I think about it, it's kind of like a pyramid with three layers. So a lot of people think that the most important thing is understanding, empathizing with users, understanding their decision-making process, but also how they think, the demographics, all that stuff, like knowing your personas. And then they think that that is basically all you need to write copy that converts and... have them take some kind of action. So what I add in between those two layers, so the understand layer and act layer, it's also the experience layer. And that means basically looking at what they do on the website, which can mean using heat maps, watching user interaction data when you do research, understanding how they consume the copy that you write and how they go through the sections or the pages, how they navigate, what's their flow. And that I think is kind of the missing piece that a lot of people skip when they write copy. also need to understand your audience, how they think, make decisions, who they are, and why they act, but you also need to understand what they do on the website that takes them through their decision-making process. That's why a big part of what I do is also wireframing the copy that I write, so laying out the structure in a skeleton that a designer can take and implement on their website. Mark Baldino (07:26.848) And do you, this might be getting a little into the weeds. mean, are you doing multiple versions of these? Are you doing AB or multivariate testing of content? Or is it, I'm going to launch it, I'm going to study it, I'm going to refine it. Chris (07:39.305) Yeah, so it depends on the project, but we usually always write variants for at least the core pieces of copy, which can be the value proposition copy in the above the fold section or some calls to action, especially when you have, I don't know, for example, a newsletter or a bookademo page. So we might write a couple of variants of those. But for the wide frames, I typically have one version and maybe I add comments on with a couple of variants that my clients can test. We rarely do testing ourselves, but that's something that we offer. Obviously when they ask for variants, especially for the core components, we always have at least three, four alternatives. Mark Baldino (08:25.966) So are you always getting quantitative data back to help make those decisions or is it qualitative data would be a little bit different and be more kind of your expert review of what's working and not working or are you always relying on quant? Chris (08:32.555) Yeah. Chris (08:36.097) Yeah. It's actually, from my perspective, more of a qualitative data. So we have some quantitative data in terms of, especially if the client has a lot of customers on their list and we can run a very big survey so we can get some of the data. Also, if they have a lot of traffic, we usually run website polls or website surveys with a couple of short multiple choice questions. Those can be helpful. But we really rely mostly on qualitative data, which I call, when I collect data, I kind of divide it into like three layers. So there's the kind of surface layer, which is what people say, which is all the language that you can find on review websites, or if you already have a customer sales call recording. So that is really helpful for the language that they use. Then the kind of the structural layer, which is the UX aspect that I mentioned earlier. So although heat maps user recordings, then the deeper layer, which is more of the qualitative side of things, which is usually the super helpful customer interviews. And when I do customer interviews, I try to cover the decision-making process is not really asking them, Hey, what do you like about the product or what, would you want to see? It's more of like actually understanding that decision-making process from before they stumbled on the solution. to like during and after so that we can understand the transformation that needs to happen. So yeah, I would say there's a space for quantitative data, but in my case, it's more of a quality and understanding how people use language, how they speak, what they mean by certain things. So we can mirror as much as possible their actual language. Mark Baldino (10:08.087) to. Mark Baldino (10:23.244) Okay, I mean, it's mirroring a lot of the UX design and I should say UX research process that we're doing, which is let's understand goals, motivators, what's their journey going to look like? A lot of tools we're doing like workflow business tools. it's, know, how are you, if I'm an accountant, how am I preparing my clients' taxes? Mark Baldino (10:47.672) to move forward in the process. In your case, it's about conversion, but you're still understanding the process. You're still understanding goals and motivators really. Chris (10:54.229) Yeah, the jobs to be done. Mark Baldino (10:56.654) Yeah, the job's to be done. And then you're kind of understand, and if I'm going to try to understand this correctly, you're then saying, okay, what made you Converse? You're actually taking kind of success cases and learning from that as well. And then you're to go apply that to a set of designs and copies. Chris (10:58.336) Mm. Chris (11:11.137) Yeah, exactly. And as you said, it's really important to understand the before as well. And when you were talking about what they tried, other things, it's also important to understand not only direct competitors or maybe similar platforms that they use if it's a SaaS company, but also competitive alternative approaches, which can be another way of doing the same job. So important to understand all of those. Mark Baldino (11:39.564) Yeah, I will refer to that as like analogous research. So not direct competition, right? If you do an e-comm, you have their direct competitor and you whatever space they are, but like, I, my company tends to support complex decision-making process. And so I assume that's, you're getting called into a lot of those scenarios. So how are people with similar goals and motivators going about making their decisions and how can you learn from that and then, and then apply that and then test it or launch it and kind of watch it. Chris (11:43.958) Yeah. Mark Baldino (12:09.23) and refine it, I'm assuming is also part of that process. Chris (12:12.489) Yeah, especially when you have a decision-making unit where there's a lot of different stakeholders. You might have the check signer, so the guy, the person who actually signs the check, the manager, the influencer, or the daily user, and how their decision process works together along the team. It's not only one person. need to keep into consideration all of those and those dynamics, especially when... Mark Baldino (12:18.178) Yeah. Chris (12:41.205) creating the sitemap because typically my projects, usually, it's rare that I just write copy for existing pages. Usually it's a repositioning project, messaging strategy, copywriting, and we also basically redesigned the navigation based on all the research that we've done. So we take into consideration all those decision-making dynamics as well. Mark Baldino (13:04.706) Yeah, I think a lot of clients really struggle with that multi-user, multi-constituent, multi-decision making process, right? They kind of want to write one piece of copy for a product or service and have that serve all of those functions. But I think what you're saying is, there's different, you need to deliver different types of content, format and writing actual, like the content you're producing at different times to support that. Chris (13:27.402) Yeah. Mark Baldino (13:30.476) that decision making process, but how do you tie it all together for, because it seems like it's really, it seems really complex, especially as you said, which sounds like almost like an enterprise sale where there's daily user, there's somebody who's going to go out to initial research that they got to go through procurement. Then they got to have somebody signed the check. Like that's like a really complex purchasing decision. Like how do you tie it together for your clients? Chris (13:30.976) Yeah. Chris (13:38.229) Yeah, yeah. Mm. Chris (13:47.711) Yeah. Yeah. So that's a great point. And I still believe that the homepage can speak to all the whole decision making unit, but obviously it doesn't need to be that specific, but it needs to convey the company's positioning basically. the needs convey what you do, who you do it for and how you do it better, uniquely or different, right? So that's the job of the homepage. And then to guide the right people to the right next page, which you need to understand the flow that they go through. And for that, obviously, the best way is to have dedicated solutions pages or use case pages, all of those help you qualify and further self identify your different customer persona. But the homepage should be like the main destination where people understand truly like who you are, what you do, who you're for. And then they can take the next step and One thing that I kind of a one of my mantras, I would say is that we don't really, we don't really sell products. We sell decisions to, to customers, which means the way that I see it, it's that the call to action that you have on a page, let's say your primary call to action. Okay. You might, maybe you have a button, but that's not really your main goal. Your immediate next goal. for users when they land on your page, it's for them to make that micro decision in that specific piece of copy or section to move to the next right section for them, right? So let's say that they land on the homepage. Maybe you have a call to action right there that says book a demo, but is that the right decision that they need to make? Probably not because they don't know enough yet. the right decision for them is maybe scrolling to the next section, learning a bit more. Maybe they see a solution for procurement. They move to that page. Okay. That's the right decision for them. The right, the right sale at this specific stage and point. So it's all a series of micro decisions that then leads to the final main conversion. Mark Baldino (16:01.686) Right. most of your clients, probably could have asked this earlier, are kind of B2B SaaS companies. These are software. You mentioned Booka Demo and stuff like that, you Procurement. So is that typical use case or, I'm sorry, typical client for you? Chris (16:13.587) Yeah, mostly B2B SaaS company, but I also work with other types of B2B. Like for example, now I've been working for a while with a nonprofit, which is also B2B. that's interesting. The interesting aspect of that, when we talk about different decision makers and the job of the homepage, is that in this case, they have kind of like a community, right? So they have members of their community and they also have partners who are companies or in their case, philanthropic partners. So it's very interesting to kind of find that balance between, okay, who should we speak to on the homepage? we speak to our partners or to our members, right? So that's all those dynamics. So yeah, typically B2B SaaS, but sometimes in general, some other types of B2B companies. Mark Baldino (17:04.206) So multi-constituent complex decision-making processes is who you're trying to help. Do you like, are there, and again, if it's a different process, it probably, there's a different answer here, but let's say B2B SaaS software, are there consistent points of indecision in the process? Chris (17:07.369) Yeah. Yeah. Mark Baldino (17:28.546) pauses, roadblocks, or they're like at the point where I have like 15 different options and I don't know how to move forward. Like, do you see any common themes of where people get stuck in decision-making processes and how do you help, how do you identify those, illuminate them for your client and then what do you do to try to get people to push through? And maybe it's this micro decision-making, understand those micro pauses or something like that. Chris (17:34.507) Mm. Chris (17:45.355) Yeah. Mm. Yeah, so a lot of times the main blocker that I see is that vagueness in the value proposition copy when they, especially on the homepage, or even more specific landing pages that people reach from ads, right? So the company can't really describe what they do, who they do it for and how uniquely in a crystallized concise way, so they resort either to copying competitors, so everyone basically says the same thing, or using jargon, and happens a lot with enterprise companies. So the first thing that you see, okay, if you're a prospect landing on the page, you basically see the same language used over and over, you kind of think, okay, what does this guy do that's different from everything else, right? I'm already... using another tool, especially if it's very deep-seated into your own system and I have very high switching costs, so I don't even want to start learning about this thing, since I don't understand what's unique or better about this. So that's probably one of the main ones. Other problems, maybe it's probably lack of the right expectation setting. So I like to think of expectations both the setting... Chris (19:13.568) the right expectations and also matching them or exceeding them after. that's one thing that I, you probably know, as a UX designer as well, when you watch a lot of usability tests that I used to work at a usability testing startup as well, one thing that you see is how badly often the copy or the design, how it fails to set... and match expectations. So people expect something to happen, then they click a button on the other side, there's something completely different, right? So that's, that's a big problem with messaging that I see as well, especially when you have to book a demo, you don't know the value that's in it for you. It's mostly like a sale. Okay. Hey, book a demo. We're going to try it. We're going to have like a discovery call where we basically try to glean everything from you, but you're not getting enough any value out of it. And it's. It's quite time consuming, so a lot of these demos might be like an hour call, so people need to know what's in it for them before they actually click those buttons. So, expectation setting and matching is also another big problem that I see with the messaging that a lot of companies don't really pay attention to. yeah, I think these are probably the main two ones that are not often talked about that I see, and I'm sure there are other ones. Mark Baldino (20:35.126) So with the, yeah, no, with the first one, are you helping them write that copy and understand? Like that's like, that's almost like business strategy, like stepping them through, this is your unique selling proposition. This is how you're different than your customers. This is how you now need to communicate about that on a website. Do you actually take them through those steps? Chris (20:47.329) Hmm. Chris (20:56.445) Yeah, yeah, totally. So that's a big part of how we come up with that value proposition. It's the positioning and messaging strategy work that we do. So for positioning, after we've done all the research, so customer interviews, surveys, looking at reviews, competitor research. After all of that, then we started working on the positioning strategy, which also involves speaking with every major stakeholders in my client's team. So to understand their internal perspective. And then we have a... Typically, 90-minute workshop with the same team, and that's mostly to get aligned on what I said, so what they do, who they do it for, and how they do it uniquely. From that positioning workshop, the deliverable result, it's a clear and very systematized understanding of, I don't know, the two or three, maximum four differentiated value themes that they offer. So what are those? unique things that they do and the benefits that they deliver with those that together make their unique value. And that's a thing that a lot of companies maybe misunderstand. think that every single thing, single thing that they mentioned, the value of position needs to be unique, but actually it's the combination of those things that makes them different from other companies. Mark Baldino (22:41.548) So the second component you mentioned, which was expectation setting, like some of that seems like an internal process, right? Like salespeople have maybe a playbook and they want to follow that playbook. it's to your point, I think I'm doing a service here by asking them lots of questions and getting lots of data out of them. But sometimes that feels like actual disservice to the potential client. It seems really selfish. Like, yeah, it feels like a pitch as opposed to, I mean, somebody told me once like sales is service, right? You're supposed to. Chris (22:50.625) Mm. Chris (23:00.993) Yeah, like a bitch. Chris (23:09.472) Mm. Mark Baldino (23:09.87) help them in that process. And so there is part of that exploration, which is like, what are your true needs? But only if you're doing it in a way that you're actually serving them. how do you get around me? Salespeople can be a challenge, sometimes really aggressive folks. Like, how do you work around that and get them to maybe, it's almost like a behavior change or a process change, less than what you're doing on your website, which is content, right? Do you have to, do you bump into that? Am I overstating the problem? Chris (23:27.041) Mm. Chris (23:33.919) No, no, that's actually true. There's a really good book that talks about this by Bob Mesta. I don't know if you know him, but he's really big into jobs to be done. And he's got this book called Demand Side Sales, which is in contrast to supply side sales, right? So you basically use the jobs to be done theory for sales. So how to do a pitch, how to understand all the forces that are involved in the process. And what I found in my process, which is the positioning, messaging, copy process. We deal a lot with the sales team because we speak to them to understand, what are the objections that prospects have? What's the language or messaging that you see works? What are the competitors that you see popping up in deals? So all of those things are very helpful for us. But also the work that we do helps the team align on some of the things that sales... people do right. so the final product, our copy, we typically find that it's very aligned, very much aligned with the sales process, the things that work in the sales process. So it's all of kind of like an organic process that also takes into account what sales does and also corrects some of those things that maybe are a bit too pushy or or sales pitchy. So it's very much like an organic process. Mark Baldino (25:03.17) Right on, right on. I think when I think of copywriting, when I think of, I should say, when I think of AI and generative, copywriting, journalism, these are areas that I think people in those professions are worried about in terms of like, it's replacing them, right? And you've also talked about empathy, which I don't, I think empathy and AI are probably two areas where people don't think that the Venn diagram overlaps. Chris (25:32.488) Yeah. Mark Baldino (25:32.898) very much, but I know you try to embrace it in your process and instead of pushing back on AI, you kind of try to build it into your process. you talk a little bit how you're using AI and maybe specifically how you're using AI to better empathize. Chris (25:47.785) Yeah. Yeah. So maybe going back to, because of my past and engineering, I have this kind of framework that I call empathy engineering with AI and it's kind of a four part, it's actually a cycle. If you look at it at the end and with those four letters of path coming from empathy. So the first one is prepare, then you have articulate, then test and harmonize. each part is basically, this is the framework that I use to in my research process, process strategy, and actually writing. So the whole process throughout, I have different users for different NLMs for different things. And the first one, so the prepare stage, it's basically collecting all of your research data. So the more you have, better, which means all the customer interview transcripts, all the survey data, all the team interview in internal with my client's team, collecting all of those and kind of organizing it in a way that's clear. maybe censoring some parts that are like sensitive or privacy protection. So this is the prepare stage. The second one, articulate, it's where you, and it might sound strange to some people who are not used to it, but it's a stage where you actually shape your AI into a simulated version of your customer persona, right? So let's say that from your research, you have these three... ICPs, customer personas, you can actually simulate them using AI. So what I typically do is I have my one chat in an LLM, that's my strategy, strategist chat. Then I create separate chats, one for each of these personas that basically stay in character through the whole process. And I have a simple prompt that I use, but it's very effective to actually use them and... test your messaging, ask questions, going deeper. Obviously it's not good. It's never going to take you at least for now to 100 % understanding or mirroring of your customers. But especially if you are a smaller company startup, which typically they don't really have access to a lot of customers yet or research data. Even if you get to a 60, 70 % accuracy of the insights that you get, it's really... Chris (28:10.209) because most of these companies just resort to copying competitors or really struggle to articulate their positioning and messaging. So I think it can be really valuable if you do it the right way. So after this kind of articulation stage where we shape these personas, we do the testing. And this is okay when you have these personas. Then you can ask questions, can have a conversation with them, you can show them pieces of copy that you wrote and ask them, hey, what do you think about this? Or you can kind of simulate. One time, for example, I even simulated an entire email sequence with variants for each emails. And I asked them, for each of these emails, give me your preference with maybe a score. And I basically A-B tested an entire email sequence. And it told me, OK, these emails were better because I resonate with this, this and that. And that was pretty crazy because when I tested the actual email sequence, was maybe not a hundred percent, but 95 % accurate as far as the result that I got. it also the advantage of doing it this way is that because typically, especially in B2B, you might know it's super hard to test with real decision makers in B2B. can't really pay. Mark Baldino (29:16.824) How about that? Interesting. Chris (29:33.345) a CFO, a CMO for an hour of a usability test or message test, right? There are some platforms like Winter who do it as well, but again, speak more to enterprise level companies. So if you're a smaller companies might not be feasible for you. And so I think this is pretty good alternative. And the last step, which I call harmonize, it's where you, once you've gotten all of those insights from your testing, from your synthetic personas, then you can use all of those insights to actually formulate better hypotheses for the next round that you're running, for the next research or for the next testing. It's kind of like having like a laser that once you've done a round, it points you better and more specifically to something else that you can look into in your research to then have an even more precise next cycle. of the whole thing. yeah, it's still, there's some platforms that do it for you. So you can recreate your persona quite easily. But again, they are mostly for enterprise. So the way that I've been doing it is very, very manual and very like a human in the loop process. So I'm still the human going in and verifying and validating, but so far I find it really, really valuable. Mark Baldino (30:35.233) Awesome. Mark Baldino (30:51.054) right? Mark Baldino (30:57.966) That's awesome. Thank you for breaking that down. think the path process you're following and how you're using AI doesn't just relate to what you're doing from a copy and conversion perspective. There's a lot of areas people could extract that out. And obviously it's an accelerator in many ways for your work. You just explained the process on a podcast. So I assume you're pretty transparent with your clients that you're... Chris (31:10.443) Hmm. Mark Baldino (31:26.54) you're using this and that you're using, like, how do you explain it to them? And what is, what is their response to how you're using AI as part of the process? Chris (31:27.37) Yeah, yeah, Chris (31:35.623) Yeah, so I typically tell them, yeah, we are using AI to write our copy. And the thing that's surprising, it's when we typically have messaging strategy meetings, when we show our messaging framework, maybe a couple of valuable position. Sometimes we see their reactions, like surprised, almost excited at the copy that they see. And then we tell them, yeah, this was basically AI that kind of wrote this copy. But because we had all our process before that, We used actual real research from real humans. So it's not just asking any random LLM to use the whole knowledge of the internet that you have to create these personas. No, it's more of like, we have these personas as this real research data. Use this to actually go deeper, mirror it, give us specific information, super vivid information. Obviously, the more research data you have, the better. But clients, I was actually thinking about maybe doing some additional offer where I create specific LLM projects that my clients can use once I'm done with everything to write their own copy. Because I use this tool called Team GPT with my team so that we can basically use the same client voice between all of us. and it's kind of interchangeable. But I think they just moved to enterprise. So yeah, I'm still kind of exploring how to do it, but it could be, I mean, I've heard, I spoke with another consultant that was saying like, hey, aren't you scared that like your job is gonna be over once you delegate and enable your clients to basically do what you're gonna do. And my opinion is... you're still going to need guidance on the strategy and also that intuitive sense that a copywriter has for what looks and feels and sounds good. So the copywriters are becoming more of like the engineers, the architects, and kind of the editors of the copy. It's a bit less about writing and more about the orchestrating things and editing and fine tuning. Mark Baldino (33:51.022) Yeah. Well, I think to that person's question, the answer is you either have to find a way to use it or not. Like it's here and it's here to stay. And you're still relying on humans for running the research and loading it and setting things up. And then I had a previous podcast guest who used the same term, which was the editor mindset, which is we're not doing as much as generation because Chris (34:03.486) Exactly Mark Baldino (34:19.968) LLMs can do that faster, but we have to get into an editor mindset to figure out, okay, now I've gotten this back. As you said, does that feel right? Does that sound like it's coming from this company and kind of editing from there? But I think the model you've laid out is great. And I think that embracing AI in our work and being confident enough to explain it to clients is really interesting, is important as consultants. Cause I think a lot of people use it in the background and they're maybe a little bit afraid to say, Chris (34:29.899) Yeah. Chris (34:47.637) Mm. Mark Baldino (34:49.326) I've been using AI here to help. A, because they maybe aren't using as robust a process as you are. They kind of want to hide it. And I think that that's kind of a shame because I think there are ways it can accelerate and improve our processes. Chris (34:58.41) Yeah. Chris (35:02.485) You have to show it as a value add, not just a replacement of what you do. Mark Baldino (35:06.285) Yeah. Yeah. No, fantastic. Well, you're a process oriented person and I really, really appreciate that. I see myself as one. So I love that you've broken down your process for the audience and kind of shared it. And I think it's going to resonate with folks who maybe are in a similar space as you, but also for, you know, I'm hoping that there's potentially some people who need your services and can find you through the podcast, But so give us a sense. I mean, obviously you have a website. I know you have a podcast. Give us a sense of where people can find you out on Chris (35:26.507) Mm. Chris (35:39.485) Yeah, so my website is conversionalchemy.net. I probably would point most people to the newsletter. It's a weekly newsletter that you can sign up to get some of my latest thinking and shares. That's where I also typically share the podcast when it comes out, even though you can find it on our website. And I'm typically mostly on LinkedIn, just chatting, nerding out on this stuff and learning. Mark Baldino (36:06.126) Well, I just want to thank you for your time today. I appreciate the energy and kind of sharing your processes as go. And I think the audience is really going to like the episode. So thanks again for your time, Chris. Chris (36:17.575) Awesome, thanks Mark.