B-to-B Firm Mutiny Shows How AI Can Help Resource-Strapped Brands

When you’ve invested time, effort and capital into a product that has shown how well it can perform and how happy it can make customers, who can help the world see the traits you see in it? That’s the essence of a marketer’s job, and it doesn’t dissipate just because that marketer takes on a new role. Almost a decade ago, Jaleh Rezaei began working as CMO of cloud-based payroll company Gusto and didn’t like what she saw. The company was tossing money at various aspects of its marketing—SEO, public relations, etc.—that was driving a lot of visitors to its site, but not getting many to stay. They had a strong core of startup founders, but attempts to branch out weren’t resonating with the customers they were trying to reach. Mutiny's Visual Editor AI at work. Rezaei looked at business-to-consumer companies like AirBnB, Uber and Booking.com and saw that they hired massive growth engineering teams of hundreds of engineers, data scientists and product managers. Those teams wove together custom software that helped them better understand their customers. It was costly, but Rezaei had to know if it would work for Gusto. After hiring a team of their own, revenue grew by more than 100 times, while the cost of acquiring a customer decreased twofold. Rezaei and her business partner, Nikhil Mathew, eventually founded Mutiny, an AI-based platform of website personalization tools for businesses, to take “a problem that we solve manually, with blood, sweat and tears,” and use software to automate it and “democratize access to that for everybody else in the field.” She just needed to sell her product. “After doing that, for a number of years, the lightbulb went off that the problem that we were experiencing was likely a global problem for other CMOs as well,” she said, “and that it was getting in the way of every company being able to grow faster and more efficiently.” Addition through subtraction Launched in 2018, Mutiny is codeless AI that allows companies to identify visitors to their website and personalize headlines, photos and certain copy elements. It takes teams of engineers and data scientists out of the equation, reduces overhead for the buyer and shows thousands of versions of the company’s site to numerous audiences at minimal cost. It’s the CMO’s answer to a CFO or CEO’s problem. “What the CEO and the CFO care about is revenue,” Rezaei said. “Everything else that happens before that is just spending money.” How Marketers Can and Should Measure Social Media ROI During her time as a head of marketing, Rezaei learned to break down revenue into demand and conversion. Demand wasn’t an issue: Advertising, content generation and public relations place a company in front of the right customers with the right message and get them interested. Conversion—the push across the line from interest to sale—is a bit more difficult and often requires a stack of marketing technology to address. Rezaei’s team at Mutiny estimates that $19 out of every $20 spent on marketing is wasted because companies can’t capitalize on the demand they’ve produced. When working with b-to-b companies like Qualtrics, Snowflake, 6Sense and Carta, Mutiny is taking the paid and account-based marketing that’s funneling people through the website and subjecting them to numerous data points that find their best matching content, convince them to stay and, ideally, increase customers, corporate program leads and revenue. “There isn't really a great solution for how to help every marketing team get the most out of the website, get the highest conversion, get the highest revenue,” Rezaei said. “There is a smattering of tools.” Give them what they want Organizational productivity software company Notion needed to find its people. Since their product has numerous uses—a Google Docs replacement, project management software, a wiki—customers would come its way through online searches and paid advertising. A customer looking for wikis would be routed to the Notion website, which provided an overview of the company’s various offerings. “They would see why, in general, Notion’s a great product, but they might not understand why it solves that specific wiki pain point for them,” Rezaei said, “so they might bounce.” Mutiny's AI tracks the inbound experience on a company's website. Notion believed that if they could target customers based on their individual needs, they could not only attract more business but boost revenue exponentially. In teaming with Mutiny, they were able to adapt the website to the specific customer and explain to visitors trying to create wikis how Notion could help their project. While Rezaei said companies could adapt their sites to align with hundreds or thousands of potential customer experiences, even a slightly broader view can make a big difference for a brand like Notion. “When companies make these types of changes, they are looking for efficiencies like getting a 5% or 10% increase in conversion—that would be considered a home run,” she said. “Notion saw a 60% increase in conversions in the first three months by doing this type of adaptive action to what the user was actually looking for.” Marketing to marketers As the pandemic has given way to an unsteady economic recovery, Rezaei’s greatest challenge in bringing Mutiny to the marketing community is making businesses aware it exists. As she mentioned earlier, demand isn’t the issue: Every marketing team is being pressured to do more with less and increase revenue more efficiently. If Mutiny can grab the attention of executives shifting money from advertising to more cost-efficient programs and other solutions, it can tap into that growing demand. Conversion, again, is the more difficult portion of the equation. Throughout her marketing career, artificial intelligence has been the answer to that particular dilemma. Looking at large-language AI models like GPT-4, Rezaei noted that they do a fine job of writing content but can do better if you give them more contacts and more data. Since Mutiny’s launch, more than 100 million people have interacted with its personalized webpages, and its AI has learned about personalization from that data. Southwest Airlines and Grammarly Turn B-to-C Strengths Into B-to-B Success Almost a decade ago, when she was a head of marketing, Rezaei considered AI “the single best investment that we made.” Today, it’s key to Mutiny’s pitch to other marketers. “Marketers have been very receptive, especially when they see the quality of the AI,” Rezaei said. “What they love about it is that the product replaces resources they do not have: They do not have engineers, they do not have data scientists, they don't have hundreds of people to write permutations of content, and that's exactly what our AI automates for them. There's this incredible empowerment that comes with the technology that marketers that use Mutiny really appreciate.”