“Smart AI can differentiate who you’re talking to, when you’re talking to them, and what you need to say, and how that’s where this starts to make a real difference.”

Christopher Willis, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Product Officer of Acrolinx, joins us on this episode of Be Customer Led with Bill Staikos. Chris is regarded as a very innovative and results-driven CMO with a track record of building effective marketing and sales groups. Also, he is accountable for all areas of the organization’s marketing strategy. Moreover, Chris specializes in content governance, artificial intelligence, and pipeline management. In today’s discussion, we dive deep into various aspects concerning the improvement of content and its effect on the customer experience. 

[01:10] Background – Chris shares his journey to this point and highlights the characteristics that set him apart. 

[06:03] Acrolinx - Chris outlines Acrolinx’s fascinating AI and content-related projects. He then elaborates on AI’s impact on content development, curation, and consumption since its adoption. 

[15:48] Content as an Asset - Numerous businesses consider content an afterthought rather than an asset. Chris describes what he believes companies lack on the experiential side, especially when explaining its value for the first time.

[20:36] C - Level Initiative – Chris explains how revenue modeling resulting from content governance becomes a C-level endeavor. 

[23:33] Content Fitness – Chris gives an excellent explanation regarding the idea of content fitness.

[29:46] Horizontal Solution – Chris discusses the corporate sizes to which their service extends and whether or not it is genuinely an enterprise-level solution. 

[32:13] Inspiration – Chris mentions the business executives he looks up to most and why he does so. He also notes where he gets his inspiration.

Resources:

Connect with Christopher:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/cpwillis/

Website: www.acrolinx.com

Be Customer Led - Christopher Willis

Welcome to be customer led where we'll explore, help leading experts in customer and employee experience are navigating organizations through their own journey to be customer led and the actions and behaviors, employees, and businesses exhibit to get there. And now your host bill stagos.

He's got a lot of great expertise before that, and he's just a thought leader in this space. And we're so excited to have you on a show, Chris. Welcome. Welcome to be customer led. It's great to have you.

[00:01:10] Bill Staikos: I, I know a fact for a fact, that's you, because we had a really great conversation, as an intro call and I'm excited to get into this topic. So today's story arc is around making content better via artificial intelligence and its impact on customer experience. Something that, a thing or two about before we get into that, Chris, you've got a really great journey and I would love for you just to share that journey with listeners and what were some of the differentiating factors maybe in your.

I actually have a well-rounded liberal arts background with a major in theater and a minor in philosophy. So. Didn't really know what I was gonna do. I did have the benefit of, growing up with computers. My mother made sure that I had computers growing up, coded on a Commodor 64. And when I, I remember that, oh yeah, got outta college.

my opportunity to enter technology was, was actually through an assistant role. It wasn't a technical role. It was moving into a business, working with the CEO mm-hmm learning a lot while I sat at that desk. Beginning my coding, journey. and then moving into a more development oriented role in a startup, took me to KPMG in Europe, where I moved from a project role into a sales role and, and started selling, internet.

I was largely self-made, but got really lucky at a experience several years ago, when we hired a new president of the company who had a, a history of CMO roles at very large companies. And he. Taught me all the things that I didn't know. Well, some of the things I didn't know, I guess I'm probably still learning, about really being in my role and, when I made it to acro links where I am now, you come in and you think, what would I do?

And that's where you see roles like. Chief pipeline officer enter into the vocabulary around me, pushing me into areas that I I've been involved in, but not responsible for in the past. and that continuation of growth, has been really important and really exciting to me. You think that when you get to a certain level, that's where you.

That's where you are. You've learned everything you need to learn. But, I think one of the things that's really exciting about my career is that there has been a continual learning experience getting me to where I am and to where I'm gonna go next. I love

So thanks for that authenticity and, and, and honesty. Let's talk a little bit about, so I, that's a really interesting journey and like, I, I, I hearken back a little bit, at one point when I was about to report in a CEO was like, not that I'm not ready for it, but I actually think that we should report into the COO and have more impact there.

It takes actually some real self-awareness to like, just look at yourself on mirror and say, this is not the right time. Right. And I still have a ways to go, versus kind of forging ahead and say, I'll learn as I go, which as a C CEO, sometimes isn't sort of the best. Approach. Right. So I'm sure I'm sure

I had never been exposed to like the, the KPIs that we measure this business on are, I mean, exciting and remarkable to me, probably not much to other people that have worked in much larger organizations, but, things that I had not had exposure to that I now have exposure to that have changed my whole way of looking at the future.

it just continues to be exciting.

[00:05:52] Christopher Willis: Yeah. It's so this is an interesting business. Alyx is an AI powered software product that improves the quality, fitness and impact of specifically enterprise content at scale.

So our companies are the biggest technology companies, pharmaceutical companies, banks, and global manufacturers, and they have. Millions of pieces of content out there in the world. And what we've established in this space is that content in all of its forms matters. Each thing that you create has a purpose.

And if we can help to increase the impact of that content, you increase business results. So our product. Takes in all of your content creation guidelines. So how you think you wanna create content, clarity, consistency, character, terminology, inclusiveness emotion, and then governs the creation and or ownership of content.

So the go forward of creating new content, we guide writers in real time to write the way that we've just established. We want the company to write, but that's not super exciting. That's a thing that happens going forward. I also have a million pages of. That are sitting in a repository and we can go back through that and align that now with clarity, consistency, and character of our business and moving forward from there.

Now we have this perfect piece of content and a byproduct of our, of our solution is a score. We call it the acro link score. And, that tells you how aligned you are with your guidelines. I've got a 95 document. Fantastic. Let's say it's a webpage. That means it's perfect. That means it's everything that I hope it is.

It's using the right words, the right tone, the right style. It's inclusive. It's got the right emotion built into it. It's got everything that I hope it has. Mm-hmm and I put it out into the world. And it doesn't resonate with my audience. What do I do with that? And we now are enabling the connection with this, the post production consumption analytics to see what content is performing so that you can go back into your repository.

and create more content like that. And so to the point of the name of the podcast, listening to your customers, how do they wanna, how do they wanna be communicated with? So we think we know, right? Like my job is to identify the tone of our company. We, the way that we communicate, that's part of what I do.

I like to think that I'm. Good at it, but you don't really know you're good at it, unless you can tie content to consumption mm-hmm and end result. So I created it's perfect. I put it out there. It's not converting. What can I learn from that? What am I doing wrong? What am I, how am I positioning in a way that's not resonating with my audience?

And if we take that. Overlay that over another segment of content, can we get those same results? And the end result of all of this is essentially revenue. I mean, we had a, we had a customer speak at our QBR several weeks ago. And the question was asked, how do you, how does your company measure what you do and, and answer would've been, decreased bounce rates, increased conversion, time on page that wasn't the answer.

The answer with no hesitation was. I'm sorry, what go on? Well, if we create solid good content, effective, impactful content, we drive business for the company. We see revenue go up or down based on the content we create. Fantastic. So you're saying that through the governance of content impact, you're driving your business.

Yep. Thank.

Right. that, that company's got their head screwed on straight as far as I'm concerned. So Alyx is a 20 year old company. They clearly, weren't doing this, I'm assuming 20 years ago. Right. They may have pivoted at some point. Content has changed dramatically in that period of time. Now, with the layover of AI, what do you think that has done to.

Content creation, curation and consumption. Like how much of an impact have you seen AI have in

but content. is as simple as a, UI and a product. it's a single webpage it's text on a billboard. It's the script that drives your chat bot. it's, long form eBooks and white papers. It's, it's this one to many communication that we're creating in the business. What people are realizing is that it's it's best when it feels one to one.

Are the ones that are succeeding in the marketplace, because I mean, if you think about what we've gone through in the last couple years, this whole digital shift we've been marketing for years, it actually happened. And now your, your touch points that you, that you own in the world might be the only way that you're communicating with your consumer audience.

And if that's the case, then those who do it best and who have it aligned. Win. And the mistake that you make then is cool. That's a marketing. Like, I'm hearing you, I'm gonna talk to my marketing team, but it's not because that's not the whole experience that a company delivers. You've got consideration, transaction retention and loyalty.

Mm-hmm so things prior to. like the product, like product documentation, like product manuals, mm-hmm, like educational content for using this product that then eventually leads into sales, enablement, and marketing content that then goes into post-sale service and support and the consistency that you need to have across that.

Now we can tweak things like tone of voice. I might be a company that wants to be light and conversational in marketing, but clear and concise and service and support, but I'm still going to inherit things. From the broader voice of the company, but bill here's the problem. Most companies don't think that way at all.

There isn't somebody responsible for content that way. There there's a role in a lot of companies. That's the, the chief experience owner. But that again comes down to sort of more of a marketing yeah. Website role. Like I'm creating a customer journey. The customer journey, isn't just buying software or buying a product.

It's the whole package. Yeah. And that's, that's where leveraging AI across your business, smart AI, they can differentiate who you're talking to when you're talking to them and what you need to say and how that's, where this starts to make it a real difference. In, in your

I. Kind of thinking about this conversation. There's so many companies out there that don't view content as an asset. They view it as an afterthought. Clearly the company you were talking about, it views it as an asset because they're measuring revenue off of it, right? Like that's a clear sign to me that they view it that way.

But back to your point around a lot of this sits in, in marketing, maybe that is not viewed as something that's driving. Top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, or even sort of deep in a postsales, environment, loyalty and, and revenue creation. What do you think? Is it just, is it the journey view? Is it metrics?

Is it, is it, does it sit in the wrong place in an organization? Like where, what do you think that companies are largely missing on the experiential side, particularly when you're going to talk to them for the first time, maybe even, and saying, this is why you

One is. The idea of silos in the business and I'll come back to that, cuz that's the less interesting one, super obvious. The other one is that when you try and have a conversation about content in a business today, and you say anything about costs, you're gonna lose people because bill, I can save you money on the creation of your content at scale.

And the first thing that you think is cool. Show me where I'm spending that money. Like where on my budget. In my line items. Does it say content creation and unless you're IBM outsourcing all of your content agencies? Yeah. You don't have that in your budget. I don't have it in my budget. It's the thing that people do when they go to work.

We are all content creators in emails, in the webpage land, web landing pages that we create, blog articles, product content, all of that tech docs, all of this. Content that you're paying for, but you're paying it in head count. Mm-hmm . So the first thing is to show you what it actually looks like, like when you think through.

The creation of content really means to a business. So a company that has, a, a million pages on one sub domain of a support site, argue with me about how much it costs per page. Like we think that it's about, between a thousand and $1,200 per page from a, a headcount cost to create editorial time, the back and forth that comes into that, the final review and any legal that it needs.

So

[00:16:42] Christopher Willis: It's asset. And then you, the next question is obviously, so what are you, what are you doing with it?

Like how often do you maintain this asset? How are you maximizing the use of this asset? and we're finding that companies generally maintain about 10% of the content they own tops, which means that 90% of it is sitting unmanaged in a repo or a set of repositories in a business. Filled with potential risk.

Most of our customers live in regulated industries. Mm-hmm so things are changing. Rules are changing, content needs to change with it. And it's not, that becomes a real issue. So just helping people to understand that this thing that happens when you go to work, that email that you just created is part of a, a broader asset that your business has, and it should be created as such.

And if we can take this thing that you've spent all of this money on and make it more. Versus just continually making more and more and more and throwing it on the top of the pile. You're you're going to see positive business results.

what's interesting with a, with a platform like Acrolinx. You know what I've realized, and especially I'm pretty active out there and social and I look back on my old content, just understand like what, what fit and what didn't fit, et cetera. But even in that 90%, how much revenue they're probably leaving on the table by not understanding that better.

What's resonating with our, with our customers and our process,

And so, like you say, you can start modeling. The revenue that you're gonna see as a result of, of content governance is very real.

[00:19:14] Christopher Willis: it is a C level initiative.

That is a thing that we know C level leaders have to take an active role. Mm-hmm in this broader customer experience. And what we find. So you going, who, who would get this? Who's gonna understand what we're talking about. Well, the, the head of brand is gonna understand this. Yeah. Yeah. The head of brand generally sits in marketing.

the head of brand doesn't have a team or a purview for execution. The head of brand is defining the brand either internally or with an outside agency, putting some product out in front of the organization. And hoping to drive alignment. So that's, if that's the person that gets it and that's been my experience, they get it.

So now it's, it's going up to who in the company cares about this and. The only answer there's two answers. One of them's real, and one of them's kind of real CEO is the person that cares about this. CEO doesn't know that they care about this, but they care about this because this is the essence of what they do.

Mm-hmm , this is the global strategy of the business on how the business communicates, but that's not, you're not gonna see somebody's job description for a new CEO and have content governance be part of it. The other person that I, I, I reckon and cares about this is whoever it is that cares about the company wide email signature.

If I could find that person in every. That person understands what I'm talking about. Mm. Because every company has a global email signature, and that's the only thing. That's the only global aspect of a, of a business that is the same for everybody. And that person, again, probably somebody relatively lower level that sits in either marketing or it.

Would understand this and be able to extrapolate out that, okay, I get it. I get what we're trying to do. I could run this, I could run this part of the business, but that doesn't, that's the one that doesn't seem real. Like, I, I like the idea of it, but it doesn't seem real.

If you're looking to sell a platform like lings as well, possibly. Yeah. It might be a longer road, no offense to them. So a Acrolinx, uses a really, a term that I've never heard before in which I just love. And we've been talking a lot, a little bit about it, but you use a term content fitness. Yes. So, and I really love the context in which you all use it.

So can you define content fitness for us and, and the, and, and the content cube that ACC links has? So the

There are companies that sell content quality solutions for next to nothing, give it away for free. But the other problem is that quality is subjective. Calling any of this equality, play misses, really the intent of what we're doing. We're trying to create content that's fit for purpose. That's and it's different.

There are companies in the world for whom and, and maybe this is more hypothetical. Bad quality content would be fit for their purpose. If you are a shifty offshore bank, trying to build senior citizens out of their savings by getting 'em to sign documents, they don't understand signing away their, their finances, not by the way.

One of our customers. Just saying this could be a thing. Your idea of quality content would be garbage. Like things that unclear hard to read, using words, nobody understands that would be content that's right for you. And so we need to be able to deliver for our customers content that's fit for their purpose.

Now, a more realistic example would be looking at. The way that we think you should create content, because it's the way that we create content, lively, conversational, using simple language, lack of buzz words, informal. That's what we think that's fit content for us. It's not for, for instance, a large English bank.

One of the London banks doesn't wanna be cute and fun and informal fit for purpose for them is, is formal. Mm-hmm that's, that's the type of content they're trying to create. they're using very specific language designed by them for their audiences to drive the personality of their. So this content of, of this concept of fitness is about identifying what content needs to be to solve the problem first.

So what's the question being asked. Does this answer that question then from there, assuming that it does, does it answer it in the way that we'll be consumed by the audience that we're delivering to? Cool. The next phase of that is going to be, is it. Like, so are you creating the perfect piece of content on beekeeping and putting it on the national milk board website?

Because if you are, it's not gonna resonate. It's not that it's not perfect. It's not that it's not fit for some use. It is just not fit for our use. Yep. And so what, we're what we're delivering and you talk about how it's, the product must have evolved in the last 20 years and it absolutely has content cube, our most recent release.

Is that link to consumption analytics that allows us to see how these things resonate. Are we creating content that is fit prior to that? It's, we're creating content. That's great, but the fit aspect of it. Does it work? Is that great unless it works. And that next step says it's working because here's the thing.

Gartner did a survey several years ago for people like me at much larger companies. Do you know what your audiences are looking to hear? Do you know how they want to hear it from you? And I think 80% of CMOs that were surveyed said, we, we have an idea, but we will acknowledge that we're guessing. And so if that's the case and we're guessing, how do we validate?

And what we've done is given the ability to validate, to align around the model and validate the model's usefulness and. Iterate from there. And so when I got here, we talked a lot about strategy aligned content, your strategy, your content aligned, where I'm trying to get us to, as we move into the future is audience aligned content.

so I have an idea. This is what we're gonna do. Mm-hmm put it out in the world, listen to the feedback of our audience, through their consumption of this content and iterate to get closer and closer to better results with that audience by understanding what drives their engagement. And that's where this gets really exciting.

Again, dialing up the volume on impact, making everything work

I mean, that really is the premise of the show be you're you're now being customer led by taking these signals off of your content and what your customers are telling you about it, through their engagement, through it, and what it's doing from a revenue perspective. And then optimizing from there. Is that where you see, or I guess that still feels like an, I guess my question is that still feels like an enterprise level view.

right. Like when does, when does it get sort of more democratized and people at mid-size companies now, even thinking about it, maybe in a different way to say, Hey, I'm looking for opportunities to differentiate against the big, the big boys in the, in the room all the time. Do you see that? Do you see that sort of, do you see the technology.

Coming down market. So to speak a little bit in terms, size of company, or is it really more of an enterprise level solution? No,

like, they pop up a bank, digital bank and it comes outta nowhere and boom, it's backed by somebody huge and up it comes. And they're not the size of the organization that we currently see implementing solutions like this, but they're hiring people from those organizations that understand. What you and I are talking about right now, they understand the, the personality of a business.

And would've liked to have been able to implement that in their larger enterprise, but were unable to, because of the silos in the business and the different ownership of content across the business, but they've moved and they have CEO level visibility. Smaller business and the ability to create that singular voice.

And that's what they're setting out to do. And we don't go out and market to companies like that, but we are seeing companies like that come to us. Hmm. And we see them now buying software for that purpose. We are a, I mean, we're a horizontal solution. I use our product and we're a very small company compared to the.

We sell to, but it's not just the scale. It's also the function. If you understand that one voice across a business, if you understand getting closer to your audience and content is critical to the personality. And experience of your, of your product. Then this starts to make sense, and we would expect to see over the next three to five years, our product to continue to evolve, to be able to support those types of companies even better.

But the last one is where do you go for inspiration? Maybe those two are two in the same, perhaps, but

But before that PTC, HP a number of large businesses and couldn't be learning more than I'm learning from him. on a more broad level, I did have an opportunity several years ago to spend one. Fantastic evening out with Richard Branson and have been aggressively following him ever since he's an amazing creative leader.

And I think that the thing that I try to do is to add creativity to the process. a little bit of crazy. And, I, I, I think that that's something that I, I admire in him from an inspiration standpoint. This is corny and it sounds canned, but I actually. Decided what I was gonna say. It's really my team.

I am the type of leader. Like we've talked about my background and it's not a traditional growth model. I don't have, I, I don't have all the experience that the people that I hire have, but I'm okay with that. My job is to. Let's go all the way back to theater cast the right people in the right roles, give them the context, the blocking, and the priorities to allow them to do the best job that they can do.

And I can't save the play on performance night. Like if it's not going well, there's nothing that the director can do to jump outta the audience and save it. Same thing here. I have to have people. That know what they're doing that can do it and that do it on a consistent basis. And a lot of the inspiration that I get is just coming in every day to the people that, that work in my organization, see the things that they're doing, see the way that they're growing.

And that gets me wanting to continue to come to work every day. Love

Where can folks find you or the company like what's the best way to, get in touch. If people wanna

[00:31:58] Bill Staikos: Cool. Awesome. Thanks so much again, have a great weekend. All right, everybody we're out. Talk to you, everyone.

Thanks for