Jason McLinn, senior partner at Bain & Company, has extensive experience consulting with chemical and ingredient companies. He joins Knowde CEO Ali Amin-Javaheri to discuss how chemical companies are modernizing their customer experiences, preparing support for sales personnel and the importance of finding specific applications for AI.
Key digital insights include:
Evolving B2B expectations
How you can get every sales rep to perform at the same level as your best reps
Bringing structure to currently chaotic product information
Enabling the customer to self-serve documents and information online
Using LLMs to find new applications or customers for products
+More
Interview Transcript
Ali Amin-Javaheri: All right. Hello and welcome, everyone. I’m your host, Ali, CEO and co-founder of Knowde. Our goal with this series is to share perspectives, and today we’ve got a great one.
I’m thrilled to welcome Jason McLinn from Bain. Our audience is well aware of Bain; however, for those that may not be, they are a global consultancy that helps ambitious clients define the future: help you think differently, discover new opportunities, achieve bigger results. They have deep expertise in the chemical space, including every subsector imaginable.
Jason is a senior partner and head of the Americas Customer practice. He formerly led the Americas Chemicals practice and is an expert in the broader Energy and Natural Resources vertical. I hope I got that.
Jason, thanks so much for taking the time. Maybe you’d give a little bit more on your background before we jump in.
Jason McLinn: Sure. Thanks, Ali. It’s great to be here, great to do this. I’m looking forward to talking with you today.
As you said, I’m a consultant. I joined Bain actually 29 years ago. Most of my work is on the growth and the commercial side of companies; to me, that’s way more fun and rewarding than headcount reduction or other things, and so I’ve picked a career doing the types of work that I love. For the first 10 years or so, I did mostly CPG [Consumer Packaged Goods] work. Which is an industry that’s incredibly savvy on customers, segmentation, use cases, role of data, all these things.
Since then for almost the last 18 years or so I’ve worked more in industrials and honestly, I felt like I could bring some lessons from other industries to try to help the industrial companies get more sophisticated. Chemicals to me was interesting, it’s tied into every value chain. I joke that if you trace every product that you can find far enough back, you’ll find the chemicals industry again.
That means you need to know a ton about different end markets, different megatrends; there’s just great variety in what we do. As you said I currently lead our Customer practice in the Americas, I led our Chemicals and Materials practice before that. I’m on our governance committee for partner compensation and promotions, so I’ve been able to do a nice balance of working a lot with clients, but then taking on a few internal roles as well.
Ali: Congrats on the almost 30 years. I did not expect that at all.
I love that you’re here because you have a unique point of view that many of our guests haven’t historically: you’ve engaged so many companies across this industry and you’ve been able to identify patterns, which I think our audience will certainly appreciate.
By the way, were you a ChemE [Chemical Engineering major] or how did you go from CPG to this industry?
Jason: I’m not, no, I was a Math major actually, and I ended up liking chemicals because eventually I was able to tie the products to things that I could understand and digest. I always loved physical products and their movement through things. It felt like you get to apply every different business lever then: customer, supply chain, procurement, manufacturing, all of those. And so I loved the idea of chemicals. And just most of all, as I said, you’re touching every value chain, every possible industry. And so for me, I entered consulting when there were still generalists, and maybe this is a little bit of holding onto that, of getting to sample in a lot of different segments.
Ali: I’ve based my entire career in this industry, and I absolutely love it. I’m probably not the most entertaining person at social gatherings; however the line I always use is, “We’re the mother of all industries and the brand behind the brands.” And the way you said it, I may use in the future. It is an amazing space.
Let’s talk about the cross-section of chemicals and tech. I’d love to know how you’re supporting customers when it comes to modernizing their customer experiences.
Jason: It’s a place that’s changing fast. I’d say first of all, something that we’re seeing a ton of in the chemicals industry is sometimes called the consumerization of B2B in that anything you do, you can order something on Amazon and know exactly where it is and have it tomorrow, and you can go on your phone and see almost anything about anything. So you have to remember that companies are made up of people too, and they’re used to these experiences.
So all of a sudden you realize, as you think about customer experience in a chemicals B2B environment, the bar has been raised enormously by what people experience in their personal liveslife and what they just think is normal access to information. Truthfully, many chemicals companies five or 10 years ago struggled with that; some still struggle with it today.
But companies just hadn’t invested enough in their technology. They oftentimes didn’t have sound enough foundational data to even answer simple questions like “Where’s my product and when will it arrive?” or “What happened to this order?” or “What’s available or unavailable?” or “What’s my lead time?” or things like that which are just very basic questions for a customer to run their own business as they might interact with any sort of supplier.
Ali: When you’re sitting around the table with the C-suite and you make a statement like the one you just made, have you seen that they’ve noticeably become more open?
Jason: Yeah, I think there’s a relatability in some of the challenges that a lot of the chemicals companies have. First I think they’re just made up of wonderful people [who] feel like they’re doing the right thing for their business, for their community, for society.
And oftentimes it’s nice for them to hear we’re not alone in this, right? We’re not alone in the struggle that we don’t have our data mastered. I almost never find a company that feels like they’ve got everything they can out of their ERP or their CRM. So there’s oftentimes almost a chuckle as you have these early conversations of wow, it’s okay that we struggle with that because many other companies struggle with that as well.
Ali: What part of the customer experience do you think folks are going to focus on modernizing? The examples you just gave were around mainly the transaction, and I think for most chemical companies that will be the hardest part just because we’re talking about heavy integrations and making sure that your data is really cleansed prior to giving customers real-time access to it. A lot more of what’s happening on the front end of the buying journey around things like research and discovery.
Jason: I think there’s a lot that happens there as well. I’d say sales preparation is something that’s transforming, particularly in the last few years.
The idea is how do we make all of our salespeople like our best salespeople? What do they do for the pre-call conversations? What’s the pre-call checklist that they use? And then how do you use technology to push all that information right to the salesperson in an easy-to-digest format? It’s often pulling from different systems, but just having them have access to order patterns, call notes, history, external information on the account, historic win-loss.
And it just allows them to run their own sales cadences in a much better way with greater speed, greater precision, bringing in information that… they probably could have found if they would have put in the work to do it, but you just make it easier for all your salespeople to do that. And so in a sense you’re raising the waterline of your entire sales team.
Ali: I love that, being able to give a salesperson 20 years of experience instantly. Especially in our space where there’s a lot of knowledge that’s constantly walking out the door and none of it’s really digitized. And so this, the use case you just brought up, I think is amazing. It’s like giving every sales rep the experience of a TSMD person. And I think that we’re getting closer… actually, not even getting closer: I think we can solve that problem today.
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. I see enormous progress in companies doing that.
And again, some of these are… you don’t need to put in [SAP] S/4HANA to do that, right? There’s ways that you can do this with much simpler, faster, lower-cost overlays to the information you have. And you can just feed things right into the sales team and you can train them on routines that they might do. I think that’s one example that I’m seeing right now of how technology gets used.
I’ll say there’s another one that’s just all-around content management. I know this is a place where Knowde plays as well. Marketing collateral development, product registration, safety data sheets, contract administration, these are just enormous pieces of unstructured information: how can you bring some structure to it and make things more efficient? Make things more effective? How do you think about all the content that you have? Marketing collateral development, product registration, safety data sheets, contract administration, things like this that are just enormous pieces of unstructured information: how can you bring some structure to it and again, make things more efficient, make things more effective? For example, there’s one company I know in another industry that reduced the time and the headcount they needed for marketing content development by 75 percent because they just realized they could enable a ton of it through AI.
Ali: Do you mind if I dig in on that a little bit?
Jason: Sure.
Ali: Did somebody actually structure all that marketing content and then ingest all the unstructured content as well? And they’re just serving it up through a chatbot?
Jason: Yeah, and they realized that there was a ton of relatively redundant activity with a little bit of customization they had to do, right? Doing registrations or things like that. And a lot of it’s fairly boilerplate information with a little bit of customization to the nature of the product or things like that. And so they were able to invest effort in that.
Marketing collateral is just another one where you can go from sending everyone the same message to something with a little bit of personalization without a ton of effort, and AI enables that enormously in a way that five years ago you couldn’t have done. You couldn’t have done it the way that people do it now. And so I think the world’s moving forward on something.
To many companies that haven’t invested as much in technology it’s a way for them to catch up quickly or even leapfrog without having to, again, install gigantic new systems. There’s actually things that they can do on top of the systems they have to make better use of data.
Ali: Is there a particular customer-facing use case in the chemical space that you’re seeing accelerate?
Jason: I’d say a lot of the contact center-type interactions have accelerated enormously. And this is both at an individual customer level as well as thinking about themes. You have many fairly routine interactions and sometimes you’re doing the chatbot-type thing directly with the customer. Other times you’re using it as an agent to support your own customer contact group.
Just, again, providing more information, more availability of data. Sometimes you can even program it to have the set of questions, the chain of questions that you want to go through with the customer to better understand their need, qualify it. And again it’s almost like real-time training, like we talked about with the salespeople before, it’s making everyone like your best person because you’re sending them prompts of what they might ask.
Ali: Yeah; I’ve heard of contact center a lot as well, where there’s lots of repetitive tasks, maybe half of which can be automated. Or at least maybe not automated, but enable the customer to self-serve. Simple things like in the more regulated spaces they need access to a lot of documents and our industry still runs on documents. So if at minimum, to make them easily accessible.
Jason: Yes! Easily accessible and then sometimes, again, you can add in questions that they might ask to clarify the need with the customer. Your most experienced people may do that by their own nature and their wisdom of having done it for decades, but this is a way to accelerate the progression of younger people.
Ali: In the conversations that I’m having a lot of senior execs have AI top of mind and I think that there’s a lot of interest in pursuing the concept. I think they’re struggling a little bit in identifying real-world applications, like “What problems can I actually solve?” Instead of thinking about it in terms of problem-solve they think about more of a tech implementation, which I don’t think is the right approach. Contact center, I think is a great one. Basic customer self-serve capabilities.
Has anything around something like pricing come up?
Jason: Yeah, we’ve actually seen great progress on pricing as well. If you think of how pricing used to work when I started, decades ago, everyone would do a pricing scatterplot: you graph realized price versus volume or things like that, that are pretty simple.
But that doesn’t always really tell you where to focus, right? Usually the next thing companies do after they do that is they start trying to bring up all the lowest prices, but sometimes those are the lowest prices because they’re the most price-sensitive customers or the place where we have the worst position. And that’s actually why they’re the lowest and therefore they’re the hardest to bring up.
We’ve seen companies get a lot smarter about incorporating customer behavior into pricing and thinking about “Why does someone buy the way they buy? Who has influence? What else do we know about them? Are they a highly selective customer? Are they someone that’s worked with us a lot? Are they happy with us? Do we have high share? How is their market changing?“
These are all things that companies can use and do more of almost like a price scoring mechanism and think about: “Is this a customer where we reach for a relatively higher price because we think we have a really unique value to bring to them? Or are we going to have to give more on price given the competitive environment and market conditions around them?” And so you can actually be much more nuanced using information to think about what’s your pricing strategy towards different types of situations.
Ali: Yeah, I don’t think we’re that far away from using known AI capabilities in order to give us the insights that we need to know the elasticity. The challenge that I think some companies are going to run into is they need a little bit more structured data around “What’s the product being used for? How much of the formulation do I make up? Give me a relative index on switching costs.”
Jason: I just did this with a company fairly recently, where an enormous amount of what they did was thinking about “What’s the cost of their product?” defined as precisely as they could, and then they’re going to do some sort of margin goal on top. But what they didn’t do is what you’re describing: the discovery of “Why does someone buy from us? What were their alternatives? What would they do if not this? How do they use it? How much value is being created in the value chain by them using our product?” “If you spend more time on customer discovery, which is unstructured data — it may come through conversations, it may come through reading — it’s information that can be gathered and analyzed. You would have much more sophistication as you thought about your pricing approach.”
And if you actually spend more time on some of that customer discovery, which absolutely is unstructured data – it may come through conversations, it may come through reading things – but it’s information that can be gathered and it can be analyzed. You would have just much more sophistication as you thought about your pricing approach towards them.
Ali: I totally agree. And historically, it hasn’t been easy to analyze because it’s been sitting in Word documents that are attached to the Salesforce record, and nobody’s going to go through and read all those Word documents. But you can now analyze it in completely different ways and pull out the info you need in order to have some better indicators. I think that’s a massive game-changer. The other ones I hear are things around new application development, new customer identification – all, I think, amazing use cases that can now be solved that historically were much more challenging.
Jason: Yeah, it’s amazing. I’d encourage listeners to just go out and pop some of their products into a large language model and think about the responses. But that’s something that absolutely gets asked is “Okay: a product has these features and benefits – who would care about that?” Go out there and scroll the web and think about what are other applications for these. And we see more and more companies doing that type of work of “How do I find additional applications for products that I have” or “Who’s most similar to the types of companies that I’m selling to today?”
Ali: The key takeaway, though, and you said it already, is start with the problem and then get to the tech, because there are a lot of folks that will get excited and get things into pilots – and then it doesn’t become a real solution.
Jason: Yeah, this is one of the challenges that we see: a huge percentage of pilots get abandoned. And I think it’s because companies chase lots of little bright lights. They try to do a thousand things in a little one-off way, sometimes with different tools and vendors for each of them. But they’re not addressing the underlying process and they assume the tool by itself is a fix.
One of the lessons we’ve seen is that what you’re solving is still a business problem. You might be using technology in a new way to solve a business problem, and it could be how do we fill our pipeline faster, or find new customers, or increase our win rates, or things like that. But at its core it’s a business problem you’re trying to solve and you have to think of it that way. What are the process steps that go into it, and which of them can we accelerate or bring better information to make better decisions? That’s the way companies create real change. We call it getting past the trap of incrementalism. How do you get at the core of what you’re trying to do, which is a business issue, and use technology as an enabler? But not technology as just the end in itself.
Ali: Yeah, that’s a great term. I’m going to steal that from you.
I was talking to a customer yesterday, and I’m sure you can relate. With all the growth expectations from [Wall] Street that, it’s a different expectation from the Street this year than maybe last year, there’s a lot of executives that are saying “We’re going to organically grow by X percent, five percent, seven percent, whatever” and what I’m always a little surprised by is the little access to the pipeline that they have and how are they coming up with these estimates? Because you know: pipeline health is not an easy thing for most companies to get access to.
Jason: No. First, I’d say adoption is problem number one, right? That there’s spotty adoption that you have, and what’s in there is either missing a lot, stale, a mix of different things. Sometimes even filling the pipeline becomes the goal in itself rather than the quality of the pipeline. So I think sometimes it’s a little bit how do you get better information flowing into it.
What doesn’t always happen is just the coaching of the salespeople of how to advance things through the pipeline. Something that we’ve seen – I would say truthfully more in other industries, but might be coming to chemicals over time – is the idea of, we call it propensity, but “What’s the real signal of interest before the deal is won? What are you using to assess the probability of winning?” Companies in other industries just being much more forward-thinking. “What are we going to win? What are we going to lose and why, and what lessons can we learn over time?”
And this, again, is another wonderful place to use data and information to get sharper and sharper over time of what tells us that we’re likely to win, what tells us that we’re likely to lose and how do we better weigh the pipeline we have so we have a more honest representation of what our future revenue is, based on propensity, based on historic lessons and patterns that we see.
Ali: It’s a huge opportunity, huge. And yeah, the core of it is a data problem and like a CRM adoption thing and all that. There’s so many opportunities in this space and that’s probably why you’ve been in this space for so long just because everywhere you look, you’re like, wow, there is so much here that can be solved that other industries have solved.
Jason: I think so. Sometimes a lesson for that is that people look inside their industry and they look at their immediate peers and say “What are they doing?” and “We need to do that, too.” But sometimes the answer comes from somewhere else.
Now I’ll admit as a consultant, that’s a bit of a benefit we have is that I’ve had the luxury of working on hundreds of projects with different chemicals clients over the course of my career, but I have a thousand partner colleagues around the world that work in every industry and we can share information pretty readily: What are the trends that we’re seeing? What are we learning somewhere else that we might bring into the chemicals industry and would help them better understand their customer?
And it might be something you learn, in some cases, even from a B2C environment, because in many situations they’re further along in customer engagement and use of data and things like that. So I can learn from my financial services colleagues things like that: How have they thought about running marketing programs toward certain customer types? What are the lessons learned, and sometimes, what did they learn five or 10 years ago that we need to catch up on now?
Ali: One of the challenges this industry has as well is just not understanding the possibilities. And things have changed pretty dramatically over the past three years. Speaking of growth, every company is looking for that next great customer and by structuring the product data and the customer data and running a basic prompt in the LLM, you can identify new customers now.
You can say “Here’s the catalog I’m interested in, here’s a segment of the market that I sell to; suggest other ones I should be talking to.” And the result, if the data is structured and the prompts are done the right way is surprisingly good. We are amazed internally as to how they’re reasoning to these responses because it is sophisticated.
Jason: It is, absolutely. And it’s, again, something with LLMs that’s available now that wasn’t available in anywhere near the same capacity even a couple years ago. Another of my favorites is if you’re gonna go out and talk to a customer, if it’s a public company, throw in their last couple of investor presentations, throw in any recent articles about them and better understand just what’s likely to be on the mind of the customer.
Because if you can help solve their problems, if you can make it more of just a discussion [rather] than “What’s our product and what’s its price” but “How do we help our customers solve their own problems and challenges?” then you’ve formed a much stronger relationship with them. And that information is available in unstructured format today, but you have tools that can help you bring some sense to it relatively fast.
Ali: That’s an easy breezy use case that somebody can implement in a matter of weeks. Call it key account management and give that tool to all your sales reps and say, look, before you go visit them, write this query in and just know that the first three bullet points are probably what’s on their mind.
Jason: It is, and it’s just amazing when you’ve done this, right? I’ve done this looking at competitors, you can look at your competitors: What have they said? What does the LLM think of their strategy? What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? How does it compare to yours?
And it’s never perfect, but it tells you a lot relatively fast that you can then apply your own wisdom and experience and judgment on top of rather than having to begin from scratch and draw up all the data on your own.
Ali: Yeah, totally agree. Last question. Are there any big, bold ideas kind of brewing in the back of your mind that you think could have major dividends in this space?
Jason: I think change from AI is going to be enormous. I think we’re only on the front end of it and people are probably underestimating how much it’s going to really transform business. They say the internet was probably the only thing like it, maybe this will be even more powerful.
But we just see so much change occurring right now. We talked a little bit about salespeople before, but the idea that you can prompt the next best action in an end-to-end way to a salesperson. You can give guidance as you move from prospecting to content generation to pricing to closing a deal. I just wonder how many years until you can have almost a virtual sales rep do this? It may not be that far off in some categories that you can program the sales rep to do this and over time, at least in some use cases, you don’t even need the person.
Ali: In a transactional sale, we’re not that far away.
Everyone’s tired of hearing those two letters, but at the same time, I think everyone’s way underestimating the impact and it’s going to happen way quicker than what we saw 25 years ago.
Jason: I think that’ll be a huge change. I think there’s a big change coming in just marketing and awareness building. Historically, if you want to learn about a product, you might put it into a search query, go look and see what comes back. With AI on top of search queries we see the enormous impact of zero-click search. B2B clicks are declining.
Companies should go look at their products and see what comes back from some of these AI responses on top of the search now because they are no longer directing people to click into someone’s website to ask them to do a certain thing where you control the narrative, and so you need to think about other mechanisms to have communication with your prospects.
Ali: People are underestimating the power of these prompts. You can type things as nuanced as “Tell me all the direct and functional replacements to this specific product, and what are the manufacturing locations of said products?” And you’ll be surprised.
Jason: And what are the pros and cons of product X versus product Y and how would I choose? Yes. And the amazing thing is, every couple months it gets better and better, too. So if you don’t like the answer now, wait three months and maybe come back and try it again.
Ali: It’s pretty crazy.
Jason, I appreciate this conversation a lot. Honestly, I could probably talk to you about it for another hour and a half, but we’ve already gone much longer than most of these typically go for. Everyone loves these short, informal conversations with folks that help shape the industry, and you certainly have. You’ve sat in the boardroom with a lot of these executives, educating them, trying to build confidence in the future. I appreciate everything you’re doing to move the industry forward. So thank you for spending a few minutes with us.
Jason: Certainly. It was a pleasure. I enjoyed it.
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