Urban Rethinking the Customer Journey in the Age of AI written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
I spoke to Andy Crestodina’s audience at Orbit Media this week, and I opened with a disclaimer. If you came for killer prompts and AI hacks, you picked the wrong session.
Thirty-plus years in, what we are here to do as marketers has not changed. We have a pile of new toys. The job is the same.
So I started with a question instead. Think about the last service you hired that you had never bought before. Where did you start?
We all know the answer now. But browsers are doing something they did not do a couple of years ago. They are just handing over the names.
I showed the room a real prompt: best remodeling contractor in Kansas City that specializes in older homes. Three companies came back. That is the part worth sitting with. A shortlist got made, and nobody on that list knows it happened. Nobody left off it knows either.
Andy named the problem better than I did. There is no analytics report for the times you did not get cited.
The funnel stops at the sale. That always bothered me.
The marketing funnel is still taught in Marketing 101. I taught it too when I started.
What always struck me as wrong is that it ends at the transaction. The whole exercise is getting balls into the top and counting how many fall out the bottom. The shape itself tells you where you get to stop caring.
For most of the businesses I worked with, the most profitable growth was already sitting in the customer list.
So about twenty years ago I flipped it over, welded on a second one, and started calling it the Marketing Hourglass
. Seven stages: Know, Like, Trust, Try, Buy, Repeat, Refer.
I think of those as behaviors rather than funnel stages, because they describe what we actually do as buyers. We want to know who can solve a problem. We do not want a sales call yet. We want to figure out whether we like what somebody has to say. Then, if it costs more than $29.99, the trust bar goes way up. We want a look at what working together might feel like before we commit to a $50,000 engagement.
The shape widens at the bottom for a reason. One customer has to become many. That should be the goal of the whole thing.
And AI is making that more true, not less.
What moved inside each stage
Know
Buyers are finishing their research inside a model before you exist to them. It used to be about ranking. It is moving toward being cited.
What actually gets a business named? Other people naming it.
- Reviews with substance. “They fixed our scheduling mess” rather than “great service, five stars.”
- A category you can state. If you cannot say what you do and who it is for in one plain sentence, neither can the model.
- The same story everywhere. Same name, same category, same claim, every place you appear.
Every one of those predates AI by about fifty years. That is the part I find funny. People keep asking for the new checklist, and the answer is that the businesses doing the boring foundational work are the ones getting rewarded. It was always the right behavior.
Like
Competent content got cheap enough that competent stopped setting anyone apart.
Show your work, messy parts included. Put a person on camera, because voice and face are the cheapest proof that a human made this. Take a position a competitor would argue with, because agreeable content is filler.
One caution on that last point. People have accepted that a lot of what they see is AI-made. What they will not forgive is faking humanness. Trying to be more human by being less human is the bigger sin.
Trust
Anything can be faked, so doubt is close to the default setting now. Real and verifiable beats polished.
- Testimonials on your own site became reviews on platforms you do not control.
- “Trusted by hundreds of companies” became named clients a buyer could go call.
- Stock photography of two people pointing at a monitor became real faces with real names.
- Pricing on request became published pricing, or at least a range with an explanation of what moves it.
- Badges and awards became results with a date on them.
Try
This is the one that gets the most pushback. We are an accounting firm, how would somebody try us?
Here is the reality. I have written seven books. If you want to know what I would pitch your business, you can ask a chatbot for free and it will walk you through my framework in ten steps. So handing you a PDF of that same thing is worth close to nothing.
I want an audit with my data in it. A teardown of my actual website with actual numbers. Something valuable enough that I would have paid for it. That is the new bar.
Buy
They show up already decided.
Publish the price. Cut the steps between deciding and paying. Answer every question they have not asked yet: terms, timeline, what happens in week one, who they actually work with. And put those answers next to what you are selling rather than parked on an FAQ page nobody visits.
The part I most wanted people to hear
I went back to those three names from the start of the call.
The one at the top is a client of ours, a Kansas City remodeler. So I could answer the question Andy asked, which is how they got there.
Massive review volume. They genuinely specialize in older homes and they say it constantly. Their project portfolio is full of older homes. And critically, their reviews say it too. You get language like “our home was built in the twenties, and not every contractor understands what is behind the wall when they open it up.”
That is doing more work than anything on their website.
Here is the detail that made the room go quiet. All three results were sourced from Houzz. Not one of them linked to the company’s own site.
Your website is one input, and it is no longer the loudest one. It is also the only one you fully control.
Now look at where those other inputs come from. Reviews, forum threads, roundups, podcast mentions, a customer describing their experience. Every one of those is produced by somebody who was happy with what happened after they became a customer.
The back half of the hourglass used to be where you made your margin. Repeat business, no acquisition cost, easier sale. That is still true. But increasingly it is also where you get found.
A buyer walks these seven stages in a line. A business runs them in a circle, because somebody who refers you is introducing you to a person who had never heard of you. Refer feeds Know. That loop was always there. It used to be slow and private. Now it is indexed.
A few practical things that came up
Put third-party reviews on your site as text, not through a widget. Most of those tools render in JavaScript, and a lot of AI crawlers will not see them.
Stop treating onboarding as a service function. The first thirty days decide whether a review ever gets written. Andy called that a challenging suggestion, and he is right, but I would go further and put onboarding on the list of marketing channels.
Ask for the review when the result lands, not at renewal. And keep at it. Forty-seven reviews all posted on the same day in 2022 does not read as a legitimate signal to anyone, human or machine.
Build the referral ask into the agreement. When you sign a client, tell them you are confident enough that you will come back in ninety days to check, and if they are thrilled, you would like an introduction. I have yet to have anyone say no. Then actually go back and be specific about who you are looking for.
If you want a referral incentive, make it interesting. Our remodeling client used to offer $1,000 and half their clients turned it down, because somebody doing a $200,000 kitchen does not need another thousand dollars. We changed it to a handyman for a day. A carpenter comes out and works through your punch list. Costs them less, and people will not stop talking about it.
Favor podcast guesting over guest posts. A twenty-minute conversation produces a citation on a high-authority domain, and the host is motivated to promote it. And train the host rather than trying to train the model. Tell them exactly what you want to cover. It ends up in the transcript, and the transcript is what gets read.
Where the leaks actually are
I asked everyone on the call to score themselves on all seven stages, one to ten. (Want to take the Marketing Hourglass assessment?)
The pattern I have seen for twenty years held up. Most people can list plenty of ways prospects come to know them. Many have a decent sales process. Almost everybody leaks on Repeat and Refer.
There is a second pattern worth naming. A lot of people collapse Like and Trust into one thing. All the energy goes into getting the message right and putting the badges up so somebody books a call. Treating them as two separate jobs is a real opportunity for most businesses.
Nobody sets out to build a broken journey. The leaks show up because the pieces were never connected. The SEO person built one stage, somebody’s agency built another, a contractor built the website, and nothing links them. Then AI multiplies whatever is there, gaps included.
Connecting them is the work. It is also the part AI does not do well, because somebody has to decide who you are for and what you are trying to accomplish.
If you own a business, go find your lowest score and start there. Bringing one stage up often lifts the ones around it. If you serve businesses, start looking at your clients that way.
I believe the mission of a business is guiding people from where they are to where they want to go. That has always been true. What is new is that if you do it well enough, the machines notice too.
Questions from the session
How do you offer a low-risk first step if you sell a six-figure service?
The bigger the number, the more it matters. On our discovery calls we do not pitch. We run people through the Marketing Hourglass and ask them to fill in each stage. About halfway through they say some version of “we do not do any of this.” Nine times out of ten the next sentence is not “send me a proposal.” It is “could you do that for my business?” A bigger offer means bigger risk, so you have to let them experience the value rather than describe it.
Should you charge for that first step?
There is a case either way. We never have, because we work with a lot of smaller businesses. But the universe of people who want free things is very large, and it is easy to skip something you did not pay for. If you charge, reverse the risk. Tell them it is worth $999 and offer a full refund if they disagree.
What about repeat business when customers are unlikely to buy again?
Then referrals carry the weight, and your job is making it easy for people to talk. Our remodeling client gives every client a hardback book of their finished project. They photograph every job anyway for their own marketing. The book sits on a coffee table, and the first thing anybody does after a remodel is invite friends over to see the kitchen. The book generates the conversation.
Do incentivized reviews still work?
Some industries are regulated, so check first. Where it is allowed, connect the incentive to something creative in your business rather than handing out cash. It costs less and people enjoy it more.
How do you make podcast appearances help with AI visibility?
Separate guest posts from podcast guesting. Guest posting has become a hard game unless you write something nobody will bury in a category archive. Podcast guesting is different. You get a citation on a high-authority domain, content you can repurpose, and a host who is motivated to promote the episode. Train the host, not the model. Tell them exactly what you want to cover and why it fits their audience. It lands in the transcript, and transcripts get read.