Happy Triple Threat Thursday!
Here’s one Signal to notice, one Spark to try, and one Shift to consider.
📡 Signal — What’s Changing
Buyers are doing more research where you cannot see it.
According to Gartner’s 2025 B2B Buyer Report, more than 70% of the buying process now happens behind the firewall inside private tools, chats, or closed communities.
The same pattern shows up in consumer behavior too. Search is being replaced by summaries. Customers do not browse twenty pages. They ask an AI or scan an aggregated thread.
Your buyers are not just reading about you. They are interpreting you through AI filters and internal conversations you will never access.
A plant manager might paste your spec sheet into ChatGPT to compare options.
A procurement lead might ask, “What is the difference between Vendor A and Vendor B?”
A consumer might rely on an AI-generated summary of product reviews before ever visiting your site.
That is the real change.
The visible funnel of website traffic, ad clicks, and email opens is shrinking.
The invisible funnel, where AI and group discussion shape perception, is growing fast.
Why it matters: Your brand is being summarized, paraphrased, and shared in spaces you do not control. The first impression is no longer yours. It is the AI’s.
What you should do this week:
Run an “AI readability audit.” Drop your website, product sheet, or top customer review into ChatGPT or Perplexity. Ask, “Summarize this company’s strengths and weaknesses.” The answer is how buyers already see you.
Design for both humans and machines. Use clear structure, plain language, and consistent claims. AI models extract meaning from precision.
Assume you will be quoted out of context. Every page, post, and paragraph should make sense on its own when copied or summarized.
If your message can survive being compressed by AI, it will thrive when real people finally see it.
⚡ Spark — What to Try This Week
Re-Frame GPT: The Crash Test for Your Messaging
Most companies pressure-test their messages after launch, when feedback is already expensive and public.
Re-Frame GPT lets you do it before you hit send.
It is built as a messaging clarity and positioning tool that reveals why communication fails before it ever reaches the customer.
Instead of polishing what works, it deliberately generates failed versions of your message: confusing, tone-deaf, or jargon-heavy, then explains why they fall flat.
By showing you what breaks, it helps you fix what matters:
Find weak framing that confuses instead of convinces.
Spot hidden assumptions that make your message sound generic.
Eliminate fuzzy language that kills trust or clarity.
Rebuild stronger phrasing that holds up across different audiences.
Think of it as a crash-test lab for your story.
Marketing, product, and leadership teams use it to pressure-test headlines, decks, and sales language until what’s left is durable, believable, and easy to repeat.
If clarity is competitive advantage, Re-Frame GPT is how you stress-test it.
🔄 Shift — How to Rethink It
Start from losses first and design around failure
Start from losses first and design around failure.
A manufacturing supplier I spoke with found that late delivery fears were killing deals before they started.
Their sales team used to lead with cost savings and specs.
They switched to leading with, “Here is how we guarantee on-time delivery, even when things go wrong.”
Nothing else changed. Pricing, product, team. But trust doubled.
They stopped selling what they made and started selling what they would not let fail.
Most teams try to prove their upside: ROI, time savings, benefits.
The smarter approach, especially in long sales cycles or trust-based categories, is to start from the losses.
Ask: “Why do deals die? Why do customers drop off? What causes hesitation or churn?”
When you design around those answers, everything tightens.
Your sales process gets clearer. Your onboarding gets smoother. Your promises get more believable.
Why it matters: In mature, practical markets, risk avoidance beats flash.
Buyers want confidence that nothing will break, not excitement about what is new.
Consumers are no different.
Clarity and reliability close more sales than cleverness.
How to apply it:
List the top three failure points where people get stuck, confused, or frustrated. Build preemptive fixes around them.
Add early warning signals that show when a customer or project might fail before it happens.
Run a “black swan check.” Ask, “If this completely failed, what would cause it?” Fix that first.
This is not pessimism.
It is professional paranoia. It protects profit and trust before the risk ever appears.
Thanks for reading Triple Threat. See you next Thursday with another Signal, Spark, and Shift.
— Alexandria Ohlinger
p.s. If you’re looking to build real growth systems as leverage inside your business, where people and automation work together, you can book a strategy session here to map the first steps.
And as always, I share quick insights on LinkedIn each week. Connect with me here if you’d like to follow along.