Marketing as Sales’ Intelligence Engine: How Naviant Built 978 Personas With AI

What if the most valuable thing AI can do for your marketing team has nothing to do with content? A year ago, Mike Campana, Chief Marketing Officer at Naviant, was an AI skeptic. Then he showed me Resonance, and it blew me away.

Resonance is a web-based tool that Mike and his team built without a single engineer. Behind it are 978 personas across multiple vertical markets, and it connects to Salesforce and HubSpot. Before a rep walks into a meeting or a BDR picks up the phone, it tells them who they’re talking to, what that person cares about, and how to move the conversation forward. It even tells a BDR how to pronounce HCAHPS and what not to say.

In this episode, Mike explains why most persona projects end up as a checkbox nobody revisits. He shows how his team mapped entire buying groups north and south of the economic buyer, and how marketing became an intelligence engine for its number one customer, the sales team. He also shares the approach I think every nontechnical marketer should hear: plan in Claude first and have Claude direct Claude Code. Along the way he tells the very funny story of the two arguing with each other about what Mike really wanted.

If you’re wondering how AI can bring marketing and sales closer together, or whether you need developers to build something real, this episode is for you.

Key Topics Covered

• "(00:00)" Introduction
• "(03:30)" Mike’s AI journey, from Jasper and Perplexity to workflows and tools
• "(05:45)" Deeper buyer intelligence for sales teams
• "(08:15)" Researching every attendee at a round table
• "(09:30)" Why most persona projects fail and the buying group problem
• "(12:00)" Building 978 personas
• "(14:30)" Inside the build
• "(16:15)" Lessons from beta testing the MVP
• "(17:00)" How Resonance works
• "(19:00)" Using Claude as the single gateway to Salesforce, HubSpot, and Resonance
• "(21:15)" Arming BDRs
• "(24:30)" What the tool can and can’t do
• "(28:00)" Building without a developer
• "(32:45)" Advice for teams
• "(35:30)" What’s next for Resonance
• "(37:30)" Five key takeaways

Find Casey Meehan here.

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