The buyer left the room. Your message followed.
Your team did the research. The buyer was clear in the interviews, clear in the brief, and gone by the time the campaign shipped. I speak about why that happens to good teams, where exactly it happens, and how commercial leaders keep buyer evidence present at the moment decisions get made, with AI doing the legwork and people making the call.
Keynotes, workshops, panels and fireside chats for conferences, professional bodies, business schools and in-house teams across the UK, Europe and the United States. Every session runs on the framework in my book, The Buyer in the Loop.
Built for rooms that own the message
Book me when your audience needs someone who can connect four things most speakers keep apart.
The strongest fit is marketing leaders, product marketing and product management, commercial and sales leadership, and insight and customer experience teams in B2B. Life sciences is home ground: tools, reagents, instruments and diagnostics.
AI made the gap expensive
Volume stopped being an edge the day it became free.
Every competitor now has the same capacity to produce content. Meanwhile the cost of keeping buyer evidence usable at the point of decision has collapsed.
The teams that pull ahead over the next two years will be the ones whose buyer is still present when the approval meeting starts. That is the argument your audience takes home, with a first step they can take before the week is out.
See how I present
Seventy-six seconds from a recent session, cut around the arguments that run through most of my talks. Captions are burnt in, so it plays on mute.
Recorded for the Content Marketing Summit 2026, hosted by Digital Collegium. Longer footage and a full session recording are available on request.
Four moves your audience will remember
Every talk turns on one question the audience answers about their own organisation: where exactly did your buyer leave the room? The first two moves diagnose. The second two prescribe.
Where did the buyer leave?
The buyer exits at three predictable handovers: at inception, at launch and at the pitch. Each leaves a fingerprint, and the audience names the one in their own last launch.
Why do they keep leaving?
Organisational gravity pulls every message away from buyer truth and toward internal consensus. It acts on good teams as much as weak ones, and a force with a name can be designed against.
What holds the buyer in place?
Ground, Query, Govern. A synthetic customer built on real buyer evidence, questioned from the buyer's friction and used under one rule: synthetic for directional, human for decisional.
What keeps it true?
Real buyer conversations feed the model, and the model points at what to research next. Buyer research becomes a habit the team keeps.
Your audience leaves with a located exit
A keynote changes how people see the problem. A workshop leaves each team with work they can carry upward on Monday.
Afterwards, people can
Each team leaves holding
Four talks, one argument
Each talk enters the same framework through a different door. The argument holds; the exit you start from changes with the room.
The Buyer in the Loop
Why buyer insight disappears between research and market, and the four moves that keep it present. The full framework, told through a marketing leader who did everything right and still watched her campaign fall flat.
30 to 60 min keynote or half-day workshop
For marketing leaders and cross-functional commercial teams
Booked for Surrey Business School and the University of Leicester
The Buyer Who Left the Room
Organisational gravity, named. Four reasonable edits, each defensible on its own, translate buyer language into capability language before anything reaches market. The audience leaves knowing what to change at the next review.
30 to 45 min
For brand, content and product marketing teams
Delivered at the Content Marketing Summit 2026. Booked for SAMPS North America
Give the Buyer a Seat at the Table
Why customer truth drops out of commercial decisions, and how a grounded synthetic customer brings it back into the review. Includes a live demonstration: the same asset, two prompts, one flattering answer and one useful one.
45 min keynote or 90 min workshop
For marketing and commercial leaders weighing up AI
An earlier version delivered at The Uprising 2026
Synthetic for Directional, Human for Decisional
Where AI belongs in buyer research and where it becomes dangerous. The evidence on both sides, from studies where synthetic respondents track real ones closely to reviews where they match in just over a third of cases, plus a five-point check to run before trusting a synthetic answer.
30 to 45 min
For insight, research, AI governance and leadership audiences
New for 2027
Specialist sessions suit narrower rooms
AI-Augmented Selling
How sales teams use grounded synthetic customers to prepare calls, map buying groups and walk into meetings already briefed. The pitch exit, from the seller's side.
60 min
Delivered at SAMPS Boston
Beyond the Persona PDF
Why personas rust. The persona was right; it was also absent when the decision got made. What keeps buyer insight usable under a Tuesday-afternoon deadline.
30 to 60 min
Delivered at Surrey Business School
AI for Account-Based Marketing
Five AI moves that turn account-based marketing from spreadsheet to system.
45 min
Delivered at SAMPS
Custom workshops
Built for sales, go-to-market and life science commercial teams, and run on your own launches and campaigns.
Half day or full day
Scoped on a 30-minute call
Every booking includes a 30-minute discovery call and an audience tailoring session, whether the room is academic, biotech, pharma, diagnostics, tools or services.
Rooms and reviewers say the same thing
"Post event, you were consistently listed as a favorite presentation. You are a star!"
Mark Schaefer, marketing strategist and authorAudience reaction
"I wasn't a new reader. I was already in the choir."
David Oliva, Organomation, on reading the bookSaw me speak at the ACS Marketing Elements Summit and SAMPS Boston
"Matt Wilkinson has named one of the scariest hauntings in modern marketing: the buyer disappears like a ghost between the research deck and the campaign launch."
Ann Handley, author of Everybody WritesOn the core idea
"One of the biggest hidden problems in marketing: companies drifting away from the buyer while believing they are customer-centric."
Joeri Billast, author of The Future CMOOn the problem
Seven formats fit most programmes
Pick the format your event already runs. I will shape the session to fit it.
A full session recording and longer footage are available on request.
Upcoming
Five confirmed dates between now and early December.
Recent talks
MCP: The Missing Connection in Your Sales Stack
A fireside chat with Amarpreet Kalkat, founder and CEO of Humantic AI. What Model Context Protocol means for a sales team in practice, where it already changes daily selling, and why a synthetic customer wired into the stack does more work than a persona document ever did.
Watch the recording
AI, Sales, and Me
A guest lecture for the Cameron School of Business at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. What changes for the seller when the buyer arrives already briefed by AI, and what individuals and firms can put to use: call preparation, buying-group mapping and grounded synthetic customers.
The Buyer Who Left the Room
Delivered on the AI track of the Content Marketing Summit, hosted by Digital Collegium for higher education marketing teams. Why approval chains quietly rewrite content for the people signing it off, and how grounded synthetic customers keep the reader in the room.
Beyond AI Prompting
Familiar AI is just the lobby. The real work happens further in. A panel with Ann Brine of Promega, Nick Clare of Succession and Sarah Neely of SignalSwell.
Pivotal Links
Everyone says they know their customer. That customer is never present in the rooms where the decisions get made. Delivered to the research and IVD reagent community at the networking event hosted by Pivotal Scientific.
The Uprising 2026
AI Beyond the Prompt, co-delivered with Brian Piper and Dan Nestle at Mark Schaefer's marketing retreat for senior marketers.
NEB Global Marketing Meeting
A talk on what AI is doing to life science marketing, followed by a series of workshops on building a marketing campaign in a day with PersonaAI.
Durham University Business School
A guest lecture on PersonaAI and what a marketing strategy looks like when the buyer is in the room for it.
The Conference Execution Gap
Where conference money goes and where the preparation fails, built on original exhibitor survey research.
Seventeen rooms and counting
The Uprising hosted by Mark Schaefer, SAMPS European Conference (Cambridge, UK), SAMPS Annual Conference (Boston, MA), ELRIG Drug Discovery (Liverpool, UK), Saint-Gobain Sales Directors Forum (Paris, France), the Association for Key Account Management at Siemens HQ (Munich, Germany), New England Biolabs (Ipswich, MA), Pivotal Scientific (Oxford, UK), Cranfield School of Management (Cranfield, UK), Surrey Business School (Surrey, UK), Durham University Business School (Durham, UK), the University of Leicester (Leicester, UK), the University of North Texas (Denton, TX), the University of North Carolina Wilmington (Wilmington, NC), IFE London (London, UK), the Content Marketing Summit (online) and the C&EN Marketing Elements Summit (Washington, DC).
Take the session inside your team
Some rooms want the second half: the workshop run on their own launches, a grounded synthetic customer built from their own buyer evidence, and advisory support while the habit forms. My Saint-Gobain programme for sales directors started when someone saw a session I gave to the Association for Key Account Management in Munich.
Ask about workshops and advisoryTell me who is in the room
Email matt@strivenn.com with the audience and the outcome you need from the session. I will tell you which talk fits, what I would change for your room, and whether the date works. Dates for the first half of 2027 are open now.
Email matt@strivenn.com Or book a 30-minute call