If you've ever sat in a room building a buyer persona out of age, job title, and company size, and still walked away without a clue why your best-fit prospects keep ghosting you, this episode is for you. Sarah sat down with Susan Baier, founder and CEO of Audience Audit, to talk about a research method most agencies have never touched, and why it explains gaps that demographic data just can't.
You'll walk away with a clearer read on why your personas might be lying to you, the actual numbers behind the AI trust gap between agencies and their clients, and a gut check on whether you're one of the many people who know exactly what would fix their pipeline and still haven't done it.
This post is based on Episode 68 of Revenue Rewired | Agencies, AI, and Trust: What 1,000 Buyers Actually Said with Guest Susan Baier.
If you'd rather listen than read, find the full episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or Amazon. It's worth your time.
Susan's built her whole practice around a simple observation: two people who look identical on paper will make completely different decisions. She used the example of planning a family vacation. Line up ten people who match on age, income, gender, and family size, and you'll still get ten different vacations. Demographics tell you who someone is. They don't tell you how that person thinks about a problem, how much confidence they have in solving it, or what they actually value when they're choosing who to trust with it.
That's the gap her method, attitudinal segmentation, is built to close. Instead of starting with who a buyer is, her team asks people to rate around 40 belief statements, things like how confident they feel tackling a problem or how they weigh cost against expertise. The segments come from the answers. Nobody decides in advance how many groups there will be or what defines them. Susan's newest work pulled from nearly 600 agency leaders and 400 of their clients, close to a thousand people rating their honest beliefs rather than checking boxes about their job title.
Listening back to this conversation, I kept thinking about how much of B2B marketing still runs on the boxes. We buy media against age brackets and firmographic filters because that's what's easy to target, not because it's what actually predicts behavior. Susan was careful to say demographic data isn't useless, it still matters for things like which channel a group leans on, but it works best paired with belief data rather than as a replacement for it. Her line about it being "more fishing than hunting" has stuck with me since the recording. Attitudes don't show up on paper, so the only way to reach them is by putting out something that makes a buyer think, you know me.
Here's a number worth sitting with: 82 percent of clients said that seeing an agency be transparent about its AI use increases their trust. Only 25 percent of agency leaders say they're actually being fully transparent about it. That's not a small gap, and Susan's read on why is simple. Agencies are scared that admitting they use AI will get them fired or make clients ask for a discount.
The data says the opposite is happening. Susan pointed to broader research from Edelman showing that 59 percent of buyers already assume business leaders are lying to them to get their money, so every agency walks into a first meeting with a credibility deficit built in before anyone's said a word. In that environment, silence about AI doesn't read as neutral, it reads like something an agency is hiding from the people paying the bill.
Susan's advice was concrete enough that I wrote it down mid-episode: put your AI use policy on your website, ungated, tied to your actual values as a company. It's not a compliance checkbox, it's proof to a prospect that you've thought through the risk and you have a real point of view on how the technology gets used instead of just chasing whatever's new. That's the kind of thing a buyer remembers when they're deciding who to trust with their brand.
This is the part of the conversation that'll make agency owners sit up. Roughly 30 percent of clients in Susan's study expect agencies to cut fees because of AI. But when you look at what clients ranked as important overall, cost savings landed near the bottom of the list. What they want instead is better strategy, sharper ideas, more thorough work, the kind of output that comes from an agency actually using AI to think harder rather than to do less.
Susan drew a sharp line here between agencies selling tactical output and agencies selling expertise. When what you're offering is something a client's own team could replicate with ChatGPT and Canva, you're in the group at risk of getting squeezed on price. Judgment, a specialized point of view, and pattern recognition built from doing this work across a lot of clients don't get replicated nearly as easily. She told a story about an agency that spent 2025 niching down hard, and eighteen months later their pipeline was full and their rates were up. Nothing else about that agency changed. They just picked a lane and stopped trying to be everything to everyone.
The 86 percent of agency leaders in Susan's data who said reputation as an expert is what clients value most had it right. That's not a soft metric. It's the actual mechanism by which clients decide who's worth paying more for.
Susan shared a stat from her research that's going to stick with me for a while. Agencies that named pipeline as a serious problem were asked what strategy they believed would fix it. Over half could name something specific. When asked whether they were actually doing that thing, only 17 percent said yes. Everyone else knew the fix and sat on it.
She also found a 20-point gap between how much a client trusts what an agency says about itself versus what a trusted third party says about that same agency. That gap is widening, not shrinking, which means content built to sound impressive on your own site is doing less work than it used to. Buyers increasingly want to hear it from someone else first, a podcast host, a peer, an expert they already trust.
Put those two findings together, and you get a fairly uncomfortable picture. The agencies pulling ahead aren't smarter or better funded. They're the ones who picked the strategy they already believed in and gave it an hour a week instead of letting it sit on a list. Susan referenced a program by Pam Slim called Tiny Marketing Actions built on exactly that premise, small consistent moves instead of a big plan that never launches.
Q: What's the real difference between a buyer persona and attitudinal segmentation?
A: A persona is usually built from demographic or firmographic traits, things like age, industry, or company size. Attitudinal segmentation groups people by what they believe and how confident they feel about solving a problem, which Susan's research shows predicts behavior far better than demographics alone.
Q: Should agencies be worried that clients want to replace them with AI?
A: Susan's data says no. Clients overwhelmingly told her agencies are essential to hitting their goals, and the agencies at risk are the ones offering tactical work anyone could replicate, not the ones offering strategy and expertise.
Q: Is being transparent about AI use actually going to cost my agency money?
A: The data doesn't support that fear. Cost savings ranked low on what clients want from AI use, while 82 percent said transparency builds trust, so hiding it is the riskier move.
Q: How many people were in Susan Baier's 2026 studies?
A: Close to 600 agency leaders and 400 of their clients, close to a thousand respondents combined, drawn from a 13th annual client study and a study Susan's run with agency leaders since 2022.
Q: What's one thing I can do this week based on this episode?
A: Pick the one pipeline or growth strategy you already believe would work and give it an hour. Susan's research found the agencies growing fastest weren't doing anything exotic, they were just executing on what they already knew would work.
This conversation with Susan is a reminder of something we push on constantly at StringCan: the strategy work matters more than the tactics, and buyer research that only looks at demographics is going to leave real revenue on the table. We help clients build messaging, positioning, and sales enablement grounded in how buyers actually think, not just how they look on a spreadsheet.
If this got you rethinking how your team defines its audience, listen to the full conversation with Susan Baier and reach out if you want to talk through what attitudinal thinking could mean for your own pipeline.