The Front Lines
SubscribeContent Studio
Christina Bottis.
Chief Global Marketing Officer · Mural

With over two decades of go-to-market, product development and executive leadership experience, I’ve built winning growth strategies for B2C and B2B brands driven by obsessive buyer and user focus, full funnel journey optimization, and scalable activation and adoption.

Guest
Christina Bottis
Chief Global Marketing Officer
Company:
Mural
Location:
Greater Chicago Area
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The B2B Buyer Journey Has Already Changed. Most GTM Teams Are Still Running the Old Play.

There's a version of your consideration set problem you probably don't know you have.

Your demand generation is optimized for a buyer who reaches out when they're ready to evaluate. But the buyers you want most — the ones who move fast, have budget, and know exactly what they need — are doing the entire evaluation before you ever see them. By the time they surface, they've already decided whether you're worth their time.

Christina Bottis, CMO at Mural, watched this shift happen in real time inside her own business. In a recent episode of Unicorn Marketers, she broke down how her team detected it, what they did about it, and why most B2B marketing organizations are structurally unprepared for what's already happening.

From searching to asking — and why the gap matters

The signal wasn't a strategy deck. It was behavioral. "We've even seen in our business," Christina said, "the way folks were searching a year ago has now shifted to asking today. And that's a totally different mindset."

The mechanics of that shift explain why it's disruptive. When buyers search, they're navigating — they're assembling a picture from multiple sources they've chosen. When buyers ask, the LLM assembles the picture for them and hands over a shortlist. The consideration set gets generated before the buyer visits a single vendor website.

What follows is a pre-purchase flywheel that runs almost entirely without you. "AI is gonna spit out a list of things, I'm gonna go to the site, I'm gonna go play around with it for a few days, I'm gonna see if it's valuable to me," Christina explained. Then review sites. Then peers on Reddit or LinkedIn. Then, if you've survived all of it: "okay boss or okay procurement, I think I'm ready to start really going down a path with these."

The number she put on the trial window is the one that should recalibrate your product marketing priorities: "You have less than a week to prove value or they're gone and you don't even make it to the list, you're just out totally."

That's not a product problem to hand off. It's a GTM architecture problem. Your entire motion — content, community, reviews, trial experience — needs to earn inclusion in that flywheel before a prospect ever identifies themselves to sales.

Getting cited, not just ranked

Mural's content response to this shift starts with a single reframe. "What we're putting out there — is it going to answer a question versus inform?" Christina said. "It's a subtle difference." But it's the difference that determines whether an LLM cites your content or surfaces someone else's.

"Citations now drive everything," she said. "It's not even just about being included. We want to be cited, we want to be linked." Mural's dedicated SEO/AEO function maps white space continuously — questions and terms where they don't yet appear in results — and builds content designed to own those positions.

The trade-off question — does optimizing for LLMs hurt traditional SEO — she dismissed directly. "Traditional search is the foundation of all the stuff that ends up in the LLM search." The teams treating AEO as a replacement for content fundamentals are undermining the very substrate LLMs draw from. The discipline is the same one that separated good SEO from keyword stuffing: write with genuine ICP relevance, communicate real value to a specific person, and the algorithmic layers reward it. "At the end of the day, you're trying to communicate value and a message and relevance to somebody — to demonstrate that, hey, we know what you're going through, we know your pain points."

ICP cadence that actually keeps pace

None of this works if the ICP model is stale. Christina's cadence: quarterly qual/quant studies to reset the baseline, weekly signal capture through Gong call reviews, customer conversations, and prospect interviews — fed directly into messaging, sales talk tracks, and product.

The weekly loop isn't optional. "Sales goes into a meeting and says, hey, I've heard this question like five times now — can we start to educate on it before they get to me?" she explained. Product flags where users are gravitating. Marketing distills it into content that can own a term, earn a citation, get linked, and land on the list. The feedback loop is the infrastructure.

For teams building ICP from scratch, her starting sequence is concrete: use tools like Clay and ChatGPT to fill firmographic and demographic gaps quickly, then run laddering interviews to build behavioral depth. The technique is simple — keep asking "and then what?" — but what surfaces is rarely what a survey would catch.

She described an example from early in her career working in healthcare. Through customer interviews, her team discovered that nurses had a shared ritual of unwinding after high-stress shifts by exploring craft beers together — which evolved into peer recommendations and eventually a podcast built around it. "Those are the types of nuances," she said, "that if I were gonna throw an event and invite people, I should hopefully know a little bit about the things that they like and they gravitate towards." The application isn't just event planning. It's the difference between messaging that feels like it was written for your ICP and messaging that feels like it was written for a job title.

Community as a research loop, not a retention play

Mural's community, currently running on Discourse, started organically on LinkedIn — enough passion and engagement that the team asked how to take it further. The reason it's working, Christina argued, comes down to one discipline: "It's about them, not us."

The diagnostic before scaling is specific: are users starting conversations without being prompted by the brand? "If the brand is always prompting the talk, you'll probably get some interaction. But that's not where the true value turns into potentially a buying activity." Mural held back on growth until that threshold was real.

The practical output isn't goodwill. It's signal. Community conversations surface the vernacular gap — how practitioners actually describe the problem versus how marketing describes it. "We may call it one thing and then you realize, well, actually the real practitioners talk about it in this way," Christina said. "So that's the easy win." Closing that gap improves search relevance, messaging resonance, and sales effectiveness at the same time. The same conversations feed content and webinar topics, product ideas, and account-level intelligence back to sales.

For anyone starting: "Number one, start small. Number two, go find the people who are talking about you already." Use mention-tracking tools to identify existing LinkedIn advocates, bring them together first, and let them shape the structure before you build for scale. "That definitely leads to higher engagement and without engagement, there's no value."

The teams pulling ahead aren't running more campaigns. They're doing the ICP and community work that makes every campaign sharper — and building the feedback loops that keep it that way.

Listen to the full episode of Unicorn Marketers with Christina Bottis, CMO at Mural.

Eight takeaways from this conversation.

Actionable for Marketing Unicorns marketers

  1. ICP isn't a document — it's a feedback system that has to keep pace with behavioral change.
    The assumption that "we know our customer" is the most common ICP failure mode, and it's getting more costly. Christina pointed to a shift happening at Mural in real time: the way their buyers were searching a year ago has already shifted to asking — an entirely different mindset and intent signal. When buyer behavior is moving that fast, quarterly qual/quant reviews set the baseline, but the weekly loop matters more: Gong call reviews, customer and prospect conversations, and cross-functional signal-sharing into messaging, sales talk tracks, and product priorities. The question isn't how often you revisit ICP — it's whether you've built the infrastructure to catch the signal when it surfaces and route it to the right people fast enough to act.
  2. The consideration set has been structurally inverted — and most GTM teams haven't caught up.
    The old model: a prospect contacts sales, gets on a consideration list, evaluates. The new model: an LLM generates a shortlist, the prospect self-qualifies by running a free trial, validates through review sites and peer communities, and only then — if you've survived all of it — do they bring you to procurement. Christina put a hard number on the trial window: less than a week to prove value, or they're gone before you ever make the list. That's not a product problem. It's a GTM architecture problem. Your entire top-of-funnel motion needs to be designed around earning inclusion in that pre-consideration flywheel, not assuming you'll get a sales conversation to make your case.
  3. Getting into LLM results means shifting from content that informs to content that answers.
    The frame Christina uses internally: is this piece going to answer a specific question, or just inform? The distinction determines whether LLMs will cite it. Her team's dedicated SEO/AEO function is continuously mapping white space — terms and questions where they're not yet present — and converting those gaps into content that can own a term, earn a citation, and get linked. The goal isn't inclusion in results; it's citation. And critically, traditional SEO isn't being traded off — it's the substrate. As Christina put it: "Traditional search is the foundation of all the stuff that ends up in the LLM search." The teams treating AEO as a replacement for SEO fundamentals are building on sand.
  4. Channel strategy should follow your ICP, not the algorithm of the week.
    On Reddit, LinkedIn, review sites, and peer communities: Christina's framework is straightforward — the question is always where the customers actually are, not which channel is currently weighted by LLMs. She's seen the narrative cycle through Reddit, Wikipedia, LinkedIn posts, and back. Her team shows up across all of them because buyers use different channels at different stages — Reddit might be irrelevant at top of funnel but become critical once someone is already a customer looking for peer advice. Discounting a channel based on algorithm weight misses that the customer journey is non-linear.
  5. Community-led growth works when you wait for user-to-user energy before you scale.
    Mural's community (currently running on Discourse) grew out of organic engagement that started on LinkedIn. The reason it works, according to Christina, comes down to one principle: it's about them, not you. The diagnostic she uses before scaling: are users starting conversations without being prompted by the brand? If the brand is always the one sparking discussion, you have an audience, not a community — and an audience won't generate the buying-adjacent activity that makes community a GTM asset. Mural deliberately held back on growth until they saw genuine user-to-user collaboration, resisting the temptation to optimize for member count.
  6. Your community is your fastest ICP research loop.
    The practical output of Mural's community isn't goodwill — it's signal. Terminology gaps (how practitioners actually describe the problem versus how marketing describes it), content and webinar topics, product feature ideas, and account-level intel on wins and challenges all flow from community conversations back to segment marketing, product, and sales. Christina flagged one specific and immediately actionable win: discovering that real practitioners use different language than what Mural's own marketing copy uses. Closing that vernacular gap alone improves search relevance, messaging resonance, and sales effectiveness simultaneously.
  7. When building community, let sub-groups form from behavior, not from org charts.
    Christina's observation from running community programs across multiple companies: people naturally cluster around two things — vocation and geography. The instinct to pre-structure a community into tidy topical forums often backfires because it imposes categories before you know where the real gravity is. Her approach at Mural: keep it small and tight initially, watch where people gravitate, then formalize what's already forming organically. In past roles, opening up the ability for users to create their own subgroups revealed unexpected clusters — "product managers unite" and "marketers unite" emerged before geographic ones. Let the community tell you how it wants to organize.
  8. Laddering interviews surface the behavioral ICP data that no survey will capture.
    The interview technique Christina uses: start with "how'd you get into this?" and keep asking "and then what?" The goal is behavioral context — what their day actually looks and feels like — not just role and company size. She described an example from healthcare work early in her career: conversations with nurses revealed a shared ritual of going out for craft beers to decompress after high-stress shifts, which evolved into peer recommendations and eventually a podcast. None of that would have shown up in a demographic profile. But it's exactly the kind of detail that lets you design events, content, and brand experiences that feel personally relevant rather than generically targeted. For the ICP work itself, she recommended starting with data segmentation (tools like Clay and ChatGPT can fill in firmographic and demographic blanks quickly), then layering in interviews to get the behavioral depth that turns segments into real personas.

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