Soul at Scale with Noah Fleming

What the Savannah Bananas, customer loyalty, and AI can teach us about building a business people actually care about.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the irony of AI in marketing. We have more tools than ever to personalize customer experiences, automate conversations, and create content at scale. Yet somehow, we’re making it easier for businesses to sound exactly alike and harder for customers to find a real person when they need one.

We’re getting remarkably good at scaling activity. I’m increasingly interested in how we scale the things that actually make people want to do business with us.

That’s why I was excited to talk with Noah Fleming, author of Soul at Scale, on the Human-First AI Marketing® Podcast. Noah has spent nearly 20 years helping companies improve customer relationships, retention, and growth. His new book explores something I’ve been advocating at Avenue9: how to maintain your human edge as technology makes it possible to automate almost everything.

We covered a lot of ground, from the Savannah Bananas and Undercover Boss to customer feedback, employee empowerment, and how Noah uses AI in his own business. Here are ten ideas from our conversation that I think every business owner and marketing leader should consider before adding another AI tool to their tech stack.

1. Do Things That Don’t Scale to Build a Business That Does

Noah opens his book with the story of Jesse Cole and the Savannah Bananas, one of my favorite examples of a company that understands the value of creating remarkable experiences.

When Jesse was getting started, he personally called people who attended games. He did it when there were 100 fans, then 500, then 1,000. Obviously, you can’t personally call everyone when you’re filling NFL stadiums, but those early conversations helped him understand his customers and build the culture that made the Savannah Bananas so successful.

Most businesses are trying to eliminate this kind of work. We want automated follow-ups, self-service portals, and customer journeys that run without anyone touching them. Those tools can be useful, but there’s something powerful about a business owner who actually talks to customers.

Think about the last time the owner of a company personally called to thank you for your business or ask how things were going. You probably remember it because it rarely happens.

For a small business, this is a tremendous opportunity. You have access to your customers that larger organizations often struggle to maintain. Those personal conversations can reveal opportunities, generate referrals, and create stories people share with others.

I’ve written before about how marketing is shifting from content to conversations. Noah’s Savannah Bananas example is a great illustration of why those conversations matter. They give you the insight and trust that make your marketing more effective.

If you have 100 customers, try calling five of them this week. You might be surprised how much you learn, and how much they appreciate the attention.

2. Leaders Need to Get Their Hands Dirty

Noah brought up Undercover Boss, the television show where executives disguise themselves and discover what actually happens inside their companies.

It’s a funny concept when you think about it. Apparently, some executives need a fake mustache and a television crew to find out what their employees deal with every day.

As companies grow, leaders naturally become more removed from customers and daily operations. They start relying on reports, dashboards, and management meetings to understand what’s happening. The problem is that those numbers only tell part of the story.

A customer service dashboard might show that a complaint was resolved in four minutes. It probably won’t tell you whether the customer felt heard, whether the employee was frustrated by the process, or whether the problem could have been prevented altogether.

AI can help analyze thousands of customer interactions and identify patterns that would otherwise be difficult to see. That’s a valuable capability, especially for smaller teams with limited resources. But leaders still need firsthand experience with the people and processes they’re responsible for improving.

Before you automate another workflow, spend some time with the employees who actually use it. Listen to a few customer calls. Sit in on a sales conversation. Ask your team what makes their jobs unnecessarily difficult.

You’ll probably discover a few things that never made it into your quarterly report.

3. Protect the Human Moments in Your Customer Experience

Every customer journey contains moments that are relatively routine and moments that carry real emotional weight.

Customers generally appreciate convenience when checking an order status, scheduling an appointment, or finding basic information. Automation can make those experiences faster and easier.

But consider what happens when a delivery is late, a project goes sideways, or a customer is worried about making an expensive decision. That’s when people want to know someone understands their situation and cares about the outcome.

Noah’s work challenges business leaders to think carefully about these moments before deciding what to automate. The goal is to design customer experiences that consistently deliver the right kind of attention.

For example, an AI system could recognize that a longtime customer has experienced three service problems in the past month. It could alert the account manager, summarize the issues, and suggest a follow-up. The account manager now has the information needed to make a thoughtful personal call.

That’s the kind of Human-First AI Marketing® application I get excited about. Technology helps the employee recognize an important moment and respond appropriately.

This also connects to something I discussed in Why Human-First AI Marketing Wins. Trust grows through consistent, thoughtful interactions, and AI can help us recognize opportunities to make those interactions better.

For marketing directors, this means looking beyond campaign performance and mapping the complete customer experience. Identify where customers feel excited, confused, disappointed, or uncertain. Those moments often represent your greatest opportunities to earn trust.

4. Simplify Before You Automate

One of the recurring themes in our conversation was the importance of simplicity.

AI has made it incredibly easy to automate complicated processes. Unfortunately, many of those processes were unnecessarily complicated to begin with.

Imagine a manufacturer whose customers have to contact three different departments to get a simple order update. The company decides to implement an AI chatbot that helps customers navigate those three departments.

The chatbot might save some time, but the underlying process is still a mess. A simpler system that gives customers accurate order information directly would create a much better experience.

I see versions of this in marketing all the time. Companies build elaborate lead-nurturing sequences before figuring out what their prospects actually want to know. They automate follow-ups that weren’t particularly helpful when humans were sending them. Then they wonder why their engagement rates are disappointing.

Noah’s emphasis on simplifying the customer experience is a useful reminder that good strategy comes before technology.

At Avenue9, we approach AI implementation the same way. We start by understanding the audience, the business goals, and the existing processes. Once we know what should happen, we can decide where AI will create the greatest leverage.

Our Human+AI Capability Map™ helps leaders make these decisions by examining which activities are best handled by people, which are appropriate for AI, and where the combination creates the most value.

Sometimes the most valuable improvement is eliminating three steps from a process. That’s a pretty good return on an AI investment that costs nothing.

5. Make Customer Experiences Meaningful, Memorable, and Personal

One of my favorite ideas from Noah’s work is his emphasis on making customer interactions meaningful, memorable, and personal.

I like this because it’s a simple test that almost any business can apply to its marketing, sales, and customer service.

A meaningful interaction helps someone accomplish something important. A memorable interaction gives them a reason to remember your company. A personal interaction makes them feel recognized and understood.

Consider a professional services firm that sends every client the same automated check-in email after 30 days. It’s a reasonable process, and it might even generate a few responses.

Now imagine that the email references the client’s original goals, highlights something the team accomplished together, and asks a specific question about the next challenge they’re facing. The second approach requires more context, but it also creates a much stronger reason to respond.

AI makes this kind of personalization increasingly practical for smaller organizations. Your CRM, project notes, meeting transcripts, and customer history can provide the context needed to make communications relevant.

I explored this relationship between AI and authentic customer experiences in Human-First AI: How to Build Trust and Amplify Your Voice. The more relevant context we provide, the more useful AI becomes in helping us communicate with customers.

I’d encourage every marketing director to review their automated customer communications through Noah’s three-part lens. How many are genuinely meaningful, memorable, and personal?

6. Your Existing Customers Are a Growth Strategy

Marketing teams spend an enormous amount of time trying to attract strangers.

We invest in advertising, SEO, content, social media, and lead generation. We track impressions, clicks, conversions, and cost per lead. Meanwhile, some of our best opportunities are sitting in our CRM, quietly wondering whether we remember they exist.

Noah has spent much of his career helping companies improve customer retention and loyalty. His work reinforces the importance of taking care of the relationships you’ve already earned.

For a B2B company, a great customer can represent years of repeat business, referrals, testimonials, and introductions. One strong relationship might generate more revenue than an entire advertising campaign.

Think about a small manufacturer that has 50 loyal distributors. Improving communication, helping those distributors sell more effectively, and recognizing their contributions could have a substantial impact on revenue. The company already has relationships and trust to build upon.

AI can help identify opportunities within those relationships. It can flag accounts that haven’t received attention recently, summarize purchasing trends, or help account managers prepare for conversations.

I’d love to see more SMB marketing plans devote the same strategic attention to customer activation and retention that they give to lead generation.

After all, you’ve already done the hard work of earning those customers. There’s a lot of value in making sure they stay happy.

7. Customer Feedback Should Lead to Conversations

Most companies are pretty good at asking customers for feedback. We’ve all received those surveys asking us to rate an experience from one to ten, often before we’ve even finished having the experience.

The interesting part is what happens after someone responds.

Noah encourages businesses to treat customer feedback as an opportunity to strengthen relationships. A frustrated customer gives you a chance to make something right. A happy customer gives you an opportunity to express appreciation and learn what you’re doing well.

Too often, that information ends up in a dashboard where someone reviews the averages once a quarter.

AI offers some interesting possibilities here. It can analyze open-ended feedback, identify recurring issues, recognize sentiment, and flag responses that deserve immediate attention. A small team can use those insights to prioritize conversations that would otherwise be easy to miss.

Imagine receiving an alert that a longtime customer gave your company a poor rating and mentioned a specific problem. Instead of adding their response to a monthly report, someone personally reaches out that afternoon.

The technology makes it easier to recognize the opportunity. Your team’s response determines what happens to the relationship.

This is part of the broader shift I discussed in A Sea-Change in Marketing from Content to Conversations. Real customer conversations create valuable insights that can improve both your marketing and the experience you deliver.

For SMBs, I think this is one of the most practical uses of AI in customer experience because it combines relatively simple automation with meaningful human action.

8. Give Employees Permission to Be Remarkable

You can design an excellent customer experience on paper, but your employees are the ones who bring it to life.

They know which customers need extra attention, where processes create frustration, and what small gestures make people feel appreciated. Unfortunately, many organizations make it difficult for employees to act on that knowledge.

We create policies, approval processes, and scripts designed to make everything consistent. Eventually, employees become so focused on following the process that they lose the freedom to solve the customer’s actual problem.

Noah’s examples of memorable customer experiences remind us that some of the most powerful moments come from employees doing something thoughtful and unexpected.

For business owners, that means giving your people the tools, training, and authority to make good decisions.

This is also where I think many AI implementation strategies have their priorities backward. Leaders buy technology and then tell employees how they’re expected to use it. A human-first approach begins by asking employees what would help them do their jobs better.

Maybe your customer service team needs faster access to product information. Maybe your salespeople need help preparing for meetings. Maybe your marketing manager spends half the week assembling reports that AI could generate automatically.

Our Human+AI Capability Map™ was created to help leaders think through exactly these decisions. It provides a practical way to match work with the capabilities of people and AI, with an emphasis on making employees more effective and creative.

When employees have better information and more time, they can focus on the parts of their jobs that require creativity, judgment, and personal attention. That creates a better experience for employees and customers alike.

9. Your Company’s Soul Is a Competitive Advantage

I love the title Soul at Scale because it captures something that’s difficult to measure but easy to recognize when you experience it.

Some companies have a personality. You can feel it in the way employees talk to customers, how problems get resolved, and the little details that make the experience memorable.

Others feel like you’re interacting with a collection of policies and automated messages.

As AI-generated content and automated customer experiences become more common, I think a recognizable company personality will become increasingly valuable.

For smaller businesses, this is an opportunity worth protecting. Your founder’s story, your employees’ expertise, your customer relationships, and your company culture are assets that can distinguish you from competitors.

At Avenue9, this is why we start our A9^Factor Framework™ with human-first strategy. We work to understand the audience, clarify the brand’s authentic voice, and identify the unique value the company brings to its customers.

Those insights become the foundation for AI marketing systems and scalable storytelling.

For example, a family-owned manufacturer might have decades of stories about solving unusual customer problems, developing products, and building relationships with distributors. Those experiences contain the raw material for compelling marketing content.

I’ve explored this in Authentic Marketing in the Age of AI, where we discuss how businesses can use real experiences and authentic stories to build stronger connections with their audiences.

AI can help organize those stories, adapt them for different channels, and make them easier to share consistently. The company’s history, expertise, and personality give the content its substance.

That’s a practical way to scale the soul of a business.

10. Use AI to Extend Your Expertise and Creativity

Toward the end of our conversation, Noah and I discussed how we use AI in our own work.

I always enjoy these conversations because they reveal how experienced professionals are incorporating AI into their daily routines.

Noah uses AI to develop ideas, support his writing, build custom tools, and improve productivity. His expertise and judgment guide the work, while the technology helps him accomplish more.

That’s similar to how I use AI at Avenue9. I’ve spent decades working in sales and marketing, and that experience shapes how I approach strategy, storytelling, and customer relationships. AI helps me explore ideas, analyze information, and execute work that previously required significantly more time.

For small marketing teams, this is a remarkable opportunity.

A single conversation with a customer can provide insights for a case study, several social posts, a sales training resource, and a blog article. An interview with your founder can reveal stories and perspectives that help distinguish your brand. A collection of sales calls can help you understand the questions prospects ask before making a decision.

I call one version of this approach Degenerative AI, where we begin with real human conversations and use AI to extract, organize, and amplify the insights.

It’s closely related to the approach I described in The AI-Driven Marketer’s Playbook, where we explored how small marketing teams can use AI systems to extend their capabilities and get more value from the expertise they already have.

The more useful context we provide, the more valuable the output becomes. That’s why I encourage business leaders to capture their knowledge, document their experiences, and involve their teams in building AI workflows.

You probably have years of valuable expertise hiding in conversations, emails, and employees’ heads. AI can help make that knowledge more accessible and useful across your organization.

How Do You Scale the Soul of Your Business?

The Savannah Bananas story provides a useful way to bring all of these ideas together.

Jesse Cole started by personally calling customers because he wanted to understand their experiences and make them feel appreciated. Those conversations helped shape a business culture that continues to influence how the organization operates as it grows.

For the rest of us, the practical application is to identify what makes our customers feel valued and then build systems that help us deliver those experiences consistently.

A small business with 50 customers might accomplish that through personal phone calls and handwritten notes. A growing business with 5,000 customers might use AI to identify important moments, help employees prepare for conversations, and make sure valuable relationships receive attention.

The tools and processes will evolve as the business grows. The underlying commitment to customers can remain consistent.

That’s the idea behind Human-First AI Marketing® at Avenue9. We believe business leaders should establish the strategy, understand their customers, and empower their employees before deciding how AI can help.

When you get that sequence right, AI becomes an extraordinary amplifier of the qualities that already make your business successful.

And for SMBs competing against companies with much larger marketing budgets, that combination of human connection and technological capability creates some exciting possibilities.

Soul at Scale with Noah Fleming

I really enjoyed this conversation with Noah, and I think his perspective is especially useful for business owners and marketing directors who are trying to balance growth, efficiency, and customer relationships.

You can learn more about Noah Fleming, explore his book Soul at Scale, and connect with him on LinkedIn.

At Avenue9, we help small and midsized businesses develop Human-First AI Marketing® strategies that amplify their authentic voices, empower their teams, and create more meaningful customer conversations.

If you’re looking for ways to make AI a practical part of your marketing strategy while preserving what makes your business special, let’s talk.