First-Party Data Is Your Growth Advantage, If You Know How to Use It

Sales calls. Support chats. Review threads. Onboarding forms.

Most of this data disappears into platforms like Google Drive or SharePoint, never to be seen again.

Not because it isn’t useful, but because it’s unstructured, unshared, and unmanaged.

The truth is, most teams, across industries and company sizes, don’t need more data. They need better access to the insight they already have.

In a Third Wednesday Webinar session, I spoke with Joelle Irvine, a growth and AI advisor for SaaS and ecommerce teams, about how to use AI to humanize your marketing, and unearth the full potential of your first-party data.

Most Customer Insight Is Already in Your Files, But Goes Unused

Internal call transcripts. Product feedback emails. G2 reviews.

These are the raw materials of customer insight. And most of them go unused.

We have all this information. If we're creating transcripts of our calls, we obviously have all the email backups and things like that. That's a gold mine of insights.
— Joelle Irvine

Across most teams, the data is there, but siloed. Marketing doesn’t see sales call notes. Sales never checks G2 reviews. Product only hears what filters through Slack.

The result? Decisions get made in isolation. Messaging drifts. And valuable context gets lost.

Why Teams Struggle to Access the Insight They Already Have

The problem isn’t lack of tools. It’s lack of time, systems, and synthesis.

Each team collects data for their own needs, in their own formats. No one has a shared language, or a shared space, for making meaning of it all.

And that’s where AI comes in.

How to Use AI to Analyze First-Party Data by Buyer Stage

One effective approach starts with segmentation—organizing raw data by journey stage:

• Sales calls → early awareness
• Support tickets → post-purchase pain points
• Reviews → sentiment snapshots

Applying a consistent set of prompts to each segment helps surface patterns, objections, tone shifts, and unspoken concerns.

I don’t remix this data. I keep it separate. Because I'd like to know what people are thinking and asking at different stages of the journey.
— Joelle Irvine

After analyzing each source individually, it becomes easier to compare across them and spot universal truths or key gaps.

Align Your Messaging Across the Journey

When recurring issues surface—whether it’s a credibility gap, product confusion, or onboarding friction—the next step is to thread a solution throughout the journey.

That could mean revising homepage messaging. Arming sales with new objection-handling language. Or adjusting onboarding flows to clarify the “why now.”

Once you identify that problem, then there's a continuous flow throughout their experience.
— Joelle Irvine

AI Is Fast. Insight Still Needs Strategy

Prompting is just briefing. The heavy lifting still requires strategic thinking and context.

While AI can surface patterns fast, it still takes human judgment to interpret them—and know when to dig deeper.

You can't expect it to do everything for you. You have to be knowledgeable enough about what you're doing and what you're talking about to be able to fine tune it.
— Joelle Irvine

In other words: AI isn’t replacing your strategy. It’s accelerating your clarity.

How We Help: Scaling Insight with Custom AI Agents for Growing Teams

For teams looking to bridge the gap between insight and action, this work can feel overwhelming to do manually.

At Third Wunder, we explore ways to automate and streamline the research process for high-growth teams—including startups and established organizations alike—building custom AI agents that help teams surface patterns from their own conversations, documents, and data.

It's one way to ensure valuable signals aren’t lost in the noise—and that marketing, sales, and product are all speaking from the same source of truth.

Final Thoughts

For teams navigating growth or complexity, the pressure to move fast often buries the insights that matter most. But the data is there—and now, the tools to hear it are too.

AI isn’t here to write your content. It’s here to reveal your customer’s voice.

When you listen at scale, you don’t just market better. You connect more deeply. Respond more intelligently. Build trust faster.

Because sometimes, the signal you need most... is already in the silence.