How Empathy Mapping Replaced 90% of Cisco’s Marketing Output

Summary

Podcast Summary: Experts of Experience Episode: How Empathy Mapping Replaced 90% of Cisco’s Marketing Output
Release Date: May 14, 2025
Presented by: Salesforce Customer Success
Host: Lacy Peace
Guest: Ben Taylor, Director of Revenue Marketing and Customer Journeys at Cisco

---

Introduction

In this insightful episode of Experts of Experience, host Lacy Peace engages in a compelling conversation with Ben Taylor, Cisco’s Director of Revenue Marketing and Customer Journeys. Together, they explore the transformative impact of empathy mapping on Cisco's marketing strategy, Ben’s sharp critique of traditional content marketing, and the integration of design thinking within marketing teams to enhance customer experience (CX).

---

The Decline of Content Marketing

Ben Taylor opens the discussion with a bold statement about the inefficacy of content marketing:

"Content marketing is dead. It is a driver of a waste of time. Success with content marketing is a happy accident."
[00:05]

Ben argues that the traditional focus on producing vast amounts of content often results in disengaged audiences and minimal impact on pipeline and bookings. At Cisco, he spearheaded a significant reduction in content output, halting 80-90% of prior content production efforts to refocus on understanding customer needs.

---

Shifting Focus to Empathy and Customer Insight

Transitioning away from excessive content creation, Ben emphasizes the importance of empathy in marketing:

"Put yourself in their shoes. Do you care about this? Humans make decisions emotionally. We make decisions based on storytelling and narrative."
[00:40]

Ben introduced empathy mapping to align marketing strategies closely with customer emotions and needs. This shift led Cisco to spend substantial time in understanding customer perspectives rather than merely producing content.

---

Gaining Leadership Buy-In

One of the critical challenges Ben faced was convincing leadership to embrace a "less is more" approach. He addresses this by highlighting the disconnect between content volume and business outcomes:

"More volume doesn't equal more bookings, more pipeline."
[00:31]

Ben successfully demonstrated to leadership that focusing on high-quality, empathetic engagements resulted in significant growth, thereby securing their support for the new strategy.

---

Integrating Design Thinking in Marketing

Ben delves into the application of design thinking within Cisco’s marketing teams, outlining a structured approach to empathy mapping and customer journey mapping:

"Design thinking, on empathy, map on the actual experiential part of customer experience, which is do less. Reach folks where it matters."
[14:08]

By incorporating design thinking workshops and empathy mapping into their agile marketing processes, Cisco ensures that every piece of content is purpose-driven and resonates with the target audience's current needs and emotions.

---

Collaboration Across Departments

A significant part of Ben’s strategy involves fostering collaboration between marketing and other departments such as sales enablement, customer success, and renewal teams. This cross-functional approach ensures a seamless and unified customer experience throughout the entire lifecycle.

"We're along the customer journey, full lifecycle... from top of funnel to renewal. It needs to connect those so that on its surface is not a hard thing for people to consume and say, oh, that makes sense."
[68:34]

Ben emphasizes that empathizing with different teams within the organization enhances the overall customer experience by aligning messaging and engagement strategies.

---

The Role of AI in Customer Experience

Addressing the prevalent topic of AI, Ben shares his cautious perspective on integrating AI tools like GPT and Claude into marketing:

"I don't believe that AI can truly empathize. The real risk is, I don't want people to know they're talking to AI."
[32:52]

While acknowledging AI's utility in data analysis and telemetry, Ben contends that genuine empathy in customer interactions remains a human-driven endeavor. He stresses the importance of AI focusing on problem-solving rather than mimicking emotional responses.

---

Measuring Success: Beyond Traditional Metrics

Ben explains Cisco’s pivot from traditional content consumption metrics to more outcome-focused measurements:

"We've deprioritized consumption metrics like page views, opens, click rate... We focus more on pipeline and bookings."
[57:27]

By aligning marketing efforts with business-centric metrics, Cisco ensures that their strategies directly contribute to measurable business growth rather than just content engagement.

---

Team Building and Hiring for Empathy

In discussing team dynamics, Ben highlights the significance of hiring individuals with empathy and cultural fit over purely technical skills:

"I lean into vibe. Pedigree, background, experience, they all matter. But you can teach skills, you can teach mechanisms."
[47:47]

Ben prioritizes candidates who can empathize and think from the customer’s perspective, fostering a team culture that naturally aligns with Cisco’s empathetic marketing approach.

---

Lightning Round: Relevant or Ridiculous

To conclude the substantive discussion, Ben participates in a lighthearted lightning round with hosts Lacy Peace and Rose Shocker, evaluating various marketing trends as "Relevant" or "Ridiculous." This segment underscores the importance of discernment in adopting new marketing trends, emphasizing the value of authenticity and relevance over mere popularity.

---

Personal Insights and Conclusion

Ben shares his personal motivations for championing empathy in marketing, emphasizing the fulfillment derived from creating meaningful customer interactions:

"I'm happier at work and happier in life when I'm doing things that make people feel better or helping solve problems."
[46:40]

He reflects on his success at Cisco, noting a significant growth in pipeline and bookings attributed to the empathetic, customer-centric approach. Ben concludes by reiterating the importance of maintaining empathy across all customer touchpoints and fostering a unified, collaborative internal environment to sustain long-term success.

---

Notable Quotes

• Ben Taylor: "Content marketing is dead. It is a driver of a waste of time. Success with content marketing is a happy accident."
  [00:05]

• Ben Taylor: "More volume doesn't equal more bookings, more pipeline."
  [00:31]

• Ben Taylor: "I don't believe that AI can truly empathize. The real risk is, I don't want people to know they're talking to AI."
  [32:52]

• Ben Taylor: "I lean into vibe. Pedigree, background, experience, they all matter. But you can teach skills, you can teach mechanisms."
  [47:47]

• Ben Taylor: "I'm happier at work and happier in life when I'm doing things that make people feel better or helping solve problems."
  [46:40]

---

Conclusion

This episode of Experts of Experience offers a deep dive into the critical shift from traditional content marketing to an empathetic, customer-centric approach within large organizations like Cisco. Ben Taylor's experiences and insights provide valuable lessons on aligning marketing strategies with genuine customer needs, fostering cross-departmental collaboration, and measuring success through meaningful business metrics. By prioritizing empathy and thoughtful engagement, Ben demonstrates how organizations can not only enhance customer experience but also drive substantial business growth.

Transcript

[Ben Taylor]

Marketing is the most disconnected piece from the customer experience right now.

[Lacy Peace]

You have a pretty strong opinion about content marketing.

[Ben Taylor]

Content marketing is dead.

[Lacy Peace]

Wow.

[Ben Taylor]

It is a driver of a waste of time. Success with content marketing is a happy accident.

[Lacy Peace]

How did you bring that philosophy into Cisco?

[Ben Taylor]

80 to 90% of our production stopped when I took over the team. We were spending a bulk of our time in production before. We're now spending it in trying to understand what our customers are thinking.

[Lacy Peace]

How do you get leadership buy in on something like this? I don't know that all of them would be able to accept that less is more.

[Ben Taylor]

More volume doesn't equal more bookings, more pipeline.

[Lacy Peace]

If you're ready to talk a little bit about AI, is it a big topic these days or do you use GPT or Claude?

[Ben Taylor]

I don't tend to use any of them. What what I did is I took the metrics of what we were doing and I started to show how we were reaching our customer. And I think a lot of people lean on those metrics and say, hey, we're reaching our audience. That's fine. But then I took them a step further back and I said, put yourself in their shoes. Do you care about this? Humans make decisions emotionally. We make decisions based on storytelling and narrative. People build this idea that emotions and empathy cannot be attached towards progress. Force people to sit in a room in awkward silence and sit there and think about it. We have seen 5x6x growth and what our impact is from there.

[Lacy Peace]

It's not just like, theoretically this would work, but you've seen the results. You've reported it to leadership. You've got buy in from your team. What are you betting on now then? Welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lacy Peace, and with me, as always, is Rose. Shocker.

[Rose Shocker]

Happy to be here.

[Lacy Peace]

We just got off the mic with Ben Taylor, director of revenue marketing and customer journeys at Cisco.

[Rose Shocker]

He had so many hot takes and I feel like this episode's gonna be so great for the boots on the ground marketers. I feel like they're gonna be rejoicing when they listen to it. But because having just this expectation of volume over your head and no clear through line, no clear data, just produce, produce, Produce is a recipe for burnout and high turnover.

[Lacy Peace]

Ben is in marketing, but his title, which I didn't read all of it, is also Customer Experience Marketing, which is sort of a unique title. I don't know that I've actually seen it written that way before.

[Rose Shocker]

I feel like everything he was saying is just things People need to hear right now, not only is customer experience embedded into every stage of the customer journey, but marketing's a huge part of customer experience. And as someone who's worked in marketing, I've never thought of it that way.

[Lacy Peace]

Well, and what he really brought to the discussion that I think a lot of people will need to hear is the power of empathy throughout the entire customer journey. From first time I see your logo to I bought your product, to I'm thinking about renewing, to, okay, I have loved this for years, and now I'm recommending it to a friend. And he has really beautifully weaved empathy into every touch point for the customer. And the other thing that he talks about a lot isn't just how you can bring empathy to the customer, but how you can bring empathy back to your organization. He's building marketing teams that are going to sales and ask, actually asking them from an empathetic perspective. We need to be talking about, how does this actually relate back to the human being that is our customer or is our employee or is our manager? We need to bring back play and imagination and totally putting on the cap of pretending to be your customer. What do they actually care about? What's actually interesting to them? And then when you're talking to anyone on your team pretending to be them, what do they care about? What's at stake for them? What are the risks? What reputational things should I consider on their behalf? So that way I'm supporting them properly. So Ben breaks that all down in today's episode. He talks about design thinking why your team needs it, how you can start to implement this process in your organization, how he sort of manages upward a little bit to help bring on leadership and create buy in there. And we talk, of course, a little bit about AI and his perspective there. I think he's got a really unique take on how we can mesh empathy into AI in a way that's actually beneficial to the customer and not just making us feel like we've put together this chatbot that talks well but doesn't actually do anything effective.

[Rose Shocker]

You mentioned doing some research on Cisco and you found some cool things. Tell me about that.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah. So what's. Okay, this is really interesting. In the 1990s and the 2000s, they literally had 80% of the Internet traffic going through their routers. 80%. Like they were the backbone of the Internet. Wow, fascinating. And now they've got a $500 billion valuation. So this is a massive company we're talking about. They operate in networking, cybersecurity, Collaboration. They are doing all kinds of stuff, and Ben is helping lead a bunch of their marketing. So he's just someone that we get to learn from. And I'm blown away. We even got to have him come on the podcast and talk to us in real time, in studio, for the first time ever, about the stuff that he's doing there at Cisco, to, like, champion and continue to bring forward this brand that's been around for a while, but that, you know, is ready for refresh. All right, enough from us. Let's get to Ben. Stick around and watch. Ben, you told me that you lived in Philly.

[Ben Taylor]

I did.

[Lacy Peace]

So I have a hard question for you. Oh, no, maybe not too hard for you.

[Ben Taylor]

Okay.

[Lacy Peace]

Sheets or Wawa?

[Ben Taylor]

Wawa.

[Lacy Peace]

Wawa.

[Ben Taylor]

Take a seat. There's stories of me coming out of Wawa at 3 o' clock in the morning.

[Lacy Peace]

I mean, that is a. I figured.

[Ben Taylor]

I have to go to Wawa, get a hoagie at two o' clock in the morning. It's equivalent to Whataburger. Right? Like having that hot. Are you not from.

[Lacy Peace]

Okay, I'm not from here.

[Ben Taylor]

That's concerning to me.

[Rose Shocker]

Have you been to a Whataburger?

[Lacy Peace]

No, I have not been to a Whataburger.

[Rose Shocker]

All right.

[Ben Taylor]

Where are you from? Are you from the Northeast?

[Lacy Peace]

All over the place. My dad was in the military, so it's all over the place. Yeah.

[Ben Taylor]

You have to. It's the same sort of sense of, like, I can get something completely unnecessary at 3 o' clock in the morning, and that's the joy of it.

[Lacy Peace]

Well, I mean, I lived in Pittsburgh, so we had sheets.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah.

[Lacy Peace]

So that's what we did.

[Ben Taylor]

I'm anti. I'm 100% Wawa.

[Lacy Peace]

Oh, my gosh. Every Wawa I've been into, I've been disappointed with, so maybe I need to go to, like, a better one. They all just seem kind of like me and kind of crummy.

[Ben Taylor]

Central. Philly ones are different. They're. I don't know. I guess my campus is right in the middle of Philly, so I. I don't know. I was also probably not the most sober every time I went in, too, so that's. Yeah.

[Lacy Peace]

But. Yeah. So where else have you lived besides Philly and Dallas?

[Ben Taylor]

Grew up in Dallas. School in Philadelphia. I lived in New York for a bit. New York City and Manhattan, and then I was in Houston. And I've got family out, so kind of all over, but mostly Dallas, Austin and the Northeast. So Philly and New York.

[Lacy Peace]

Okay, so which city has the best people watching.

[Ben Taylor]

People watching.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah.

[Ben Taylor]

New York. Just because there's more of them there.

[Lacy Peace]

Okay. And best drivers.

[Ben Taylor]

None of them.

[Lacy Peace]

None of them.

[Ben Taylor]

I don't know, Worst drivers. Jersey. No. Because I lived on both sides of Jersey. So you see a Jersey play. Sorry for anybody who's listening to this and Jersey. But I don't know, they're different. I'd say Jersey drivers, though.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah.

[Rose Shocker]

Worse than Dallas drivers.

[Ben Taylor]

100.

[Rose Shocker]

Wow.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah. Like, okay. No, you get on the turnpike, it's. No, I don't even want to. Dallas is pedestrian and mundane compared to that.

[Lacy Peace]

Wow. Can confirm having driven through Jersey. Yeah.

[Rose Shocker]

Good to know.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah. Okay. Well, Ben, so there's this thing that I've been noticing in pretty much all CX leaders is that none of them started as wanting to work in cx. None of them were like little kids dreaming.

[Ben Taylor]

It wasn't really a thing. Right.

[Lacy Peace]

And customer journeys. Yeah. Or marketing even. So could you tell me a little bit about what brought you to this?

[Ben Taylor]

Well, I don't, I don't. I mean it's kind of a statement, but I don't think customer experience is like this grandiose concept. It's just, you know, hitting on this theme of empathy. It's important that we engage somebody with that empathy. And so what has happened is you have your consultants and groups that have come in and said, hey, let's define this as a thing and create this sort of engagement. But the idea of it's not different. So I think if you were to ask the question to me younger, do you care about how you interact with people? Do you care about how they perceive you? I think most people would say yes. It's just that now we have this terminology attached to it. So. Yeah, like no. As a kid, am I going to get into cx? No, absolutely not. But do I care about the way that I communicate, the way that I impact, you know, what I'm doing for our company and what I do personally? Absolutely. And so I think those existed before. It's just now it has a term to apply to it.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah. And we talked a lot about marketing on our prep call. And how do you think marketing, like what role does marketing play in customer experience?

[Ben Taylor]

Well, one of the downsides of CX getting more defined is that it has kind of become over defined on this post purchase. Sort of like loyalty. I mean you look at CX different things and it's loyalty programs and it's how you have adoption kind of motions and retention sort of motions when at the heart of it, it is about truly the customer experience. Like stop thinking about what it's defined as and think about what the term means. And that's engaging with the customer. So some of the challenges that I've had is don't just think post purchase, don't just think pre purchase. I'm engaging with the customer. Yes, they're at a different point in their journey, but I'm engaging in marketing with the customer in the same way. I need to care about their experience in the same way and I need it to connect through to the back half of that engagement in the same way. So I think for me marketing is integral, I think sales enablement and engagement and down funnel, kind of like actual sales conversations, your adoption, your success motion, your renewal motion, all of those are part and parcel to what customer experience should be. And I think teams tend to, and companies tend to narrowly define that as just, you know, post purchase a lot of times and they don't think about the rest of that customer engagement.

[Lacy Peace]

So Ben, you started working at Cisco how long ago?

[Ben Taylor]

About six and a half years ago.

[Lacy Peace]

Okay. What brought you to Cisco?

[Ben Taylor]

An opportunity of a particular role to change it up. I was at Dell before and I had a friend that was here, had an open spot in the service provider marketing team. So it's very kind of like heavy handed, part of our portfolio, very technical part of our portfolio, but it was just something different. And while I loved Dell, I wanted to get into a company that had kind of a broader portfolio footprint. So nothing other than that, a good opportunity and came over and they let me work remote so I was okay with that.

[Lacy Peace]

Oh, that's great.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah.

[Lacy Peace]

Or do you still work remote?

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah, there's a mix of, you know, home and office and you know, because of we produce a lot of the stuff that allows you to work at home. So there's folks from all over the country, all over the world that are on my team, that are on, that I work with. So we go in every now and again. But it's not as much a mandate, as much as how do we make this a good experience when we go in.

[Lacy Peace]

Oh for sure, for sure.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah.

[Lacy Peace]

And so when you're at a dinner party.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah.

[Lacy Peace]

What do you tell people you do?

[Ben Taylor]

That's the hardest one to do. I mean it's what is customer experience? I mean it's kind of like our earlier bit, like it's defined a thousand ways now. I am responsible also for the services portfolio at Cisco and the marketing revenue demand generation for services and so that's usually easier because it's been around longer. As a concept, when we talk about customer experience, it can be a bit more difficult to navigate. So I kind of just say, hey, I am there from a marketing sense to engage our customers in a way that makes them feel better. I mean, I know that that's a little oversimplified, but that is how I tend to introduce it and then move on at a dinner party.

[Lacy Peace]

That's great.

[Ben Taylor]

That's great.

[Lacy Peace]

One thing you mentioned to us on your prep call was you have a pretty strong opinion about content marketing. I do, and I want to hear that opinion. I want our audience to get a taste of your passion for that.

[Ben Taylor]

I don't know what's the best way to do it that isn't going to be controversial or is.

[Lacy Peace]

I would like for it to be controversial.

[Ben Taylor]

Content marketing is dead. I mean, that's the easiest way. Content marketing should be dead. It is. When we talk about content marketing and focusing on the output, it is a driver of a waste of time and a waste of effort. And most importantly, you are detached from what is meaningful to the customer. That doesn't mean that you can't land that and become engaging to the customer with your content. But that's not your primary focus. Your focus is on the thing and not the engagement. And that is. It's just a wrong approach in my mind.

[Lacy Peace]

So how did you bring that philosophy into Cisco?

[Ben Taylor]

I stopped us from doing what we did, and that was a lot of the content that we were producing at the beginning. So I'd say 80 to 90% of our production. I kind of stopped when I took over the team that I did. And you kind of have to validate that. You have folks that are doing things. They're building social media plans, they're building content, they're building email nurture journeys. There's a lot of different engagement.

[Lacy Peace]

Well, it's interwoven into a bunch of strategies. It's interwoven into a bunch of strategies.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah. Well, it is every strategy.

[Lacy Peace]

And more content, more content, more content, particularly in marketing.

[Ben Taylor]

But you see it across enablement, you see it in renewal. It's like, let's just put more out there. So for the marketing team, you know, it was a traditional marketing team. It was pre sales, it was the marketing funnel. It was content production through multiple channels and trying to hit a couple different audiences. And what I did is I took the metrics of what we were doing and I started to show how we were reaching our customer and it was okay. And I think a lot of People lean on those metrics and say, hey, we're reaching our audience, that's fine. But then I took them a step further back and I said, put yourself in their shoes. Do you care about this? And I think that was the hardest challenge is saying, do you actually care? And looking at the things that we were doing and did they resonate? Not to us, not from our company out, but from the perspective of the Personas we were trying to hit. And it didn't. It partially did. And I don't want to speak ill of the work that we did before. It was good, but it wasn't focused again on does this matter? Are we reaching them in the spots they need to be? We were just kind of populating talking points, feeds and speeds, things that we wanted to communicate without actually stopping to slow down and think, do they care about this at this point?

[Lacy Peace]

Do you think that kind of like content output hurts brands?

[Ben Taylor]

I think it can. I think again, if you're focused on it, I think success with content marketing is a happy accident. I don't think it's a process driven success approach. Right. If you're approaching it via the content and you have success, great. But you're not setting yourself up in a way that will systematically get you that success.

[Lacy Peace]

So what are you betting on now then?

[Ben Taylor]

Design, thinking, on empathy, Map on the actual experiential part of customer experience, which is do less. Reach folks where it matters. Try to put yourself in the minds of what they're thinking. And I'd say where we were spending a bulk of our time in production before, we're now spending it and trying to understand what our customers are thinking. We're going to our sellers and having conversations. We're looking at industry studies of what matters. We're talking to more folks and actually putting ourselves in their shoes, which I think every good marketing organization does and every good customer experience organization does. But I think they tend to look after the fact and not sit there before and think, okay, I have this problem. I am so. And so Bank, I am so. You know, I'm in an industry, I have this problem, I have this fear that I'm trying to address or this opportunity that I'm trying to address. What do I want to see? And that's where I want us to meet them. Not at trying to yank them and pull them to something that we've created, but where are they naturally going to go and then talk to them in a way that resonates that they care about, that helps them. Right. And that drives everything Else, content, tactics, they all become the last thing that we focus on.

[Lacy Peace]

How are you doing this with your teams? Because I do feel like so many content marketers aren't the icp. They aren't your. They aren't your buyer. Right. So how do you get into that frame of mind where you can actually create something that they would want to.

[Ben Taylor]

See get out of your silo? I mean, you're right. If you're looking for an ideal customer and you are just sitting in your echo chamber and having a conversation, you're not going to hit it. So you can do desktop research, you can see what trends are, but really it's about slowing down, imagining you're somebody talking to sellers to reinforce that and to folks that are engaging with the actual customer. Or if you have the opportunity, talk to the customer themselves. Right. And get some of that feedback that that's. People don't allot time for that. They take their 40 hours to 50 hours a week. They have production, they have checklists that they have to do. It's a really hard thing to feel like I'm going to devote 10 hours this week to sitting and thinking. It's a scary proposition for a lot of people at work. So for me, it has been about giving them the permission to do that, my team, the permission to do that. Holding us accountable to thinking about it and not just holding us accountable to the output. So if you change, I mean, think about it this way, you're an employee. Think of an employee like a customer employee experience. Right? How do I make them feel comfortable? What are they fearful of? Like, you can do the same exact sort of thing with an employee that you can with a customer. Well, if I give them the air cover and the trust that they can sit there for a little bit of time each week and think about these problems, suddenly it starts to change the whole body of work and the whole impact that we're making.

[Lacy Peace]

So how are you actually implementing this and measuring that? Because when I hear I want them to think more. I'm like, okay, cool. Does that mean I'm blocking time off in their calendar? Like, how am I measuring that they're doing that? What's the outcome look like? My analytical brain goes to, like, I want to be able to see the metrics on that.

[Ben Taylor]

I mean, there's a really. We do design thinking workshops, we do empathy mapping as part of that, and then we tie that in. I mean, we also are an agile marketing team, so we kind of run through an agile design thinking sprint. So if you're talking really the mechanics of it. We have time boxed periods at the beginning of a release cycle that are focused on design thinking and on empathy mapping. It is part of our process. It is not just a loose, like sit here and think about it. It is we are going into our next phase of what we're doing to develop against this use case. We are going to have this be phase one where we're carving out this sprint or this time to actually go into that design thinking. And that happens before we start defining our Personas, before we go into our journey mapping, before we go into actual content production. That is actually a really distinct part of our plan and how we actually implement it.

[Lacy Peace]

So how are you thinking about using design thinking in your teams and what does that implementation look like?

[Ben Taylor]

I think step one, you empathize. I mean if you look at it, there's a lot of different ways to go through this. But for a marketing team, we want to empathize first. And that's the thing I've spoken to. Ideation is what a lot of folks call as the next step. When we ideate, we're sitting there thinking what are they? And this is where the empathy map does come into play. We think what are they thinking? What are they feeling? What are they saying? What are they doing? Right. We do this kind of quadrant in Google image search. There's 25 different ways to do this. Some say what are they talking about? But what you're trying to do is get to the heart of different emotions of what people think. So that's the ideation piece of that design thinking. And then this is where this software cycle comes into play. The test and validate and prototype. I don't care what order the phase in for marketing. That can be start to create something and go message test. Right? The test may be go to a seller, which we do, and go have a conversation with a customer to see if something resonates. Right. We will actually build the empathy map, ideate on what we think that they're doing and then kind of check in with the customer to see if that's actually what they're thinking at that point. Right. Like it's making it real and then.

[Lacy Peace]

Just doing it in a silo.

[Ben Taylor]

No, marketing is more difficult, right. If you, you can do design thinking in where it's heavily used is in like product development. If you're building something, you got a new car, you do design thinking, you get focus groups, you go have conversations. Right. Marketing is trying to move the needle on perception, on what is somebody's impetus or focus on buying, you know, the propensity of buying. So for me, it, it's harder to test because you have this innate sense of, oh, we don't trust marketers, so we're not going to give real opinions. So we may test against our seller, audience and see if that would resonate because they're closer to the customer. Right. We don't always get to go test that. Another way to test, invalidate, and then come back in that cycle is in market. And this is something that marketers have been doing for ever. Right. Like you do AB testing, you do you see where your metrics are at per channel and then you come back. So I think the most important part about how we implement design thinking is that empathize stage is that empathy mapping stage so that we have an idea of, please put yourself in their shoes and try to understand what they're thinking, they're feeling, they're saying they're doing at that time.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah, I think that's the most important piece of all this because most people skip to the, let's just make something. Not like, am I actually making something that makes the most sense given my audience, my buyer, the Persona I'm targeting? So I think that's really important.

[Ben Taylor]

All they're doing is testing and validating content marketing, just tests and validates.

[Lacy Peace]

They aren't doing the empathize phase.

[Ben Taylor]

No, they're. They're skipping. They're skipping that component of it. I mean, it may go into a brief. You may do a content brief, but it's after the fact.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah.

[Ben Taylor]

Like, it's almost inverted. You know, you're, you're thinking about the, what you're landing on that.

[Lacy Peace]

You don't think we could do it the other way around, Empathize and then make the content.

[Ben Taylor]

Well, that's what I'm trying to do. Yeah, right. Like, yeah. Is I'm. You want it.

[Lacy Peace]

That's the reason why you're slowing it down and not doing 90%, like, as much content as you guys were putting out.

[Ben Taylor]

I mean, really, practically, when I am in meetings and people are like, I see a hundred different content pieces that are being produced from across marketing at our company. Right. And when you sit down and actually look at the briefs, they all kind of feel the same. Yeah, it's very diluted. It's less impactful. And that was filled in at the end. They already decided the content, the channel. They've already done some storyboarding, and then now they're briefing on what the, you know, what that Persona is feeling at that point. It doesn't make sense to me. Then you're trying to force fit something at the end of it. So again, you're being forced into bad behavior that ends up with bad results. That's the bigger challenge.

[Lacy Peace]

So you're doing the empathize days earlier. And so you're having basically you're trying to figure out what is the guest or not the guest, sorry, what is the customer most interested in, what do they want to hear, what do they want to see? And then you're fitting the piece of content to that. Right. Like where would they be? What's the platform that they're going to be on, that kind of thing.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah, the content is even further removed, frankly. So if I'm going from end to end, you know, you have your design thinking steps of which empathy mapping is one. The test and validate phase is we don't leverage that a whole lot, frankly. I mean, what it is is getting that empathy mapping piece doing our customer journey mapping. And the customer journey mapping for us is full life cycle. So all the way from top of funnel unknown, I don't know who you are. Right. All the way down through the traditional marketing funnel, into sales enablement, into the adoption, into the renewal chain, and trying to create by Persona some hypothetical routes that the customer will take against a particular use case. Once we have all of that and have an idea, what you're trying to do is glean customer behavior and customer care about at each point, Persona by Persona, what their care abouts are. Then we determine channel, then we determine the content, and then that all of the brief writes itself. At that point, you already know the Persona, you know the stage, you know what they're thinking, you know what they're trying to accomplish. Now it's where are they looking for it and trying to land it. So some of the practical things we've done are, you know, what is it a fault kit? What is the default kit of a marketer? Email, web, social. Right. Those three things are the major things you do. And you kind of just do it. You check your box, you say you do the three things. We may not need web. Like a seller may have that conversation that we've traditionally used web for before. So we've changed, we've brought our web presence way or further up funnel. Whereas we had some deep dives before because we did empathy mapping. We looked and said, okay, our customers aren't really deep diving on the web, so why are we using it for that? Just because we were checking a Box. We've shifted that part of the customer journey more towards the seller. And so we've done some efforts around seller enablement that we didn't do before.

[Rose Shocker]

Right.

[Ben Taylor]

We're a marketing team. What are we doing with seller enablement, sales enablement? What are we doing with the renewal team? And that's the harder challenge is reaching into other groups and saying, hey, we're trying to connect this all. But for the things we own as marketers, changing the elevation, changing where we're going to do that. Are we going to a third party publication as opposed to owned? Would we be better spent spending our money on programmatic ad buys or on a Fortune.com takeover for example? Right. There's different things that we can do that are informed. That all started with that design thinking.

[Lacy Peace]

Well, it sounds like you're questioning assumptions a lot. Yeah, yeah.

[Ben Taylor]

Like, well, assumptions based on. On checking the box. I don't even think there's assumptions happening in content marketing. I think you're just doing. Yeah, I mean, I really do. I think you're just doing.

[Lacy Peace]

I mean it wasn't the doing based up some initial assumptions. Now people are just copycatting.

[Ben Taylor]

I don't know. I've seen so much where people have created throwing it out in the market and haven't thought about it again and then they're on to the next project, the next brief, the next production, the next thing. There's no thinking. Right. Because there's no permission to slow down and think about it.

[Rose Shocker]

Can I ask a question about that?

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah.

[Rose Shocker]

Wouldn't you say with like a lot like high volume? Content marketing gives you more of an opportunity to illustrate your brand's personality and your values kind of broadly.

[Ben Taylor]

Like, is that just because there's more volume?

[Lacy Peace]

Sure.

[Rose Shocker]

I mean, I mean you're getting more that you're competing with all these other companies that are just, I mean you are throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. But there's so much out there all the time. So I could see the argument for, well, we need to compete and have some edge and illustrate what are our values, what are our personality.

[Ben Taylor]

If you're trying to message test or trying to brand test, maybe. But if you have a sharp idea of what your brand is going to be, all you're doing is now creating a thousand points of intersection for continuity. And the only way, if you've decided what your brand is going to be and you want it to be consistent and this goes back to old, how tight is brand control going to be? But if you have an idea of what your brand is going to be. Now you're creating a thousand points of failure, you're creating dilution, you're creating, you know, more time internal spent towards coordination on those brand components. Right. Like how is the brand marketing going to connect to down funnel marketing. And if you're sending out a thousand things now you've got these disparate teams trying to do things and you actually have increased brand risk with more volume because there's less control over the brand and that brand equity that you've got attached to it. I mean Cisco in particular has brand measurements. Yes, there's quite a few out there. Has a pretty strong brand, has a pretty controlled brand. It's not Apple level, but it's not like this disaggregated sort of thing. It's pretty controlled and pretty calm and, and it's fine. But when we go out there a thousand ways you lose that control and then you start to really risk your reputation and market by doing that because you have so much going on.

[Rose Shocker]

Do you think it's easy for legacy brands to have that kind of operating model? Like a startup might need to, you know, lean a little bit more heavily on broader content marketing that maybe is doesn't have as clear of a through line just to stay relevant?

[Ben Taylor]

I think it goes to how confident you are in the brand image that you're trying to convey. If you aren't confident, I can see some benefit to going out there and talent and seeing what kind of land. But you know, I think of another awesome company here, Canva. Canva's got a very distinct brand and they're a startup and I would say that they are fairly consistent in the way that they go to market. And I don't, if I were them I wouldn't want a thousand touch points either because again the risk is diluting. If you have that much content you have to have a very robust sense of like a brand kit and guidelines and approved agencies and the overhead becomes incredibly difficult from there. So I mean I can see the benefit. I just, if you're asking me to make a decision on it, I think the brand risk outweighs the opportunity to get feedback with that much out there in market.

[Lacy Peace]

But this process doesn't mean no risk. Like you still might take some elements, certain risks for like, I don't know, different types of campaigns or things like that. Right.

[Ben Taylor]

Doing less if you're saying to like.

[Lacy Peace]

Even if you're doing less content, you might still have, still might be taking some risks to, you know, like do a comedic drive or have like, I don't know, some sort of funny like B2B marketing thing. Like. Yes, this doesn't mean. Not like just playing it safe constantly. Right.

[Ben Taylor]

That's more to do with the brand's acceptance of risk than it is to do with the approach.

[Lacy Peace]

But you're saying the risk, the risk of dilution is much stronger whenever you're doing well.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah, but it's harder to measure and it's harder for people to understand. Right? Like, like what, what matters in marketing. Okay, Contribution to pipeline and bookings essentially, at the end of the day, that's what the business leaders care about in the company is how much are you contributing to revenue essentially. And the real risk for us internally by doing less is not being able, not feeling like we're able to articulate that we're contributing as much to pipeline and bookings. Whereas the reality is, the dilution I'm talking about is there is a idea among marketers that doing more equates to more bookings and pipeline, yet it's not backed by numbers. Usually if you look at actually what impact is more volume, it's really hard. More volume doesn't equal more bookings, more pipeline. And so for me it's saying, okay, let's still measure pipeline, let's still measure bookings, let's still look at those things. But the strategy of how we implement it is way different than the volume equals that yield.

[Lacy Peace]

Say goodbye to chatbots and say hello to the first AI agent. Agentforce. First service makes self service an actual joy with his conversational language anytime on any channel. To learn more, visit salesforce.com agentforce how do you get leadership buy in on something like this? Because it does feel like it's a pretty big shift. You know, we work with some pretty large B2B companies that produce lots of content and, and I don't know that all of them would be able to accept that less is more.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah, it's easier for a company like us that have a longer sales cycle. It's not just, you know, a B2C style floor pop. You know, you've gone out with a programmatic campaign. You get a click, you get a purchase, right? There are arguments to be made for volume and placement. Having yield there for longer sales cycles with complicated buying patterns. The way that I've done that is just communicated the reality. Like going back to that empathy is sitting there and asking leaders the question, saying, okay, we've put out this, this and that and we have, you know, 15 different things activated on each of those three threads. Let me show them to you. Do these resonate with you? Do you think they resonate with our customers? And you're kind of putting your own work out there and challenging it for your leaders? And the responses I've got is okay, not really. And then you bring them along and say, I'm not trying to do less from an impact standpoint, I'm trying to reach them with higher quality engagements where they're at. And that tends to change the mind of leaders because you're focused on. You're still focused on impact. You're still focused on bookings and pipeline and trying to move the needle for the business, but you're just articulating a different vision for how to do that. I think, I don't think a whole lot of leaders have a very. Especially non marketing leaders don't have this baked notion that more equals more. I think that's more marketing thing than a business leader thing. So if your entire existence as marketer is precipitated on doing more equals more and that's your existence and that's your mindset, you're going to fail in that leadership move. But if you truly believe that engaging with higher quality content is going to improve that customer experience, is going to improve that velocity of a customer moving along, then you can easily convince somebody. I mean, it's no different than marketing. You're just marketing to the business leaders in that case.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah. So more of the right content, not just more content.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah. I mean that's the whole. We're going back to customer experience. That's the whole idea of it. Right? Relevancy, relevancy, empathy, impact. I mean those are the things that matter. And stop thinking about the things, think about the why. Think about the feeling that people get when they engage with you and it will drive a lot better behavior for what folks are doing. From a marketing sense.

[Lacy Peace]

I want to switch gears a little bit if you're ready to talk a little bit about AI.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah.

[Lacy Peace]

Because I think fun this will be. It's kind of a conflict. Right. We talked a lot about empathy.

[Ben Taylor]

Is it a big topic these days or AI? I didn't know.

[Lacy Peace]

Do we bring it up on like literally every single conversation we've had in the last six months? Yeah, probably.

[Ben Taylor]

I think we talk about it daily for that.

[Lacy Peace]

Oh my goodness. Yeah. Well, what I think is interesting is you've talked a lot about empathizing and so many people I've heard speak recently are talking about creating this head and heart combo. For AI, where you're actually trying to teach AI to empathize, you're trying to teach it like you would teach an employee. What are your thoughts on that? Just out the gate.

[Ben Taylor]

I think empathy needs to be part of AI, but I don't believe that AI can truly empathize. So the real risk there is, I don't want people know they're talking to AI. If you have a chatbot, for example, they know you're talking to a chatbot. So empathy is not in language to me as much for AI as it is getting closer to understanding the problem that somebody has. I don't care if you articulate that in a very kind of austere, AI driven way that you're very clear. This is a generated response. Empathy is a layer below that veneer of conversation. It is engaging and having this interaction know and identify my problem. And that to me is empathetic by action, not by language. That's way more important. So if you're focusing on how you're building out AI, if you've got, you know, limited resources and you're building a chatbot, you're building something for responsiveness or agentic, that is trying to help somebody for whatever the problem is. And you're focusing engineering resources and time towards the interaction layer. The way it speaks, the way it talks, the way it looks. I think that's less important than how accurate is the response that it's giving, no matter how it's communicated. And people will think of that as an engineering problem and they won't think about it from the empathetic layer. But I mean, what is. You're not from the south, right? Not originally, no. So what is the old phrase? Bless her heart, right? Like an insult with bless her heart. That's kind of what AI is like. If you have this like, nice veneer, but it's not relevant. It's like, okay, well for what reason? What purpose is that? You know, like, okay, you've said it to me nicely, but you have no idea what I'm talking about. So you lose trust, you lose that connection. I'd rather have my time focused with chatbot agentic sort of development being on getting closer to what somebody cares about. It's no different than what we do in marketing right now.

[Lacy Peace]

That's great. Do you use GPT or Claude, what's your preferred.

[Ben Taylor]

I don't tend to use any of them.

[Lacy Peace]

What?

[Ben Taylor]

I don't.

[Lacy Peace]

Oh, my goodness.

[Ben Taylor]

And it's not for. I am an early adopter. I'm a geek I love it. I find right now, especially in marketing, look, AI has purpose in heavy telemetry, a lot of data sort of distillation. I think it's incredibly useful at that. It has, it's, it's there for marketing especially. We do a lot of top of funnel kind of thought leadership marketing. You're just spending more time correcting what the output is. And then, you know, I actually ran an exercise yesterday with GPT where I went to my team and I got ChatGPT to basically give me three different positions on the same topic with, with veracity, with like a lot of fierce language. And I'm like, so what, what is it doing right now? It's, it's articulating your thoughts in a different way and it can be challenge and kind of create as a thesaurus, as a language kind of differentiator or a tone changer. It can have some value. But for that ideation phase, I don't trust it right now to give me something that truly stays empathetic to what people are trying to do.

[Lacy Peace]

It feels like it mirrors whatever you do. The interview.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah, well, it mirrors the data. Right, okay. Pre AI, I'm at a big tech company. You go out there, we're all using the same terms in the same language all the time. It's just this muted noise. Right, okay. Rootless prioritization. I don't know all these phrases that you hear from big tech companies all the time. That's the fear with AI using it for ideation. Okay. Is somebody else at the other company using the same sort of model, trained on the same information that's bringing you the same sort of language. So there's a level of human engagement, especially on copywriting, when you're doing things at the top end of the funnel that have short, pithy commentary that if you're relying on AI, you're going to lose some of that individuality.

[Lacy Peace]

My husband's working on a patent right now and we're talking to our lawyer about this and he was saying, I was asking like, is there a patent tool, an AI patent chat tool we could use to just help write the patent for us so we don't have to pay you, you know, how much money to do this for us? And that's, that was his problem is it's basically going to feed in all the same language of existing patents. And if everyone is using the same patent AI tool, then we're all going to have the same patent language being used.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah. And then the differentiator is going to be the one who's not using it? Yes. I mean, this isn't to say that AI doesn't have value in marketing and doesn't have. I think it can and I think it does in certain ways. Deployed in certain ways. AI has more value in a lot of, you know, I think heavy, and I said this before, heavy telemetry, heavy data set distillation, understanding, especially when it's proprietary or first party data that you're not sharing outbound, that you want to kind of get to something faster. I think it's an accelerant for some of those problems that are heavy analysis problems. I don't think it is. At the point where you're engaging human to human and humans make decisions emotionally. I don't care if they have a veneer of rationality and logic to it. We make decisions based on storytelling and narrative. And I mean the Gen Z term Vibes feels. That's what it is.

[Lacy Peace]

I just put a post on LinkedIn this morning about Vibe coding. So I don't know what it is. Everything is Vibe now.

[Ben Taylor]

Well, but it's vibe and that's all it is. Vibe is this generation's language for engaging on emotion. Right? Like how does it look and feel? People know that inherently. So why are we pretending that we don't need to address that, particularly in marketing and how we engage? So I don't know. I'd rather have three things out there that kind of break the monotony than a hundred things that reinforce the monotony. So that's a huge focus for what we do.

[Lacy Peace]

What type of content are you betting on then? So whenever you're talking about, like when you're in this design thinking phase, you guys are kind of coming up with different things you want to build or do. What are you leaning into right now that you think is working?

[Ben Taylor]

Well, we don't focus on the content at all. In the empty mapping and the design thinking that all actually kind of sorts it out. So the content is actually driven by the channel and where they're at. So if we know that they are, I'll give you an example. We have a technical decision maker who is feeling concerned about implementing an AI use case. Right? Maybe they're going to Reddit to look up things or a practitioner, maybe they're going to Reddit to figure things out. And if we've determined that our goal is then to get in front of the individual where they're at. So if it's Reddit, is it a post, is it social listening, is it an AD in Reddit, Is it something about seeing where folks there are using as sources of trust and trying to influence that? It can drive a whole lot of different behavior and activations. It could be an analyst briefing that we do that then trickles down into that engagement. It could be series of short content, but it just depends on what that Persona is seeking at that point that drives that engagement. So the design thinking is less around the content ideation and more about the ideation of what the thought process is of the customer at that moment. So the content, I really mean this. If you land how people feel, break them down by the stages their concerns, do that empathy mapping along each of those stages, the content, the channel they write themselves. So when you ask big bets, I hate that I don't have a clear answer, but it really depends on where that's at. It's almost more precise. It's a scalpel instead of a scattershot to try to hit everything. And that scalpel can look a thousand different ways. So we have to be a very flexible team and we've got great agencies and internal teams that we work with to kind of deploy things quickly.

[Lacy Peace]

I wanted to ask about that because it does feel like this in a week, two weeks, six months, like all these things are shifting and changing. So the plans that you're making, how often are you guys reevaluating? Maybe the type of content you're making, what platforms you're targeting, or even that process that you described to me of this person has this problem and then they want to solve it this way, how often are you guys redoing that and refreshing that?

[Ben Taylor]

Every two to three months, pretty much. It's almost like gorilla style. I mean, it's agile, it's agile marketing. It's guerrilla style marketing in the sense that if we're spending six months getting something to market, it's going to be irrelevant by the time it goes into market for sure. I mean, that is a constant challenge that we've got. So, you know, if we do the work up front to be more relevant and then we're able to turn quickly on something imprecise, an MVP 90% of the way, not a precise content that's gone through, piece of content that's gone through 25 approval layers and 84 messaging docs, Docker Visions, and then finally lands on it, you know, v7, v3, final PDF. Right. Whatever it is. I mean, you're laughing because we've all lived that file. I've got three of them on my desktop right now. Right like changing that behavior and saying, okay, legal clear, brand clear, let's not go throw things out that are going to get us in trouble. But legal clear, brand clear, a message out in market that has had some empathetic mapping to it and is kind of relevant is way better if it's sitting there for three months than something that goes out four months later and everything's changed. You're playing constant catch up. So for us that's where the Agile comes to play. We deal with our marketing in a kind of similar to how agile product management teams do it. We have a product and our product is our journey that's aligned to a particular use case. And our releases, we call them waves, but there are release waves and that wave will have elements of design thinking, elements of content, and then content production, and then publish. So we're not shipping these off to different teams. It is a controlled release of a product and we'll look at the existing touchpoint strategy or the existing customer journey, we'll analyze what's changed and then quickly move to what adjustments do we need to make based on that revised design thinking or empathy mapping. Has a sentiment changed in the market and if it has, what are the adjustments we need to make at those points along the journey? And that is a much quicker cycle than doing a six month plan where I've got these major topics and you go do the strategy work, you go do the content mix work, you go do the production and then we're six to eight months later essentially.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah.

[Ben Taylor]

If not longer or you've abandoned it, which happens a lot. Like you go through a lot, you go through strategy, go through the ideation phase, you start to plan, you start to build and then it's no longer relevant. And then what do we go back to? If you're content marketing, you now feel that your entire value is tied towards producing something, you spent four and a half months building something, it's no longer relevant. What do you think they're going to do?

[Lacy Peace]

What do they do?

[Ben Taylor]

They're going to publish it. Oh yeah, they're going to publish it. They spent four and a half months doing it. They're a content marketing focused team. The last thing you can I've seen.

[Lacy Peace]

Where they don't publish it. But then those people, like, I feel like their energy slowly like deteriorates, like the amount of care that they have in their company just goes downhill.

[Ben Taylor]

Well, that's that. See that's that hidden risk is attrition and burnout and contribution. And for folks that view their work contribution as deep value drivers. Personally, if you've now spent four months on something and then you're just not going to ship it, that's a terrible thing to go through. It's incredibly hard to spend that time, especially creative work.

[Lacy Peace]

I mean, creatives get so tied energetically to that. So yeah, yeah.

[Ben Taylor]

So what are you going to do? Put it on. We've had situations where folks have completed stuff and it's like, what are you going to do? Put it on a resource page as link number 17. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. So changing the whole ethos away from the content is the lead to the engagement is the lead changes the whole way that the team perceives what they're doing and how they measure their success on that day to day work that they do.

[Lacy Peace]

Do you think your team is liking this process more than maybe what was in place before you took over?

[Ben Taylor]

I don't know. Does the team ever give honest feedback? No. I love my team and I think that they are happier for it. I'll tell you. When you shift away from content on specific offer level stuff and you focus more on engaging a customer against their use case or their outcome or their problem, the other benefit is that changes less frequently. How you may like solve for it changes more rapidly than the problem itself changes. So if you talk to somebody about solving their problem, it has a longer shelf life in the first place. So on top of meeting somebody at their emotional needs from a customer experience basis, meeting somebody at their emotional needs and focusing on how they feel and that driving the content means that you have longer shelf life for relevancy and you don't have this quick change all the time. That happens whenever you're focused on a ton of stuff and moving on. You spend more time thinking about it. It's more relevant if there's a slight change, it's still more relevant than if you just had thrown out 100 other pieces before that. So just overall, there's less churn, there's less change. Right. You're going faster, there's less change. You're not as burnt out because you're not doing as much check the box content. You're still working, you're not working, you're spending more time caring about people and that is, I don't know, for most people, that's more fulfilling than spending time doing a revision on something that may never see light a day.

[Lacy Peace]

Talk to me about where this passion for empathy comes from.

[Ben Taylor]

I don't know. I think I'm happier at work and happier in life when I'm doing things that make people feel better or helping solve problems. So for me, it wasn't like a hyper tactical decision to change because that's what the market is saying to do. It was because, well, if I'm going to spend 40 hours a week doing things, I'd rather do 40 hours a week trying to help folks. Yeah, I mean, I'm not. We're not curing cancer, but we're solving problems that cause people to feel fear. That feels good. I mean, for me, that feels good. So I think helping is a natural tendency for me. I think if you can lean into that and find success and impact that way, it just makes everything a little bit easier. Work, personal, all parts of life.

[Lacy Peace]

When you're thinking about team building now, I'm sure you've gone through a lot of hiring processes and all that in the last couple years and I'm sure that things have been changing a lot with what you're looking for now that AI is becoming more of a thing, or maybe it hasn't. So what are you looking for? Whenever you're looking at crafting a team, especially if you're bringing on new folks.

[Ben Taylor]

It'S a broken record, right? I lean into fit and empathy and drive. Vibe. I lean into vibe. I mean pedigree, background, experience, they all matter. They do. But you can teach skills, you can teach mechanisms. I mean, frankly, that what matters in marketing in particular and across the chain of customer experience changes frequently. So really, what good is discrete experience on things when it's going to change anyway? So what's more important than what I found to be a greater driver of success is that how do they fit with the team? What do they think about? And so when I interview them, I give them challenges on how do you feel about this? How do you think about this? What do you think a customer would think about this? Because I'm more interested in their think and how they work through thinking in somebody else's shoes than I am about what they think the right answer is. Like if somebody has two hours to devote towards something in advance of an interview, I'd rather them not go to Gartner and Forrester and other groups and IDC and look up the, the details. We can do that. I'd rather them try to position themselves in that customer or whoever it is in this prompt that I'm giving them shoes because we do projects sometimes and think about what they're thinking about. If somebody can demonstrate to me that they're willing and able to think beyond Their own kind of interpretation of things. That's usually a really strong indicator of success for me.

[Lacy Peace]

That's awesome.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah.

[Rose Shocker]

Is there an example of a question or a pain point that you would ask somebody in an interview, like, how do you feel about this? Or do you give them a customer pain point and ask them to kind of illustrate it for you?

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah. I mean, a good example would be, we'll take a customer problem. I mean, we still have to be practical in our questions. Right. We're a technology company, so if you've got a data center that is older technology, it's not set up for AI use cases, and that's one of the big use cases we're driving right now. I would ask an interviewee, hey, how would you think about engaging a customer to address and kind of move the needle on this problem? And I would give them some constraints. I'd say break it down by who's involved, what they're thinking, and what you would do at that point. And usually I'd ask them for five to 10 minutes of their thinking on it. So what I want to do is not see, like, frankly, hey, I'd go do this. I mean, look, I'm not going to kick somebody out of the room because they lead with content, but if they lead with content, then I know they're thinking that way. So then the challenge I've got as a leader is, okay, I have to kind of disabuse them of this idea of content being the lead. That doesn't mean that they're not able to do it. It's just that's how they've been trained to think about these things, not how I'm going to engage. At what point. We do the same thing with agencies. When I go to creative agencies, I challenge them with the same sort of use case and problem that I do. Somebody that I'm interviewing, I say, how would you guys approach this? And I will tell you that 95. I keep using percentages. These are not real. There's no footnote on these percentages. But of agencies I've engaged with, 95% will come back with a menu of content to go that they can help you build. And like, well, we'll do this and we'll do this, and we'll do this and we'll do this. Like, Here are the 24 tactics and the pieces of content we're going to go do. And I'm like, you didn't give thought to the actual problem of what folks are thinking about at this point. And you Know, I'm less. What's the right word? I'm less accepting of an agency coming back that way because I'm employing them to for sure have an output.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah. Whereas if you don't want to teach them something.

[Ben Taylor]

No. And actually the agency selection I've done has been heavily leaning on that piece, which is I don't want to spend 20 hours of my week coaching the agency to how we think about the problem. I'd rather meet. And there are agencies out there that do this in a way that is more empathetic and think about the problem. And so that just is simpler for me. I don't have to spend that time bringing them on board. A person that I'm interviewing on the team is a different story because there's a whole lot more that goes into that. It is a soft science kind of art on hiring people. There are some things you can do to kind of weed folks out. But I've had success with folks that I didn't think would be the great fit and I've had terrible times with folks that I thought would be a great fit. So it's not. It is an imprecise science on bringing folks on board. Caring about them and helping them kind of come along is an easier prospect for an employee than it is for, you know, an agency that you're engaging. Sorry, I know you asked that question, but no.

[Rose Shocker]

Yeah, that. Do you find that that is commonly throwing people off? Is it often that it's throwing a candidate off? Kind of. And they come in kind of a needing to unlearn some more action oriented mindset.

[Ben Taylor]

Put yourself in their shoes. If I said I would, I mean, I'm also not like, this is not a test. Right. I'd go back and say, hey, think human. Like I'm going to help them in that prompt. I don't want them to have this native answer. Like, I think any person in any room, with rare exception, can be told to think about how it makes you feel and how it would make them feel. And they're able to do that. It's just getting them to do that and having them actually take the time to think. No different than my team. Carve them out. Give them time to think about it, make it part of the process, make it the first part of that first sprint in that cycle of that release that we're doing towards devoting, whatever you want to call it, timeboxing, giving them space to do that is no different for an interviewee or an agency or somebody that works for me. You've got to devote the time to build it into how you're doing, going about that day to day. Yeah.

[Rose Shocker]

Would you say that's one of the biggest challenges in your role, like having to help people unlearn things?

[Ben Taylor]

No, I think people want to. That's actually one of the easier things. Giving them permission and saying think about how people feel and care about things is such a natural human thing.

[Rose Shocker]

It's innate.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah. They want to do it. So that's not the problem. It's the leadership question. It's the hey, this is going to yield results. Because I am attached to numbers and numbers equals, output equals. It's getting that idea away from leadership and getting the space. So it's usually managing upward. For me, frankly, that's more difficult. It's not as much the folks that are actually, I'm asking to go do the work and think about these things. That way they're willing and able to do it. Okay. I mean, let's give a real example. What's easier to do? Go tell me how you think that person is feeling and help me validate it and go talk to them. Or give me a very needle moving piece of content that's going to drive revenue on this thing, which is a question that gets asked. It's like, I don't. I mean, I kind of know, but let's start to think about it. And it's so much easier to sit and think about how people feel and think about things instead.

[Lacy Peace]

We were talking to a woman recently who said that emotions belong in the boardroom. And I'm wondering how you might feel about that. And we work in creative land, so we are constantly telling stories and thinking about emotions. But I do wonder for these larger companies if that's something that you have to kind of reset and refresh them and remind them on that. Like, no, these are people that we're selling to and we have to think about that and encourage them to engage with their emotional centers.

[Ben Taylor]

I think you need to back it with logic because most people think that. I mean, everybody thinks they make logical, rational decisions, particularly in a C suite in a boardroom, when what you have to do is articulate, hey, in reality, we make emotional decisions in. By addressing the emotional and empathetic needs of folks, we are having that impact. So it's not so much as saying, hey, be emotional in these places as it is, if we ignore it, we're missing the primary opportunity to actually move it forward and showing them, look, this is not a new concept. I was in school and we were reviewing case studies, talking about engaging with folks in a, in an emotional way. It's just people kind of build this idea that emotions cannot be emotions and empathy cannot be attached towards progress. And it's just not founded on anything. There's no foundation for that. This Vulcan style, Star Trek, this Vulcan style appeal towards no emotion. Being the highest end of corporate success is a, is one of the biggest con jobs of corporate environment over the last 25 years. And I think we're seeing some of this rotation back towards, well, until recently, but some of this rotation back towards empathy. So yeah, for the boardroom, for the C suite, I would contextualize empathy in the way that it can create impact for the company. And then I would defend with passion why that is. Because it's not just about it having good impact. It's an opportunity cost thing. This is going to be better than going after old school kind of set methods of approaching. And I'm comparing those two and I'm putting my bets on the empathetic less volume approach. Not less engaged because I think it's more engaged, but the less volume approach to it.

[Lacy Peace]

So what metrics are you looking at then? Because you just talked about when you're in the boardroom, I need to have a little bit of logic, I need to build back up these claims. What are you looking at and what have you thrown out the window? You're like, actually don't care about that metric that maybe other people rely on too significantly.

[Ben Taylor]

We can't throw anything out because it's still a big company and people want to see certain things. So you've got to have it. But I've deprioritized, I think is the best way to frame it. I've deprioritized consumption metrics so page views, opens, click rate, et cetera. We do it for AB testing, we do it for resonance. Like, is this message resonating? We'll still look at that, but we've simplified at least my team scorecard to be more about pipeline and bookings and logic on what that sales cycle looks like and kind of just focus on that, on that component. The other challenge we've got with, I mean, you asked a question earlier about what are the. When do you kind of get into the tactics and content mix that you're going after? Well, because we kind of move fast, that can be wildly different, quarter to quarter. So just the sheer operations of measuring something that is like, okay, this quarter, we're going to do a high touch roundtable and invite certain accounts to an engagement to have a conversation. And next quarter we're going to do Reddit programmatic ads and that changes so frequently that there's no set standard of measurement on. That's another reason we've deprioritized this because I don't want the KPIs to dictate the actions that we're taking because then.

[Lacy Peace]

You just want to keep increasing that quarter over quarter.

[Ben Taylor]

If your apparatus for reporting is based on page views and email opens and click Rate or click through rate and shares and likes and the like, you are informing the behavior. So you have to be very careful with what you're measuring that you are not kind of forcing the behavior. No different than creating a I mean I have this argument a lot with leadership where we look at metrics on customer stories and the metric I don't want to be the number of customer stories, some sort of engagement, maybe some sort of. That's a tough one to measure. Customer stories are measured, but there are some consumption metrics I'd rather look at engagement or maybe go out and message test and see if you've got some sort of response that you can get from message testing. But stay away from the production numbers because it drives that behavior 100%.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah. I'm wondering if you'd be willing to give sort of a concrete example of like you've walked us through a little bit here of thinking through, you know, so and so is going to engage in this way that would be on Reddit. Customer stories are relevant in this way. I think just like a concrete story of like okay, we were doing it this way or maybe you don't want to talk about like we were doing it a certain way. But if you could sort of paint the picture of like this is something that we've implemented recently.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah. I think the one that is most pertinent for me is we are a services organization that's kind of our revenue driver is the services component. So professional support services for what we do. And when I took over the team, we were focused on our explicit offers and kind of going to market with a lot of content around those offers, which is fine. It's a great approach. It's kind of that content marketing approach. There's a. And when I sat down with the team and said, hey, is who is the Persona we're going after? Is this even addressing their problem? What are we talking about? That's where I started. Yes. Question Earlier I started to break down a challenge what we were doing to show impact. We had no real measurement on pipeline and bookings. We were having kind of minimal impact on pipeline and bookings, yet we were putting out a lot of content offers, explicit. So I actually went through. It was like a 6 to 12 month kind of. And this goes back to the retraining question and honestly it goes back to the change of behavior question. But we went through the 6 to 12 month shut it down. Is there an impact change? There wasn't a whole lot of impact change to the.

[Lacy Peace]

So you just stopped it for six months to see what would happen?

[Ben Taylor]

Well, I have 40 hours a week from somebody, so am I going to have them keep the lights on, on something or am I going to commit to a change? We committed to the change that led to shutting it down. The trickle. Some of the audience, some of the engagement, that's fine. But we weren't putting any new effort towards it and we immediately shifted towards this model that I've been talking about, the sympathy mapping, engaging with the customer journey to see where they're at. What that led to is now what we've got today, which is about 18 months later, which is this approach towards. We have customer journeys, we have reached into sales enablement and created content that lands for a purpose at a point towards a Persona with impact because that's what we think they need at that point because we did the mapping and so we've got email nurture again, we have web again, we have organic social again. But the tone, the tenor, what we've talked about has completely changed. It is not just this offer centric feed speed. I've got my columns, we've done it, we've put it out there and we are measuring pipeline and bookings and I've seen growth from that because we're more relevant. Right. Like the whole thing has lined up and I won't give numbers, but we have seen 5x6x growth and what our impact is from there and that is based on starting with the do they care what matters? Are we talking in that right way? And so that was really scary for the team. Honestly, that was really scary for the team because they had.

[Lacy Peace]

Was it scary for you?

[Ben Taylor]

I don't know. I'm kind of a risk taker so I mean I have to be mindful for my team and that's where I come in with my own empathy for my team and say, guys, we're covered. I believe in this, I'm committing to this. I will top cover, I will talk to leadership about what our changes are going to be. But this is the Right thing to do and we need to engage this way. And so that gave them a little bit of sense of confidence that if we're not, I mean there was a period for three or four months where we had nothing new going up, like nothing new going up. And that's a whole step change in behavior on how we engaged. And now I think we are just moving wave after wave, right. Of what we're doing from a production sense and not production of content, but production of these releases that are outcome aligned, empathetic adjustments to our customer journeys that are driving engagement for the business and finding that impact.

[Lacy Peace]

What I love about all this is you've sort of shared your philosophy and the step by step process you guys are implementing, but you also have results. It's not just like theoretically this would work, but you've seen the results, you've reported it to leadership, you've got buy in from your team. It's really cool. One thing you did share throughout all of this as well is that you've been working cross teams. Right. So sales enablement and marketing and sales like everyone coming together. What has that looked like? Because that's not easy. And I feel like there's been this marketing sales clash for as long as time goes on. So what was that process like getting buy in from all those different teams?

[Ben Taylor]

Well, think about what we're doing now. We're engaging more on what the customer cares about. We're going to sales and asking them their opinion more. I mean, to be brutally honest with you, it's not just saying what they need. If I'm looking at the customer journey, full lifecycle like I mentioned before, from full marketing, funnel into that sales engagement instead of just pretending that we know and handing off the baton to sales. And here's the message. How does what we are doing tie directly into the handoff and then the engagement that sales is having. We are helping craft, sometimes over the top, sometimes supplemental, sometimes all of it. Sales enablement, collateral for these use cases, these journeys that we've built. And sales loves that. Right. I'm not trying to go at them with 17 different things and content and then give them this digest that says here's the 400 things that we've put out, here's the noise, good luck, like what are you going to find that's relevant for your customer? I'm saying we did seven things around this topic. We've continued and talked to you about what the handoff would look like from that piece. So it really creates less friction in my mind with the other bodies now within the organization. The real challenge is walking that line. Because I don't own sales enablement, I don't own own our customer success motion and our adoption motion. I don't own our renewal motion and engagement from that side. I don't own the other product marketing teams and the other groups within Cisco that are doing traditional marketing. We have to always kind of merge that together. And so there are challenges in saying we are coming in to connect, help map what this experience looks like, give our thought on why we think that it should go a certain way, work with the other groups and see what they're doing to find success. And it's about over the top additive adjustments or additive components, content enablement decks, whatever it may be that that team needs. And if you go to another team like sales enablement, they know their audience better than anybody else, they know their sellers better than anybody else. So they know what they are looking for. So if I come to them and say, here's what we've built aligned to what the customer actually cares about, what do you guys have going on for this topic? What can we provide that carries through the message that we've tried to establish and the value that we've tried to build in the upfront to then augment and change? So that's where we come in. And we're not trying to change their whole process. We're trying to say, can we inform? We've done a lot of work, we have expertise, we have message testing, we have product proximity. So we have roadmap proximity to the types of things that we're putting out into market. How do we help you with all this work we've done, tie our expertise to your expertise and create one or two things that creates momentum and then.

[Lacy Peace]

We measure that so you're not dictating to them. Here's our things. Use them. Why aren't you using them? You're coming in like I'm supporting you here. I am trying to support what you guys are already doing. And here's some of the information we have that might help support the goals you guys have. So this empathy layer coming in internally as well?

[Ben Taylor]

Yes. Every single interaction, being empathetic. And I think this is one point I did want to hit on around the theme of customer experience. It has to be the full customer lifecycle. How do you have a customer experience and not look at the entire lifecycle, including before they've reached the point of sales people think about it from sales forward, you know, from, from close of deal forward, A lot of time. And that's just, it's a complete mess. The experience starts well before that. Yeah, they have preconceived notions of your brand. They've had some experiences. They have folks that, you know, are seeing a Super bowl ad or seeing, you know, out of home. We have a big ad in Heathrow, T5 and Heathrow and you see that, like, there's exposure that happens to our brand. What we're trying to articulate is our value to you. And how in the world are you going to build a customer experience practice that is not a combination of marketing, sales, sales enablement, success, renewal, adoption and renewal. You have to connect those so that on its surface is not a hard thing for people to consume and say, oh, that makes sense. They'll usually say it makes sense. The harder thing is then, what does that relationship look like? And to your point, not dictating, coming in and saying, I have some expertise and knowledge in this area, you have expertise and knowledge in that area. How do we start to merge those things together?

[Lacy Peace]

It's so funny to me though that the idea that the experience doesn't start when they first see the logo. Like, how is that news? Because I mean, like in our personal interactions, it's like, first moment I meet you, I've got like 10 seconds for you to decide whether or not you like me. Like, there's a reputation built, right?

[Ben Taylor]

Yep.

[Lacy Peace]

It's the same thing with a company. So it happens the moment that they see your logo for the first time, wherever that might be. So it's just so funny every time I hear that's like from sales onward. No, the experience started that moment.

[Ben Taylor]

I think marketing is the most disconnected piece from the customer experience right now. And look, I'll pick on marketers instead of the other side of the house. Right. If you go to a marketer and ask them, why does sales enablement exist, they'll give you kind of a top level answer of like, well, they enable sales, they help them sell. I mean, that's kind of the answer, right? They help themselves.

[Lacy Peace]

Good definition.

[Ben Taylor]

But have they ever spent time and sat down and thought about what they're trying to do? Well, why do sellers care? Well, they're trying to feed their families like everybody else, they're trying to make more money, they're trying to be successful in their jobs. So again, forcing my team as much to box timeout, to think about what the other teams are doing means they're going to show up in a sales enablement meeting, in a adoption meeting, in A success meeting, having some sense of what they're trying to accomplish and being able to empathize with that group makes the engagement that much simple. It's no different. We're asking people to be human. We're asking them to be human consistently through that experience. So it needs to go both ways. Post sales needs to reach in marketing. Marketing needs to reach into the post sales side and just make incremental progress. Especially the bigger the company, the slower the progress. That's fine. But incremental progress is the name of.

[Lacy Peace]

The game and from a customer perspective, it is really awkward and weird whenever you have this great experience in one spot of the company and then it doesn't carry through. Like sales was great, but now customer success sucks. Like why can't we carry through this message the entire way?

[Ben Taylor]

Let's go even more surface level. You don't always have treatment that the same creative treatment that's the same. You've got one look at top of funnel and thought leadership that's like this grandiose sort of vision. You've got some, you know, cookie cutter BDM deck or at a glance that that's great, but has a certain format and style to it. Suddenly you've got this random PowerPoint deck and a sales enablement. You have this disjointed kind of step by step experience. And I'm not talking about our. We do a decent job because we have tight brand controls. But again, that goes back to the point of if you have a thousand things going out there, you run brand risk because you have a thousand different ways things are. I have seen so many cobbled together things across that life cycle that it's like if we just spend a little time getting our steps together, that customer experience you're talking about is going to be so much better, even if it just feels the same. The talking points may be five words different or 10 words different, depending on who's talking, or slightly different. But if you talk to anybody at our company and you know you're talking to somebody at our company and you're buying into what it is that we're trying to pitch you from both a relational relationship standpoint and, and a value standpoint and a product standpoint, that's just less. You have to kind of have to overcome, I think.

[Lacy Peace]

Do you read fantasy?

[Ben Taylor]

I do.

[Lacy Peace]

Okay, so I think about it like a fantasy author. Brandon Sanderson likes to talk about you like Brandon Sanderson. Okay. He does fantastic like hours long lectures on YouTube that you should definitely check out if you haven't seen them. They're for free on YouTube. But he talks about how you should be able to read a character's voice without seeing who's talking. And you would know exactly who's talking, because the tone, the way they talk, the things they talk about are so distinct. And I think about that with brand is that no matter who's speaking at the company, it should be such a distinct voice that I can tell that it's Cisco.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah, Tone of voice, creative treatment, colors, type font, where you're positioning things, what your lockups look like, all those. But tone of voice is one that probably falls by the wayside more than it should. And you're absolutely spot on. Right. I mean, I always look to Apple because they have such a strong brand, but for sure, you know when you see Apple, I kind of know when I see IBM because I'm a little older, so I see IBM and I see the typeface and I'm like, oh, it's IBM. I know what they're doing. And there's these things that. And then it lets you reinforce the brand. It lets you reinforce. And it's not even reinforcing the brand. What is your brand? It is who you as a company are innately perceived. And that means you're not having to overcome that perception. So if you've got a strong brand that carries trust or carries empathy or. Look at Southwest for 30 years, they're kind of like changing that now. But look at Southwest for 30, 40 years. They were the heart brand and the love brand. Right. You knew them and that was implicit. You didn't have to figure out who they were. You knew who they were. So that's less work you're having to do. My whole job is about not creating complexity where there doesn't need to be complexity, not creating a gap where there doesn't need to be a gap of understanding. Like, let's meet people, let's reinforce it, let's be consistent, and let's talk to them about what they care about. Again, none of these are like novel, crazy concepts. It's just slow down and think about it day to day.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah, slow down to speed up. As Jim Collins would say.

[Ben Taylor]

That one kills me. I use that with my team. Sometimes I think they roll their eyes at me when I say that, but it's true. Like, if you don't have. I get this a lot. We don't have time to plan. It's the same thing. It's like, okay, so you're just going to like, meander aimlessly yeah, exactly. So, yeah, you're busy, but busy at what? Right. Like spend a little time thinking about how the three hours you're devoting on the upfront is going to impact the long term overall benefit of that.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah, well. And as you explained, that energy put in up front basically negates the energy you have to put in at the end because it's already kind of outlined exactly what you need to do, what actions you need to take.

[Ben Taylor]

What's the old cycle? The old, the kid deferred. I don't know where you put like you can have one lollipop four year old now or you can have like five of them.

[Lacy Peace]

It's a marshmallow test.

[Ben Taylor]

Is it marshmallow? Yeah, yeah.

[Lacy Peace]

So they took a bunch of kids and they put a marshmallow in front of them and they're like, you can have this one now or if you wait however long, you can have two.

[Ben Taylor]

Well, we as adults are not any better at it. And it's just in a different context. It's like, okay, you can go put out your blog now or we can spend three hours and then you have, you know, maybe it's not a blog, it's two and a half other things, but you had to slow down to do it. It's the same concept.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah.

[Ben Taylor]

And, and that's the buy in is like you're going to yield more over the long run, whether that's impact or happiness or whatever it is, by just slowing down and thinking about it and thinking truly what is going to have impact? What do people care about? I wish that customer experience hasn't become so defined as it is. It is this. TSIA is an organization. It is this, like I said at the beginning, loyalty program thing that has now over rotated into very specific contact center and chatbots and wait times and loyalty cards and all that. And I'm like, it has lost its meaning. It has become so defined in certain senses that it has started to lose its meaning. And so for me as a marketer, which traditionally people don't fully think of as part of that customer experience component, is reattaching it. That's why I'm in that experience. Like Cisco thinks about customer experience as that is the full customer experience. It's not just marketing. It's okay. It's marketing and purchase and now you're using your product, now you know what the product's supposed to do. Are you actually achieving that? That's why the customer success motion is part of it. So, you know, we as a company have Tried to re expand that definition to think broadly about it, which confuses a lot of people. Why I'm in marketing and doing customer experience, they just don't kind of get that component all the time. And so that's the main thing I want to talk about is, is that connection and try to get folks who listen to this to think a little bit more broadly about what that concept means.

[Lacy Peace]

An AI agent that your customers actually enjoy talking to. Salesforce has you covered. Meet AgentForce for service, the AI agent that can resolve cases in conversational language anytime, on any channel. To learn more, visit salesforce.com agentforce well, what I think is interesting is I think by defining things they lose their meaning. And there's lots of spiritual books I've been reading about that. Right. You know, so we can get like real woo woo there but also just with like strategies. So if I distill something into step one, step two, step three, step four, now it just becomes this unemotional process which is what I think where we've had this problem with so much content's being created is now I know step one keywords, step two this, step three that. And then I just get into this like robotic delivery tool. Like we're just these AI automation machines repeating these strategies. And so yeah, I think bringing back in to the experience like full all around this empathy, this thought, this human perspective and not trying to distill it down into this like step by step strategy or defining something really significantly it.

[Ben Taylor]

Can be a step by step strategy. Right. But you have to not lose sight of it. And you're absolutely right. Yeah, because they folks take concept, they want it to be successful, they need to share it, they need to create some sort of operational model organizational structure to how to kind of scale it out. And that's what it to your point has become this thing. But also to your point, it dilutes it, you lose it. And if, if the person who wasn't there five stages ago who's like hey, this is the reason we're doing it is no longer part of why you're doing that. You're now in this cycle. That why we're this discussion, we have to ground it.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah, you have to really ground it.

[Ben Taylor]

It's why I have a design thinking stage and the empathy mapping stage on the front end of what we do on our cycle. That's still a step, That's a process. 1, 2, 3, 4. I don't know what the steps are, but that's still a process. Right. Like we lead with that and then we build.

[Lacy Peace]

But you're not just checking the box of the process. There's a reason why you're doing the process. And sometimes that reason can get lost. Like if we were to take Ben out of Cisco or we were to take you out of your team, you know. Yeah, Right.

[Ben Taylor]

I mean, yes. It's not like I am a cog in a greater motion that's trying to do this. I am very much trying to lead this sort of idea across the group. And I've seen different levels of success across that. But you're right. Like, without. I don't mean it to sound that way, but if you take me out, who's trying to heavily drive it, I don't know how long that persists.

[Lacy Peace]

But this is true across a bunch of marketing campaigns. You know, like, there's so many phenomenal marketing leaders that just for whatever reason, maybe they switch jobs, they leave, whatever it is. And then the heart of that company feels like it's lost.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah.

[Lacy Peace]

And then it's kind of floating around until someone new comes in and plugs.

[Ben Taylor]

In and it's their modified version of that. Which isn't the worst thing always. Especially if they're close to the original meaning. But again, you're relying on them to understand what the original meaning was and what that original intent was.

[Lacy Peace]

But even in that six months of them being gone, the whole mission goal, everything that we'd set up is, like, lost. Like, wait, why are we here? What are we doing? We're like, oh, we need to remind you. Like, okay, you hired us, if I remember correctly. So it's interesting to see how just even someone being gone for a little bit can lose that goal if you don't properly articulate it to your team.

[Ben Taylor]

Well, I'm trying to get my team to, like, I am a true believer in the empathy approach to things and all that comes from that. And I'm fully malleable to what that shift may be. But I am trying to create essentially evangelists of that approach because one, it's more natural, more human, I enjoy it more. But two, it's more impactful. And so if I can make believers out of them, and I've already seen them, actually, I haven't mentioned this, but it makes me really proud to see carrying those sorts of questions that I may be asked on day one and seeing them ask those questions when they go to other groups. Right. You're creating empathy missionaries to go out into the world and create this idea across different silos and groups in the company. And honestly, that's the thing that's made me the happiest is seeing that buy in and seeing people independently slow down and think about it. And that's so like, it makes me very proud. If you want to talk about what brings me joy at work, that brings me joy at work. When I see some of that, it's not the results, it's not the impact. Sorry, bosses, it's not. I mean, it's great. I love my, you know, great. Let's have the company be profitable. That's my objective. But when I see folks kind of evangelizing this idea throughout, it really makes me feel like I'm doing the right thing and doing a good job.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah, I feel that way too. Like when I see all the numbers of what we do, it's like, oh, that's great, that's cool. But like, what really makes me feel proud is when someone tells me, reaches.

[Ben Taylor]

Out and says, hey, this thing, I heard this and therefore I did that.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah. And I'm like, wait, that feels so much more rewarding than millions of downloads. Like just numbers feel heartless.

[Ben Taylor]

I mean, you've made the whole pitch for why certain consumption KPIs don't matter. I mean, that's pitch it to the execs, right? Like you go in, if you go into a big company, share that anecdote because that anecdote resonates. Anecdotes resonate. I don't care what level. If you share the one that you just did, it's not the same that I did, but it's the same kind of concept of me going into the leadership and having that conversation. It's like actually sit there and be human for a second. Do you care about this or that? And you care about, hey, somebody told me that it impacted them. I'm just trying to do the same thing at scale with marketing and connect through that the rest of the company.

[Rose Shocker]

Yeah, I have a question just surrounding collaboration and leadership with remote work. Have you seen? Because in my head, remote work is very humanistic. It feels empathetic because you're giving people their own space, their own flexibility, autonomy and trust through remote work. But then it also, it's giving a separation between you and your team. And everything is digital and everything's already very digital in our lives. So have you seen it hinder empathy just internally or collaboration? Or is it the opposite?

[Ben Taylor]

I don't think that the mix of in office versus hybrid plays as big a role in the success of empathy as you might initially think. And the Reason I say that is hybrid work or remote work. And in person work can take a thousand different appearances. I worked at a company that was off camera and that created a whole different vibe. Back to vibe. That created a whole different vibe. On engagement, when you're remote and off camera. When you're on camera, you see people. When you're on camera all the time and you're coming in T shirts and shorts and stuff and not like properly dressed for old school environments, you have that trust. And it is very similar to being in office. Yes, you're on the screen. Yes, you're talking to a microphone, but that is closer to a collaborative in office environment. And I've also been in. In office environments, I'm sitting in a cubicle all day. So I don't think the physical location is a huge driver of that ability to have meaningful collaboration. Particular particularly around the concept of empathy. It is more about tone setting with the team, virtual or in person, than it is to do with that proximity of the physical body. I mean, I have to believe that. How am I going to do digital marketing and want to convey empathy without believing that I can be empathetic and have that sort of relationship without being like in a room. Yes, I love being in a room with people. I love when we do off sites and see folks. But it's not a necessity to accomplish that objective.

[Lacy Peace]

I think it comes back to intentionality.

[Ben Taylor]

Right.

[Lacy Peace]

So you just have an intentional meeting. We're discussing these specific topics. I'm asking you about your grass or your garden. Right. And I'm not just checking the box. If I spoke to you and got the tasks done that we need done and my camera's off and you actually have no idea what I look like. I had someone I worked with years ago that she had her camera off all the time. Then when I finally saw her face, I. It didn't make sense. Like, I made this character and I.

[Ben Taylor]

Was like, you're Sanderson. Like, you know who's talking? Like, you had an idea of what they were.

[Lacy Peace]

Exactly. And then I saw her face and I was like, whoa, this is like my. This is not computing right now. Like, something's breaking in my system. So it's funny.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah. And then you meet people you see all the time. I mean, there's so many variables to that engagement that it's hard. And I. Yeah, I agree. Being intentional on what our purpose is. Saying the words out loud. Think like you're them. Like, don't just expect people to do it. Force people to sit in A room in awkward silence and sit there and think about it. We get a Miro board and throw little sticky notes into the, into the empathy map. And like, okay, now you are a CISO and you're a chief Information Security officer and you've got to think about, you know, threat vectors and all this. And we have marketers. They're not doing this all day. Sounds fun, but it's challenging. And they're like, well, I don't know what I care about. What do I feel? Oh, no, you know, I could lose my job if somebody's going to do this.

[Lacy Peace]

Feels like workplace D and D. Kind.

[Ben Taylor]

Of like, we got, we got a D20 out there. We're good. So it's good. Yeah, we're upset, so please. Oh, gosh. My team already knows that.

[Lacy Peace]

I'm like, my husband's a dm, so don't worry.

[Ben Taylor]

Okay? Okay.

[Lacy Peace]

Don't worry. You're among friends.

[Ben Taylor]

Why is he not here, like, narrating and DMing the conversation? Yeah, no, it is, it is that way. It's. What is role playing? Role playing is just empathy. It's like putting yourself in somebody else's shoes.

[Lacy Peace]

So I think adults need more of it, to be honest. Like, I have a three year old and I watch him the way that he can just make up something. Like he has a stick and he's got a rock and like, he's in his own world that he's on a race car doing something and having a wonderful time. He's so happy. Yeah. Like, he's not imagining horrible things where he's, like, sad. He's like, constantly just making up these, like, fun, cute stories.

[Ben Taylor]

And so if you catch me outside of this studio with a sticking around, a stick and like, and a cape on, you're not going to judge me is what you're saying. Okay, that's good.

[Lacy Peace]

No, definitely not.

[Ben Taylor]

Okay, thank you. I appreciate that.

[Lacy Peace]

We got someone narrating.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah, that's better.

[Rose Shocker]

Yeah. We're going to do a fun little lightning round game. It's called Relevant or Ridiculous. And I'm asking both of you guys so you can both answer. I'm going to give you a trend, a tool, a topic that's going to kind of be all over the place. And you can just say what comes to your brain first.

[Ben Taylor]

Okay.

[Rose Shocker]

Okay. Mascot marketing. Think duolingo.

[Lacy Peace]

Oh, they're relevant. I like duolingo. I think that's relevant. But, like, there's so many other mascots that I think are irrelevant or, like.

[Ben Taylor]

The Wendy's account Ridiculous.

[Rose Shocker]

Ridiculous.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah.

[Rose Shocker]

Not relevant.

[Ben Taylor]

I don't think so.

[Rose Shocker]

Okay. ChatGPT.

[Lacy Peace]

Relevant.

[Ben Taylor]

Relevant. Still relevant.

[Rose Shocker]

Pickleball.

[Ben Taylor]

Relevant.

[Lacy Peace]

It's irrelevant to me, but I know that it's relevant for most people here in Austin.

[Rose Shocker]

Do you play?

[Ben Taylor]

No, but it's hard to avoid. So that's the relevance to me.

[Rose Shocker]

LinkedIn thought leadership.

[Ben Taylor]

Ridiculous.

[Lacy Peace]

I think relevant if it's real, not just AI generated nonsense.

[Ben Taylor]

I have seen LinkedIn devolve. There's still good stuff. There absolutely is. But I have seen some. It is a really off tread at times right now. So I don't know, I guess I'm getting other things in my algorithm, but there's. I can see that there's some elements where I'm like, I just roll my eyes. I just absolutely roll my eyes. And so it's hard. Signal to noise ratio is harder. It's harder to find.

[Lacy Peace]

That's a good point.

[Rose Shocker]

Team book club right now. Team book clubs. We're pro book club.

[Lacy Peace]

Relevant. Yeah.

[Rose Shocker]

Okay. Is your team. Are you reading one right now?

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah.

[Lacy Peace]

What? Wait, what book have you done?

[Ben Taylor]

But. Oh, I don't even remember the last one we did. I'm terrible at it.

[Rose Shocker]

Ben's like, I'm not reading it and.

[Ben Taylor]

I care about it and you care about it, but you don't have the book. My wife likes to say I can't read.

[Lacy Peace]

Yeah.

[Ben Taylor]

Like not just doesn't read, but can't read. So that's the joke that she likes to say. Like, I. The problem I have is when I read, I read like 18 hours straight and then it's 5 o' clock in the morning because I don't want to put it down. So I don't pick up a book because I don't want to sit for the next like 18 or 19 hours to go do that. Which is a horrible excuse not to read. But I like book clubs because it's not work. It's something that's like forcing you to think outside of it and it's not work. Yeah. So that's a terrible answer.

[Lacy Peace]

Okay.

[Ben Taylor]

Okay. Relevant. Not to me.

[Rose Shocker]

100% remote work. 100% remote work.

[Ben Taylor]

Relevant.

[Rose Shocker]

AgentIC AI assistance. AgentIC AI assistance. SMS marketing or SMS CX. SMS marketing or SMS CX dot.

[Ben Taylor]

Relevant. Not for me as much, but relevant.

[Lacy Peace]

I think it is relevant when it's not annoying.

[Ben Taylor]

So not political.

[Lacy Peace]

Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh my God.

[Ben Taylor]

November. I think I was getting 400 texts per hour or something.

[Lacy Peace]

Somehow I got on some email or SMS list that I'm. Tom. I keep getting. Tom, come Come out to vote.

[Rose Shocker]

I get them all addressed to my dad. Like I'm being called Philip in my inbox all the time. I'm like, are you giving my number.

[Lacy Peace]

Out out to shout out to your dad?

[Ben Taylor]

I might have also shared a text or a phone number of somebody that I wanted to see. Smart SMS marketing. So, you know, o.

[Lacy Peace]

That's what I should be doing.

[Ben Taylor]

That may be why you're getting the.

[Rose Shocker]

My dad is just setting me up for it. He's sick of it. Emoji use in enterprise comms. Emoji use in enterprise comms.

[Ben Taylor]

Relevant.

[Rose Shocker]

It's not on here, but I'm going to ask a similar question. Gen Z slang and Enterprise comms. Slang or marketing. Relevant.

[Lacy Peace]

When it's like not cringy.

[Ben Taylor]

I was going to say the exact same thing.

[Rose Shocker]

Cringe is so subjective.

[Ben Taylor]

What's the.

[Rose Shocker]

What is cringe?

[Ben Taylor]

Means Hello.

[Rose Shocker]

Okay.

[Ben Taylor]

Forced. It feels forced. I mean, think of the skateboard meme with, you know, like hello, fellow kids.

[Rose Shocker]

Personalized videos from that.

[Lacy Peace]

Can you give more of context on that one?

[Rose Shocker]

Yeah, like when you're like entering a funnel, like as a. As a customer.

[Ben Taylor]

Relevant. When it's not cringy. Same answer as the Gen Z slang.

[Lacy Peace]

Okay.

[Ben Taylor]

It can't feel forced.

[Rose Shocker]

Okay. Webinars with 50 plus slides.

[Ben Taylor]

Ridiculous.

[Lacy Peace]

Ridiculous. Yeah, Yeah. I. Yeah. No, never again.

[Rose Shocker]

Customer journey maps.

[Ben Taylor]

I think I'm going with relevant on this one.

[Rose Shocker]

Yeah.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah.

[Rose Shocker]

I'm shocked.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah.

[Lacy Peace]

Ridiculous. No, I'm just kidding.

[Ben Taylor]

How dare you?

[Rose Shocker]

Branded podcasts.

[Ben Taylor]

Relevant.

[Lacy Peace]

Relevant. Thank you for saying that.

[Ben Taylor]

Of course.

[Rose Shocker]

Great answers. All right, that concludes our lightning round. Thank you, Ben.

[Ben Taylor]

Thank you. It was fun.

[Lacy Peace]

Thanks, Rose.

[Rose Shocker]

Yeah, you're welcome.

[Lacy Peace]

All right. Oh, last question. I almost forgot. Okay. We ask everyone this normally. We let them prepare and we did not let you prepare. So we'll see how it goes.

[Ben Taylor]

Yeah, Thrilled it.

[Lacy Peace]

What's a like baller experience you've had as a customer recently that you want to shout out?

[Ben Taylor]

I love barley Swine, which is on Burnett. Barley swine is probably the closest thing Austin has to like Austin being non pretentious but still that fine dining where they care about you and they're there without being over the top or pervasive in your outing. So for me it's one of the best experiences and we've gone there for my birthday every year for the past seven years or something like that. So shout out to barley swine because it is to me the best experiential dining in Austin.

[Lacy Peace]

What kind of food?

[Ben Taylor]

It's your kind of like American fine dining mix. So you're going to get a steak with. You've got these shiitake, not shiitake. They got these mushroom dumplings pointed up on there.

[Lacy Peace]

That looks good.

[Rose Shocker]

Yeah, it looks very fancy. It looks like small portions.

[Ben Taylor]

It is. I've got a really good friend of mine that went to the Culinary Institute in Poughkeepsie, Hyde Park, New York, which is, for those who know, like, one of the best in the country, if not the best in the country, and worked a lot in New York. So a lot of the stuff I did in New York was like finding the dives that were great, finding the high end restaurants that were great. And the one thing that was through all of them, that made them wonderful was that kind of like caring about the person that came in and covering them up and making sure that they felt warm and loved while they're there at that experience. And that's why I like barley swine, because to me, they're. That they're the closest thing to that in the city. Like, there's a lot of great places, but this place is just, you know, step above.

[Lacy Peace]

I will have to check it out. Thank you so much for joining us, Ben. This was awesome and I hope we can have you on again.

[Ben Taylor]

I would love that. It was a great time today. Thank you.