Jenny Rooney (2:51)

Well, it's funny, as a mom to a college student, now newly a mom to a college student, I know what it's like when they're trying to figure out like what's the path, what's the education I should get, how do I think about maximizing my education to prep me as best I can for a career. But you just don't know when you're a young person starting out. But what was your education in? I'm just curious.

Mario Martinez Jr. (3:11)

I went to Berkeley and I studied economics and computer science and I was convinced at the time that the only thing to do after college was to do like the two year investment banking analyst program, which I'm happy I didn't end up doing or nothing against that, but. And that was a different path. I mean actually the startup that I did. So me and my friend were sales engineers and so we had to help salespeople prepare for deals and help build a deck and customize a proposal. So when we were automating that, we weren't really thinking we were doing anything marketing related, we were just thinking we were automating a sales engineer job. But it sort of turned into software for product marketing people to help them get messaging and proposals and presentations built automatically for salespeople. And then at some point someone's like, well, that's product marketing. Although the problem was it ended up getting the marketing people really angry because we made this big startup mistake which is to try and automate a business process that doesn't exist. So like we went to product marketers said change the whole way you produce content, use this crazy software we've built and then we'll automate delivering that out. So it worked when we did for them, but once we left and they had to take it over, it did not work anymore.

Jenny Rooney (4:22)

I mean, listen, it isn't just semantics, right? You gotta know what you're doing. So that's fascinating. Now I know you were at AWS and Oracle right before you went to Salesforce.

Mario Martinez Jr. (4:33)

I was at Salesforce from 2005 to 2011 after I did the startup thing for about five years. And after five rounds of layoffs starting in 2000, we shut the company down. So that was a good educational experience. Took a little bit of time off and then I went to go work at Salesforce in 2005. So I did that for about six years. And I started out with helping the company try and figure out how to sell to IT departments, which back in 2005 for SaaS, that wasn't a normal thing like it is today. So that was my first experience in Salesforce, which was great. I learned a lot.

Jenny Rooney (5:08)

And then you came back?

Mario Martinez Jr. (5:09)

Yep. I was off in the wilderness. I was at AWS for about almost 9 years. Worked at Oracle for about 3 years. Took a little bit of time off again, and then Mark asked me to come back in the CMO role. So it's been about two and a half years since I've been back at Salesforce.

Jenny Rooney (5:24)

Okay. So having worked, what felt different about Salesforce then versus when you came back?

Mario Martinez Jr. (5:30)

I mean, there's a lot different, a lot the same. I mean, I tend to find that when you have founder led tech companies, the culture of the founder is really a persistent force in that company, usually for good. I mean, there's countless examples of how it ends up being a good way to do it. But Mark's personality, culture of the company, the ways we sort of think about marketing being very customer success focused, very trying to be clear on differentiation, that stuff was all the same. But of course the company was a lot bigger, a lot of additional product lines, you know, much broader portfolio. So that was the big thing. I mean, we have, I think almost 80,000 people in the company now. It's definitely not the case 15 years ago when I was here.

Jenny Rooney (6:14)

Totally. So let's fast forward. So technically your title is president and CMO now.

Mario Martinez Jr. (6:18)

I run marketing. That's how I think about it.

Jenny Rooney (6:20)

You run marketing all around the world. So let's talk about that. I mean, that's such a loaded mandate, right? I mean, really, because it's such a global company. You've got global marketing, you've got localized regional marketing. So how are you thinking about balancing those?

Mario Martinez Jr. (6:35)

Yeah, I mean, I'd say my role in our marketing organization, there's a lot of similarities with, I'd say global B2B tech marketing organizations where we have a product marketing team very focused on the messaging and positioning and sales tools enabling our salespeople to be successful. We have field marketing teams around the world who are mapped to our sales Teams and they're charged with delivering, let's say, approximately a third of the sales pipeline that they need through all the different marketing programs. And we have centralized teams for things like paid media and creative and brand to support everyone. And then of course, like Martech's a huge part of it. So in my career, sometimes I've had the Martech team, sometimes not. We have it in our product Org because luckily I'm at a company that we make marketing software. So having that team that builds our marketing applications and the team that implements it ends up working out really good. It's not something every company can do, but it's been great for me. Yeah.

Jenny Rooney (7:32)

So let's talk about brand marketing at Salesforce, obviously. How does a company like Salesforce define brand marketing, which is both a B2B enterprise software giant and now an AI leader? What does brand mean internally and externally?

Mario Martinez Jr. (7:47)

I kind of go back to when I first started here in 2005, the guy who ran Brand, a guy named Bruce Campbell, he's the one that. He created the no software logo for Mark back in the day. But he defined brand as the sum of all of your perceptions and experiences with a company. It was this presentation. There's a lot of variations from lots of people. His was called a brand is not a logo. And I just kind of always go back to that in my head that everyone's in the business of brand. Every time someone has a good experience with one of our salespeople or a good or bad experience with customer support call or now with an AI agent that they're talking to, that all impacts your brand as much as any advertising or social media posts that we do. But when we think about the function of brand, we have the creative group that we do. But I mean, a lot of it is really, we think about changing perception in areas where we feel that there's a gap between how we want to be thought of and how we are in terms of awareness, perception, preference especially. So we've been working a lot in the past couple years in the brand space on becoming, well, you know, to drive awareness for our AI products. Because it's a little bit of a different. Like a lot of SaaS products now there's a little bit of a transition. People are Saying, well, is AI something that makes my SaaS applications better? Is it something I use on the side of my SaaS applications, is something that I use instead of? And so we have really done a lot of work to build, really rebuild our entire product portfolio on Agent Force. Our AI Agent platform so that people can be agentic in how they interact with their customers, which we think has tremendous benefits for making employees a lot more productive and effective in how they interact with customers, whether they're selling or marketing or servicing.

Jenny Rooney (9:41)

But let's talk about the agent force a little bit more because you do have the power of brand, the salesforce brand, unlike and as a way to differentiate versus pure AI vendors or more traditional CRM players. So how are you thinking about harnessing that?

Mario Martinez Jr. (9:53)

A couple things, I mean, maybe just to start with, I mean one of the, I think the most important things with AI in the enterprise is that it doesn't really work. It doesn't produce accurate, useful outputs unless it's grounded in data. Because you think of these consumer LLMs, they're training all this consumer information. You can ask them a question, great, you get something good. But in the business world, we have to be able to ground that model with data about our business and in the case of agents in the CRM sales marketing support space, information about your customer. But once you accept that, which I think everyone has, it's sort of kind of obvious, then you think about how do you do that? And then you very quickly get into, well, I need to have a trusted way to connect my customer data to a large language model. And this is where. And I'm going to get to Brandon in a second. But we've spent 26 years building a platform that companies of all shapes and sizes trust with their most valuable data, their customer data. So for us to be able to add an AI layer, an agentic layer to our platform, it gives our customers a way where they can harness all that corporate data to get better AI results that really work and drive impact, but in a way that they're not going to have to worry about, can I trust this random vendor or can I trust the implementation of this custom built agentic platform, maybe that my IT department is doing? Because getting the data security right, it's pretty hard. You think about like a lot of when these LLMs first came out, a lot of these IT departments would say, I'm just going to go train a model with all of my sales data. And then they get it back and they're like, oh, wait a second, every person who asks a question sees all the data. Oh wait, we just undid all our security rules. So this trusting AI, which has a lot of dimensions, trusting that your data is going to be secure, that the results are accurate and it's not tarnished or made worthless with hallucinations is really important. And so I think that whole area, those are things that tens of thousands of companies have trusted us with for a long time. So from a marketing perspective, it wasn't a huge lift for us to explain to our customers why if they're trusting us for email marketing, sales forecasting, and being that steward of their customer data, that they could trust us to do AI in a way that was safe and accurate and effective. And so we really focused on is customer success marketing, which is a lot of what our history has been. I mean, for me, I always believe customer success is really the foundation of all effective B2B tech marketing. Mostly because over the past 30, 35 years, so much of the tech industry has lied to so many of customers about what the products do. So everyone's skeptical. And so ultimately, I kind of believe that value propositions should be told by customers. And so like, where I think this manifested itself the most at our Dreamforce conference. And if you've been to Dreamforce before.

Jenny Rooney (12:51)

I have, yeah, yeah.

Mario Martinez Jr. (12:53)

But as a way to kind of cut through all this AI agent hype, everyone's talking about AI agents. We felt like what really differentiates us is we have like real customers. People have heard of doing real things. So we built this thing called Agent Force City. We basically took 17 of our customers. People like OpenTable, William Sonoma, Pepsi, Heathrow Airport, Lululemon, Equinox gyms. We basically constructed a small little village where customers can walk around and walk into William Sonoma and see how they're using AI agents to help people shop better. And go to Heathrow Airport to see how agent can tell you how to find food on the way to your gate. And how Pepsi, you know, Pepsi's doing a real crazy thing. Crazy in terms of I hadn't expected this of their field service. Human agents have an AI agent coach that's helping them get to the right appointments and automatically be able to detect what the problems are with some of the equipment that they have in all these small stores in urban areas. So anyways, people could go around, see. And it's not just sort of seeing the branding. It's like we want to create an interactive experience anyways. It's sort of the idea of like, let's not get too bogged down in all the speeds and feeds of why our AI platform is better and faster and more powerful. Like, we have all that information and there's a time and place to learn for that. But, you know, our feeling was let's let our customers talk for us and let's kind of get out of the hype with real examples.

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Jenny Rooney (15:30)

Well, and I'm hearing that a lot. I'm hearing build on your equity, build on your trust, show, don't tell, I mean, all the things that you're known for. I mean, you mentioned Dreamforce. I mean, that's always been such a stronghold lever, if you will, for telling your brand story. But obviously you're also. You were in the super bowl last year, correct?

Mario Martinez Jr. (15:49)

Yep. We did a Super bowl ad buy and in those ads we were doing, we were trying to drive awareness that we had an AI agent platform by contrasting the benefits of having AI agents with the negative experience of not having them. And so that's where we sort of had Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. And Matthew was always in a world of hurt because he didn't have agent force. And Woody Harrelson was sort of happy and smiling and having a great experience. And we play that out through travel in the airport, through air conditioning repairs, restaurants, and did a couple different scenarios on that.

Jenny Rooney (16:25)

No, I love that. Are you going to be back in the super bowl this year?

Mario Martinez Jr. (16:27)

That's the plan. We're working on something that's exciting.

Jenny Rooney (16:30)

So I mean, you're finding the ways for you to be in all the places and spaces that matter for broad awareness, cultural relevance, and then obviously the tactical, true showing of how your customers are using it. And by the way, those are some of the world's biggest brands that are using it and that power their systems through it. So by all means, it makes sense that you would want to use them to storytell. Let's talk about the just the company in general real quick. It's had a strong run lately. Revenue is up about 10% year over year. What does the success tell you about where Salesforce is winning today? Especially at a time when so many companies are obviously just trying to make heads and tails of this incredibly dramatic shift that they're all experiencing? And that being AI, of course.

Mario Martinez Jr. (17:16)

Yeah, I mean, I think we're still in the early innings of this AI revolution and what's the main constant for me at companies is most companies are definitely still in the process of trying to figure out how will AI impact their business processes, how will it impact the way that people work, how will it change how people use technology? So a lot of our conversations where we've seen a lot of the growth is they say, well, I want to understand how AI agents can change how much we work. Is it a little bit of incremental change or are we going to evolve so much that this becomes this concept we talk about of agentic enterprise, of every employee having AI agents that help them and make them more productive and do the things that are lower value tasks so they could focus on the higher value tasks. And we just see tremendous demand for that. And I think like I don't know the exact percentages, but what's pretty consistent when I talk to customers is that when they list out what are the top use cases where they want to have AI agents, it's in that, you know, we often call the front office space sales marketing support. It's in how do we interact with customers because that's where you need the scale. I'll kind of give you one example like in the history of our company. So I pulled some stats on like we have marketing leads we create and sometimes they get followed up on, sometimes they don't. You know, you B2B marketers will often score leads and route the higher scoring leads to the salespeople. But just in the past five years we didn't follow up on 20 million leads. Now we put them in a nurture and did some things with it. But with AI agents, when you can kind of have a two way valuable conversation for customers from an AI agent instead of or in addition to a human sales rep following up, then you don't have that capacity constraint anymore. So now we're following up on all the leads. And so yes, we're a B2B company. Most of our business will go through our salespeople. They'll talk to them eventually, but we're freeing them from having to have those lower value conversations while at the same time not compromising on leaving any of the leads behind. And so I think that's kind of a metaphor for a lot of parts of business where there's these scale trade offs people have to make that can go away if you implement agents in the right way.

Jenny Rooney (19:28)

100%. And yet I think your POV is that AI agents don't replace marketers, which by the way, that's a big, you know, anyone in the CMO community is struggling with that right now. And anybody who works in this practice of advertising, marketing, media.

Mario Martinez Jr. (19:42)

Yeah, I mean it's something we talk about about a lot. I mean, here's my perspective. What I found is I'm starting with the context that pretty much every marketer I know is being asked to do two, three, four, five times as much stuff as they have like people resources to do. So we're always in the business of saying like, okay, here of the things you want me to do, here's what I can do and here's what I can't do. And what I'm finding on my team is as people are using AI to automate and to deliver more productivity, that that productivity is being cashed in in terms of two things. Number one is doing more output and then number two, giving them more free time back. Because like so much of what we do in marketing is like date constrained. So like we had an event in New York today with like 8,000 people. Unlike some departments or professions when you can say like oh well we've pushed this out a week, like no, no, no, that's happening now. And so if we can have a lot of these burst capacity things that typically make people stay up all night and kind of go crazy and not have work life balance that if you can have something where AI can make it two times faster. So let's say doubling of productivity, you can say, well I'm going to go take 70% of that as more output and 30% of that is time back to the employee. Like everyone wins. Now at some point maybe we get to like, okay, these productivities are so massive that we need less people to do certain things. I think that's possible. But right now I'm just struggling to be able to say yes to more things. So that's where I think the biggest opportunity is.

Jenny Rooney (21:18)

Let me ask you specifically, I want your point of view on specifically the CMOS role in all this. And I almost need you for a minute to take your salesforce hat off and put on the hat of one of your client companies, for example. Like, what do you think the CMOs of those companies really need to be doing vis a vis AI in terms of driving the AI agenda?

Mario Martinez Jr. (21:38)

Yeah, a couple things. So one of my assumptions that I validated from a lot of conversations I've had is that the biggest barrier to broad AI adoption and marketing organizations is a psychological kind of factor, which is many people don't want to change how they work. That there's a spectrum of how much change seeking versus change aversion you have with people. Like, you know, think of the who moved my cheese? Thing. Some people, they're like, how dare they move my trees? And you find some people like, oh, there's a new tool. I can do things completely differently. Like, they love it. They stay up on that using. Other people don't want to do it. So with that dynamic, I found that just simply assigning out, like, every department needs to come up with one AI efficiency thing like, that doesn't work as well as having the leaders of those teams actually be the, say, vanguards, be the, be the pioneers or vanguards of using them first. I'll kind of give you an example. Like the guy that this guy Patrick, who runs product marketing for us, when we bought Informatica, he had to prep a journalist off the record on like, why do we buy the company? And we had a messaging doc. So he went and took that messaging document, threw it into a Google Gemini gem with a prompt that basically said, pretend to be this reporter and I want you to do mock interviews with me and score me. And my responses based on this messaging guy took him 15 minutes. And then he did that for an hour, got prepped, and then he went and told his whole team, this is what I did. And then there's like four or five examples or our chief creative officer who instead of basically assigning a project, first of, let me reinvent the whole workflow of how we produce, let's say customer success story videos. He went and played around with 40, 50 different tools, a dozen ways to chain them together to basically combine real footage with AI generated footage, and edit his own videos with one or two people from the video team. And then now we're in the process of going, okay, we've experimented. Let's figure out how to operationalize this, but I think it's like it needs to be a lead from the top. Like you actually have to do it. You can't just think of this as some t because it's too disruptive on how people are comfortable working to just ask people to just change without stepping forward and doing it yourself.

Jenny Rooney (23:58)

I love that. That's such great advice and perspective and so much for so many CMOs to learn from. I want to ask you really quickly a couple more questions. One on the data piece because I know you mentioned it earlier and the importance of trust in data and everything else as every marketer is becoming is obviously recognizing the value of their first party data. What are you saying to them in terms of how they need to think about activating their own data?

Mario Martinez Jr. (24:22)

Yeah, I'm happy you brought that up because that's the other big area of advice. I mean, even before AI, I think we all knew as marketers that if we wanted to do any of this fancy, exciting digital marketing, we had to get our customer data platform together. Of giving you, you know, I think about giving you a database where you have harmonized set of data around a customer where you understand all of the things they've done with you. All that, that first party data, maybe it's augmented with some third party data, but it's even more important for AI because like let's say go back to my example of following up on a sales lead. Well, what do you put in that message? Like if you don't have good data on that customer, you're going to give a very generic response. Oh, thank you for attending this webinar. I hope you enjoyed it. But like, since we understand who's the customer, what products they bought, where they're located, you go and say, well, oh, there's an event coming up in your area. Or maybe because we have it tied into our customer support system, maybe you don't follow up on that lead right now and try and sell them anything because they have a red customer support issue that they're upset with, rightfully so, or understanding where they're going on the website. Like the LLM will give like orders of magnitude better and more useful outputs if you're grounding it in that data. So a lot of our customers have been spending time getting their house in order with the data and that's why we've sort of invested a lot in this Data360 product that allows us to map all of your data into everything that Salesforce does in a really seamless Way very cool.

Jenny Rooney (25:52)

So helpful. And again, I'm sure everyone is paying attention specifically to that as well as they think about how to move forward. A few more questions just for you. I mean, given your expertise, your background, where you are now, and you personally need to stay on the forefront of all of this. No pressure, but where are you going for your insight, for your education, for your inspiration, to make sure that you're staying as knowledgeable and as of the moment as you possibly can be to lead as effectively as possible at Silk?

Mario Martinez Jr. (26:22)

Yeah, I mean, some of the most valuable, like learnings I have is when I can go spend time with other marketing leaders just to ask them about some of the hard problems. Like, we all tend to sort of think that like we're unique in these problems we're dealing with. People often have the same ones, but I think about like centralization versus decentralization of org charts, like attribution models, how much to spend on brand versus demand gen. Is this full funnel marketing thing like real or is it a bunch of bs like constantly? And what tool, what AI tools are you using? Does this actually work? So I tend to rely on just networking and understanding how other people are succeeding or failing with all of these different ideas and different tools and different.

Jenny Rooney (27:05)

Approaches and also seeing the failures as well as the wins, right?

Mario Martinez Jr. (27:08)

Yeah, absolutely. Like, you don't really learn anything from the successes.

Jenny Rooney (27:12)

No, you absolutely do not. What kind of leader are you? What would your team say about you?

Mario Martinez Jr. (27:17)

Yeah, that's a good question. I think what I want them to say is that I try to be logical in terms of thinking from first principles of like, what are we trying to accomplish? And rethinking assumptions and trying to solve problems by questioning constraints of like, is this really something we can't do? Is this not possible? And then like being deep in the details with my team without micromanaging. I think that's like the hardest thing to teach is to figure out that right balance. Because air traffic control management doesn't work. And then doing the work of your employees doesn't also work. So that's also one of these areas I always look for feedback from my team is am I striking that balance in a way that makes them effective at doing what they want to do? And it's often different for different people.

Jenny Rooney (28:08)

I used to ask the question in this way, cause I used to play soccer and so I used that as a metaphor. But where are you on the field, on the pitch? You know, are you a striker trying to score goals at every turn? Are you the midfield line trying to be connective tissue between the team.

Mario Martinez Jr. (28:21)

I find myself most happy when I have a diversity of positions and I'm doing lots of different stuff. Like when you run marketing at a large organization, if you're not careful, you just become like a budget management bureaucrat. So I've always like tried to kind of make sure I'm spending enough time actually doing real marketing work and picking the areas where I think I can add value. You know, I'm not editing every word on every webpage, but there's certain areas of the product I'm passionate about that I like to spend time on. And I think it's healthy to kind of rotate that focus around in different areas.

Jenny Rooney (28:54)

This might be a hard question to answer, and so I understand if you need to move on from it, but what would be the headline for Salesforce in 25, looking back and what do you expect the headline for Salesforce in 26 to be?

Mario Martinez Jr. (29:07)

What's a good one? I mean, honestly? Well, I'll tell you, I did this was at a dinner with a bunch of CIOs and one of them just sort of said this agent Force thing is real. I think that AI agents from a Promise to reality. I think that this year, and it's not just sort of Salesforce, but like with our customers. And of course that's not a pithy headline. That would be sort of maybe the creative brief for the headline. But yeah, from the hype to reality.

Jenny Rooney (29:33)

I love it. And last quick question. Who's somebody that you admire from afar or you may know them really, really well? This should be one CMO who you think is doing extraordinary things and that I should have on the podcast. Next.

Mario Martinez Jr. (29:45)

If you haven't met Julia White at AWS in the old role I used to have, she's doing some really interesting things there. Like us, they have a lot of the same challenges of broad, diverse product line selling all over the world, trying to balance digital and brand and executive marketing programs. And she was one of those people I was really digging into recently on org charts and what's the right structure to balance things out. She has some pretty interesting perspective on a bunch of things.

Jenny Rooney (30:13)

Awesome. Well, I will invite her on. It's been a minute since I've spoken with her and I haven't had her on the podcast yet. So I will definitely reach out. Mario, this has been a pleasure. I appreciate your taking the time. I know this is a busy week for you, so thank you for taking time out of your day.

Mario Martinez Jr. (30:27)

Absolutely. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on.

Jenny Rooney (30:29)

Thanks for being here.

Mario Martinez Jr. (30:31)

Thank you for listening to Marketing Vanguard, part of the Adweek Podcast Network and Acast Creator Network. You can listen and subscribe to all of Adweek's podcasts by visiting adweek.com podcasts. Stay updated on all things Adweek Podcast Network by following us on Twitter dweek Podcasts and if you have a question or suggestion for the show, send us an email@podcastadweek.com thanks for listening.

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