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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#751: Traject Data CEO Rochelle Thielen on the role of data in retail
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Strayer University Narrator
At Strayer University, we help students like you. Go from Will I To why not? For over 130 years, we've been innovating higher education to make it more affordable, accessible and attainable so you can reach your goals. Go from thinking Can I? To Yes, I Can and keep striving. Visit strayer.edu to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chev and its many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.
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Child
Mom, can you tell me a story?
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Mom
Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car.
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Child
Was she brave?
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Mom
She was tired mostly. But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required.
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Child
Did you have to fight a dragon?
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Rachelle Thielen
Nope.
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Mom
She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually.
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Child
Was it scary?
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Mom
Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be.
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Child
Did the car have a sunroof?
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Mom
It did actually.
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Child
Okay, good story.
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Mom
Car buying you'll want to tell stories about Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Foreign.
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Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And now onto the show. In today's hyper competitive retail landscape, is
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it even possible to build a sustainable
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brand without a thorough real time understanding of your customer and your market? Agility requires more than just fast reactions. It demands proactive insights driven by robust real time data. It's about anticipating the next move, not
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just responding to the last one.
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Today we're going to talk about the critical role of real time data in
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navigating the complexities of modern retail, from
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combating fraud and unauthorized sellers to personalizing the customer journey and staying ahead of the competition. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like To welcome Rachelle Thielen, CEO at TrajectData. Richelle, welcome to the show.
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Rachelle Thielen
Thanks Greg. Good to be here.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you.
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Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Trajectdata.
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Rachelle Thielen
Sure would be happy to. So my background is mostly in venture and private equity backed high growth SaaS organizations. So here I am now in this space around data. My role at Trajectdata is really especially since we're on the bleeding edge in a lot of cases what people are expecting out of data right now just to get out there, listen a lot right. And try to figure out what we can do to make sure we have the right data ready for the demands of the biggest retailers in the US and worldwide.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah, great, great.
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Greg Kilstrom
So yeah, let's definitely, we got, we got a lot to cover, got, got a lot to cover today.
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So we'll, we'll, we'll do our best
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to, to, to cover it all. But yeah, definitely a, a lot and a lot of changes here.
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Rachelle Thielen
Yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
And you know that's, that's kind of the theme here is just how retail is, is continually evolving and, and data certainly playing a key with recent changes from Google and other platforms. How are you seeing retailers adapting data acquisition strategies so that they have the insights they need while respecting consumer privacy and all the data regulations?
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Rachelle Thielen
So there's a lot there and I think it's like right away important just to call out. People are trying to adapt because that's all they can do right now. Like the ground is so unstable. It's an uncomfortable position for everyone to be in. But I feel like people are starting to get more confident and we can figure this out as long as we have the right data and we can remain agile to make decisions and adapt. That's the key to survival here and really the key to thriving. A great example of that is just in late July Amazon pulled out of Google shopping completely, which was huge. It threw everyone for a loop. They had been their biggest spender. So really what happened there is like all of a sudden there were all these open top positions. And that's a great example where if you were really ag dial, we saw people pop to the top there that could have never been in those positions for a while. But then what happened right after that is Google really changed the playbook for ads. So everyone who had relied on this consistency was all of a sudden on their heels trying to figure out how to handle their ad strategy. And these aren't just small companies, these are major, major brands that had to learn the hard way you can't outsource your visibility anymore. So what's really happening now, and I think will be a theme through a lot of our conversation today, is people aren't outsourcing things anymore. They're relying on themselves and trusting their own data to really guide the way forward and give them that agility to respond to anything and everything that's happening out there. And that really ties to what we're doing right, is trying to then feed that data and make sure that they have accurate, timely, scalable data to make whatever decisions come their way.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah, yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
What do you see as maybe some of the biggest misconceptions that, that you encounter regarding the role of data in retail? And how are some of those misconceptions impacting a brand's ability to compete?
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Rachelle Thielen
Yeah, so it's becoming very obvious to everyone that first off, trusting the same off the shelf dashboards simply doesn't work anymore. So I think if you were to just spend time talking to major retailers, kind of, you know, after hours, when they're willing to admit some of the things that are shaking them. People never used to feel like they had to go in the engine room of data. You opened up your dashboard, that's what it said, and that's what you responded to. Now it's forcing people to pull it back and say, where is this data coming from? How old is it? How reliable is it? And what they're finding out is a lot of the data they always observed to be telling them accurate, timely information is actually a week old or an average of 30 days old or things like that. So you just can't rely on that directionally. Sure. But if you have AI employed and you're making dynamic pricing decisions and strategy decisions, it's basically the same thing as, like when we're a kid and you look up in the sky and one day you're told the stars you're looking at died millions of years ago. Like the exact same reaction where you're finding out these dashboards you've been trusting your whole career, that data is actually not as real time as you always were led to believe. And it's as impactful really, in the day and age that we're in now. So that's probably the biggest one. The second thing I would say is like, people really assume that you need this massive team of data and statisticians, just a huge, huge team, in order to be able to do the Things that they perceive they need to do. Right now, most people think the big brands have this. You have everything figured out. Sure. Right. They have more resources. However, if you have an output like we're giving out of our products, you can push that stuff directly into Looker, Tableau, Excel and be able to make some of these dynamic decisions on a smaller scale. The same way that big brands are.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah, yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
I mean, I think on the, on the dashboard thing, I mean, I think this is, you know, it's, it's often the case where you know, you're shown something and you kind of, you. Unless, unless you know to dig deeper. And I think that gets to your other point. But like, unless you know to dig deeper, you assume the thing that, you know, when you log into any application, you know, every, every application has a dashboard. Right. So it's like when you log in, you kind of assume that those are the things that, the important things to look at. But I mean, is this also kind of, is it making marketers just smarter about data kind of being forced to look at these things in different ways? I mean, in other words, is there a, is there a silver lining here of like, we're all becoming more data scientists or whatever you want to call it?
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Rachelle Thielen
Yeah, absolutely. Especially at an executive level of the organization. When you look at like every, you know, especially in bigger companies. Right. There's like the business half and the tech half and they're very siloed or historically have been. Those two sides of the org are coming closer together than they ever have. And even for me, I have a business background in tech companies. I spend so much time with my CTO on the phone asking questions of how can we trust this data? Where does it come from? And it's made me more technically savvy as it has most of these retailers. When we're having conversations at places like Shop Talk, we are having more and more conversations with people on the business side of the house where before it was all CTOs, it was all engineers. And you can see those changes reflect collected on companies like ours, Websites, where our case studies are now pointed more towards the business case. Because we also need to adjust the way we talk about these things to bring that conversation to the table.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah, yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
So certainly privacy and regulation is always, you know, part of, part of these data related conversations. You know, would you say that, you know, are all the privacy rules rules, Are they helping? Are they hurting retail? Is it, is that not even the conversation? You know, like, what, what impact are they having on retail?
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Rachelle Thielen
Yeah. So like the best anytime there's. This is another thing you need to be agile with. So when things are shifting, it's important in data collection to, for us to always support our partners on being on the right side. So at Traject Data we only deal with publicly available information, not behind login screens that don't. We don't support store customer information. We are completely publicly available information. And that is very strong by the way. Like there is a lot of publicly available information that can guide strategy. So I think it's just like a decision that has to be made internally and then setting up the supports around it. But I would say partnering and asking those questions of your business partners is incredibly important because views are very different across the board on what that means to people.
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Greg Kilstrom
So Traject Data works with some of the world's largest retail brands. How are you working with some of these companies to maybe talk a little bit about what Traject does and you know, to use real time data to monitor competitors, gain a market edge like, you know, how does that work in real life?
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Rachelle Thielen
Yeah. Okay. So to lay the foundation, what Trajectdata does is for E commerce for Amazon, for the largest retailers in the US and world wide, we're able to capture that information and feed that into reporting AI decision making tools. So how that's applied, an example that's like very quick and very deep is we work with a very large brand that handles electronics and Prime Days is very big in retail. Right. Amazon Prime Days. So what they do with our data is they actually employ a tiger team that sits in like a war room, ingesting our data and dynamically actually adjusting prices. Like staring at screens everywhere, just like you would imagine a war room because it changes their sales in the hundreds of thousands of units that they're able to react. Because we're pulling basically all the competitive data not just from Amazon, but from other retailers. Because there's a lot of other retailers that are also running things during this time and telling them for their products exactly how much they're going for, on what site at what second, how the descriptions are, the reviews, like everything that you would want to know to change those things by the second. When people are out there shopping, they're ensuring that they're the best possible, winning that buy box and winning that number one position literally like by the second for those periods of time. And there's a lot of AI that's also hopping in and making those decisions in and around Prime Days. But I think it's that Combination of like the AI and the human advantage on that, that's just like really interesting because to me it's so many resources. Right. But when you hear about how much of a dynamic difference that makes, it's a no brainer for them to do that. So that's like one example, but just like gives you insight into how deep that stuff goes.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. And I mean, to your point, I think it's interesting that there is that human component to it as well, you know, So I don't know, maybe at some point in the future there may be less of that, but it's. Yeah, I find it that fascinating that
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there's obviously a lot of AI stuff
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going on, I'm sure in the background and even in the foreground, but the fact that there are humans working with not, you know, instead of, or replaced by like is a.
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Rachelle Thielen
Is.
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Greg Kilstrom
That's a.
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That's a pretty fascinating aspect of it.
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Rachelle Thielen
Yeah, for now. And it is definitely like when you think of a war room, that's somebody keeping an eye on multiple things. That's why you can handle the cool quantities that you can, because you have that oversight and it's making suggestions to you and asking you what type of changes you want to make. But I think the like, just the massive quantities of data that we're providing to retailers requires someone always to be guiding the direction from a human angle of where this AI is headed. Because it could definitely take off in all sorts of directions without that constant guidance.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah, yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
And so, you know, beyond that example, certainly personalization is something that many brands are utilizing effectively. It's often, you know, touted as, you know, kind of the one to one, the segment of one, whatever you want to call it, is kind of the Holy Grail of cx. How are you seeing, and you know, how do you recommend that retailers really use data to create really, you know, meaningful one to one experiences without feeling intrusive or, you know, creepy?
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Rachelle Thielen
That's why it's called the Holy Grail. Right, right, right. We might be getting more used to it, but it's still a little uncomfortable when it knows more than it should. So look, like I mentioned, we're all about publicly available information. And I think just speaking personally, like one of the things that, that we do for retailers is obviously geolocated trends and serving up to them for those type of experiences, what's happening in the neighborhoods of people. So, you know, this obviously changes seasonally depending on where you are across the world or other, you know, local things that are trending and Impacting, that's really the level that I'm comfortable with and that we provide because we're not going behind logins or getting that detail. But it's an important supplemental layer that creates the next phase of wherever people want to go. So that's one example on the other side of it that really touches on this. That's when you start to get into aio, how people are finding things now using agent search. And that's the other area that we partner with retailers a lot right now. Right. Because you're really having to keep track of sources, sentiment, how people feel towards brands so that you don't fall off the edge of the earth, frankly, in search. Because people aren't anymore saying, I want to buy sunscreen from this company. They're saying things like, I'm going on a vacation to Greece. What type of things do you recommend? And you have to be so far ahead in order to be sourced. It's really important to understand what type of prompts, rather than keywords are being put out there. So we're partnering with a lot of brands and retailers on that side of the house to help them ingest that type of data and get smarter. There's.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah, yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
And I would imagine, you know, a. A next step. There is the. The consumer buying agents too. Right. I mean, I know there's some. It's a nascent thing at this point maybe, but it's, you know, that's gonna happen soon enough as well. Right. Is. Is not even a person typing in. But. But like, yeah, you basically, you have your agent buy for you.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Right.
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Greg Kilstrom
So how do you.
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Rachelle Thielen
Yeah, and you have to be cataloging and understanding how these things are getting sourced. Now. This is a significant amount of the partnerships that we have that aren't retailers or brands are the people they're partnering with and big agencies that are really getting smart about understanding exactly those trends coming down the line that are going to change search, that are changing search. And that's like an exciting topic for another time. But it's really changing, you know, definitely,
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Greg Kilstrom
definitely more to come on, on that one. But, you know, so traject works with some very large brands. But also, you know, there's a lot of retailers that are not, you know, may not have the resources of large enterprises. There's even, you know, successful retailers that aren't necessarily huge companies. How does. How does a company like that utilize some of these technologies that we're talking about to really, you know, enhance the customer journey?
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Rachelle Thielen
Yeah. So interesting. So customer journey. So we talked about some of the things. Right. By going out there and pulling down or scraping using things like SERP tools that go out and pull from Google and other major AI insert engines. What trends are out there where products are being listed and shifting around. It doesn't take a large team, especially if you have the right tools to stay on top of those things. You may not be as frequent. Right. Like we were talking about before with those large resources, but you can directionally get yourself where you need to be by being in and around those things. An example of that too, actually that I can give for our own company is one of our partners is the Wall Street Journal, who uses our data to track tariffs. Something that is obviously a huge topic in and around retail. So if you pull up the Wall Street Journal, you'll see our data in there. They have huge analytics teams. Right. So they're showing these trends. Well, we find that interesting too. And we wanted to be able to do that for ourselves to share with our partners. We don't have those type of resources that the Wall Street Journal has. So we hired an intern. We have one intern here that's taking that same type of data and on a very targeted area, like for instance, on furniture, she's doing the exact type analysis that the Wall Street Journal is and pushing that stuff out through blogs for our retail partners and others out there. If you take that in a small business approach, that's a great way to show an example of how getting an intern or one specific employee that's very good and it has just come out with their MBA could really give you an advantage. And I guarantee you'll be shocked at how much they can do with the type of data that's available today and very simple tools like a looker or a tableau or even Excel.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah, nice.
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Greg Kilstrom
So you know, in addition to, we've been talking a lot about, let's say the customer acquisition part of things. Certainly retail fraud and unauthorized sellers are a significant concern for. Yeah. For, for a lot of brands. How can real time data help here and you know, used be used to identify and address some of these issues.
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Rachelle Thielen
So I love this topic. Right. Because it's like being a sleuth and you're kind of like you get to go to battle with the bad actors in this space. It's like so important to have really forensic level data because here's what happens. We know because again like you said, this is one of the hot areas that's crazy growing and that we partner with a lot of retailers and services that Just do this on is unfortunately like use Amazon for an example. You can have a clear case of fraud where you can pull something up and you cannot get that data taken down. It's just like a very hard process to do that. You need massive quantities. So in most cases people know who their unauthorized sellers are, at least the big ones who do this a lot. We work with them to basically forensically capture every single time that they're doing something and build these massive files for them and cases essentially that allow them to actually get Amazon and other sellers out there to kick these guys out and it actually works. And that's a huge win by the way, because that's the biggest thing you'll hear when you talk to people out there is it's amazing how difficult it is when you have evidence of these things happening to actually fix the problem. We work with a great partner called Sigil that does exactly this and has figured out how to do it. And sometimes people, you know, think that they're bad actors, but there's also just like unauthorized sellers that don't know they're not hitting map or you know, selling for the wrong prices or whatever else. And I learned a lot of this from working with them is like just making people aware in a lot of cases will fix problems. Like you don't have to think the legal route all the time. In some cases it's just awareness and training these sellers how to do the right thing. But there are also the cases where you've got fraud or just massive cases and we do and can win cases along with people by providing very clear cut, court ready levels of information for them.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah, yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
So as we wrap up here, a couple things first, looking ahead, what are you. I know we've talked about quite a few things. A few of these things are, you know, still, still lots more to share and a follow up. But you know what, what's on your radar? You know, what are some of the most promising emerging trends that you're seeing in retail data?
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Rachelle Thielen
Yeah, it's a great way to wrap up because we covered two of them. I think the one that we just talked about and there's an old saying I'm sure you've heard too, that sometimes the best offense is a great defense. And that's how I think about brand protection is like it's not as flashy or as sexy a lot of the things that you see on stage up there with AI, but this is incredibly important to make sure that your organization has a very strong strategy there because that has an enormous impact on the bottom line of a company, whether they have that or don't have that under control. And the second thing is really not anymore. Trusting those third parties, whether it be Google reporting your ad strategy back to you, the dashboards you've always loved and trusted and are that comfortable blanket next to you and just starting to question those things. If they're really serving me the same way as they did five years. And no matter how big or small or how many resources you are having something that gives you the comfort that you're in control, that you have your own data through a very simple API that can at least cross check. If you're going to stick with your dashboards, then at least have something that you can cross check and verify that. Yep, this looks directionally the same way. Or something's up here and I need to question whether this data is getting too old.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah, love it.
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Greg Kilstrom
Well Rachelle, thanks so much for joining today. One last question for you before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it?
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Rachelle Thielen
Consistently find the people out there who are asking a lot of questions and consistently pushing back against norms and listen. Right. I love asking those questions of what am I not thinking about right now that I should be? And taking that back to your own organization and being willing to get out of that comfort zone and really take some chances and invest in things like research and development right now. It used to be research and development. It's really, I think, what's happening tomorrow and not 10 years from now and what keeps us all thriving and even surviving today.
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Interviewer/Host Assistant
Yeah. Love it.
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Greg Kilstrom
Well again I'd like to thank Rochelle Thelen, CEO at TrajectData for joining the show.
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You can learn more about Rochelle and
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Traject Data by following the links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening to the Agile brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoy the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me if you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event. Go to www.gregkillstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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Strayer University Narrator
The agile brand.
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Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
And Doug there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
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Greg Kilstrom
Hey everyone, check out this guy in his Bernie. What is this, your first date?
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Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Oh no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.
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Rachelle Thielen
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league. Anyways.
- [26:27]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
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Rachelle Thielen
Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty.
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