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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#744: Journey management and driving business results with Mark Smith and Raymond Gerber, Institute for Journey Management
00:31:59
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The Agile Brand.
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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. 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. Now onto the show. The Customer Journey guides the lifetime value of our most important audiences.
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Yet how do we ensure that we.
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Are planning, mapping, managing and optimizing these journeys effectively? Agility requires a deep understanding of your customer's journey and the ability to adapt your strategies and tactics in real time. It also demands a willingness to experiment, to learn and iterate quickly, embracing change as an opportunity rather than a threat.
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Today we're going to talk about the.
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Exciting new Institute for Journey Management and.
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How it's helping businesses unlock the power.
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Of customer centricity in a complex and ever changing world. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Mark Smith and Raymond Gerber from the Institute for Journey Management. Mark and Raymond, welcome to the show.
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Thank you, Greg.
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Thanks very much, Greg. Pleased to be here.
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Yeah, looking forward to. I know Mark, you're a returning champion here on the show. So looking forward to talking with both of you today. And before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourselves and your roles at the Institute for Journey Management.
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So Ray and I are both founders of this new Institute. We are both longtime members of the Journey Management Marketplace. The Journey Marketplace and actually interestingly for a long time bit arrivals and head to head competitors. My old company was Kitewheel and we were always ranked up there alongside Ray's old company Thunderhead, in particular the Journey Orchestration Marketplace. Now you know that's both of us have had a career. Rael introduce himself. I've been in the customer behavior, customer interaction market for a long time before that, then became the Journey Marketplace and essentially set up this institute to help more companies understand what's possible from Journey Management.
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Right.
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The two, our two businesses, Kite, Will and Thunderhead did very well, had great exits, but as a whole the space really hasn't taken off like both Ray and I Know it could. We've seen the value that can be delivered from journeys, but not enough companies are getting that value. And so the Institute is essentially a, an association for this industry to try and help everybody in the industry get better results.
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I'm Raymond and nice to meet you all. I live in Florida, fortunate to live in the sunny state. And I always joke, people say, where are you from? I say, I'm from the deep south, really deep South Africa. I lived in the states for 27 years. Fortunate to live in London for a couple of years. In the middle, as Mark said, I was the CTO and CPO for Thunder 8. And it's interesting that even though Mark and I competed heavily, we actually never met until Joanna from Polaris said we should get on a call and start the Institute together. So very excited to be here. We had really good kickoff meetings with a couple of founders. Interesting. The purse thoughts were this is going to be more of a technical institute of how the solutions in the journey ecosystem work together for the betterment of organizations and customers. But very quickly, in the first meeting, everybody agreed that we need to elevate the term journeys to clarify the term journeys and to escalate the value that people get from journeys. So we kind of changed our manifesto to, to focus on elevating the concept of journeys. Obviously, you know, Fundraiser was sold, Usermind was sold to CX companies and we don't think they optimize the value of those solutions within cx. And there's many reasons for that. It's not just the companies, it's the target audience and the complexity of the product. So we hope we can work together with the industry to be able to bring what we call the concept of journey led transformation using journey led value management concepts to the industry.
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C
Great, great. Yeah. And you know, as someone who's been following this, this market pretty closely for, for quite a while, I, you know, definitely this, it's, it's great to have to both of you here really, from the. I mean, definitely. I, you know, I'm very familiar with Kite Wheel and with Thunderhead, so looking forward to talking about this. I want to follow up a little bit more on. I know you gave a little bit of background of why you started the Institute, but I wonder, was there a moment, was there just kind of like an aha thing where, you know, man, this is what's needed right now, you know, what's the gap in the market?
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Yeah, well, I think that came. Actually, Ray mentioned that we, we got introduced by a mutual friend at Forrester Joanna de Quintanilla, who's really the journey expert and journey leader within the Forrester organization. And she got Ray and I to go on a call with each other. And that was the point because, you know, despite all of these years of competition, we realized we actually agreed on so many things. And in particular, we shared this kind of frustration about the fact that this, this Journey marketplace hadn't really taken off, despite the examples we'd seen of value. Why aren't more people doing it? There's a blocker here. There's a mysterious kind of blocker that's stopping businesses taking on this technology. And why? What's that? And actually, Ray had the idea. He said, you know what? I think an organization, let's call it an institute that can try and solve those problems in an independent way for the benefit of the whole industry, practitioners, business leaders, as well as the technology companies and the consultancies, but can kind of work across that whole ecosystem. Maybe that's the kind of thing that could sort of release the opportunity here.
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Yeah. And for me, a big trigger was, you know, especially as I spent nearly three years with Qualtrics trying to help them integrate UserMind into their platform. Not very successfully. Not again, not their own fault. It just happens to be a different target audience. And the products was maybe not where it was supposed to be. You know, is the vendors in the space created silos. We, as the industry talk about, you know, go beyond silos, work together, but you had Journey mapping vendors and your journey orchestration vendors and journeylytics vendors, and you have CDPs and next case Action decisioning. That all kind of like, while we do journeys, but not like the others. And so I think that especially the last year at Qualtrics, I really started thinking about how do we integrate and maximize the value of all of these platforms as an ecosystem working together. And especially when you look at the event of Genai, how that is just elevating up the concept of journeys in the space, making data available. I think for me, that was the exciting moment and that's why I initially thought was going to be a technical play. But I think happily we've transitioned. Not that there won't be a technical play in the future. I think these vendors, as they sit around the table talking to each other, they realize, man, we can't be silos. We need to really work together for the betterment of companies that use the concept of journeys as well as the end customers.
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And I think there's a. There's a great point. There which is the other the. So the point, it all started when, when we met and found out we kind of agreed on things. I think the, the crystallization of. There is something here was when we got a set of initial companies together for a first meeting and that those are essentially that group has become our founding member group. A set of technology companies in this space. So there's companies like Journey Track, Symanteca, they do more orchestration minded companies like Incuba and Alterian and csg. And what was great was we got those, got them together primarily the CEOs from those companies all came and met and sat around the table for two days with Ray and myself and went through this discussion. And I just think that it's pretty rare to get head on competitors like that to start collaborating in a new way. And what became apparent was they do agree, they agreed with this idea that Ray and I had that by working together we're going to be able to solve some of these problems that affect everybody. We all want it to be a huge, fast growing, successful industry. Together we can stand a better chance of getting there.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for, in that discussion. So many of those names have also been guests on the show as well. So. And, and I think, you know, you're, I think you're making a great point here as well. This is talked about quite a bit. I mean, you know, I work with a lot of, you know, Fortune 1000s doing, doing consulting and the customer journey always comes up and management of that journey often comes up. And yet there's still some hurdles to, you know, some of the why behind all of this. There, there's still some hurdles, you know, so despite executives being familiar with this concept of journey mapping, journey management, you know, what are some of the, the key reasons that maybe it's a, maybe a combination of holding companies back from being more successful with it or, and may perhaps that's aligned with the purpose of the, the Institute as well. You know, where.
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What's the hurdle to overcome here?
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I mean, I think I'll take this one. I think the first one is a complex problem to solve. You know, when you move from managing individual touch points, you know, to managing the journey as a whole as one. When you try and get to the point where it is a customer managed journey versus a managed customer journey where you put the customer in control, you know, you are saying for yourself, your own organization, I'm willing to give up control because I'm doing it for the Betterment of my customer. I think thirdly is, I think the fact that the industry became silos in itself, you know, created separation between the different vendors and confusion. Is Adobe really a journey management solution or it's not? You know, is the old Salesforce campaign solution that they bought a journey management solution as an art? You know, what really is our journeys and Journey concepts. And then I think especially Mark and I, we were in a more focus on journey orchestration where 10 years ago when you talk about artificial intelligence and machine learning, it was kind of like looked on as now we need to go hire five doctorates with statistics degrees to manage that. And I think those are all things that is overcomeable. And it's obviously with the event of Genai becoming mainstream, I think that will make it easier. I still think we have the issue of the, especially with the event of Thunder being bought by Medallia and Usermind by Qualtrics, them trying to sell it into a CX team where the CX team is underfunded. They don't have a corporate remit, they have a CX voice of the customer remit. So I think those are the big things that we will work as a team, Mark and I, with the founders and people that subscribe to say, how do we overcome this? How do we change this for people to understand the strategic value of journey led transformation that will allow investments to increase in the CX teams to become journey teams rather than CX teams.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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And one of the key things that the companies have to take on to be successful with this is to realize it's not just in the CX team.
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Yeah.
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This, the whole concept of a journey and this one, one of my passions is that just the concept of journey has to be across the business. It has to be everywhere in the business, not just in the CX team. Because everything touches, touches the journey. And so you've got to get it out. But as Ray says, it's a transformational thing. So it's kind of hard and complex. And so only the real persistent, determined companies are kind of getting there currently. And one of the other big reasons for that is the kind of the way businesses run are unfortunately often very short term. The real benefits from a transformation to become truly journey centric are a long term win. Now. They're huge.
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All right.
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We're talking about doubling your growth rate over a five year period. Okay. That's a huge change and a huge win for a business. But it often gets left behind. Smaller wins this quarter.
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Right, right.
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And that kind of dynamic is a real challenge. When everybody's in a job for an average of 3 years. Who wants to build a 5 year plan? When what you earn is dependent upon this quarter, this year's numbers delivery? Who wants to develop a five year plan?
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Right.
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These are real challenges. And so our whole methodology that we've put a huge amount of effort, Ray in particular has put a massive amount of effort over the last six months actually documenting the kind of methodologies that allow businesses to get to the long term goals in a series of short term wins that involve becoming more and more journey led and more and more allowing incremental value to be delivered by making the approach all about delivering value is a key step to each of those incremental things, aiming for and building towards that long term vision.
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Yeah.
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And so that's, it's a big challenge. We're not, you know, that's why I think it warrants something like an institute to help organizations get through this because it's complicated. And so, you know, a big part of our mission in the institute is to provide information and guidelines and methodologies and frameworks of how to get there, but it's also to provide a community of the participants to share information and approaches and success stories and failure stories and what works, what doesn't work, all of that. And our platform's very much going to be a community for people to get together and kind of share that stuff because that's what's needed.
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In my experience, you know, silos are, it's a cliche to say break down the silos, but it's real. You know, there's, there's a reason why we keep saying that, but I, I think the other, the other thing, I mean this seems really valuable because you know, there, there are things written about best practices and things like that, but in my experience as well, those are great starting points. But the Conversations and the collaboration and the interaction. Because, you know, every organization is different. You know, you, there is no, there is no template for how, even, even if there's standardized departments, generally speaking, like there is no one way that the two organizations are run. So I think that collaboration and that opportunity to, to talk about this stuff and, and share goes beyond just like a white paper or so. You know, again, not, not that those can't be valuable, but it seems like there's, there's some real possibility here to, to solve those. And I mean given, given that. Let's talk a little bit about, you know, who's the ideal members for the institute? Like who are you, who are you looking to reach out to at least first?
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Yeah.
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So our primary initial audience is the business leader, right? Someone who owns a PNL and has got all of these business goals on their shoulders and is looking for help, knows it's complicated, has heard a lot of the buzzwords, but frankly not quite sure what they all really mean. That's our primary number one audience is three main things that we're providing for for that audience is this kind of executive education program to guide them through how to, how to do this stuff, be a library of real validated case studies of where the value is. And see this community, this peer network of other business leaders, plus a whole bunch of experts, consultants, technology people from the industry who you can go to to discuss and share and find out answers to, to your questions through. Essentially you can think of it almost like it's like a little LinkedIn microcosm, just focused on journey management.
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Yeah, yeah. And I think we, we doing planning to do something fairly unique is, is because we want to make sure personally, like we nearly handpicked the initial founders, you know, that come from reputable vendors and they're passionate about journeys. We also plan to have the first round of subscribers as invite only because we want to make sure that we start building on a very, very solid base where when you have the people like Graham Garrett from Truist being invited and agreeing to join, you know, that is seen as somebody pivot in the industry that is passionate about it. I think what we'll find is you'll start getting the next round of people that subscribe join not only because of us as founders, but also because of the collaboration and the conversations they can have with industry leaders, you know, that are kind of on the other side of the fence. Like we are originally from vendors, but people that are practitioners that are getting the value from those solutions.
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Yeah, yeah, that's Great.
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What about the.
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Obviously AI has already come up in this conversation. It's hard to escape it ever these days. But what's kind of the role of AI education? And you know, it sounds like to a degree there's an education about journey management in itself. Again, nobody's kind of completely unfamiliar with it but you know, these, these two things are, are probably going more and more hand in hand. So what, what's the, what's the, the volume of AI education I guess in all of this?
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Well, you know, I always say that, you know, AI is only as good as, as the questions that you ask.
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Yeah.
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And I think that the role is, is the Institute doesn't one plan to answer all the questions? But we hope to educate the audience and the subscribers to know what questions to ask and not only how to ask them, but how to interpret results that's coming back and provide them with a deeper level of knowledge where they can get deeper and deeper through engaging with Genai systems. But also they can better understand the feedback that come back and what is true and what's not true because it's based on such a lot of information. Obviously we're also looking at the technical impact of Genai and the role that it can play to help people. I mean, for example, building journey atlases, we plan to through the Institute make available mechanisms either, you know, GPTs that kind of build, that allow people to provide context and create their own genealysis context diagrams, et cetera, et cetera. So we have some ideas in terms of how to maximize the value of this. But we hope that we can position the Institutes a mechanism for to people to educate how to filter out and how to maximize the value of those solutions.
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Yeah.
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And I just also had a comment about agentic AI which I, you know, we see that is going to have a big impact on customer experience.
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Right.
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We also see it being a huge driver for the need for journey management because all of a sudden you start inserting a lot more automation and a lot more intelligence into the interactions between customers and businesses. You need a lot more management and context for that, which is exactly what a journey management system provides. And so there's a really tight connection between the capabilities being made available by AI tools, whether they be analytical, generative, like Ray was talking about. Agentic. They're all very relevant, but they all need to kind of be brought together in this context of the customer and the journey. And that's. And so lots of our education is going to be about that and about how to use it, we're not going down educating people on what AI is. It's all about how to power journey management with those AI capabilities that are now, as you said, everywhere.
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Yeah, yeah. And I feel like probably sooner than a year from now, but a year from now we're probably going to be talking more about consumer agents too. Right. Which is a whole, that's a whole different. Maybe not different, but it's another channel. Right. At the very least that could be accounted for in that journey. So.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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I think for me, just a very interesting thing is, and maybe I'm overhyping this, I think we are getting so spoiled as consumers and as business users by using simple prompts. You know, Mark and I talked about it a while ago in terms of the cost and effort and impact that it had on having to build complex interfaces, you know, for configurations and all the key way work and having to make it work on all the browsers. You know, I think this can be a massive transition where your typical business uses OP Journey solutions will want the interface to be prompts which will I think allow the vendors to get a lot more value to the solutions without spending too much time on worrying about the interfaces and really getting to the point where we talked about moving away from the managed customer journey or the managed user interface to the customer managed interface. I think I'm excited to see all that transition becomes relevant in the, in the journey space.
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so maybe, maybe a good segue there. Following that, that trend. What are you looking ahead to in, you know, 2026 and beyond? You know, what are some of the trends in journey management that, that we should be paying attention to? Maybe some of, some of what we.
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Already discussed, but yeah, definitely some of what we've, what we've discussed. You know, our, the Institutes for focus for 2026 is really about membership.
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Right.
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We, as Ray says, our first wave is an invite only to build this community for the business leader. Because our view is it's got to start there, we've got to have those leaders wanting to do this, otherwise nothing else is going to happen.
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Right.
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But as a fast follow, there's then a second wave of education programs and engagement opportunities for the practitioner. So in a simple sense, those leaders will then want their teams to be educated and there'll be a whole platform for those practitioners to come on board. And so we're going to be on a big membership drive and looking for many thousands of people to be in this institute by the end of 2026, sharing, collaborating and Learning about journey management.
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I mean for me, from a technical vendor technology perspective, I'm looking forward to the traditional machine learning models, reinforcement learning, you know, required within agentic AI to become mainstream and embedded within all the journey platforms. But obviously with a simplified layer of gen AI sitting on top of that because we still, we can afford to just transition into agentic AI. You know, we need to still have that belief in predictions and prescriptions are consistent and unique and not biased can be validated. So I'm really excited about where this industry will go in the next 12 to 18 months and hopefully Mark and I and the other founders can influence, you know, how people get value from journey led solutions.
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Yeah, love it. Well, I'm excited to see, see what you build here. I mean you both helped build this, this whole, this whole area. So really, really excited to, to, to, to see, see where this goes. Before we wrap up, I want to ask you both, like to ask all my guests this question. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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When I play golf, I stretch. That's why I say agile.
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There's no wrong answers now.
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Now I know what's wrong with my golf.
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Everything comes to golf for me. So I think it's just, you know, know I've never been a really good student, but I've been a really good researcher and you know, in my whole life I averaged about reading 1500 pages a month and obviously in kind of semi retirement, I do even more of that. And as Mark said, a lot of that translates into content. And obviously I think the, the funding for me will me will be to see asset contents become exposed to people of a younger age and not as deep in the industry as we are. How that changes their thoughts around the value they can get from, from journey led initiatives.
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Yeah, so it's funny. Great answer, Ray. I, I was going to say reading as well, you know, it's, it's vital. But the other thing is thinking.
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Right.
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And so many people in business have no time to think, to like really think about things. And so that's reading and thinking. And Greg, I just wanted to say thanks so much for having us both on, on the podcast. Really enjoyed it. Great conversation. I thought, great questions for us. Real pleasure to be here. And anybody out there who wants more information about the Institute and is thinking about applying for membership, come to i4 the number4i4jm.org and I cannot stop without.
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Saying go USA and the Ryder Cup.
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Awesome.
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That's right. You've got from my accent that I'm not originally from the US but like Ray, I live here and I am now American. So the Ryder cup is a conflicting time.
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Nice. Well again I'd like to thank Mark Smith and Raymond Gerber from the Institute for Journey Management for joining the show. You can learn more about Mark and Raymond and the Institute for Journey Management.
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By following the links in the show.
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Notes.
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Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand. If you enjoyed 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@theagile brand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me if you're interested in consulting or advisory services or or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkilstrom.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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Before we continue, I wanted to share a key strategic resource that a majority of the Fortune 500 are already aware of. Finding the best technology, business and talent solutions is not easy. With business demands and competitive pressures mounting, you need to be able to design, deploy and optimize your technology to provide leading customer experiences while driving business growth. Those of you that have been listening to this show for a while know that this podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, a global provider of technology, business and talent solutions for more than 80% of the Fortune 500, tech systems accelerates business transformation for their customers. Whether you're looking to maximize your technology ROI, drive business growth, or elevate customer experiences, TechSystems enables enterprises to capitalize on change. Learn more at techsystems.com that's teksystems.com now let's get back to the show.