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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#753: Wrike CMO Christine Royston on building marketing teams for agility
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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. 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. Now onto the show. Is your marketing organization built for disruption or doomed to be disrupted? Agility requires both rapidly responding to market changes while also anticipating and shaping your products and services to map to evolving customer expectations. This means embracing new technologies and strategies while maintaining a laser focus on delivering value. Today we're going to talk about how leading marketing organizations are leveraging AI and collaborative work management to not only survive, but thrive in today's dynamic landscape. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Christine Royston, Chief Marketing Officer at Wrike. Christine, welcome to the show.
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Thank you. Thanks for having me.
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Yeah, really looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Wrike?
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Sure, sure. I have 20 years of marketing leadership experience in B2B tech and at Wrike I lead global marketing, brand and communications and I'm really focused on enabling that high impact, data driven work across my team, across the organization, across our customers. And if you think about Wrike, we're an intelligent collaborative work management platform. We help millions of users and many, many companies. It's really any company that needs to optimize their workflows. A couple examples of what those workflows could be We've got Varsity Yearbook, so they manage their campaigns in Wrike. We have Jaguar Land Rover that focuses on their product life cycle in the product. And then we've got Siemens who handles their client service delivery in Wrike. So definitely focused on helping customers to streamline projects, connect their teams and figure out how do they do more impactful work. Nice.
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Nice. Great. Well yeah, let's dive in here then. And we're going to talk about a few things today, but I want to start by your CMO at wrike. Let's talk about that role of the cmo, which is certainly seen its share of changes over the years, but particularly let's talk about recent changes. So you're navigating the complexity of the marketing technology landscape. How do you look at doing that while also making sure that your team has the right tools and the right skills to succeed?
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Sure. So I feel like martech and that whole landscape has always been changing quickly. If you think about those charts that show sort of the volume of technology that's out there, I think the big difference now is I am seeing it evolve so much more rapidly. It is something that it's tough for an individual to keep up with. And especially if you think about the acceleration of AI, what that brings to existing martech, it opens up new martech. And so it's really, you know, it's really about not having more tools, but making sure you've got. Got the right ones. They're integrated into your tech stack, into your workflows. We're always evaluating our tech stack and we really look at how is it really enhancing the team, how is it making us more efficient, more effective? And then of course, we use WRIKE to centralize our work and think about how do we automate things and break down silos. You know, I think the key thing here is, is making sure that you're giving your teams the tools and technology that help them be more efficient, more effective, more creative. It's not about replacing, replacing people, but it's making the teams that you have today able to really deliver even better output.
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Yeah, yeah. And definitely the chief martech, you can't even see the logos on it anymore. It's so small. Right. It's just like it's more an idea than an actual map at this point. And certainly with AI, there's not only all of the products have AI in it, but that's added a whole dimension of the separate sort of siloed AI tools as well. So adding even greater complexity with all of that, whether it's separate AI tools, AI integration and just AI integrated into the role of marketing, how does the role of a CMO evolve with that? And you know what, what kind of skills are either needed now or do you think are going to be needed for marketing leaders as. As things continue to evolve in that way?
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So I do think the, the basics remain. You've got to be able to balance the company brand, the Company reputation with driving growth and, and making sure marketing is contributing to, to business results. I think now CMOs are really needing to think about how do they become orchestrators of AI strategy across their team, across marketing as well as the pieces of the business that marketing is touching. So I think it's always been about managing resourcing. Do CMOs have the right team members? Do those team members have enough time? Do they have enough budget? Does the CMO have enough time to kind of think about strategy? But now we need to think about how do we leverage AI within all of that to be more efficient, more creative. So as I think about those future skills for CMOs and really any leader, it is about driving agility across the team as well as the go to market motions that we're always involved in and making sure that we're thinking about how are we leveraging AI ethically, how are we leveraging it in the right ways for the best output. So I, I think it's, it is a fascinating time to, to be, you know, a marketer, a cmo as you think about just this, this constantly evolving world out there.
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Yeah, yeah. I mean I, I feel like, you know, I got my career started at the early days of the Internet. So you know, it feels like that kind of, kind of sea change almost in. I didn't have a lot of marketing experience prior to that, so I, but I, you know, that, that big change of just like lots of people trying to figure out how to best harness this, this, this power and you know, these capabilities and you know, I know, you know, Wrike has certainly expanded the, the capabilities within, you know, within the, the tool itself. Using AI. Maybe can you share how you're using AI within. Because you use Reich within Wrike. Right. So, you know, how are you using AI within your marketing organization? You know, by using Reich and other methods.
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Sure. So we recently released a copilot for Wrike. So this really helps the team prioritize their tasks, it routes approvals, it auto summarizes project updates and that really saves the team hours each week so that they can focus on more strategic things. And then actually just this week at our annual Collaborate conference, we announced reg's Agent Builder. So it's a tool that's going to allow anybody to create custom AI agents using natural language. And I think this is really going to accelerate AI adoption across really any team. I'm super excited to see how the team is going to think about using this. It's going to really put them in control of how agents work. And what do they need agents to do uniquely for their workflows? And then, you know, outside of wrike tools, we certainly use AI for a lot of different use cases. It can be accelerating content creation, giving us the opportunity to do even more ideation around campaigns. Personalization is another big one. Really excited to kind of see how we can think about that personalization element.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, Agentix certainly is, it's an exciting part of the, I think it's kind of the next evolution of, of some of the gen stuff. So yeah, definitely excited to be able to see that as well. And I know Reich did some research recently on agentic and highlighted some interesting findings. Do you want to maybe share some of the takeaways and how that can help marketing leaders prepare for embracing some of these things like agentic?
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Sure. So some of the interesting statistics that we found were, you know, over 60% of workers are already using AI agents, but their effectiveness is sort of being limited by siloed data, not enough context. Out of people who are using AI agents, more than half are using the tools daily. And even those that aren't using them daily, a big percent are using them weekly. And so if you think about employees who have access to, you know, both planning and execution tools, the question is like, how do you integrate those? How do you make sure you're not using fragmented data? You've got multiple systems that are potentially impacting the efficiency of AI agents. And so I think looking at that data, it's great to see this adoption. So to me it points to the fact that we don't have a risk in adoption or even that AI isn't going to help humans. I think the risk is, is AI using the right data? Is it using a complete set of data to help to move work along? And so I think that really points to the need for having this structured knowledge. Do you have all of your workflows documented so that AI has the right inputs to actually be helpful to you and give you the right output?
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You know, we've been talking about silos for a while, but you know, often referring to human teams and, and things like that. I think with a, with some of the gen AI or AI in general, that was the case. But I think with agentic, it brings this, it kind of brings this whole idea of collaboration, kind of puts a new contact. I, I think it redefines what we call teams, you know, within organizations because, I mean, there are or are going to be hybrid human and agentic teams within organizations. So that kind of brings me to the next topic and maybe focusing mostly on the human teams for now at least. But talking about collaborative environments, it's so critical again for the silos that already existed. I think the more we can eliminate those, the better. But how do you see just how crucial collaborative work management is in just making marketing and marketing ops move efficiently? How do you think about that?
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Sure. I think at its core, marketing is a truly collaborative function and that can be within a team, it can be with cross functional stakeholders. We certainly collaborate quite a bit across the organization. And so I think that the importance of collaboration on its own means when we're looking for technology, how can we find technology that is facilitating that, enhancing that? Because it's, you know, it's not just a requirement. If you have fantastic collaboration, it's going to be a multiplier in terms of your team's performance, your team's ability to deliver amazing work. And really you want the best ideas from all teams. You don't just want the person who has this job title thinking about driving this solution. You want to make sure that you're capturing input and ideas from across the organization. And so if I think of collaborative work management tools, I think it helps to facilitate those ideas and input. We actually launched a visual collaboration solution earlier this year that helps with some of that brainstorming, that ideation that can then pull those ideas, once agreed upon, into a project. And then even once you've got the ideas and you've agreed on the plan. We all know things come up as you're executing campaigns and even as you're evaluating campaigns. And so having everybody on the same page of here's where we are or here are the results and everybody has the same access to the same data, it means you're going to continue to be able to leverage the best of the best from a lot of different team members with different perspectives.
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Yeah, yeah. And maybe you could talk a little bit more about that part as well of just like how, you know, Reich is able to help because there's a, they're measuring the success of this as well. So from a performance aspect and you know, just streamlining processes. Like what are, what are some ways that that a platform like that can, can, you know, meaningfully do that?
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Sure, sure. And I can share a couple of, of examples from, from customers who are also seeing the benefit. So we have a customer who's based in the uk, but, but, but is a global digital marketing agency called Jellyfish and they have really focused on driving efficiency in their agency. By leveraging Reich. So they saw a 95% time savings when they just looked at how do we summarize client calls and capture the action items. Using Reich AI to kind of kick off, okay, we just had the call, what's the next step? And if you take a look at the, you know, the, the savings there, they save three, three to five hours a week just on individual workload. So even outside of that kind of collection of, of actions after a call with the client, individuals are able to save time that they're able to apply back to more creative, more strategic types of work.
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Yeah.
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And you know, a totally different industry. We've, we've got Cineos Health, which is operating at massive scale. They've, They've got over 47,000 projects and they're using AI search across all that volume of data and workflow information to figure out, you know, what is the right standard operating procedure or document that they need. So they're not having to figure out, okay, where, where did we put that in the hierarchy? They can use search, go and find it and make sure they're able to get that information to all their distributed teams. So it's definitely, you know, it's a, I think it saves time. It allows you to, you know, apply that time into more, more interesting ways, things that, that people want to spend their time on but might be consumed with kind of manual, task oriented work.
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Yeah, I mean anything that saves me having to look through 47,000 projects worth of documents is, is more than welcome. So. Yeah. Nice. That's great. So, and you know, maybe, maybe along those lines, last thing I want to talk about is just, you know, we're on the Agile brand podcast. We'll, we'll, we'll talk a little bit about Agile. And you know, certainly agile marketing is something near and dear to, to my heart in building these organizations. I mean there's, you know, we could always say that change is constant and we need to move faster and faster. And you know, I've, there's never been a year where it wasn't true that we needed to do more with, you know, we had more to do more with or what, however you want to couch it. So, you know, we're always being asked to do more with less technology is increasing all, all of these things, all, all of these good reasons to be more agile and adaptable. You know, what advice would you give to marketing leaders that are, you know, certainly feeling that pressure, maybe feeling it more than ever and just needing to build adaptable teams in this Face of, you know, constant change, constant disruption.
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Sure. So I think the first thing is about the team that you're building. So, so making sure that you are hiring people, that you are making it clear that you want people to experiment. You want them to experiment with technology, including AI, new ideas. You want them to learn from failures. You want to make sure people feel like they can try new things even if they're not 100% sure it's going to be a success. And I think that ongoing learning mentality and just an inherent curiosity is so certainly something I look at when I'm hiring for team members. So I think that's the first thing is do you have the right team in place? And then I think the other piece, just definitely around being agile and being able to react to the constant change we're in is as you think about your workflows, your processes, certainly you want them to be robust and measurable. Now we need to make sure they are flexible because technology is changing so much. How are we going to apply AI and new innovation to those workflows so that we're not building something that's so rigid that we have to rebuild it when there is a change in process or when there is a new technology that's going to make it so much more efficient? So I think that's, that's the second piece just around that flexibility and agility. And then third piece I think is, is something that is, you know, has been, been, been constant throughout my career, which is making sure you, your teams, your strategy are aligned to the company strategy. So does your team actually understand, you know, what does success look like, not just for them for marketing, but for the company because that's going to help them really build strategies that drive the right results and certainly, you know, using, using technology in order to support that strategy. But, but I think that helps to make sure that people feel empowered to say, I know what we're trying to do and I'm gonna come up with some ideas to try to figure out how I support that broader corporate strategy or organization strategy.
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Yeah, yeah. Love it. So, looking ahead, you know, let's say we have this conversation a year from now or so. You know, what, what are some of the biggest opportunities and challenges you see for marketing organizations? And, you know, how would they position themselves for success?
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So I think on the opportunity side, I am excited about this opportunity that we all have to rethink how work gets done. How are we leveraging AI? I think now more than ever, most leadership, most boards, investors are looking at how can teams come up with new ideas? Because we're all kind of feeling this pressure of how do we make sure we're maximizing AI? We know our competitive competitors are. And I think one specific example of this is around personalization. I feel like we've been, we've been in these different phases of personalization and it's always been sort of the game changer. How do you give somebody exactly what is relevant to them? And I think it's actually, it's, it's going to become a requirement. If I see an ad, if I get an email and it misses the mark, I'm going to wonder why is that? I know there's, I, I know there's technology out there that this particular person could have used to give me something that I find valuable. So I think that expectation is one that we can jump on as an opportunity and figure out how do we get ahead of that? I think on the challenge there is this ongoing question of privacy and data accuracy. If you think about automation as well as you need to always be looking at where is that human in the loop? Where do we sit as AI evolves, as technology evolves, you know, how do you think about maybe I had to be involved in this piece of the workflow, I had to be involved this early in the process. But now that we're thinking about different ways to run our workflows, my team sits in a different place. And so you have to figure out where do you and your teams need to spend time, whether it's reviewing, informing, enhancing the output of AI. And so I think when you think about your teams and how you operate, it is making sure that you're thinking about this constant optimization of workflows. It is not set it and forget it. You're going to have to continue to think about how do you revisit. And one final thought here is I think it's going to be fascinating to see what new marketing roles are sort of created with this world. If you think about their roles themselves will change. We will still have digital marketers who do this, we will still have content creators who do this or. But I know there are going to be totally different roles out there for people who have this sort of blend of creativity, marketing chops plus technology background and think about new roles that are being created every day. I think is fascinating for marketing.
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Yeah, yeah. Love it. Well, Christine, thanks so much for sharing 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 consistently.
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Sure. So I, I'm always looking outside my, my company. I have a great team around me. I have great peers around me. But I like to make sure that I'm looking outside to see what are trends that I'm seeing from other CMOs, thought leaders, industry organizations. So I want to make sure I'm, I'm staying current and I make sure I'm actively setting aside the time on my calendar, block my calendar out weeks ahead of time to make sure I either have time to read that long list of articles or listen to podcasts or if I get invited to an industry event, drop it on the calendar so things don't get scheduled around it. So I'm, I'm taking that time because that is part of, you know, it's part of my job. It's part of any, anyone's job is to continually upskill yourself. And a lot of that is making sure you're, you're looking at learning from others. Certainly, you know, AI is a great time saver in making sure I have that time on my calendar for that creative thinking and that learning and certainly, you know, want to make sure that my team is, is doing the same thing. So it is something that I, I encourage certainly using, using Reich to kind of stay on top of things that maybe I would have had to manually check in with the team and say, where are we at with this project? What's going on? I've got a CMO dashboard that I can look at to say, what's the progress? Is something in the red. What do I need to add to my next one on one agenda. But I think, you know, it's definitely a fascinating time to be a marketer and I think focusing on what's important to you, your company, and then using technology and all of these tools to make sure you're still focusing on the right things. So definitely, definitely some of the things that I think about.
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Yeah. Love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank Christine Royston, Chief Marketing Officer at wrike, for joining the show. You can learn more about Christine and Reich by following the links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening to the Agile brand brought to you by Tech Systems. 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@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 consideration, 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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The Agile Brand.
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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 deployments 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, Tech Systems enables enterprises to capitalize on change. Learn more at techsystems. Com. That's teksystems. Com. Now let's get back to the show.