← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#782: Saleforce Marketing Cloud CMO Bobby Jania on the end of "Do No Reply" marketing
00:24:48
Loading summary
Transcript70 lines
- [00:01]
A
The agile brand.
- [00:10]
B
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and.
- [00:14]
A
Topics marketing leaders need to know.
- [00:16]
B
Stay curious, stay agile and join the.
- [00:18]
A
Top enterprise brands and martech platforms as we explore marketing, technology, AI, e commerce and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience.
- [00:28]
B
Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today.
- [00:32]
A
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.
- [00:44]
B
The Agile Brand podcast is brought to.
- [00:45]
A
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.
- [00:57]
B
Make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app.
- [01:00]
A
You listen to podcasts on and leave.
- [01:02]
B
Us a rating so others can find us as well.
- [01:04]
A
And now onto the show.
- [01:08]
What if the most damaging phrase in your marketing isn't a four letter word but three simple ones? Do not reply. Agility requires more than just moving fast. It requires breaking down the walls between departments to respond to customer needs in the moment they happen to. It's about empowering every part of the organization to act as one cohesive brand, turning every interaction into a meaningful conversation.
- [01:31]
B
Today we're going to talk about the.
- [01:32]
A
End of an era of one way impersonal, do not reply marketing. We'll explore the shift from siloed campaigns to unified real time conversations and what it takes to empower every single employee from sales to service to be an.
- [01:47]
B
Extension of the marketing team to build.
- [01:48]
A
Trust and drive growth.
- [01:50]
B
To help me discuss this topic, I'd.
- [01:52]
A
Like to welcome Bobby Jania, CMO Marketing Cloud at Salesforce.
- [01:56]
B
Bobby, welcome to the show.
- [01:57]
C
Thank you for having me.
- [01:58]
B
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this.
- [02:00]
A
Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Salesforce.
- [02:05]
C
Absolutely. Again, my name's Bobby. I lead all things marketing at Marketing Cloud. I've been at Salesforce now for somehow over 11 years and I've been in the digital marketing space for coming up in 15 years. Started off as a computer engineer. Made a weird turn somewhere and got myself into product marketing. But definitely happy I made my way over here.
- [02:24]
B
Yeah. Nice.
- [02:25]
A
Well, yeah, so let's dive in here and we're going to talk about a few things today. But I want to start with this from the strategic level and this shift from thinking about things in terms of campaigns to thinking about things in terms of conversations. And so In a recent article that you wrote, you declared the end of no reply marketing. Beyond it just being a poor customer experience, what are some of the deeper business and brand implications of this kind of one way campaign centric mindset that you think leaders often miss?
- [02:59]
C
Yeah, I mean, Greg, if you think about it, the do not reply address is perhaps the most damaging artifact of the legacy digital era. You know, we often critique it as poor customer experience and it is because, you know, a deeper business implication is that, you know, it represents presents like a deliberate blindness. We're just kind of putting our hand in the way saying, no, we don't want to talk to you. And in this modern data economy where we want to have that customer response and it's the highest fidelity signal available, the fact that we just find out don't ignore it, but say don't even send it to us is kind of crazy. So when a brand sends an email from a no reply address, they're effectively telling their customer, we want your money, but we don't want your voice. And you think about this from a business perspective, this is pretty catastrophic. And there's kind of three primary reasons. First, it really serves as a feedback loop required to train the AI. If you think about the value of the data we can get from the customer, sending information directly to that brand, and how that could be used to train AI if you block that inbound signal, then your data models are going to remain static and honestly, they're going to eventually decay. Second, it creates brand debt. Every time a customer sees the no reply, there's a micro fraction that forms in their trust. And over time this is going to start to train customers to ignore that brand entirely. So this is really why we're seeing this shift with AgentForce and this transition from campaigns which are really episodic and one way blasts, to conversations which are continuous and they're bidirectional and they're adaptive. A campaign has an end date, but a relationship doesn't. And so by utilizing these autonomous agents to manage inbound replies, we're finally able to scale listening in the same way that we scaled broadcasting. And so suddenly we are turning the do not reply dead end into a please reply revenue channel.
- [04:46]
A
Yeah, and so you mentioned agent force. And I want to talk a little bit about. You recently introduced this concept of agent force marketing where every employee is empowered to be a marketer. So this is significant cultural and operational shift. How does a CMO even begin to champion this idea internally, especially when speaking to heads of sales or service who have their own distinct KPIs.
- [05:17]
C
Oh, absolutely. And championing the shift really requires all of us to reframe what work is and what work we're actually asking AI to do. I think the biggest fear in any organization is that AI is here to replace people. And as a leader, I think you have to tackle that head on and that we aren't asking AI to replace our best humans. What we're asking to do is do the work our humans physically cannot do. And I think that's kind of the key piece here. The strategy here is to find your impossible backlogs, if you will. So let me give you a transparent example of what this has meant for Salesforce. As we view ourselves as customer zero and we've done all of this rollout. So we identified a ton of massive inefficiencies over the last 26 years. As an example, we had accumulated over 100 million inbound prospects. These were orphan leads that no human SDR could ever call back. We simply just didn't have enough hours in the day to call these people. Right. They were at a score that was low enough that they may have raised their hand and said, please call me. But we still just didn't have the human capital to go and do that. So we deployed our AgentForce SDR to tackle this long tail. Now, I want to be clear. This agent did not start out perfectly right. Initially, we had a high rate of I don't know in the answers, but the agent has infinite patience, and it worked through 8,000 of those dormant leads in the first three weeks, and the result was $500,000 in pipeline that would have otherwise been zero.
- [06:45]
A
Wow.
- [06:45]
C
It wasn't magic. It was just math. Right. And this is how you can empower your org, where you don't swap humans for robots and you give your humans a partner that never sleeps to handle this backlog that they could never touch.
- [06:58]
A
Yeah, yeah. And of course, that backlog and kind of the quality of leads is. Is really dependent on data. Right. And on. On good data and unified data. Right. So, you know, the vision of a unified, responsive brand hinges on that single source of truth that I know many talk about, but fewer achieve. We'll just put it that way. So in your experience, what's the most common roadblock that large organizations face when they're trying to unify their data? And maybe what's the first practical step to overcoming it?
- [07:38]
C
I would say the most common roadblock is actually the physics of data gravity. And for over 20 years, the industry best practice has always been build this central data lake and put all of your data into it, try to copy everything into it. And the reality is that by the time you finish that migration project, the schema has changed again, the market has moved and the data is then stale and it's just an endless game of catch up. Most organizations are just drowning in unstructured data. PDFs, emails, call transcripts, Slack messages. And the traditional database wasn't built for these. It was built to handle rows and columns and they fail at capturing the nuance of these customer conversations. So the practical step forward is this fundamental architecture shift which is just stop moving the data. And so at Salesforce we've really tried to champion this with our zero copy framework within data360. And this is where we connect to where the data lives, whether that's in snowflake databricks or a legacy erp. The fact is that we're eliminating this idea of data drift and the staleness of traditional ingestion. And this allows us to have both federation, but federation with intelligence. But then we go a step further with AgentForce. So now we can use context indexing to ground our agents with not just structured fields like last purchase date, but also with unstructured context like why did they return this item? This allows the agent to reason with the full picture of the customer in mind. And this first practical step is to audit your data strategy. Right? So how are you trying to move your data? Who are you trying to connect it to? And then the latter is the only path to agility.
- [09:20]
B
If you listen to the agile brand, you're here because you want to lead. You want insights to help you build smarter experiences, stronger brands and customers who keep coming back. That's why you are going to love SimplyCX, a brand new podcast from Microsoft hosted by Nicole McKinley, Microsoft's global customer experience lead, SimplyCX takes you inside the conversations that are shaping the future of customer experience and and engagement. Each episode features industry experts and business leaders from companies like CarMax, TD bank and T Mobile exploring the innovations transforming CX. We're talking omnichannel journeys that actually connect AI that enhances human connection and how culture, collaboration and technology can work together to deliver trust, personalization and scalable growth. If you lead cx, influence CX or simply want to understand how the most admired brands stay ahead, simply CX belongs in your rotation. Hear real stories, practical lessons and the innovative strategies that will define the next era of customer centric success. Elevate the way your organization connects with the customers who matter most. Start listening to Simply CX every other Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts, and follow host Nicole McKinley on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going. Still jumping between tools just to update your website? Framer unifies design, CMS and publishing on one canvas. No handoff, no hassle, everything you need to design and publish in one place. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites and it's now redefining how we design for the web with the recent launch of Design Pages, a free canvas based design tool. Framer is more than a site builder. It's a true all in one design platform. From social assets to campaign visuals to vectors and icons, all the way to a live site, Framer is where ideas go live, start to finish. Framer is a free full feature design tool. Think unlimited projects, unlimited pages, unlimited collaborators, and all the essentials ready to design, iterate and publish all in one tool. Start creating for free@framer.com design and use code Agile for a free month of framer pro. That's framer.com design and use promo code agile framer.com design promo code agile rules and restrictions may apply.
- [11:42]
A
And then of course with the Data foundation in place, and I think this is where a lot of organizations are also getting stuck, you know, beyond even the unified view of the data to have great performance. With AI, you know, it's garbage in, garbage out, right? So you know, once, once the data is in place, then you know, AI is that engine that makes it action and often in real time. Could you maybe give us a tangible example of how AI helps service agents, for instance, have a marketing conversation without needing to be a marketing expert?
- [12:17]
C
Yeah, I think, and I think Fisher and Paykel is a perfect example of a brand that does just this because they don't just sell appliances, they sell a luxury lifestyle. And for a brand like that, the contact center is a high stakes environment. Every conversation either builds the brand or it breaks it. And traditionally that's where the conflict is. Operational leaders hate it when you ask service agents to market or to upsell because it slows them down and hurts their average handle times or aht. They are then forced to choose between efficiency and experience. But AgentForce removes that trade off because the agent already knows the customer was browsing a 36 inch range on the website. It instantly serves that context to the service agent. The agent doesn't have to spend five minutes digging around for the next best action. It's just right there. This allowed Fisher and Paykel to drive a 33% increase in conversion without slowing down the resolution. So it turns the service center from a cost center to a revenue driver without forcing agents to act like aggressive salespeople.
- [13:20]
A
Yeah, yeah, that's great. Building on that and talking a little bit more about measurement, shifting from this again, this campaign mindset and campaign open rates to the success of real time and you know, much to the example you just gave cross departmental conversations, old school marketing dashboards are, you know, sometimes less relevant because we're telling a different story. Right. What new set of KPIs should leaders be looking at to measure the impact of this more relationship focused approach?
- [13:56]
C
Yeah, there's definitely going to be an end to some of our vanity metrics that we're really used to. Open rates and click through rates. I'd like to tell you that someone was loud, but they don't really tell you that you were effective. So when you think about deploying an agent, you're managing a workflow, not a broadcast. So therefore we really need to have metrics that evolve to measure both now performance and also now trust. So we look at three layers of the new KPIs. The first is really outcome metrics. So instead of email opens, we're looking at meetings booked or problems resolved. So for our SDR agent, the primary metric isn't volume, it's that 500k in pipeline that we mentioned earlier. The second is conversational quality. So you know, we normally track like I don't know rate from, you know, the first launch of our agents. And you know, we had to admit that the ignorance was pretty bad at first with about 30% of the time though through reinforcement and through that learning and better context and better indexing. And we drove that where the agent said I don't know from 30% down to under 10%. And we're continuing to get a lower I don't know rate signifies that higher trusted conversation. So you're getting that the value exchange is happening because the customer is getting what they want from the agent then. And then the last, I think is a metric that we've all talked about forever and that's just customer lifetime value. So ultimately we're shifting from campaigns to conversations. And you know, a campaign again is time bound and a conversation is part of a relationship which hopefully doesn't have the same defined end date. So the proof and the longevity is really are we building a relationship? And if we're building a relationship, hopefully we have customer lifetime value. So then does an agent assist the customer? If they do that, does that customer Buy more often? Do they have less churn? Are we seeing AES use SDR agents in a way to achieve higher order values because they lead to potentially better quality qualified before they were ever even touched by a human. So I think that this metric is going to be, it's been a metric that's been in the marketer toolkit for a while, but it's going to really become important in the future.
- [15:59]
A
Yeah, yeah. And even if we're unifying data and tying all of these things together with agents, we still, many of us still live in that world of siloed departments and teams and everything like that. And so it's important that there's attribution and things like that. How do you effectively tie the success of say, a service agent acting on a marketing insight back to that marketing team's overall contribution to revenue customer lifetime value? How does that relationship work in this scenario?
- [16:31]
C
Yeah, absolutely. I think attrition's been the third rail of marketing politics for a while. The solution in my mind lies in democratizing the data visibility. And how does everyone see the same data, be working off the same data? And so with Agent Force 360, we introduce this idea of shared marketing intelligence. And this allows us to visualize the performance data and the attribution models directly in the flow of work and specifically actually from inside of Slack. So this means that we can track the lineage of the deal. If a service agent uses the next best action that's recommended by marketing cloud to cross sell a product, then that's a revenue event that's tagged and we can visualize this instantly. It stops being about marketing claiming credit for sales work and starts being about actual organizational attribution. So when a service leader can look at a dashboard and can see that 20% of their team's upsells were driven by marketing intelligence, the dynamic starts to change. They stop viewing marketing as a cost center and start viewing it as a strategic partner that makes their team smarter. And this is where the technology can enforce collaboration.
- [17:39]
A
Yeah. And so for those CMOs or marketing team members sitting out there, you know, one question may come to mind here. You know, if every customer facing employee now, you know, quote unquote, becomes a marketer, what does that mean for the marketing department itself? You know, how does the role of the traditional brand or campaign manager evolve in this new world of collaboration that you're describing?
- [18:08]
C
Yeah, I mean this is an existential question. I said this one time in a keynote to make everyone at your company a marketer. And one of the marketers in the audience came up to me and was like, please don't say that, please don't do that. We don't want to do that. And I mean, I get it, but at the same time, there's this concept. If everyone's a marketer, no one's a marketer. Well, the reality is it's a little different. And the answer is that the marketing department evolves from being a factory of content to really being an architect of the brand. And so in this campaign centric world, 80% of a marketer's time is spent on the assembly lines, building the list, coding the HTML, checking the links, managing all the approvals. This is low value, high effort work. And AgentForce automates the assembly. The agents can build the campaign, optimize the segments and execute the sends based on the creative brief. This liberates the marketer to focus on the why and the what. So the marketer becomes the brand governor. Their job is to define the strategy, the voice, the guardrails, and to create the soul of the brand. They set the rules of engagement for the agents and this elevates the profession. We stop being button pushers and we start being market makers. We move from executors to orchestrators.
- [19:19]
A
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I love that because it elevates the role of humans, but it also elevates the role of the marketer right in this, in this world. You know, to your point, if, if, if we've democratized parts of this now, the, the most elevated part of that now belongs to, continues to belong to the marketers. Let's say in this scenario, what do you say is the biggest skill or maybe even mindset shift that marketing leaders need to adopt to, you know, not only lead their, their brands away from the do not reply marketing that we talked about this shift to marketers being more architects than doing the busy work.
- [20:03]
C
Yeah. I think the hardest shift is going to be that we all have to let go of the illusion of control. And I intentionally say the illusion of control. But what we're going to gain is the reality of scale. So marketers, myself included, we are trained to be perfectionists, to approve every pixel, make sure every little piece is lined up perfectly. But you can't approve every single interaction when you have agents having millions of concurrent conversations. The other reality is the marketer's not in control today. The customer is so already thinking we're in control is just false from the get go. So the mindset shift needs to be go from governance over micromanage. You have to learn to trust the system you've built. This means investing in time. It means having a trust layer. It means defining the ethical boundaries, the tone guidelines and the data access rules. Once you set those guardrails, you have to let the agents run. It's the shift from being a managing the player to managing the game. And it's going to feel risky at first, but it's the only way we can achieve the true agility at the speed of the modern consumer.
- [21:12]
A
Yeah, yeah. Well, a couple last things as we wrap up here. First thing, if we were having this interview one year from now, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
- [21:24]
C
So I think it's going to be this idea of the agent to agent economy. And it kind of sounds a little like science fiction today, but the infrastructure is being built for all of this right now. Today we build agents to talk to humans. And if you kind of think about that, the next step, all of us as consumers probably going to have our own agents and we're going to see this idea of the rise of the consumer agent personal bots. So in 2016, the question won't just be how does my brand talk to you, but how does my brand agent negotiate with your personal agent? And if your personal bot wants to reorder coffee or negotiate a software renewal, my bot needs to be able to speak in that protocol. And so I think we're preparing for a world where your website traffic is half human and half agents. Think of it kind of like the early days of SEO. We used to optimize for human eyeballs. Soon we started optimizing for agent logic. This shift is going to be coming faster than people realize.
- [22:20]
B
Yeah.
- [22:20]
A
Yeah. Well, I would love to talk about that a year from now with you and definitely have a lot of. There's a lot of implications on branding as well as marketing in that scenario. So definitely would love to talk about that. Well, Bobby, thanks so much for joining today. I got one last question for you. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [22:42]
C
I try to stay as close to the customer as possible. I'm sitting here right now in Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. I joke around that I literally sit in an ivory tower. And so for me it's how do I make sure I don't get trapped in boardroom? How do I make sure I don't get trapped looking at spreadsheets that can sometimes mask the reality? And so I love getting the front lines not just from taking calls with customers and meetings, but sitting down with our SDRs and listening to them take the phone calls, looking through transcripts of what's happened with service agents, even going through we launched one of our first two way email campaigns. I was going through all the emails to see what did customers actually say back to us. So I just feel the closer I can stay to our customers, the closer I know to what's going on.
- [23:26]
A
Yeah, love it. Well again I'd like to thank Bobby Jena, CMO Marketing Cloud at Salesforce for joining the show. You can learn more about Bobby and Salesforce by following the links in the show notes.
- [23:39]
Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems.
- [23:43]
B
If you enjoyed the show, please take.
- [23:44]
A
A minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well.
- [23:48]
B
You can access more episodes of the.
- [23:50]
A
Show@Theagile brand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me.
- [23:56]
B
If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or looking for a speaker for.
- [24:00]
A
Your next event, go to www.gregkilstrom.com that's.
- [24:06]
B
G R E G K I H.
- [24:09]
A
L S t r o m.com the.
- [24:13]
B
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.
- [24:25]
A
Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
- [24:32]
The Agile Brand.
- [24:37]
D
Before we continue, I wanted to share a key strategic resource that a majority of the Fortune 500.
- [24:43]
A
Are already aware of.
- [24:45]
D
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.
- [25:30]
B
Com.
- [25:31]
D
That's teksystems.
- [25:34]
B
Com.
- [25:35]
D
Now let's get back to the show.