← Uncensored CMO
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- [00:07]
John Evans
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the uncensored cmo. In this episode, we have a returning guest, none other than Colin Fleming, who's one of the most popular guests of all time on the podcast. Now, for those that don't know, Colin used to be a racing car driver and it even made it as high as Formula one and then went on to become the Chief Brand Officer at Salesforce. So he really, really knows all about B2B marketing. He is now the CMO of ServiceNow, and I'm here to talk to him at Adobe Summit in Vegas about what B2B marketers need to know that they don't know, and also how to use AI. AI has transformed marketing in the last year, and the development has been astonishing. So I want to find out, where is AI impacting on marketing, and what should marketers be doing to use AI more effectively in the future? Here it is. Colin, welcome to the show.
- [00:53]
Colin Fleming
Yeah. Great to be back with you, John.
- [00:54]
John Evans
I. I was gonna say welcome back to the show. I should say, couldn't I? Because last time we were a few floors up in Salesforce Tower, weren't we?
- [01:00]
Colin Fleming
Looking out over that day.
- [01:01]
John Evans
It was looking over San Francisco. It was a beautiful day. But since then, you've moved on to ServiceNow.
- [01:07]
Colin Fleming
Yeah.
- [01:08]
John Evans
So how's it going?
- [01:09]
Colin Fleming
It's amazing. You know, after 13 years at another company, it's always a daunting thing to jump and think about a different organization, new challenges, new problems, new people, new products and services. So it was a bit intimidating, I'm not gonna lie. But I'm about 10 months in now. I love it. I love every minute of it. New challenges, fresh things to take on. And it's a bigger role, too, because when I was with you before, sort of a chief Brand officer role now, and now it's a CMO role, so it's the fullest.
- [01:35]
John Evans
Congratulations. Yeah, thanks. Now, for anyone listening and watching that doesn't know what ServiceNow do, he's like, I haven't been asked that question before. It's one of those companies, isn't it, where you look it up and go, oh, my God, you're everywhere. And I didn't know. But, yeah, Explain a bit about what.
- [01:52]
Colin Fleming
ServiceNow is actually the allure of joining the organization because they've built this incredible product that is everywhere. The tagline is, the world works with ServiceNow because it literally powers so many IT departments and customer service departments and HR and finance and you name it, but nobody knew what they did. And let's be honest, we still don't. And so that was part of the allure, is to solve that problem. And we call ourselves the AI platform for business transformation. Basically we plug in on top of all of your hundreds and hundreds of systems. The average company has 385 different applications. Wow. We plug in on top and make it almost the iPhone of the enterprise. We make it as clean as glass. One user experience. I don't log into any of those 385 applications. I log into ServiceNow for HR, for Finance, for marketing, for sales, for customer service, things like that. So it's a bit of a new take on enterprise software.
- [02:41]
John Evans
Wow. And am I right in saying something like 85% of Fortune 500 companies use? I mean that's a lot of customers you're, you're servicing.
- [02:48]
Colin Fleming
Yes, it's a great, a big business. I mean we're now in the Fortune 500 top five enterprise software company in the world now. And so it's a big story. But we haven't been able to capture that sort of market interest yet. And so that's one of the things that we're focusing on is humanizing the brand, finding new ways of telling the story.
- [03:04]
John Evans
Now I'm fascinated to know what the role of marketing is like in ServiceNow because like, I mean we often have this debate about B2C versus B2B and kind of what the role of the marketer is. How well understood is it in ServiceNow?
- [03:16]
Colin Fleming
Thankfully, one of the reasons why I joined the organization was Bill McDermott as a CEO and if you look at the work he did at SAP, building an unbelievable brand at SAP, I sort of knew walking in that I had an evangelist for marketing in the C suite. Right. And making sure that the CEO was going to be on our team. And that's exactly what's happened. He is the biggest evangelist and the biggest supporter. And so it's made the transition really rather straightforward because we've got the support of the board and the support of Bill to really build this to be what we call Desco 21C which is an intimidating acronym, we call it the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century. And we've got this massive ambition and we're going to need marketing to get there. So moving from a product led company, which is historically where it's been 20 years old now, started in San Diego, lots of it, lots of product orientation, to now almost a brand led organization that's trying to make its mark in the enterprise, which is a fun, fun little journey.
- [04:10]
John Evans
Now I kind of Grew up in fmcg, which is very kind of marketing led. Tech and financial services in particular tend to be kind of products or service led. And marketing is often seen as the sort of like, you know, you turn up at the trade shows, you do the brochures and the website, you know, it's kind of a service, isn't it, rather than a leadership role. Any advice for anyone listening about how you kind of position marketing in more of a leadership role in the organization rather than the sort of service function which I'm sure a lot of people listening are resonating with this.
- [04:37]
Colin Fleming
You know, I've been so blessed to have incredible executive teams that do support marketing. But I will say it was a bit daunting walking in because it did suffer from a little bit of that. Marketers were subservient to other departments and felt like we didn't have a seat at the table or an opinion or a point of view on what it should be. And so the biggest shift we made was we stopped asking others to speak our language as marketers, CTRs and CAC and lifetime value and start to think about what language does the business speak. And so things like putting the brand on the balance sheet, really thinking about shifting and speaking their language really helped us lower the sort of the guard down a little bit and also showing how much value we can bring. So talking about, you know, the 95, 5 rule, talking about things we've talked about in the past to really influence how long term decisions gets made and this, the role of marketing within the organization is pretty critical. So we're on that journey. Like I mentioned, we're just 10 months in, but we've got a warm welcome for the entire organization.
- [05:31]
John Evans
I mean when we talk about this, when we last caught up about, you know, how, how buyers make decisions, how infrequently they make decisions compared to your perception, that kind of thing.
- [05:39]
Colin Fleming
Right.
- [05:39]
John Evans
I don't think this is that well known generally. I mean, what's your thoughts on how well educated most marketers are about how B2B buying decisions are made?
- [05:48]
Colin Fleming
It's not there. It really isn't there. I think it's a small few percentile of people that really understand the buying journey. And one of the things that I found is the company has done an incredible job building a digital footprint with our partners with Adobe and so many things like this, a world class B2C digital marketing engine. And it was fantastic. I walked in like what a gift to walk into something like this. But it was disconnected from the way Actually, people buy our product. It was high transaction volume. But reality is this is a 400 plus day deal cycle. We've got 15 members of the buying committee at least.
- [06:22]
John Evans
Wow.
- [06:23]
Colin Fleming
The strategy was disconnected from the actual outcomes. We've tried to bring those two things together by bringing things like buying groups and buying centric or what we call opportunity containers to really think about, I'm not going to send this lead to sales until it's really ready. And I tanked lead volume by more than 50%.
- [06:42]
John Evans
Did you? Oh, nice.
- [06:44]
Colin Fleming
New CMO comes in, tanks lead volume by 50% going, what's going on?
- [06:48]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [06:48]
Colin Fleming
But I tried to combine that language with look at the lead conversion and look at what's happening. And so we were able to make up the difference and more by saying these are ready for sales and they're ready for primetime. We know who the buying group is, we know who the influencers are. And that's a big shift. That's really interesting because that's not, it's not the spoken truth in B2B.
- [07:08]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [07:08]
Colin Fleming
But the reality is there is known buyers and there are unknown buyers. The procurement folks, the finance folks, the people that are the whisperers in the audience. You got to know those folks too. So number one was just like finding the buying groups and like shifting the mentality of what it means to generate a lead.
- [07:26]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [07:27]
Colin Fleming
And the second thing we've moved into, obviously building more of a brand. So it's been a high transaction volume, lower funnel lead volume narrative which we've built an incredible business on. But we all know the Aaron Big Bass institute numbers, like 81% of the buying decision is made upon first thought. So we needed to build the brand. And so hopefully you've seen some work from Idris Elba and us in the past, recent past that helps us kind of really establish servicenow is a little bit more of a household name.
- [07:50]
John Evans
Well, we're getting into advertising. If I want to talk about the leads, I think that's quite interesting. So 50% drop in leads, as in how did you define what a lead was then in that case? Because I mean that's, you know, sales effectively are living off your leads. Of course that's what you're here to do. So if you're, if you're dropping them by 50%, how did you define.
- [08:09]
Colin Fleming
It was an intimidating scenario. Meeting with the meeting with the executive team saying lead volume hockey stick in the wrong way. But again, speaking the language of the business. So yeah, lead volume's down, but conversion rates up 60, 70%. So we're sending quality leads and really just thinking about preparing the interest, inbound interest for the company, for primetime. And I do think that that's just a mindset shift. And so I did ask for forgiveness as I walked in the door. I said I'm going to do this and if it doesn't work, we'll turn it back. We can reverse this, no problem, but let me go. And the company had the trust to let us go. And it's been amazing to see the transformation as a result of that. And now marketing is so much closer to the transaction and so much more strategic and almost at the table with sales as business partners instead of some subservient nature. Yeah. Which is an amazing place to be and every marketer want. And so again putting language, speaking their language and really helping be the best business partner possible has really enabled that.
- [09:09]
John Evans
So to put it in kind of funnel terms, you do more of the kind of middle funnel bit then getting the lead ready to have the conversation rather than just chucking loads of contacts out there.
- [09:17]
Colin Fleming
Well, the idea of a lead or an MQL is that that doesn't exist anymore. I mean it can some companies still operate from like that. But really thinking about grouping leads together of relevant interest areas. So we may have the CFO and HR leader and IT and we'll bring those together before we send it to sales to say do we have the right signal? You know what's interesting, you think, okay, I'm going to have one lead and I'm going to send it over to sales and it's going to convert and everybody's going to make their quarter. That's not how it works, is it? We need to be thinking about establishing that buying group and really thinking about that long term. Right. And so really thinking about how are we connecting the dots between all these buying groups? Because you know, one of the things we were doing is we weren't thinking about different departments. We were a single product company. But now we've got to make sure that we're establishing the right amount of interest and sending it only when it's ready. That means conversion's up. We can establish the right humans and make sure that we're building the right momentum inside the business.
- [10:14]
John Evans
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. You can do the long term bit then. And then when people are ready to buy, boom, there you are. The team are ready to have the conversation and convert then, aren't they? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So talk about the how are you going about Building the brands then, because we started the conversation about how many people understand what service now do. So you've got a bit of an education job as well as a brand job. So how have you approached that?
- [10:35]
Colin Fleming
Yeah, of course. Well, look, I mentioned the company's ambitious, and so the company wants to be that defining enterprise software company. So I didn't have to convince the brand or the company to go big. So it was already in the DNA. But we needed to find the right way to do that. And, you know, enter Idris Elba. Enter a simpler story. We talked about this just before, where the company was really set on selling products to different audiences. And that's a good. There's a lot of companies that operate in that way. We wanted to sell a vision, and that vision happened to coincide with obviously, artificial intelligence entering all of our lives. And. But we are the company that can help put AI to work. And so initial tagline was put AI to work, which is an incredibly simple thing. We can put it into your business. We edited it towards the end, though. Putting out of work for people and that for people was really, really, really important for us because we wanted to be in service of you and I. Right. We wanted to be a more approachable organization, so established a good message, a good narrative. We hired Idris, who's been an unbelievable brand partner for us. I didn't know a ton about Idris getting into this candidly, but what an. He's a serial entrepreneur, super approachable guy, wicked creative, and we fall in love with them. So, you know, matched with a more human story, telling that with a great brand ambassador and building out a cast, which I'm sure we'll talk to.
- [11:54]
John Evans
Yes.
- [11:54]
Colin Fleming
Has been a really good formula for us. And so really establishing that with identifying an ownable narrative and making sure that the world sees it.
- [12:01]
John Evans
Yeah. One of the interesting things, I think, about how you've approached your advertising as well is you can even see the Personas of buying groups actually appearing in the ad itself. Was that intentional?
- [12:11]
Colin Fleming
It was. You know, we've talked about distinctive assets in the past and how important that is for us. It was a really interesting sort of prompt that actually a relatively junior member of our team challenged us with, is you're pushing the organization to buying groups and how we think about our lead flow and operations. But what if we thought about buying groups in our ads and in our. In our communications? And that was a big unlock. So if you look at our recent advertising, you'll see Idris Elba, who is the face of it, of course, but you'll see characterizations, personification of our buying groups. You've got Patty in it and Kate in HR and Jim in it and Dusty and app Dev. And then you've got this aloof character, Nick, which is a lot of fun. And so you've got a little bit of something to poke at. Nobody knows what Nick does. We still don't know, and maybe at some point we'll find out, but it's really bringing this idea of these buying groups to life. And so our distinctive assets are very different than distinctive assets I've had in the past. But we're building their Personas and building their personality so that whenever we go to market in the different lines of business we do, we've got a character that we can rely on and tell that story with.
- [13:13]
John Evans
And over time, presumably those characters can turn up in different scenarios. And, you know, you kind of continue the.
- [13:18]
Colin Fleming
You absolutely bet. We're just getting the drama. We're just getting started with these characters, and it's so much fun. Like, our product marketing organization is taking Patty in it, for example, and she's in the demo videos and she's in the Persona campaigns, and we're really utilizing those characters for a lot of fun. So I think we don't know where we're going with it, candidly, and that's okay. We're just finding new ways of asking the questions and kind of playing and have some fun.
- [13:41]
John Evans
I did smile at Nick, actually, because Idris gets in there at the end, and you can see Nick is the least impressed person in the entire film.
- [13:47]
Colin Fleming
Ironically, Idris created Nick the character. So Idris is a funny one. We love Idris to death, and he's got such a wicked sense of humor. And we were on set with, ironically, my vice chairman, Nick Sitson, who's an incredible leader inside the organization. And Nick had a harder time explaining what he did because it's such a vast role and such a unique role. And so we had a character, this individual who was going to be called something else, and it just goes, call him Nick. We're going to make fun of him. And so now we've got this character who we adore, and we're having a little bit of fun with him.
- [14:20]
John Evans
Yeah, amazing. I mean, just talk through. I know you've got lots of different versions of the ad, but just talk through one of the typical ads because it really simply communicates the role of an AI agent in the kind of process, doesn't it?
- [14:33]
Colin Fleming
So the whole premise is every corner of your business. So what's unique about service now is we service nearly every aspect of an organization, whether it be customer relationship management or of course it, which is our strength in our business. Hr, finance, you name it. And so we really kind of traverse every corner of a business. And so a lot of the ads is actually follow idiots around every corner of a business and talk about the impact that we have within each of these departments. And there's a wink and a nod, there's a little bit of humor and bringing some personality to the company. And one of the things that I found when I joined the company was there was this like intrinsic big culture of humor and fun. And it's based in. The company was founded in San Diego, so it's got a bit more of a relaxed vibe. But that culture and DNA wasn't translating to the work. And a lot of our jobs as CMOs is to just find what's unique about the company and put a spotlight on it. And so we tried to bring some of the humor and the personality out of the company and into the work. And I think we've been pretty successful at that.
- [15:27]
John Evans
Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it? Like, why do we think that we have to leave our personality out at the door when we go to work or make work? I did this thing last year in cad, actually called with a colleague, Adam Morgan, called the extraordinary cost of being dull.
- [15:40]
Colin Fleming
Yes.
- [15:40]
John Evans
And we actually worked out, which by.
- [15:41]
Colin Fleming
The way, I loved it.
- [15:42]
John Evans
Did you see that?
- [15:42]
Colin Fleming
Yes, I was there.
- [15:43]
John Evans
It was like 50% of the emotions we've measured at System 1, over 100,000 ads or something. 50% of emotions in B2C ads are nothing at all. I mean, imagine all that money, all that effort and people feel.
- [15:56]
Colin Fleming
So it actually had no impact on the.
- [15:57]
John Evans
No, nothing at all. Right. In B2B, 60%. So six out of 10 emotions reported having seen. And you know, I mean, you know better than anyone how much work goes into this and how much investment and the organization that goes into to making stuff happen. And 6 out of 10 people feel nothing at all. Yeah, it's just insane.
- [16:14]
Colin Fleming
Well, obviously the think, feel, do method, Right. So obviously the big push for us was finding a way to take what is a sort of a scary technology. Obviously autonomous AI agents and artificial intelligence and multi agent organizations and all these crazy things. Like the IT nerd in me geeks out, but it's not an approachable thing. And so in some of the ads we brought in the idea of a metaphor of personal minions softening the Idea of agents into personal minions. We even dropped an F bomb in one of the ads, which it took us a long, long time to get the courage to do something like this. But just making the stories more approachable. And I do think, like, we are at the bleeding edge of technology, but instead of just using that, using the humor, using the personality, softening the technology a little bit, can hopefully capture some of that emotion you talked about.
- [17:01]
John Evans
Yeah, it's so key for Marxist because we get so wrapped up in what's possible technical rather than what actually, you know, the audience wants. I mean, we were joking before, but we're here at Adobe Summit, and I was a brainstorming dinner last night.
- [17:15]
Colin Fleming
Yeah.
- [17:15]
John Evans
And they kicked it off with a. Right, we have a brainstorming about agentic AI and how you're using it in your business.
- [17:21]
Colin Fleming
Right.
- [17:21]
John Evans
And I was like, I felt really awkward going, could I ask the stupid question? What are you talking about? You know, and once I. It took me about half the dinner to kind of unravel exactly what they meant. I'm like, oh, oh, I see. So you have AI agents that go and think autonomously and make decisions and make things better without being prompted. I'm like, I'll get it. But I'm just like, I'm reasonably intelligent and well informed and I don't know.
- [17:42]
Colin Fleming
What you're talking about.
- [17:43]
John Evans
Certainly a year ago, no one was mentioned.
- [17:45]
Colin Fleming
We're talking about the last six months. And this is the speed of our industry right now. And, you know, there'll be moments when I feel like we're at the cutting edge and we've nailed the message or nailed the differentiation. And then literally two weeks later, another company has done it. And so we're just in this absolute race to find differentiation and unique, you know, a unique path for ourselves. But, yeah, it's moving faster than ever. And it's our job to find a way to keep up and own that differentiation.
- [18:09]
John Evans
So if everyone listening now break down what an AI agent does for everyone, in case anyone like me, maybe I'm the only person out there, parts just like, oh, this is a whole new thing.
- [18:19]
Colin Fleming
How geeky do you want to go? No, this is.
- [18:21]
John Evans
Come on, give us the. Give us the, you know, the sheep dip into how this thing works.
- [18:25]
Colin Fleming
So there's sort of phases of agents, right. So we start off with the idea of generative AI copilots. Like, so Microsoft got Copilot, we got OpenAI. We've got all these things, and those are amazing technologies, but it requires a back and forth I prompt a question, it returns it back to us. And obviously we built incredible businesses and incredible capabilities with that. We then moved that into like single agents that could do functions really well. And I could do this repeated task in a repeated way and automate that really nicely. And that's a deterministic path we call it. It does what it says it's going to do. We're now entering to what we call multi agent autonomous agents, which are non deterministic, which means they reason and they find their own paths, which is a really interesting path. And this means you can set it down a workflow that you may have established or some sort of scenario and it may find a better path for you and they can edit the path and really reason and think through and modify and adjust how necessary. And this is the new world we're finding ourselves into. And then we're going to go to predictive autonomous agents and it's going to keep going, but in a real short period of time. You can see how the nerdiness comes out.
- [19:30]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [19:30]
Colin Fleming
And how do we apply that to a simpler marketing phrase where you don't scare your audience? Because those of us that live in technology every day, I could talk about deterministic and non deterministic workflows all day long, but we know that our audience isn't there and we need to meet them where they are. So how do we soften the technology? How do we make it more approachable? And that's what we're trying to do with our marketing.
- [19:48]
John Evans
Where are these agents most apply? Where can you use it for kind of maximum impact?
- [19:52]
Colin Fleming
Yeah. We've seen a lot of momentum in customer service and you see a lot of companies you're looking for repeatable tasks. We like to say that the AI agents do the small stuff, so we as humans can do the big stuff. And that's the big trade off we're trying to make. So trying to bring more authenticity and more real world scenarios to the humans effort and automating the mundane. So you see it in customer service, you see it in IT service and operations, you see it in hr, you see it in finance, you see it in app development. And if you think about computer science degrees, which was if anybody coming out of school 10 years ago, you'd say computer science all day long.
- [20:27]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [20:27]
Colin Fleming
Well now a lot of that is kind of repeated and AI agents can handle all of that. So the types of roles that we're entering into is a very different world.
- [20:37]
John Evans
That's really interesting, fascinating stuff.
- [20:39]
Colin Fleming
Yeah.
- [20:39]
John Evans
Because I guess Human instinct is to fear that change, isn't it? It's like, well of course it is. If the agent can do this, like what am I employed to do? Theoretically, then if the agent can take care of the mundane, you can do the interesting. There's an competitive upside there because then you can focus your mind on strategy, creative, whatever.
- [20:57]
Colin Fleming
So. And those that are successful will be the more curious ones. Like I truly believe that we're only limited by curiosity. And the more creative marketers have an incredible opportunity in front of us, don't we? Because we're going to be the ones that find the differentiation, that find a way to take this technology and harness it in the right way. You know, there is that fear that, you know, AI is going to take jobs and of course there will be some of that. Every technological revolution has, has taken jobs, but it's also created incredible amounts of new ones too. Yeah, and so I won't take your job. It's going to be people using AI that will take your job. And so those that are curious, those that are people that are embracing it, are the ones that will be ultimately successful.
- [21:32]
John Evans
I think that's so interesting because you got, I mean without over kind of, you know, stereotyping it, but you got the kind of more creative kind of marketers that like have the ideas, join the dots, come up the thinking. Then you got the more technical kind of execution ones that probably understand AI better, but you want to be over on the kind of creative one as well. So it's like there's that kind of tension between people using AI, probably more efficiency minded and the ones that need to be using it are the more effectiveness minded probably.
- [21:58]
Colin Fleming
And in the middle is just curiosity to experiment and embrace. And I do think that's what I'm trying to teach my team and work and myself is just like ask the questions, think about where we're going, what could we be doing. Because I think that curiosity and the imagination is what will bring those two sides of the brains together and create a space where marketing can ultimately find the best differentiation possible. Because that creativity is going to be the unlock that we kind of pushed aside with the idea of performance marketing and things like that. Curiosity and creativity are going to be the unlocks we all need.
- [22:28]
John Evans
Yeah, that's quite amazing, isn't it? I mean, is there any part of the marketing plan you can't apply that to? I mean, presumably you could look at, you know, agents, media planning agents, you know, go and optimize my media for these objectives and go figure out research agents, you know, go and tell me my buying Personas that I should be talking to and what messages to give them, you know?
- [22:46]
Colin Fleming
Yeah, and we're doing things like that already. Like we identified and we talk about category entry points all the time. We identified 76 category entry points that we didn't know existed.
- [22:56]
John Evans
Wow.
- [22:57]
Colin Fleming
Through the use of synthetic research and artificial intelligence, things like that. So just, it's making us smarter. But we had to be curious enough to ask the question. And I do think that's going to be the mental shift we have to make.
- [23:07]
John Evans
I like definition curiosity, because that's what's going to get you there, isn't it? Yeah. What about the risks? Because I suppose if you're delegating to an agent.
- [23:16]
Colin Fleming
Right.
- [23:17]
John Evans
What happens when it goes wrong? Or do you mark the agents out? Do you have like a, like quality control step where you can intervene or.
- [23:24]
Colin Fleming
Well, that's the next frontier for a lot of us. And you know, ServiceNow has a leadership position in both orchestrating agents and also governing, and we call it our AI control tower, which is essentially being able to keep tabs on who's doing what, using the best agent for the best job. And of course, keeping a human in the loop. Major decisions, things like this always have a human in the loop. There's approval cycles, things like that, that's going to be important. And so, you know, having a platform that can really think end to end is where our differentiation is. Our ability to sort of orchestrate against agents that are within ServiceNow, but also Adobe agents and vice versa. Right. So I think that the idea of orchestration, again, something we weren't talking about six months ago, is the new frontier for these kind of third tier.
- [24:05]
John Evans
You're right. There's a whole lot of words I've just learned in the last 24 hours. Yeah, orchestration is another one.
- [24:09]
Colin Fleming
Welcome to Silicon Valley. Yes, exactly.
- [24:11]
John Evans
It's wild. We weren't talking about this six months ago, but how then. Well, talking about orchestration then, how then do you kind of make them work together and potentially as well, like when we were at Adobe here you work very closely with Adobe. How do you integrate your technology, their technology, how do you orchestrate all the moving parts to play the right music?
- [24:29]
Colin Fleming
Yeah, I mean, that's what we're all developing for. Right. And so Adobe is clearly going to build agents for their specific use cases around marketing. Specific use cases. We'll build them for customer service and IT and HR and finance use cases. And the question is, how do they query each other and work together. And that's the technology we're building now, which is that orchestra, orchestration layer. And you know, I do think that's. If you listen to any larger technology company, that's the ultimate race that we're trying to make right now. Make sure the human in the loop, make sure we can orchestrate this into the business. And ultimately the companies that will win will have the most data. Because, you know, artificial intelligence is only as good as the data that it's being trained off of and actually has access to. And so the larger platforms, the servicenows, the Microsofts of the world, the Adobes of the world, do have an ultimate advantage here. And the question is, who can race to get there the fastest?
- [25:18]
John Evans
Wow. Is there going to be a CMO agent or a CEO agent, do you think?
- [25:23]
Colin Fleming
Of course there will be.
- [25:24]
John Evans
Because if you think about it, your job is to oversee all the various activities end to end, right?
- [25:29]
Colin Fleming
Yes.
- [25:29]
John Evans
So presumably an agent to go.
- [25:31]
Colin Fleming
Right.
- [25:31]
John Evans
We need more of that, less of that. We need to change this, change that.
- [25:34]
Colin Fleming
Again, automating the mundane so we can focus on what a blessing would be to be focused on the more strategic elements of being a cmo. Instead of thinking about media segmentation and lead flow and buying groups. What if I were to focus on what's our narrative? You have to unlock your brain to really identify what unlocks, when you can automate those things. And I think that's the channel that I'm trying to make is what will this allow me to do? And yes, of course, I still today already rely on agents to do much of my work. Now we got to think about what it allows us to do.
- [26:06]
John Evans
It's like kind of wild, isn't it, how much has changed in such a short space of time? What do you think are the kind of skills required for senior marketers in a CMO like yourself? What skills are now going to be required to win in the next kind of like five or 10 years, given the direction of travel, where this is all going?
- [26:21]
Colin Fleming
Yeah, I mean, I think the last six months has changed that perspective quite a bit, hasn't it? So it's hard to think about too far out.
- [26:26]
John Evans
It isn't.
- [26:27]
Colin Fleming
Yeah, I go back to that word, curiosity. I do think that that's going to be the Curiosity and creativity are ultimately the differentiators that will separate the ones that do a great job from the ones that do a good job. I think that's going to be a big, big push. So I'm bringing in outside speakers outside perspectives into my team just to open up the curiosity and within myself too. I just don't. Sometimes I'll not be curious enough in a scenario and realize later I could have just done this. I think that's an unlock that we all can make. So I think creativity and curiosity. You know, the hardest part about a CMO gig is the context shifting that you've got to make. And even moving from a brand role at a prior company to a CMO now, I'm often intimidated by the context shift that I have to make throughout a given day, and I do believe that that will become less so actually and allow us to prioritize the things that are strategically important for the company and maybe automate some of the things that might not be as strategically important.
- [27:22]
John Evans
Yeah, yeah. Now you're doing keynote speech, aren't you, at Adobe Summit. So what are your big messages for the world of B2B marketing? Well, given all of this change. Right.
- [27:33]
Colin Fleming
It's amazing to be here at Summit. Actually. I feel like I'm with my people because first time I've been.
- [27:38]
John Evans
Of course. Yeah, I forgot this. Of course you'd have been at Dreamforce.
- [27:41]
Colin Fleming
The last I was competing with Adobe for the last 13 years of my career. So just to.
- [27:45]
John Evans
I bet it wasn't lost on the organizers to get your log either.
- [27:47]
Colin Fleming
Well, just to have a badge and walk in the door was an intimidating thing. But no, there's a couple messages. Number one is, you know, we've talked about this in the past, but my background as a. As a professional race car driver has been this really interesting context shift. So I don't come as a career marketer per se. And so I'm going to shine a light a little bit on what I think is flawed in B2B marketing. Right. I think that we've talked about playing the long game, Peter and Les and their work and things like this, and how do we really shine a light on really how to make that strategic place inside an organization? So I'm going to call a little bit of bullshit on marketing for a little while and then one of the companies that. One of the things we do at ServiceNow really well is we rely on our partners. And Adobe is a fantastic partner. And so much of our transformation is on the back of Adobe's technology. And so we'll showcase how we're thinking about buying groups, how we're thinking about journey optimization and personalization at scale. So we've been talking about personalization and marketing for 30 years. Right. For the first time in the last six months I see it, it might actually happen. It feels real and I see it. And we're doing it. ServiceNow has been historically an IT company. We sell into it, but we're now entering into HR and finance and CRM and all these new technologies, new areas. We can't take what worked in IT and apply there. So we're using technology to help us do exactly that. So I think there's a little bit of, hopefully lessons I've learned and then a little bit of how, here's how we're using Adobe technology.
- [29:12]
John Evans
Well, I love that. And you really are flying the flag for the whole kind of brand building, understanding of the buying audiences, all those kind of things, which is really good. The thing I worry about, personalization at scale. It's been a joke for so long that actually now it's possible everyone's going to be like, really? How are you using IT as service now in terms of personalization, what effect is it having?
- [29:33]
Colin Fleming
I think of course we're able to get to one to few, so there's always the promise of one to one. And I think what's challenging with, you know, some of the data changes we've made, but getting one to few is a really important thing. So you know, obviously I'm going to speak to a Chro at a Fortune 500 company differently than I'm going to speak to a middle market company or something to this effect. So there's levels of maturity, there's levels of AI readiness and so we actually have spectrums of AI maturity, AI readiness, spectrum sizes of the company and we'll tailor the message pretty deliberately by that. So our journey optimizer helps us do that, which is fantastic. And then of course obviously some new agent announcements here from Adobe which is awesome to really help us think about kind of real time optimization of that as well.
- [30:12]
John Evans
Yeah, I mean it's quite crazy, isn't it? I mean just listening to the folks at Adobe talk about, I think they've 10x'd reduced in terms of speed of making things and then increase kind of click through rates on messages by about 30%. That is an incredible shift in a short amount of time, isn't it?
- [30:28]
Colin Fleming
I mean we're all seeing it and I think that again we can even go more. We're just limited by our curiosity. Are we asking, we talked about events earlier, like how do we think about generative AI and these new agents in our events? How do we personalize the content context of the experience for those that might be dialing into knowledge from India or for the Philippines or something like this, you just unlock all kinds of opportunities for us, even things like positioning. I have the best positioning person I've ever met right next to me. It's called ChatGPT and it's fantastic. And so just being curious enough to ask the questions is quite fun.
- [31:02]
John Evans
And the thing that struck me this morning, actually, at the conference, thinking about agent AIs, is that personalization at scale allows you obviously to change the messages for the person with the data you have, but with the agents, they can be almost going back and forward and going well, actually, I've got this bit of feedback. I'm going to change it next time. And they can think independently without you having to do anything. And I thought that just takes it on to a whole nother level, really.
- [31:26]
Colin Fleming
The phrase reasoning you'll hear a lot about too.
- [31:28]
John Evans
I said what it is. Yeah, right.
- [31:29]
Colin Fleming
So it's reasoning. So the models. And it's funny, we went so crazy on models and, and large language models were all the rage. Now it's almost become a commodity to a degree. And now we're looking at reasoning and orchestration and agents and things like this. So just literally in the last year, it's completely pivoted, but now we have to be thinking about automation, really reasoning and really thinking about trusting these scenarios to help us get to this next level of kind of marketing transformation. It's pretty exciting. Yeah.
- [31:56]
John Evans
So we've got agents, orchestration, reasoning. Is there anything else I need to know about data? Data?
- [32:02]
Colin Fleming
Yeah, actually, I think the job of CMOS will run towards more of a data conversation when you think about it, because you point the world's best AI at the world's worst data source.
- [32:13]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [32:13]
Colin Fleming
You got nothing. And so I do think that the integrity of the data and the quality of the data is something that I'm challenged with right now. Candidly, we all are, and we're working through it now, of course, but we are limited a little bit by our data today. And so I do think that I find myself, and I'm sure many CMOs do as well, thinking through, how's my data? What's the health of my data?
- [32:33]
John Evans
That's a very, very good point, because you can have the veneer of efficiency if it's based on bad data. You just be hugely efficient doing the wrong things.
- [32:41]
Colin Fleming
And that's where you get hallucinations with some phrases I'm sure you've heard and things like this. Bad data leads to bad AI. And so the relationship between AI and data is one to one. And you've seen a lot of bleeding edge companies thinking about artificial intelligence. Companies like ServiceNow and many others are thinking about how do I build the data foundation. Yes. So that we can allow for that great AI.
- [33:01]
John Evans
That's so interesting. I mean, actually at System One we've been kind of grappling a bit with this because we've built a hundred thousand database of emotional responses from humans.
- [33:10]
Colin Fleming
Right.
- [33:10]
John Evans
Which is brilliant. And we're trying to train the AI on that. Right. Because if you train the AI kind of on the kind of, you know, everything on the Internet, you basically deviate to the norm. You know, you basically averages. So we've been looking at the difference between. It's quite wild, the difference actually we're trying to teach it on actual human response.
- [33:25]
Colin Fleming
When you do, can I play with it? Because obviously we use System 1 quite a bit for a lot of our message testing and so just being able to query that level of databases.
- [33:34]
John Evans
It's really interesting. It is literally like going to school because it's like you can see it get better and better, but it's not quite there yet. So we're trying to see when can we get AI to kind of replicate the kind of human response because I guess it's the ultimate thing because our human responses are emotion and feeling. So you can't different to sort of rational. Is my logo in shot or whatever it's which is easier to do.
- [33:55]
Colin Fleming
You've seen Gartner's hype cycle, like the peak of the hype cycle, the trough of disillusionment. We're sort of in that trough of disillusionment because enough people have experimented with AI and if your data's not great, you're going to get some hallucinations and you lose faith. But we have to realize that when you get those two things working together, you're back at that.
- [34:11]
John Evans
Yeah, you're back in.
- [34:12]
Colin Fleming
So more work to be done.
- [34:13]
John Evans
But I think that's a lot we need to do. That's absolutely spot on. Now we're in Vegas and the F1 comes to Vegas. And of course I got to ask you about your former career because for anyone who doesn't know, you've had a very, very interesting kind of very unusual path to marketing as well. So just explain a little bit about where you started life.
- [34:29]
Colin Fleming
Yes. Nonlinear career journey for sure. I joke that I've been sort of powered by fake it till you make it since I was 8 years old. So I started at age of 8 years old racing go karts here in the United States trying to make my way into a European dominated sport of Formula One. And I was able to. And so I spent majority of my early career driving race cars, and so Formula 3 and Formula 2 and then ultimately a test driver into Formula 1 and somehow was able to find that context shift into a COO of a large software company. But, you know, it's funny how many similarities between those two roles.
- [35:02]
John Evans
Well, I wanted to ask you that because on the surface of it, you probably can't get more distance, really, between those two disciplines, but what can you take in terms of lessons from one end to the other?
- [35:11]
Colin Fleming
You know, we've talked about this before, but one of the things that is quite on the surface is it's a very expensive. A lot of the racing drivers raise a lot of personal sponsorship, and so you end up pitching CMOS. I was pitching CMOS at the age of 13, raising almost $20 million in personal sponsorship. And I learned a lot about what CMOs cared about and more importantly, what they didn't care about. Things that you thought CMOs cared about, they were like, ominous. Put your logo on the car. CMOs actually don't care about that. CMOs care about the hospitality and the storytelling. So I learned a lot about what they cared about. So it actually made the transition to the world of B2B marketing a lot easier because I sort of knew what to follow upon in terms of what mattered. And so I do think that's helped the transition, but also the pace that we're moving, the differences between driving a car at 230 miles an hour and leading a large marketing organization, it's not that.
- [36:05]
John Evans
Not as different as you think.
- [36:06]
Colin Fleming
And it might seem crazy to say that, but it really, genuinely isn't.
- [36:09]
John Evans
And you're involved again in F1, aren't you? Because it sort of followed you.
- [36:12]
Colin Fleming
I can't seem to hide from it.
- [36:14]
John Evans
Follows you around, hasn't it?
- [36:15]
Colin Fleming
Well, I am a massive fan, massive fan of Formula One. Always have been, of course, and I spent my life chasing that dream. So, yeah, ServiceNow is a wonderful partnership with Aston Martin. In fact, we just renewed it, increased it as well, where the entire Aston Martin factory building these Formula One race cars runs on ServiceNow. So IT and HR and finance, all these departments run in the most beautiful way on ServiceNow. So it's fun to tell that story.
- [36:37]
John Evans
Now. I love that because, like, because in your head, you just assume, oh, they've got money, they put their logo on the car. Actually, if it's legitimately embedded into the company and making the. Making the team job's not done.
- [36:48]
Colin Fleming
If you're just slapping the logo on the car, you're not going to do the job there. You've got to think about what's the story I'm telling, how am I using this experience, this story to generate great experiences in hospitality scenarios. And yeah, look, if there's a little bit of branding on the car, awesome. But when it's driving by at 230 miles an hour, nobody can see it anyway.
- [37:06]
John Evans
Do you think you could attribute some of the performance of Aston Martin back to some of the software changes you've made in the organization? 100% pretty cool.
- [37:15]
Colin Fleming
If you haven't had a chance and obviously you're in the UK as well, go see their factory in Silverstone.
- [37:20]
John Evans
I'm available.
- [37:21]
Colin Fleming
We'll get you an intercept there. But it's a beautiful operation. They've built the most modern formal one facility as well. And ServiceNow is on all the screens. It's amazing to see building what they hope to be a top team in the future as well.
- [37:34]
John Evans
That's pretty epic. And you bring your customers there to show it off to you.
- [37:37]
Colin Fleming
100%. 100%. And that's again, part of the storytelling is bringing executives into their factory to kind of show it off, which is a pretty cool story to tell.
- [37:46]
John Evans
That's pretty amazing. Well, I could talk for ages about all this and I haven't got too much time, but maybe to end up. What's been the biggest, maybe most surprising kind of lesson for you in the last 18 months since you've, since you've left Salesforce and taken on this new role. And since you last spoke, what stood out to you?
- [38:02]
Colin Fleming
Well, I think I built my career as a brand marketer. Product marketing, then brand marketing. And so I think the context shift into being a CMO is so much fun and just really trying to both learn and internalize and also find a common vision for a thousand plus person marketing organization is a lot, is a lot there. So I've really enjoyed that. And it's been met with such an incredible, rapidly evolving period of time with artificial intelligence. Right. So like it's learning the context shifting while the world is changing. Literally every day has been this unbelievable, like, resurgence of energy for me and I just, you know, you never. I was at a company for 13 years. Yeah. You don't really realize that you're not learning any longer until you kind of exit it and you're like, oh my gosh, I'm learning things for the first time. New challenges, new environments and I do think that's a lot of fun. So I do think that the pace is keeping us on our toes like I've never seen before. So it's always, it's always a fresh problem to solve.
- [39:00]
John Evans
I love your point about vision actually because it's so easy in any kind of any role, but any senior marketing role is you end up just in the execution, don't you? But actually of all the C suite roles, it's the one where you've got to be looking ahead, where you know, where does the ball bounce next and where do we need to be going? And it's dangerous. If you do the role for too long, you then become sucked into the execution. And this is what we've always done. But it's your job to stay out of it. Well out of it as well. But to be looking ahead and seeing where particularly like as you say, with the amount of change, if you're not there going, hey, hey guys, it's going over there. We need to be my team.
- [39:34]
Colin Fleming
Because we spent the first two weeks writing out a two paragraph vision statement. Because if we didn't have that.
- [39:39]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [39:40]
Colin Fleming
What do you have? What is anything that you're doing in service of? So.
- [39:43]
John Evans
Yeah, exactly.
- [39:43]
Colin Fleming
We spent literally two weeks writing out a vision statement and five priorities. And everyone in the marketing organization knows those priorities. They all ladder up their priorities to those priorities. And that vision statement is the proverbial on the wall.
- [39:56]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [39:57]
Colin Fleming
For every single thing. We start every meeting with it, we start every town hall together with it. Everything we do is in service of that vision. And I think that's really, really, really important. And I do think that if you don't have that, all the tactics are in service of, frankly, not much.
- [40:10]
John Evans
Totally. And it makes decision making much easier because if it fits for that, we do it. If it doesn't, we don't. And then suddenly like it strips out a whole lot of debate, a whole lot of dead ends and detours along the way.
- [40:20]
Colin Fleming
That's exactly right.
- [40:21]
John Evans
Amazing. Colin, thanks so much for doing this. It's great to see you again. I'm delighted to see where your career's gone next and it's good to see the energy and passion you got for it. And thanks for teaching me a bit about AI.
- [40:32]
Colin Fleming
This was fun.
- [40:32]
John Evans
This is a journey, right. So it's good to be.
- [40:34]
Colin Fleming
Great to be with you, John.
- [40:35]
John Evans
Yeah, you too, mate. Thank you. Thank you very much for listening or watching uncensored. Cmo. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show, so please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast. If you want to contact me, you can do I'm over on x uncensored CMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.