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Podcast: PrOTect It All (LS 25 · TOP 10% what is this?)Episode: Beyond Compliance Cybersecurity Insights With Blake Hoge and Aaron CrowPub date: 2025-05-05Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationIn this episode, host Aaron Crowe sits down with cybersecurity professional Blake Hoge for an unscripted deep dive into the world of IT, OT, and everything in between. In this engaging conversation, Aaron and Blake share their personal journeys through the cybersecurity landscape—from consulting roots and data center audits, to navigating third-party risk, compliance programs, and even some unforgettable experiences in global call centers and power plants.   This episode goes beyond the technicalities, exploring the importance of hands-on assessments, the unexpected vulnerabilities that linger in even the most sophisticated environments, and why fresh eyes are crucial for spotting hidden risks.  Aaron and Blake also open up about their favorite use cases for AI—both on and off the job, and how these evolving tools are reshaping everything from incident response planning to everyday productivity.   But it's not all about cyber threats and compliance checklists. The conversation takes a thoughtful turn as the two discuss the vital role of mental health, physical wellness, and community in sustaining long careers in high-pressure fields. From rucking at dawn and cycling in Moab to decompressing at cyber shootouts and embracing new technologies, Aaron and Blake remind us that protecting it all starts with taking care of ourselves and each other. Join us for a lively, candid episode packed with actionable insights, relatable stories, and a reminder that cybersecurity is, above all, a people business.   Key Moments:    09:47 Power Plant Fire Recovery Chaos 13:36 Infrastructure Maintenance & Security Compliance 16:10 Access Control Testing Concerns 23:22 "Design Process: Theory vs. Reality" 31:22 Dynamic Incident Response Planning 33:07 Commitment to Security and Transparency 39:21 Customized Consultancy for Unique Needs 47:05 "Understanding Contract Essentials" 50:42 In-House AI to Safeguard Data 57:47 AI Simplifies Search and Booking 59:13 Mental Wellness Strategies in Tech 01:03:52 Fitness and Energy Through Activity 01:10:44 "Business is a People Endeavor"   About the guest :  Blake Hoge leads third-party security at Airbnb, strengthening partnerships, and founded AmplifyGRC to support small businesses in building security and trust. At Instacart, he developed and scaled security and trust programs and compliance programs. At Salesforce, he managed security for global data and call centers. With over a decade in governance, risk, and compliance, Blake holds CISA, CDPSE, and PMP certifications, reflecting his expertise. Blake lives in the greater Austin, Texas area, and enjoys connecting with other professionals locally.   How to connect Blake:  Linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blakehoge/ Company website: https://www.amplifygrc.com/   Connect With Aaron Crow: Website: www.corvosec.com  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronccrow   Learn more about PrOTect IT All: Email: info@protectitall.co  Website: https://protectitall.co/  X: https://twitter.com/protectitall  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PrOTectITAll  FaceBook:  https://facebook.com/protectitallpodcast    To be a guest or suggest a guest/episode, please email us at info@protectitall.co   Please leave us a review on Apple/Spotify Podcasts: Apple   - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/protect-it-all/id1727211124 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1Vvi0euj3rE8xObK0yvYi4The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Aaron Crow, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

In the latest episode of The Retail Tea Break podcast I'm joined by an internationally recognised expert in the retail industry. Michelle Grant is the Director of Strategy and Insights for Retail & Consumer Goods at Salesforce The seasoned researcher helps global organisations build the future of their business. She has shared her thoughts with the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Financial Times. At Salesforce, she blends data and analysis to create thought provoking content that helps companies understand how new technologies will impact the future of their business.Michelle is back on The Retail Tea Break podcast to share the insights and trends from the 6th Connected Shoppers Report. The document includes global insights and trends from 8,350 shoppers and 1,700 retail industry decision-makers. We discuss:Global challenges and opportunities Instore shopping and digital growthExclusive Irish insightsUnified commerceEncouraging loyaltyEmbracing AI; the next generations…So grab that cup of tea, sit back and listen to the latest episode of The Retail Tea Break podcast.Catch up on previous episodes on your favourite podcast platform and while you're there please hit that follow button so that you get to listen to it first every week. Follow for weekly updates and watch us on YouTube by subscribing to The Retail Advisor. Sharing is caring—share episodes with your network and tag me, Melissa Moore, and The Retail Break podcast on social media.If you'd like to get involved in the next season of the podcast, as a guest or a sponsor please email melissa@theretailadvisor.ieTo download the Connected Shoppers Report: The Sixth Edition Connected Shoppers Report - Salesforce.com

Silvio Savarese is a pioneer and AI research lead with the AI research team at Salesforce, one of the largest and most influential enterprise software companies globally. Before joining Salesforce in 2021 as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist, Silvio spent nearly 11 years in academia at Stanford, where his research focused on robotics, machine learning, and language models. At Salesforce, his team has developed AI tools like CodeGen, which assists with coding using conversational AI, and Merlion, which enhances system availability by detecting potential failures through time series intelligence. Silvio's team is also working on conversational AI for personalized summaries. He is a strong advocate for practicing AI responsibly, contributing to Salesforce's advocacy on AI trust, safety, privacy, and security.In this conversation:Silvio's journey from academia to industry and the challenges he faced during this transition.We explore the differences between working in academia and leading an AI research team at Salesforce.Silvio shares insights on how his background in robotics informs his current work with AI for enterprise software.We delve into the ethical considerations and responsible practices in AI development at Salesforce.Silvio explains the three pillars of AI research at Salesforce: foundational research, product incubation, and product innovation.We examine the trade-offs between using large language models versus smaller models in AI applications, including their environmental impact and potential risks.ResourceSubscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Silvio AI fun fact articleAn episode you might like about extending life with AI

This week's episode of The Retail Tea Break podcast is sponsored by Salesforce, the world's #1 CRM. I'm joined by an internationally recognised expert in the retail industry, a seasoned researcher who helps global organisations build the future of their business.Michelle Grant is Director of Strategy and Insights for Retail & Consumer Goods at Salesforce. She has shared her thoughts with the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Financial Times. Footwear News honoured as one of the 6 Powerful Women in Technology in 2021, Rethink Retail continues to list her as one of the top retail influencers in the world for 2022 and 2023.At Salesforce, she blends data and analysis to create thought provoking content that helps companies understand how new technologies will impact the future of their business. In this episode, she takes me through Salesforces predictions for the holiday season.This is a fantastic episode, so grab your cup of tea, sit back and listen in!Topics:· Salesforce predictions for the Christmas and holiday season· Predictive AI driving digital sales· BOPIS; delivering an efficient, convenient shopping experience· Returns policies impacting the shopper journey· Social media advertising delivering peak ROI both instore and online· Resale gifting· Keeping Christmas shoppers For more information visit: https://www.salesforce.com/eu/campaign/salesforce-ireland/Original five trends for holiday predictions: https://www.salesforce.com/blog/holiday-shopping-predictions/Updated predictions with forecasts for spending: https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/salesforce-holiday-predictions-2023/Link to Connected Shoppers report: https://www.salesforce.com/resources/research-reports/connected-shoppers-report/For more information and the transcript, please visit www.theretailadvisor.ie

What's up folks, today we're joined by Bobby Tichy, he's Co-Founder and Chief Solutions Officer at Stitch. Bobby's a highly respected Martech veteran having spent over a decade working in technical roles for some of the biggest names in martech:He spent a combined 6.5 years working on the Professional services teams at arguably 2 of the most well known companies in martech, Salesforce and Marketo where he was able to lead and support countless implementation projects for some of the biggest brands in the world.At Salesforce he focused on Marketing Cloud technical and functional architecture. At Marketo he focused on project and program management.In 2016, he left the in-house world and jumped to the agency side of martech working at Lev (a premier Salesforce consultancy) for 6+ years where he focused on Marketing and Enterprise architecture solutions. He also co-founded the In the Clouds Podcast, a show about Salesforce Marketing Cloud.Last year, after Lev was acquired by Cognizant, he co-founded Stitch leading their solutions team. Stitch is a new martech consultancy that specializes in Segment and Braze tech stacks.Bobby's an expert in all things marketing technology architecture, customer data platforms, customer journeys and Dachshund dogs as the proud dog dad of 3. Bobby, welcome to the show, pumped to chat today.In-house vs agencyI'd love to start by getting your take on agency vs in-house, pros and cons and maybe get the inside scoop on going from SF to arch-nemesis Marketo a few years ago?I think the, the easiest way to think about agency versus in-house is when I was at Salesforce and Marketo, you're really just focused on the specific problem as it relates to the technology. So that might be implementing, you know, Salesforce, Marketing Cloud or implementing Marketo for a particular customer. But when we're on the consulting side or the consultancy side, you're really more focused on that customer. So what problem are we trying to solve? It's much more about business problems and outcomes than it is technology problems and outcomes.That's probably the best way to think about it. Or at least the the biggest delineation that I've seen over the years, which the consulting side is so much more fun and so much more complex. It has each has its own challenges.On the SF to Marketo switch, I think I I was so naive at that point I had no clue that it was like moving to their arch nemesis. Now it would be like going from Braze to Iterable or you know something along those lines. And it was interesting because I even remember at the time, once I got to Marketo, there were all these kind of rumblings. You never know if they were founded or not. But you know when Exact Target got acquired by Salesforce, was it, you know, who are the other bidders? And I don't know if you ever listened to the Acquired Podcast, but there's an episode of Acquired on Exact Target and Scott Dorsey goes through like that whole process. Which is pretty neat. And then he mentions the SEC filings, they actually have to disclose, they don't disclose the actual companies, but you can kind of deduce who the other bidders were. It's kind of neat to go through.But anyway when I got to Marketo, there was like all this conversation about Salesforce because the Salesforce and Marketo integration (at the time) was market leading as far as market automation platforms were concerned and the Exact Target and Salesforce integration was not all that great at the time. Now obviously that's totally flipped, but at the time it was interesting because I remember my first two projects on Marketo and Salesforce, I would kind of throw Exact Target under the bus a little bit with the horrible integration they had with Salesforce even though they were part of the same company. But I I had no idea to your point kind of like the political elements of my switch at the time.Switching platform expertise, from SFMC to Marketo to BrazeSo you went from SFMC to Marketo before going back to a SFMC focused agency but now you've left both platforms and at Stitch you guys focus on Segment + Braze. Did you play around with Braze before joining?(At Lev) we had a couple of large enterprise media entertainment customers that were leveraging both Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Braze and so they would use SFMC for journey orchestration and e-mail and then Braze for mobile because it's the mobile capabilities were so much better. The UI is a little bit better too, especially for marketers. And so that was our first introduction to that platform and then as as we were leaving Lev and trying to figure out what we were going to do next.Everyone that we talked to, people from Movable Inc, people from Salesforce, you know sales leaders there and other people in the Martech ecosystem, all of them were saying like Braze was really where a lot of the marketers were going because it combined a lot of what we all loved about Martech, which was the advanced use cases, the power of the data. But combined all that with better usability, more real time, better mobile capability. So it just seemed like a perfect marriage of what we had experience in, but then also what was up and coming?How would you differentiate the companies that use Braze versus Marketo or SFMC?These are broad strokes, so they're not specific or like universal comments. But I think the number one thing that we've seen for folks who are using Braze is those teams are typically more innovative and fast moving where they're relying on marketers to build out campaigns and be in the tool every day and where they they understand. I think the other area of that too is they have the best understanding of their data. So what's really awesome about Braze is this, this real time or event based architecture but also the the ability to to layer in some of those things.One thing that we always came up against whether it was at Marketo or Salesforce Marketing Cloud was we don't want to bring in all of our PII into the platform. And so you started to see like Movable Inc does a really good job of this, of being able to combine multiple different data sets and then just put to like push out a piece of content or copy that is personalized. But Movable Inc doesn't require that PII, It's just based on these integrations that are happening in real time and with Braze we can do something very similar right where I can call out to my Snowflake instance at the time of an e-mail send and I don't have to bring that PII into the platform, but I can still populate the PII and the e-mail. So these things that are are really fast-paced and moving.I think the area where Marketo is great is on the B2B side. We always saw a lot of customers migrate off of Marketo to whether it was SFMC or Braze because they're trying to use it for B2C campaigns or for high volume campaigns.Implementating Marketo at TeslaThe one example I always like to use, and this is years ago, but I was on the team that was implementing Tesla at Marketo back in I think it was 2015 and they were launching their Model 3 and it took Marketo about 8 hours to send about 2,000,000 emails. And so obviously I'm sure that's changed, you know being seven years ago, but at the time was a big deal. It took forever, right? And especially coming from Exact Target, which was this unbelievable sending engine. I couldn't believe it took that long. So suffice to say that was a bit of an escalation on the Tesla.Marketing teams represent the platforms they're using just like Dogs look like their ownersThis is probably not a very nice thing to say, but, I've heard comedians say that dogs look like their owners. I think Jerry Seinfeld actually mentioned that on one of his Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee episodes. I think you could say that same analogy for marketing teams, they represent the platforms they're using.Whenever you talk to a team that absolutely loves, you know, Adobe campaign. You know, it's most likely going to be a pretty rigid team that has very a lot of different data silos and it's kind of like the my stapler type of thing from Office Space, right?And then you have people who are using more innovative or faster moving platforms and they're much more nimble and flexible. It was just last week I was talking with a client of ours and they have a 14 day email SLA for a campaign, which is not horrible, but it's not fast by any means, right? And then we'll have other clients who have a three day SLA from beginning to end of that email campaign. So it's it's just interesting the different types of teams you see using different types of platforms.AI toolsThe other big topic these days and not just in martech is AI. Maybe we can spend the rest of our time here, there's plenty to cover.Job replacement and pausing AIDo you think AI will take over martech jobs, in 10-15 years? What are your thoughts on the current pace of advancements, should there be a pause?I definitely think there should be a pause. Not related to anything regarding Martech, but I just think that at the rate that innovation is happening, it becomes a little bit scary, especially when some of these AI systems start to get sentient feelings like what we saw come out of Silicon Valley a few months back. So I'm definitely on board for just you know, taking a brief pause. I think the hard part is globally do we fall behind if we take that pause? Do we think that China's going to take a pause? Do we think Russia's going to take a pause? There's all kinds of other implications to that.AI implications in MartechI think on the Martech side it's really exciting for technical marketers. And even for non-technical marketers, I think things that marketers always aspire to do like like A/B/N testing or optimizing campaigns, historically marketers are really bad at that and it's not necessarily their fault. They just don't have the tools to do it.It's kind of like how I feel about attribution. I'll never forget I was in a in a meeting with a client with one of our senior leaders at Lev and someone at the client asked about attribution and how we solve for that. And he piped in right away and said attribution's a pipe dream, which I just thought was hilarious, but also a little bit true, right? You can do first touch, you could do last touch, you could do equal touch. Like there's there's different ways of looking at it. But I think in my hope is that AI I will be able to help with that, that we'll be able to be a little bit smarter.And based on the business you're in, the industry you have do I have a mobile presence on my more brick and mortar like all these different things. In addition to integrations, AI will be able to help with building out snippets of code that those things like attribution will become much easier.I think that on the non-technical side you know everything that AI is pulling from is original content, right? Everything that is these, these algorithms or these machines are being fed is all things that that they're picking up from either the web or from libraries or whatever that might look like. And so I think there will always be a need for organic content. One of my hopes is, and I don't know if this is an AI solve, but my hope is that more marketing becomes more technical. Not self fulfilling, but we just get a notch deeper into the weeds, whether it's a blog article or things like that.Advice for adapting to AIFor marketers listening today, what advice do you have in terms of what they should be learning or doubling down on to future proof their careers in a AI-first marketing world… Yeah, I think the first portion of it is using it as an ability to learn. I've learned a lot about whether it's a platform or different types of marketing strategies through like having conversations with ChatGPT. So I think those things are helpful where it's condensed learning where it's doing a really good job of taking all these things that are are publicly available and then deciphering that in a way that's easy to digest.Propensity modelingThe area where there's a lot of opportunity is in propensity modeling, where marketers a lot of times are reliant on a data science team. If you don't have a data science team or something like that, I think they can be incredibly helpful. There's at least from what I've seen across any of the, you know, the MAP's or CEP's, there hasn't been a platform that's done this extremely well yet.And I I imagine that over the next three to five years will become much better of not only like propensity to buy or propensity to engage, but also you know, channel optimization. I mean there's still all kinds of companies out there that are sending emails three times a day because they think it drives more revenue than if they send one a day, which is probably a whole other podcast that we could dive into.And then also too I think the on the data front. Being able to actually understand your data in a in a more functional way without the need for a data science team, that's probably where I see the biggest opportunities for marketers. And then also embracing it, don't don't push back on it like there's not, it's you know, we're not we're not going back in time. You know, how can you leverage it to make yourself more efficient but then also make your campaigns or your strategy more effective as well.Happiness question: how do you balance everything and remain happy in your career and personal life?I spend a lot of time with my wife. We we walk together every morning. We go on trips together. We hang out a lot. Young people say like they may married their best friend. I don't think most people think that, but I did and it's awesome and she like knows just a just as much about Stitch as I do. So she's like she's like the combination of like friend, spouse and like manager all in one, which is awesome.Like I think some people would have a hard time with that, but it's like someone that constantly is pushing you, but then also the source of your happiness to your point as well. That's pretty cool.—Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with Midjourney

To power through business issues takes two. Whether it's the two customer bookends (the initial sale and delivering on promises) or the two-some of you and a co-founder, balance is power. By navigating relationships and using each other's strengths, you can sustain the passion to build a business.In this episode, I (Daniel) discuss balance in both leadership and your team with Jim Goldman, the Co-Founder and CEO of Trava. Jim shares how working well together, having at least one person who loves sales, and passing along knowledge sustains passion. He goes on to offer the perspective of hiring people who already possess proper balance and capabilities, and then training for skills.“Laughter makes us more productive… [So] we take our laughter very seriously.” -- Jim GoldmanWhat You'll LearnSustaining passionPartner balanceOne needs to love salesRelinquishing controlHire for capabilities, train for skillsSavage with a sage mindsetCharging intensityRecommended ResourcesConnect with Jim GoldmanJim is the Co-Founder and CEO of Trava, a cybersecurity risk management company. Along with having worked for the FBI and Salesforce, Jim says about himself…“I am proud of my ability to solve big hairy problems (BHPs). I believe in doing things right or not at all. My to-do lists are legendary. I am a strategist, connecting dots that others don't see, but also an achiever, focused on delivering meaningful results.At Salesforce, I built the company's first Security GRC organization where I am responsible for enterprise-wide Security Governance, Risk Management, Compliance. I was initially also responsible for Information Management/Data Governance including GDPR, which has since transferred to the Chief Data Officer's organization.I am a diversity champion. My current team (~80 people globally) is 41% women and my leadership team is 42.8% women.I build efficient programs and effective organizations. I fix broken processes. I solve problems rather than treat symptoms. I believe in the speed of trust.I have started degree programs at major universities, research labs serving the FBI, and trust organizations for cloud computing companies. I am an internationally published author and am a frequently invited conference speaker and panelist.The values that I live by and profess to my teams are loyalty, honesty, and humor (mostly at my own expense). I was practicing servant leadership before it had a name.”Trava Linkedin - Jim GoldmanLinkedin - Trava Securityjim.goldman@travasecurity.comFacebook - Trava HQInstagram- Trava SecurityTwitter - Ttrava SecurityCONNECT WITH DANIEL FULLERDaniel is a partner and the VP of Business Development for FullStack PEO and co-host of the Savage to Sage podcast. He is passionate about seeing people, leaders, cultures, and organizations develop. He says, “When I have the honor of being a part of that maturation process, it's even more satisfying. My life and work are given to empowering...

Catherine Nichols is the VP of the Office of Accessibility at Salesforce and an experienced disability rights advocate. At Salesforce, her teams strive to ensure its products, workplaces, and virtual experiences are accessible to all.Connect with her on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherinecnichols/ Find out more about the Office of Accessibility at Salesforce.com/Accessibility and join the conversation on Twitter @SalesforceA11y AXSChat is Supported by Amazon. Captions are kindly provided by MyClearText.Support the showFollow axschat on social mediaTwitterhttps://twitter.com/AkwyZhttps://twitter.com/axschatLinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/antoniovieirasantos/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/axschat/Vimeohttps://vimeo.com/akwyz

Ms. Nunley is an experienced world traveler and has spent more than 20 years in the technology industry. She's held leadership positions in Strategy, Product Management, Revenue Management and Online Distribution with many of the leading global hotel software providers like Micros Systems (Oracle Hospitality) and Sabre Hospitality. At Salesforce she lends her industry expertise to help deliver the next generation of hospitality solutions and strategies to the global community and remains excited to step into the next decade of Hospitality Customer Engagement.

Amy Guterman is a human-centered designer and innovator, with a focus on leveraging tech for social impact. She is the Senior Director of Community Innovation, Impact Labs & Open Source Commons at Salesforce. At Salesforce, her team leads Impact Labs and Open Source Commons to foster community collaboration and inspire innovation on the world's most pressing challenges. Amy's work includes designing interventions to address issues in equity in education, housing and homelessness, and global health information systems. Her work has been featured in publications such as Forbes, FastCo, Wired, and The Verge and recognized internationally by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The White House.

In today's podcast, we are talking with Michelle Grant about NFTs. We discuss the ways in which brands are currently using them as well as potential uses for large and medium-sized brands in the future.  Make sure you tune in to find out more! Michelle is a seasoned researcher who helps global organizations build the future of their business. At Salesforce, Michelle is a Senior Manager, Strategy and Insights Retail and Consumer Goods, where she  blends data and analysis to create thought-provoking content around the impact of digital transformation in retail and consumer goods.    Today's sponsor is Synder. Synder makes tax season feel like a Friday night because it helps Amazon businesses to close their books correctly, always have a P&L report, balance sheet and inventory tracking on hand. If you run your business on more than one sales channel, Synder is perfect for you to have all of your revenue and expenses data in one ecosystem and set up KPIs that work for your business. You can start Synder with 56% off with the coupon code EASYBOOKS by going to Synder's website, that's synder.me/braintrust and submitting your email in the special form. Visit the website to get a discount and also receive an actionable ecommerce checklist on crucial metrics understanding along with the coupon code EASYBOOKS. Manage your data like a Thanos!

Most growth-focused businesses don't like to wait to get results. They want to see an immediate return on their marketing and branding investment. That said, if they have the patience and financial fortitude, they will realize the benefits of the long-term strategy of B2B brand building! Colin Fleming, SVP of Global Brands, Events and Customer Marketing at Salesforce, says, “At Salesforce, there was a moment of reckoning when we realized that brands actually needed to be built, curated, nurtured, and, every once in a while, kicked in the pants and reset.” Fleming states that brands shouldn't just plan quarter to quarter but also think about three and five years ahead. In Part 1 of this 2-part series on successful B2B marketing, we talked about why businesses should focus on both the short and long-term elements of their marketing strategy. After all, building your brand will add to the overall value of your company. In Part 2 below, we will talk more about this delicate balance and dive into some brand-building tactics that will benefit you in the long run… B2B Brand Building: The Benefits of Long-Term Tactics and Why They Are Needed Does this sound like you? You just started your business, and you compare it to other companies that have been around for five or more years. They have thousands of loyal customers and reviews, which is overwhelming and makes you feel like you have a long (and challenging) road ahead. Well, we don't want to sugarcoat this for you. You DO have a long road ahead. If anyone tells you that you can build a strong brand and community of tens of thousands of loyal customers in one month, they're either lying or simply don't understand marketing. June 23, 2021, by Lisa Thorstenson

Brandon Clauser is a young, ultra-high-performing Sales Account Executive at Salesforce, the $200 billion global software giant. He is extremely hard-working, determined, and has achieved an extraordinary level of success before age 30 — all without a college degree. He credits his success to his intense work ethic, perseverance, doing the right thing, and finding ways to understand and help people as some catalysts for his success. Early in his career, he found deep internal motivation from “the gift of desperation” — wanting to create a better life for himself and doing whatever it would take to achieve success. He began his sales career doing cold calls to sell walk-in bathtubs. After achieving success in sales, he followed his intuition and pursued opportunities in software sales and quickly found his “path” to help technology companies grow. As an individual contributor at various companies during his career, his personal performance had been greater than the sum total of the majority of people in the sales department. Brandon has risen quickly to the top of the sales leaderboard within every organization he's been a part of while supporting his team and gaining the trust and confidence of his customers. At Salesforce, he is a leading Account Executive focusing on the healthcare industry. He works with senior- and C-level executives to deliver solutions that help his clients better serve their end-customers. Brandon is positive, energetic, grounded, and has an inspiring story — a story for anyone seeking to improve their life with a vision, goals, and hard work. He is an example of what is possible.

The world of ecommerce is constantly changing — this last year being a prime example. How people shop in 2021 is radically different from how they shopped in early 2020, so forget about thinking about comparing today’s world to a decade ago. Although that is fun to see how much has changed. Now, it’s all about keeping up with your customers, which is why for our first official roundtable episode of Up Next in Commerce we wanted to bring on two people who have been on the cutting edge of the industry for years. Ashima Sehgal is a Software Development Manager at Amazon Music and Jon Feldman, a Senior Marketing Leader for Salesforce Commerce Cloud. These two go way back to their days working together on ecommerce implementation at Restoration Hardware, which was a journey in and of itself, and while they remain close friends, they sit on the opposite side of the fence when it comes to certain aspects of the future of ecommerce. We get into all of it in this episode, including discussing whether shopping at the edge is the future of the industry or just a passing fad, and how to get buy-in when selling a new implementation. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did!Main Takeaways:Make It Easy: When pitching or selling an implementation, the key is to tell the right story and make it hard for the business to say no. Highlight the pain points that their business is facing, and play up how you will solve those problems from beginning to end and be a great partner throughout the process. But one thing to remember, don’t try to tackle everything from the start and be upfront about what is prioritized and what is put on the backburner. Edgy Opinions: There is a lot of debate on the future of shopping at the edge and whether or not it is a fad. Regardless of whether it sticks, businesses should be harnessing the power of meeting customers where they are and selling to them in those places, but the base ecommerce platform should not have to suffer as a result of those efforts. It’s All A Simulation: In the last year especially, there has been a lot of talk about the death of retail and the rise of an ecommerce-only economy. That is a myth. While 2020 and early 2021 undeniably changed the way people shopped, it was more of a blip in the timeline and not a true indicator of the future, which will more likely be a blend of in-person and online experiences.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Welcome to Up Next In Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at Mission.org. Today's episode is going to be a really fun one. It's our very first official Roundtable and we have the two perfect guests joining us. First up, we have Ashima Seghal, the software development manager for Amazon and Jon Feldman, a senior manager of Product Marketing at Salesforce. Ashima, Jon, how's it going?Ashima:AwesomeJon:How's it going? Stephanie:Good. I'm glad to have you here. So I heard you guys have a little background, you've worked together in the past and I wanted to start there so people can know your relationship, like how do you all know each other? And maybe, Ashima, I'll let you start with that.Ashima:Yeah, I feel like Jon and I have worked together forever now. 2008, I moved to the U.S. and I met Jon, the first company I joined. It was a consulting shop, we work together to help people build their ecommerce websites and features on it. And, he's mentored me through that period to help me understand better where my interest lies. And he's also helped me grow my management skills and given me opportunities as he grew in the ladder in those organizations, I saw some opportunities come my way as well. And then, we worked together recently in Restoration Hardware. As a director of engineering, he and I worked together in terms of prioritization of what should be done when and working closely with the business, in terms of understanding how to get to the customer, how to go get features quickly to market and so on and so forth. So, a lot of history there to explore.Stephanie:And that really talked Jon up. So Jon, is that your recollection as well?Jon:No doubt.Stephanie:And what was your favorite project that you all worked on together?Jon:My success in ecommerce is deeply intertwined with working with Ashima. I mean, we worked very closely, both at Access Group where we did a zillion implementations. And then, when we went to Restoration Hardware, we had a really beautiful relationship and so far, I had the crazy ideas and she had the practical skills to do those. And so, it worked really symbiotically. So I feel like we've seen a lot of stuff and built the systems so yeah, really delighted to be sharing this.Ashima:Yeah. One funny story, I can tell you was we work for Falabella in Chile, and it was a Spanish speaking Morgan, I didn't understand as much Spanish so I would speak my English louder thinking they would understand me and Jon would be like, why are you yelling at them? I'm like, I'm not yelling at them. They just don't understand me. I'm trying. So, that was some happy moments.Jon:I remember that. That's wonderful. That was back at the building of [inaudible] or whatever.Ashima:Exactly.Stephanie:My gosh, that's awesome. And Restoration Hardware, that seems like a really good company to work on, especially from an ecommerce perspective, because when I was looking through articles and whatnot, it was talking about how they were resisting moving to ecommerce for a while. So, were you guys working there when that was still undergoing, when they didn't really want to make that move or were you already past that hurdle, and already ready to start implementing things?Ashima:I can go first and then, Jon can add to that. But if Restoration Hardware wants, they don't want anything to do with digital, they would close their eyes and close that shop today. The reality for them is they want to be beautiful. They want customers to come and touch them and feel them. They want people to experience it and then, love it. And digital is a hindrance to that because digital is very removed. It's away from the customer, however beautiful an image you put on digital, the fabric is something you can't feel and that's what they're selling. They want you to experience it. Then, going into building restaurants in their business than going into hotels half that is an extension of that. But we were more of an idea shop. We were enablers for them, not that loved and given as much money but still help them run 90% of their business through auto management and so on. So, we were critical to their success, but didn't get as much love I would say. Jon?Jon:No, I totally echo that. I think that Restoration Hardware is at its core, a luxury business and they want that luxury, in person experience. And it's really interesting because it was fascinating to be there during a time when there was all this transition to digital and everybody's like, well of course you need these nine things and to have like a real hard no, the experience is fairly impersonal and manual. I think it was really frustrating at the time. But it's really impacted my thinking since that I challenged the ease shopping at the edge. It's definitely something we're seeing. There's huge growth in it, right? It's a big area, certainly, Salesforce can't stop talking about it. But, from a Restoration Hardware standpoint, it's growth, but is that the growth that's important for my brand, which really affected how I evaluate some of that stuff.Ashima:Right. Another important thing is that we were always asked to do one day in their store, and Jon did it and we did it like all of us employees did it. And it was fascinating, because you could see why that was important. You could see that they wanted customers to come every day, look at a cushion and buy that and keep the relationship going. That is what they thought the bread and butter was. I met this lady who comes in every two, three months and buys a new big thing for her house. She has lots of money.Ashima:And that's the 1% that they're targeting. And that's what's running their business. They don't care about the 99%. They don't want to be digital, because they don't want to be for the masses. They know who their customer is. And that's what I learned in Restoration Hardware, that they were so aware of who their customer was and they were very successful. Look at the stock price now, right? That's part because they understand their customer. And we were just like I said, enablers. So, we were a step removed from that painting and so embedded in engineering, but if you talk about business, they were geniuses, I would say.Jon:Yeah, no doubt. Gary, he has built an unbelievable business. Restoration Hardware was a very difficult place to be in IT but it is an unbelievable business.Stephanie:Were there any big projects that you remember that you felt really strongly about? You're like this could go through and you just got like, Nope, sorry. We are not doing that.Ashima:Many of those.Stephanie:Maybe your favorite memory?Ashima:Yeah, we brought in so many different awesome implementation options for [mobile] and people just didn't buy it. It's like my cat who knows I'm here but pretends I'm not here. It's like that. Restoration Hardware acknowledges mobile is important but just does not want to invest in our mobile experience. I still say our because I feel like I'm connected to the brand but it is still sucky. Right? So I feel like mobile was the big, big one and why it's painful is because we brought in so many different ways of getting it in, like let's do it incrementally. Let's get one page there. Let's just get on iOS like, no.Jon:One of the strongest members I have is one of the chief merchandising officers who I want to be really clear is a lovely person, I follow her on Instagram, we're still buddies, is super brave but sitting at one of those tables in the center of innovation and whatever it's like it's the big show building and Restoration Hardware is really designed, if you're a vendor to be like, yo, this is the place, holding up herself and being like, who's going to buy a couch on this? Right? And I was like, man, we got a long way to go. Technology is not the place these guys are hanging out so-Ashima:Right.Jon:Man. So, before I get into... I want to dive deep into implementation because I know you both had background in that. But before that, I would love it if Ashima, you can explain maybe your current role at Amazon and then, Jon will go over to you just so everyone knows who we're talking to.Ashima:Yeah. Like I said, I'm software development manager there. I manage teams that run the front page of music app. So my team is a full stack team, which translates into iOS, Android web engineers, as well as Silverstack engineers who come together to build features for browsing, how customers discover music more easily, and highlight the personalization capabilities that we have under the hood and make it more obvious for customer experience improvement.Stephanie:Pretty cool. All right and Jon.Jon:That's awesome, probably the highest performing team at Amazon Music, I assume.Stephanie:I would think so too.Jon:[crosstalk] Ashima took the technology path after leaving Restoration Hardware and I was like, I can't do another project or I'll be dead. So I went into marketing and now, I do event content and I do all the flashy video stuff for Salesforce. It's a ton of fun. Ashima, your worst nightmare, I am paid for thought leadership. People pay to listen to the crazy stuff I say.Stephanie:I do want to dive into the implementation piece. I want to hear a bit about, we haven't actually dove that deep into that side of things on the podcast. Usually, I have brands on big and small, but we don't go into the weeds there and because you both have seen a lot of implementations in your career, I was hoping you can go through what makes a successful ecommerce implementation, like what does that look like, any case studies, I want to know how someone can make sure to put their best foot forward when thinking about that?Ashima:Yeah, in my experience, the best way to sell an implementation to a business stakeholder is to highlight their top three pain points, what is it that you're struggling with the most like in case of Restoration Hardware, or even my current company, we would ask them, what are the features you wanted to get in in 2019 and still haven't been able to get out of the door? And how can we increase velocity? Velocity is a word business loves. They want their things out the door, in front of the customers as soon as possible. That's one. Two, I feel really strongly about instrumentation and collecting metrics. If you don't know where your customer is and how they're using your site and what they're thinking as they're using your site, it just is pointless in many ways, because you can't make progress in any specific area, if you don't know how well or bad it's doing.Ashima:So those two avenues of velocity and instrumentation connect with business a lot. And then, also giving our business a sense that we're not boiling the ocean, we're going to go slow, start at point A and take you through to point B and won't abandon you midway and here's how it's going to go and give them an early peek into what an implementation would look like, is again, something that just strikes under with business and I feel like they understand our side of the problem.Stephanie:Okay.Jon:I couldn't agree more with agreeing on a language from an IT standpoint with the business and how you can evaluate the success of it. So ahead of time, you know that the business values this and IT values this and is the project to achieving that yes or no, rather than some... because the worst situation is where people start pulling metrics that no one's ever measured out of the air. And it's like, in the last week, our average card size is down 82 cents, you can chase that rabbit pretty deep.Stephanie:I was just going to ask that about metrics. It seems like at least back in my Google days, everyone was always operating in different metrics. I worked with product teams and [inaudible] teams and they didn't really see eye to eye with what was important. So, how would you present that to leadership in a way that connects with everyone who's your manager or manager's manager, and not just presenting business metrics that don't make sense to an engineering team who's like, well, wait, this is actually the bigger infrastructure problem while business is like, but what about my average order size? How do you think about that good balance without overwhelming them with hundreds of metrics?Ashima:Right. I feel like I agree with Jon that metrics and exclusivity don't make sense but if you connect the funnel that, here's where the customer started, we can see that we have so much value in this detail page and this is the button they're clicking the most. And if I improve this experience and reduce the number of clicks, it's going to get us this much left in the final revenue number. I feel like starting and ending, creating a story out of it has the best impact.Ashima:If you throw out a caught value number from the middle, maybe that won't resonate as much but creating a story, creating here's where we start, here's where we see most value. And this is where it's going to end, might have a better-Jon:No, totally. And I can think of two reasons why that's important. One is that it provides a north star for the project as it's going. These projects are multi month projects with different stakeholders and a lot of movement in them. And so being able to touch back to here are the use cases that we all agreed on that we're doing I think, is really critical. The other is it's interesting because it's table stakes to the level you're talking about is to have a broad agreement with the business and IT about what it is you're building full stop and while you're building it. I can think of implementation we did in Emeryville, which was, super lovely people but they were ultimately trying to save the business by replacing their ecommerce engine and as the business degraded, the energy around like we're going to get this new site out and all of a sudden the boat's going to float again. It just doesn't bear out that way. If you don't know why you're building and how that's building your business, technology alone is not going to do it. [AD READ]Stephanie:Yeah. And I love the idea to around having to have a story for it. I don't think I've heard of many, especially, engineering managers speak that language before, which I think is awesome. But I mean, we talk about that in our company all the time about, every podcast needs to be told and the hero's journey type format, even our show notes, everything needs to be told in the story, it needs to open up loops. I'd be interested to hear how you structure that to connect with other people. How do you think about building a story in a way that's going to sell leadership and excite them for something that they might not be able to see like the changes that are happening after a year or so?Ashima:Yeah, and I might be preaching to the choir. You guys are much better than me in this business but I feel like you have to know your audience. If you're going into a VP discussion, your story is going to be totally different and if I'm selling it to my senior manager, he's going to look for what is my [inaudible] AWS. What story are you telling? So knowing your audience, and creating the story based on it is super important. We pay a lot of attention to documentation and story writing. That is why all engineering managers are, well, could have been all of them, rounded part of just knowing what will resonate with that particular team member is super important so that you can bring out just those facts in that conversation and sell that specific point. Jon, I don't know if you have any-Jon:In marketing, we call those personas.Ashima:Personas.Stephanie:Tell me one more thing, Jon, how do we approach that?Jon:How do we approach aligning the stories with a persona? Yeah, I totally agree with Ashima, you have to know your audience, you have to really be able to know what the people want... like any big project like this, it's only going to be successful when it's a mutual success. So understanding how you can talk to somebody and say, we're going to do this and it's going to help you this way, and we're going to need your involvement this way, right? Knowing how to have those conversations is the way to, I think, introduce people to these big projects and get them excited about it. But then, also really being focused on, here are the problems that this project solves for you, constituent of this project, because if people don't have any skin in the game and there's no clear connection between their participation and some better outcome, they're not going to want to do it.Jon:A lot of it is people have some sort of vision, we came in at the point where people already had a vision that they were going to do something at the ecommerce thing and we filled in the blanks of here's what your store would actually look like and here's how your use cases actually match into a finished product. And so, I think she's really right, that you really have to know what the people who are consuming the information about the project need to hear to feel great about it to feel like it's a solution to their problems.Ashima:The other important thing to remember is the the reviews that go well are the ones where you're not tackling 10 problems. I feel like you should look at your story again and find the two problems that you're trying to solve, don't talk about 20, 10. The ones that are successful are the ones that are saying, here are my two problems, working backwards from it, here's where we need to start and here are the big milestones we're going to touch as we work towards it. So working backwards, shortening your storyline to one to two problems that you will solve and never say you will solve everything because you will never be solving everything. There's just too many things that you could fix.Ashima:As an engineer, I could find 1001 things to fix on a particular implementation, on a system. But are you trying to save cost? If cost is your end goal, your story should be just focused on cost. If getting customers specific feature is your goal, that's what you should be focusing on. If you try to do too many things, the audience gets confused. And then, you don't get consensus with it. Because they're like you're asking too much of me. I can't make all these decisions today. So, you don't get good outcomes of this conversation.Jon:Totally. I think that that's a really good insight all the way around when you do an engineering project because it's... particularly one of the sides, right? You live and die on the success of it. And in a very real way, it sucks but a lot of it is also politics and the visioning or how the perception of your project is in the company, and projects that are incrementally spinning off benefits, even if they're not huge, but reliably doing it in my experience, get a lot more love and attention than the, there's going to be this unbelievable bang on Thursday and everything's going to change, right?Jon:Those big bang projects, I think, can be very traumatic for everybody involved. And so, I think the idea that you start with something that works, and then build on top of that, rather than, I got to get all 10 of these perfect at the same time, it's a much harder climb.Ashima:Yeah. The last thing I would say about this is, be honest and upfront about what the trade offs are because you're not going to make everybody happy out of an implementation. Never have I seen that in my career making everybody happy.Jon:Of course.Ashima:So, the prioritization is key to success, like I was saying, picking through problems and solving them. But even within that, you're not going to be able to fix everything, right? If you set the right expectation as a consultant, as an STM or whoever you are in that meeting, and say, this is what I'm going to be able to do in this timeline. And, this is what I'm not going to be able to deliver up front, that might make you lose some customers, but you'll probably gain more customers out of that and I feel like that's a more honest conversation, you earn trust.Stephanie:Yeah, I was thinking-Jon:Yeah, total radical transparency, being upfront. We had a mentor Ashima and I, who would say, hold your client's feet to the fire. Every time he'll be like, are you holding their feet to the fire? And that idea that all of these are partnerships and that a strong vendor relationship is not a vendor who is complacent and like, I'll do whatever you want but is actually holding your feet to the fire and being like, if you don't do these two things, these outcomes are going to happen. And I'm not going to be injured the same way you are, but you got to get on it.Stephanie:Now I know where you got that line from Jon, you pulled that on me last week.Jon:Some inside baseball, Stephanie is outstanding at holding her clients feet to the fire. It's really great, because long ago, I learned that people in business negotiations very rarely say stuff, just to say it, right? There's always something that happens. And I was like, this is the third time I've heard this. It's consistent every time.Stephanie:Yeah. So how has the landscape changed when it comes to maybe either re-platforming or moving to digital for the first time? What were the maybe the two to three biggest problems that were being solved back when you were at Restoration Hardware or before then to now where before maybe people were focused on costs or just simple things? What's the focus now that people are trying to achieve when going through any kind of digital transformation or re-platforming? What are they looking for now?Ashima:I feel like business and engineering are looking for different goals. Engineering is looking to break down the architecture. When Jon and I did initial projects, most of the systems were monolithic. And there was this one giant deployment doing everything and when it broke, everybody cried. We've moved on from that world into the new brave world of Azure and AWS, and every other small or big company trying to get into the buzzword cloud but what that really means is that the implementation goal from engineering side has changed. We've felt more empowered to make small changes. I don't want to boil the ocean. I don't want to switch all of my implementation but I'm going to change this part of this page and just live with it and then, see how it goes.Ashima:And that's a big empowerment factor because then, I'm not stressed about changing everything at once. Right? I can go make micro changes. From business point of view, I feel like the challenge is about understanding younger customers and that's a totally different challenge from engineering because you have to run more user surveys. When we were doing implementations, I barely saw anybody doing user surveys, and coming back to me with a product doc saying, here's what I found. This is what people want, and it's going to be awesome. It was like, I have some intuition. I want to implement incrementality and this is what we should try and do and we'll see what happens. I feel like business is smarter now. I see many more people doing user research, user deep dives, experience deep dives ahead of time to know why they're building something, what would resonate, how do I get that 12 year old into my service so they will stay with us until 40 and I have a continuous revenue stream. So, I feel like the business landscape is changing from that point of view. Jon?Jon:Yeah, it's really interesting that you say that. It reminds me of a million years ago, like 2000, 2001. I was at ATG, which became Oracle commerce. And we were at some crazy Swedish auction bidding site and in Stockholm, I remember the CTO comes in and he's like, are there any features of ATG we haven't turned on yet because we should turn them on and I was like, that's bananas. And so, I think that initial like, I just need to be online. I don't really care what it is because I just need to hold the hill like just to physically be there I think is less important than to Ashima's point. There's a lot more intentionality about like, I want to produce this experience for my customers, and it's tied into a larger journey rather than like, if I'm not selling online.Jon:Although, actually, you said two things I was really interested and the first is that, just to say it out loud, right? At Salesforce, it's not a monolithic, kind of is monolith, right? Like we have micro services or APIs but it's all behind the curtain. It's not pure micro services in the way that someone else would but provides it all API stuff. I hear what you're saying about engineering teams having more ability to make small changes and being able to just get in and do stuff, because stuff is more easily manipulated, because there are more places, I don't know, from access. But, I think that also comes with a lot more ownership. I mean, you need an engineering team that's capable of doing those things, or more maintenance in that scenario.Ashima:Yeah, absolutely. You can't microservice the heck out of the system. You have to be intentional about it. But I feel like in the last five years, our overall engineering pool of people have learned this and it's no longer an anomaly. More people are doing this, it doesn't matter what language you're using, you could be on C, C++, or you could be on Golang. I feel like there's lots of people who have experienced it, learnt it. The bigger companies are now doing it, the Walmarts are all microservice based so we're no longer in the world where people were just experimenting with this and created hundreds of them. I feel like we're more intentional now, we've learned from our experiences.Ashima:The pool of engineers we have now are more experienced. This is not a new thing for them so, I feel like I have seen... maturity is the word I was looking for, that people are becoming mature in their implementation and more intentional about it. It's no longer monkeying with this new concept like-Jon:No, totally. Not only their robust skills in the marketplace, but their design patterns as well that people can fall back on. It's not like I'm now writing the very first of these ever on the internet.Ashima:Right.Jon:Awesome. That's really interesting. I've already answered the question.Ashima:The other thing I would mention from business side, which I really appreciate is people are trying to do one thing and one thing really well. You could go to the play shoe store, and you see kids shoes, they do that awesome. I love those shoes or the furniture I recently bought. These companies who are doing small things less inventory, trying to make the business profitable but doing those really, really well. I feel like that's a huge switch from ecommerce that Jon and I are used to where I am this shop that is going to sell everything under the sun and tell me how to sell it and that was hard because every product is different and categorization is different. The search has complexity and those were really hard problems that we were solving. I feel like businesses are becoming smarter in deciding where they're good at and what they should be doing.Stephanie:Yeah. [crosstalk]Jon:Shopping at the edge is this big idea, right? That all of a sudden, you can't keep people within your website, that all of a sudden, those four walls of your website are gone and now people are going to be shopping in marketplaces or on Amazon Music or at the Hertz checkout thing, or you're renting your car, you can buy whatever, right? And I think it's a compelling idea and I think it really speaks, Ashima, to what you're talking about in terms of little engineering things to make it easier. Like all of a sudden, you're like, now I can really easily ingest orders from the Hertz kiosk. It's not a big lift to do something like that.Jon:And we're seeing crazy growth and I think it speaks a lot to that engineering crowd into the marketing idea that you'll have a lot of control agility to be able to do this stuff. So I mean, as a Salesforce employee legitimately, it is something that we're investing in making happening, but I don't know, it'll be interesting to see how brands navigate it. Because certainly, it's a different model than I'm used to putting on the internet, certainly different than I'm used to using personally, but then, Ashima's point was like, kids today, right? Stephanie:I was going to say exactly what you just said, Ashima about how now, it used to be kind of chaotic, because businesses were trying to do everything. But now to think about, it seems like businesses have to be everywhere to sell, consumers want to shop everywhere. I mean, I know Jon mentioned shopping on the edge, that term which we've brought up a few times in the show and I want to hear how you guys think about that. Because I talked to quite a few brands who say that consumers are on TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, they're over a walmart.com, they're on Amazon, how do we keep up? We need to be selling everywhere quickly. And maybe Jon, I'll let you start because I know you have a strong opinion that maybe doesn't go well with what Ashima thinks?Jon:I think Ashima and I naturally falls in different sides of this. I think in addition to brands now not necessarily needing to have a gigantic... you can have a very focused set of skus that are easy to merchandise and understand. You also don't need to own all the software and stuff that you once did. It's much easier for a brand to be like, I'm going to exist to sell beanies. They're going be the greatest beanies in the world and assemble, it's the software stack for the brand stack, getting back to that, assemble the software in a way that, frankly, a physical brand that has a lot of legacy stuff is going to have a much harder time following you along. Ashima:I'm not opposed, or I don't think it's something that's not happening, it is happening. Shopping on the edge is happening. My point is that, as an engineer, as an engineering team, it doesn't preclude me from building a strong ecommerce site that's going to be my core platform. I still have to do everything in my power to make that as a strong space, that it can be stable enough to take regular orders. So the engineering effort to chase 50 different places is hard. But I feel like all teams probably first need to focus on making their core platform strong, right? It has to be.Ashima:And the second point I would make is only small... only X5 of your customers are coming from the edge shopping and that is why it's harder to understand exactly how to show your features and what will work for them and that's where my point about user case studies might work. But the bigger bulk of customers still going to come back into your site to explore other things that you have. So if you have X number of dollars, where would you get the most value out of them? Would it be just a shiny poster on Instagram, and bringing them back to your site or putting in your engineering dollars and making that one click work from Instagram? So that's where I struggle what would give you the best bang for your buck? Jon.Jon:Yeah, no, it's, I think, a great point, right? When you're talking, I'm like, man, I definitely want that core platform that's like robust and could do anything.Ashima:Yeah.Jon:I think what you're saying about user stories is ultimately the right answer, though, because when we think about core platform, I think you and I, Ashima, generally, we think about big robust servers sitting in a box somewhere, able to handle any trade, but that's not what every brand's priority is particularly something you want so-Ashima:Yeah.Stephanie:Yeah. Essentially say, they didn't even know they needed a website. They were just like, if you... I am trying to think, who we had on who is... a more recent episode where they're like, well, if we're selling on Instagram or Facebook or wherever it may be, no, it was a bot within Facebook Messenger. And you go on there, it's a personalized bot and then, they can say, this shirt would fit you perfectly and you can buy within Facebook Messenger. And she was making the point of like, why would you even need a website, if you can sell within Messengers or through Dms which is where the world is moving right now? Who cares what your website looks like [crosstalk]Jon:I guess, right back to this Ashima's point about user stories, right? Which is that ultimately, it doesn't matter if you have... pure in the server box of ecommerce definition, if your users are all on TikTok and they're going to buy through some crazy thing, you'd be bananas to invest in the giant server solution or in a traditional ecommerce solution. You want something that can flexibly follow wherever your customers are and knowing that if you don't own the store they're in, that they're probably going to move around a lot, right? It's not going to be TikTok forever. And so, you need the ability to service that.Ashima:Yeah, I feel like I'm a little bit biased being in Amazon, just the pink hat makes me think that I'm not just selling to TikTok customers, I'm thinking big. I have my customers everywhere. So it might be that for your brand, that might work. But for the [inaudible] of the world, they have to have strong presence on their own platform, and TikTok might help. I recently made a big purchase of couches I bought from article.com and I didn't do the shopping on the edge but what was super helpful was to look at Instagram photos of people using that furniture in their house and how it's set up.Ashima:It enabled me to buy it. So again, I was thinking one of the investment people are making is an AI and augmented reality and so on and I don't know if it's worth it because you the Warby Parkers of the world which are sending you the thing at home or the Instagram approach where you're showing people how your product looks in someone else's home. I feel like that's so much more effective to me as a customer that, making this guess of where my dollars should be spent is a hard problem. And I just am not fully convinced that shopping at the edge should be your end goal if you're a big hump.Jon:No, I think even in the most robust Salesforce marketing, we're definitely not suggesting, turn off your channels, shopping at the edge is the only way. 104% [crosstalk]. don't even need it anymore. it's going to be really interesting Ashima because my kids have Amazon accounts, I think. I don't think they've ever bought anything but turns out, all this management of your kids accounts trying to keep them affiliated like Apple , not doing a great job, Amazon, not doing a great job. Anyway, that's not where they go to shop for stuff. It's all social. I'm like, I need a cable, I go immediately to Amazon. They will not do that.Ashima:That's a really great point because I feel like there's a generational gap that I am starting to understand better as my kids are growing up, living my life through them a little bit and that's a great educational experience for all of us learning, how are people adapting to these new things? What are they connecting with? What are they not connecting with? And so on and so forth. My kids don't even read books, it's all audible. I'm like, I'm going to listen to story that I pick so the life is very different than... why I call shopping at the edge, a fad is it's working really well for this generation but for how many years? The next thing is going to replace it is my opinion and that's why having a core strong platform will get you over this hump into the next one.Stephanie:What do you think could be the next thing now? It's piqued my interest of like, what do you see coming after shopping at the edge just dies? No one does that anymore. What are they going to be doing next then?Ashima:You know-Ashima:I have started to see people use Airbnb experiences and Amazon explorer experiences a lot. Just yesterday, a friend of mine said they've gifted their friend or their wife a Valentine's gift of our tour in [inaudible] somewhere in Korea. I'm not saying name right.Jon:Korea?Ashima:It was awesome. Yeah, it was awesome. Lik this person walked through the markets, who then, they could show them the product. It was a very personalized tour so, I thought that's like the next big thing. And even an ecommerce opportunity like if you're buying from here in a shop in Korea and they can ship it to you.How unique is that? I think there's lots of potential and then, doing online experiences. I'm going to do a cooking class with you and then, I'm going to buy all of these pots and pans and ice from you because it looks awesome. I feel like that could be the next big thing.Jon:No doubt because we've got this live shopping demo that we do which is that it's like we have... it's funny because I thought of you when I narrated. I was like Ashima is going to be like this is never going to happen but it's that, there's an Influencer, you can buy stuff on the side so it's interesting to hear the facts.Stephanie:I think that's the way to go. Yeah, I mean, I think about we had someone saying that they... Andrew from Ideoclick, he teaches or does something with Harvard Business School on ecommerce and stuff. And, she was mentioning they had an influencer from China come in and show what shopping looks like and what her fans do and it was within three minutes, she'd racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales of a Harvard sticker. And they're like, that's power.Jon:Totally.Stephanie:It was new to me. I mean, I get it. I buy shirts and clothes and all this stuff on Instagram just by seeing people I follow I'm like, they remind me of myself and that shirt's cute. So I guess maybe not top level.Ashima:Yeah. Well, I use Airbnb a lot. We go out a lot and one of the things that I really enjoy is that something that that person is using in their house, I sometimes come back and buy it because I've experienced it. I've worked with it for two, three days and I loved it and I'm like, I should have this fixture or I should have this knife or I should have this other thing that I've experienced now, lived with it and I feel like that's such an awesome way to promote product, where you can touch and feel it and experience at no extra cost, but then, also buy it if you really like it. So, if Airbnb uses it, they should give me some money. But-Stephanie:We've got affiliate Airbnb, come on.Jon:Right? I think you're really, right and I also think about Twitch because I do some deejaying stuff so I am on Twitch a lot and there's not only crosssection between product buying but also, in terms of rewarding the influencer directly with cash, that your experience where you're like, this is great. I love being here and they're also selling stuff.Stephanie:How are you guys thinking of retail then, you talked about touching, feeling things and experiencing that, obviously, retail hasn't been at the profile lately. How are you guys thinking about that?Jon:That's why all these predictions, they are really a little tricky because this physical digital thing is all screwed up, well, not screwed up but vastly affected by the pandemic and that's incredibly changed everybody shopping habits. I mean, I bought stuff online, I never buy again and so, if I'm really honest, I am not sure the Twitch DJ stream outlives clubs opening. I'll talk about how Twitch is going to change the world and it's all great but I don't know if people are going to hang out online all day if they can go out once a week.Stephanie:Yeah. [inaudible] I am ready to get out.Jon:Yeah. Like everybody-Stephanie:[crosstalk].Ashima:Absolutely.Jon:For me, in person is going to be a big trouble. The camera's not going to get it done anymore.Ashima:Yeah. I feel like this is a blip, I feel like retail and in person shopping is going to come back with vengeance once things open up, we all get vaccinated and be safe. I generally think this is a blip. I feel like retail's going nowhere. It's going to be back. Restoration Hardware is all ready for it, I'm sure.Jon:[crosstalk] Do you think that they'll shift...yeah, totally. Do you think it'll shift the market place, right because I agree, I think we are going back to in person something but the Best Buy down the street has evolved so many times. During the pandemic, they were a fulfillment center then, they were a store , then, they were like outside only and now... I just don't know that it makes sense for Best Buy to have that big retail store and not have a [inaudible]. I agree they'll come back but, I don't know if it's going to be the same.Ashima:Yeah. With Fry's stores closing last week which was a sad event in my household. My husband loves Fry's.Jon:That was really sad. Bad day.Ashima:Yeah. You are absolutely, right that it's going to look different. It's going to be more personalized as, I think, we discussed before, it will look different. There's also going to be a disparity, the big guys are going to have money, they're going to come back the same way, the Targets, the Walmarts, they are going to be the same. The little guy or the medium guy has to make some sense of what will get them through this hump and keep them going. I don't see a [inaudible] store coming up near me, even if they were planning to, I think those plans will be delayed but I feel like some of it is going to back the same way it was, earlier.Stephanie:Yeah. The one thing we keep hearing is more about curation when it comes to stores, that people want to go there for an experience, you go to a pottery ban, you go to West Elm, whatever it maybe and you're lik, this is my space, this is my style, I come here because I don't want to think but then, I also think about me and I'm like, I go to a T.J.Maxx and it's just, all over the place and I thrive there. I'm like, this is my spot. Find something fun and I don't know what to expect so, I think it just depends on the shopper.Ashima:I love that comment because it's very hard to create emotions online. Pe`ople don't have the patience of going through things and things online. This feeling of hunting and finding gold in that aisle, that's going to stay with us, again, there's a demographic that loves it and that demographic is waiting for being vaccinated to get out there.Jon:And you think that digital needle in haystack experience doesn't exist in the same way it does, I mean, like T.J.Maxx, I found this unbelievable bargain.Ashima:It does in some cases, where you guys talk about Instagram and finding something you didn't even know existed. Sure, it does but not in the same way. Finding the $5 t-shirt that you didn't know exist in T.J.Maxx is like, that's new.Stephanie:It's my day. Walking out of T.J.Maxx store snapping, maybe Jon, he looks very confused about our conversation.Ashima:Yeah.Jon:No, it's cool. There's a Ross up here. I know what's up.Stephanie:Ross-Jon:Ross is like the... you could get, Ross is a second store, right? It's just lost inventory so anything can be there.Stephanie:Extra lost. No one goes in and doesn't get lost. All right. Well, Ashima and Jon, this has been an amazing round table. So fun having you guys on. We definitely have to do it again, where can people maybe find out more about your work. Ashima, we'll start with you. Where can people find more about you?Ashima:You can find me on LinkedIn, a lot about me, things I write or things that are relevant to me so LinkedIn is the right place.Stephanie:LinkedIn. All right. Jon, what about you? Where can people find out more about your work?Jon:Yeah, totally. LinkedIn is a good place or just search for Salesforce and my name. I write a lot of Salesforce stuff, number one blog ever. Number one performing blog.Stephanie:Yup and you have an amazing stay conversation for it. Everyone should check it out, methodical trans in there. We've referenced it a few times in our newsletter and it is very helpful for anyone who's either trying to start an ecommerce shop or trying to transform into a big brand. So, thank you guys so much for doing this show and we will see you next time.Ashima:Thank you very muchJon:Thank you.Ashima:Take care, Stephanie.

Christina Zhang is currently a manager for the department of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology at Salesforce. She didn't start her career in either social impact or tech. In this episode, she shares her process of switching roles and getting into the tech industry. At Salesforce, Christina's worked on diversity, equality, and ethics projects: first as a data analyst, then a program specialist, and now as a manager. What super interesting about her career is that she's basically written her own job description not once but now twice and has been building out the Ethical and Humane Use of Technology department. -- S T A Y C O N N E C T E D ! instagram: instagram.com/tech.gals facebook: fb.me/techgals email: techgalspod@gmail.com website: techgalspod.com S U P P O R T! anchor.fm/techgals/support --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs. Today I’m excited to have Emily Ricco from Salesforce join us. Emily, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience. Emily Ricco: Sure. Hi, glad to be here. I’m Emily Ricco and I work at Salesforce. I’ve been there since May and I work on our global enablement team. Salesforce is the leading CRM company in the world. And what I do is I help to enable our sales team and other sellers to do their job the best that they can. Prior to that, I worked in learning and development at HubSpot for seven years. And we did all of our onboarding and ongoing training for all of our employees globally. SS: Well, Emily, I’m excited to have you. You’ve worked at some well-known brands helping them build out learning. And in fact, you and I have talked and one of the areas that you are extremely passionate about when it comes to learning design is being able to co-create content with your learners. So, I would love to hear from you, how do you go about engaging learners in the design of your curriculums? ER: Sure. So, first I’ll talk a little bit about what we were doing at HubSpot. So, at HubSpot, we created a program that easily took people in from the business who were subject matter experts and gave them an overview of some basic instructional design principles so that they could start creating their own content. And the reason we did this is because, as the L&D team, we needed to prioritize what would impact our global organization on the broadest scale. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t opportunities within individual teams to be trained on specifics. We wanted to make sure that the training they were creating was just as amazing as the training that we were creating on our team and help them in a way that would scale for the company. So, through that process, we were able to help them create lots of different courses on topics such as diversity and inclusion, processes that impact individual customer-facing teams and a lot of other soft skills. At Salesforce, we use Scrum to manage our projects. One of the things that sets our team apart is that we engage learners in the design process every step of the way. So, from the beginning when we’re doing our needs analysis, we make sure to do focus groups and meet with learners and do a lot of discovery interviews. Then along the way when we have a storyboard, we want to check in and make sure that we’re using realistic examples and things that will really resonate with them. Then we have demos throughout the development process from prototype to alpha, beta, and gold with our learners so that we can make sure that navigation is clear, that things are really tuned into what they need and we’re not putting too much or not enough, and that they’re getting some helpful stuff. SS: I love that. Now I want to click in a little bit on how to go about leveraging employee-generated content for training. I’d love to hear from you what some of the benefits are from that approach. ER: The way that we did this at Salesforce was we launched a program that helps sales leaders nominate folks from their team that are interested in contributing to training. So, we have a kind of roster that we can reach out to get them to help us. And we make sure that we use their time as wisely as possible. We make sure to give them kudos and thank you’s at the end. A big part of Salesforce is culture to make sure that we’re thanking all the people that help us to be successful along the way. I think some of the benefits that this has had is that we have real-life examples that we can build scenarios from and we use the language that resonates and the right terminology that resonates with our learners. Sometimes we might, as learning experience designers, have a really cool idea of how to implement something, but if it’s going to fall flat, we want to try to fail fast and get to know that directly from the end user right at the beginning. So, it really helps us to have that empathy, understand all the ways that it’s relevant or maybe not relevant to them throughout our design. SS: I love that. And I love how it’s built into the culture over there at Salesforce. Now, I’d love to understand this last year has obviously been a change at the tides, and I think a lot of organizations, Salesforce especially, has made the choice to go into kind of a remote work environment, for obvious reasons. And so, I’d love to understand how you guys have been able to ensure that learners are engaged in the training programs, particularly with everything that’s gone virtual? ER: Sure. So, one of the things that we think about when building virtual training is how can we create opportunities for our learners to share the stage? So, we want to make sure that the way that we design all of our sessions is that there are opportunities for them to share their own stories. We try to limit the talking from the facilitator as much as possible and make it really interactive. Another important thing that we’ve implemented is trying to have a producer present at all of our virtual sessions. So, the producer role is someone who can handle all the technical issues and also make sure that people are being engaged, whether they’re introverts, extroverts, and they can make sure that the facilitator acknowledges them and is paying attention to what’s happening in the chat. I think the producer role has really helped with taking it to the next level and making sure that people feel that we’ve created a space of belonging. Another thing that we try to bring into our virtual sessions to make it more engaging is using technology appropriately. So, we have a variety of different tools available at our disposal. And so, we try to use the right one for the right job. I think being flexible with the tools and the environments that we can use really helps us to match them with what we’re trying to accomplish in the session. SS: I think that’s amazing. And I love that you guys work a sense of belonging into that. Now, I want to shift a little bit because on LinkedIn you also talked about the value of learner-facing objectives. So, I’d love to hear from you, what are some of the ways that learner facing objectives have helped to improve the success of your learning programs and how do these objectives differ from those you set for yourself as a learning design team? ER: So, learner facing objectives are definitely something that I’m still practicing. So, when I was first learning about instructional design and taking some courses, we learned the typical Bloom’s taxonomy. Here are the verbs you should know and use in your learning objectives and make sure that they’re always measurable and the learning objectives should link really clearly to the activities you choose in your design. However, at Salesforce, we talk a lot about having those learning objectives, but also creating learner facing objectives that help to market our course and increase that relevance to our learner and make them feel like this is something that’s going to be a good use of our time. I think that one of the ways that this has helped improve the success of our programs is just by not getting too caught up in learning and development sort of jargon and trying to speak the language that our learners speak and speak the language of the business. And so, when they’re searching for what course to take next or they’ve been enrolled in something, it really is our first impression and the way that we can get them excited about what’s to come. I think that the way that these objectives differ from what we set for ourselves, we usually create both. So, we still want to make sure that our objectives are guiding our design and that we’re using measurable terminology and we’re looking for behavior change in what we set. Then we do a second group of learner facing objectives. And those are the ones that we put into our course. Those are the ones that we usually share with stakeholders because again, our stakeholders and our subject matter experts are not folks that necessarily come from a learning background. And we don’t want to put them off with too much jargon that they’re not familiar with. We want to be speaking in a way that they understand and that they can contribute to. SS: I think for those in our audience that are maybe a little bit less familiar on the learning side, how do you go about thinking about what behavior changes you want to see and then how do you go about measuring that? ER: Sure. So, one of the ways that we think about how to get at what behavior change we want to see in our sales team is by having guided conversations with our stakeholders and SMEs to define those. The way that we set that up in case that’s not something that they’re too familiar with is we really try to break it down and say, “Before this training initiative goes out or this enablement program goes out, what are the current things that they know? And what are the current things that they’re doing?” Then we ask them a second follow-up question. After this, they go through this training program. What are the things that we want them to know and what are the things that we want to make sure they’re doing? We also try to take a look at KPIs. So, are there any ways that we can indicate that success was achieved? So, whether that’s maybe trying to look for metrics in our CRM that we use, that we want to see go up or down, or if we want to decrease the time to certain, other metrics. Like, we’ll try to pick those and get a benchmark of what they look like before the training and what they look like after the training intervention to see if we’re reaching our goals. SS: Fantastic. Now I want to pivot a little bit and talk about another of your areas of expertise which we’ve been hearing more interest arise in this area from sales enablement practitioners, and that’s really around applying best practices to project management. I think sales enablement professionals are so responsible for the orchestration of so many critical things within their organization that in order to do it all well successfully, you really need to be very good at project management. You have expertise in applying scrum to project management. You’re even Scrum certified, which is impressive. So how do you apply that knowledge to your role when you’re designing learning programs? ER: So, at Salesforce our global enablement team has really gone all-in with Scrum. And that’s how we manage all of our projects that we do. I think that really helps us to provide, alignment across our different projects we’re working on. It allows us to make sure that we’re keeping our stakeholders in the loop of any risks or impediments that we’re facing. And it also allows us to move quickly so we can make iterations, have changes come up and not be completely thrown off on our deadlines and just move very quickly as a team. So, the way that I apply my own Scrum knowledge when designing programs is, I try to break things into different pieces or user stories. And that allows me to structure my own time to achieve things, make enough time for different layers of feedback to come in and alter my path and also just think a few steps ahead, but also be flexible. That is how it’s helped me. SS: That’s fantastic. Now, you’ve mentioned a few of the ways in which it’s important to have project management skills, just generally speaking, for sales enablement, but I’d love to hear from your perspective, why it’s important to have really strong project management skills as a learning designer? ER: Sure. So as a learning designer, we’re asked to be a lot of different things and one of them is a project manager, and it’s really important to be transparent about what you need from other people to get your design done. And when they can expect things from you and have that solid relationship with all the different people that you need to work with, whether that’s your stakeholders, your subject matter experts, your production team if you have one, and finally like your LMS team or your marketing, like if you have learning marketing team, everyone. So, having project management skills just makes you a better communicator and a better teammate. I think also a lot of the learning design process can be pretty fluid and you learn different things every day that might change your path. And so, having that autonomy over how you manage your time and how you can move things around to reach your goal is really important as well. SS: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Well to close out on this particular topic, I’d love to hear from you a little bit more broadly beyond just even behavior change. How do you go about measuring the success of your learning programs? ER: Sure. So, we generally try to abide by Kirkpatrick. The first level of measurement is reaction. So, we do have surveys in which we ask our learners, “How relevant was this for you? Have you built confidence in these topics after going through this program?” We also collect like completion information as well, but where we’re trying to get to be level two and three, which is really about has that behavior change happened. So, looking for those metrics that might indicate that working with their managers or peer coaches and doing before and after comparisons using rubrics to determine what good looks like what, great looks like and what okay looks like. And then also just looking at our CRM and seeing what data points we can pull to show the business change that we’re making. SS: I love that. Well, Emily, thank you so much for joining us today. I enjoyed learning from you on all of these learning topics. ER: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. to our audience. SS: To our audience, Thanks for listening for more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Today we are speaking with Michelle Grant, Senior Manager, Strategy and Insights, Retail and Consumer Goods at Salesforce. She is a seasoned researcher who helps global organizations build the future of their business. At Salesforce, Michelle blends data and analysis to create thought-provoking content that helps companies understand how new technologies will impact the future of their business. Mentioned in this Episode Connect with Michelle Grant Find out more about Salesforce Connect with Kiri Masters Learn more about Bobsled Marketing

Did you know that, despite accounting for over half of the college-educated workforce, women in the United States made up only 29% of those employed in science and engineering (or STEM) roles? That’s according to the latest research done by the research group, Catalyst. For women of color, the number is even smaller at 11.5%. But here’s an even more disturbing statistic, in engineering, specifically for Latinas, this figure drops to a low of 2.3%! In this episode, we get to celebrate one of these trailblazing Latina women who has worked hard against the odds, fighting tooth and nail, to be in this elite 2.3% - Iliana Quinonez, Sr. Director of Solutions Engineering at Salesforce. Iliana shares exactly what it's like working with the boys and how we can pave the way for future female generations. Iliana is an award winning, Latin Trailblazer Woman in Engineering and a Developer of Leaders. She is a passionate advocate and ambassador for Equality, Diversity & Inclusion. Her career in the high tech industry spans over 25 years across 3 continents and more than 15 countries, working at both enterprise and startup companies. She has held leadership positions in several functional areas including solutions engineering, product, and marketing strategy, consulting and business development. She is the former Chair of the Board for Latinoforce, the Salesforce Latinx Employee Resource Group and currently serves as their Advisor. Highlights: [03:42] Iliana’s journey [08:57] Moving forward in moments of uncertainty [11:39] Techniques in dealing with uncertainty [15:42] Iliana’s success habits [19:43] Keys to building your community [23:54] Asking for mentorship [28:06] Secret to achieving your professional goals [35:04] How to accelerate your career in the digital age [38:09] How to do your personal brand audit   Quotes: “Fear is a natural response to uncertainty. But the more exposure you have, the more comfortable you become in those moments .”– Iliana Quinonez “Practice visualizing different scenarios, as it will condition you, psychologically, to be better prepared for challenges.” - Iliana Quinonez “At the end of each day, take some time to review your TODO list and prioritize.” – Iliana Quinonez “Building your network so that it is broad, you need to have different circles that will add value to your network.” – Iliana Quinonez “Find joy and fulfillment in giving to the community at a time when nobody's asking you for something.” – Iliana Quinonez “We don’t have failures, we have experiences and lessons learned.” – Iliana Quinonez “If you aren’t investing in networking, at least a few hours a week, it's something you need to put on your agenda.” – Iliana Quinonez “Be sure to do a brand audit - you need to know what people are saying about you when you're not in the room.” – Iliana Quinonez   About Iliana Quinonez: Iliana is a Latin Trailblazer Woman in Engineering and a Developer of Leaders. She is a passionate advocate and ambassador for Equality, Diversity & Inclusion. Her career in the high tech industry spans over 25 years across 3 continents and more than 15 countries, working at both enterprise and startup companies. She has held leadership positions in several functional areas including solutions engineering, product, and marketing strategy, consulting and business development. At Salesforce, she currently leads the Solutions Engineering team for the West Coast. Iliana is the former Chair of the Board for Latinoforce, the company's Latinx Employee Resource Group and currently serves as their Advisor. Iliana is originally from Mexico City, holds a BSc in Computer Science from Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico) and an MSc in Information Systems from the London School of Economics (UK). She lives in San Francisco with her husband and their two daughters.   Links: Website: www.salesforce.com LinkedIn: iliana-quinonez-34794/ Twitter: @iquinonez1

At Salesforce, innovation is not only a core company value – it’s an entire department called the “Office of Innovation.” Vivianne Castillo (cas-TEE-yo) is an Innovation Consultant at Salesforce. She also happens to be a trained therapist. She helps C-suite executives navigate some of the human-centered pitfalls of innovation such as fear of failure and shame.

How are some companies using account-based marketing to shorten the sales cycle, increase penetration in key accounts, and improve customer NPS scores? This week onThe Inbound Success Podcast, Terminus Co-Founder Sangram Vajre shares his insights on the past, present, and future of account-based marketing, including who it is right for and how the sales and marketing teams of the future will be able to use buyer fit and intent data to laser target the accounts with the highest likelihood of closing. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with keynote speakers including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS".  Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Sangram include: Sangram says that the easiest way to think about ABM is that it is focused marketing and sales activity. The best use cases for ABM are for companies with larger transaction value sales or those who are going after a smaller audience within a larger marketing strategy. ABM solves for a challenge that many companies experience. Specifically, it is a way to address situations where a company might be generating a lot of leads, but the sales team feels they are of poor quality. ABM 1.0 was about identifying the top 100 target accounts and going after those using targeted ads, custom landing pages, and direct mail campaigns. ABM 2.0 takes it a step further and uses buyer fit and intent data to automatically identify the best fit companies - the ones that are most likely to close - and then develop ABM campaigns around them. The ABM of the future could use artificial intelligence to take that buyer intent and fit data and then automatically build landing pages and ABM campaigns for those prospects. Sangram believes that in the future, marketing is actually going to own setting sales quotas because they will be the team that has that fit and intent data, which will make them more accurate in forecasting what can actually close. ABM is best suited to companies with a high degree of organizational readiness (meaning they are bought into the approach from the CEO down and they have a "one team" kind of mindset) and with larger sales transaction values. The three primary use cases for ABM are for acquisition, pipeline velocity, and customer satisfaction. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the Terminus website Visit Sangram's personal website Listen to the #FlipMyFunnel Podcast Connect with Sangram on LinkedIn Follow Sangram on Twitter Get Sangram's book Account-Based Marketing For Dummies Join the #FlipMyFunnel Community Listen to the podcast to learn how ABM is evolving and what the most successful ABM campaigns do to get results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host):Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast.I'm Kathleen Booth and I'm your host and today my guest is Sangram Vajre from Terminus. He is the chief evangelist and cofounder. Welcome Sangram. Sangram Vajre (Guest): Thank you, Kathleen. Excited to be on the show. Sangram and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: I am excited to have you here. I have not had anyone come on and talk about account based marketing before. Before we jump into that though, I would love it if you could tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and about Terminus and also ABM in case people don't know what it is. Abount Sangram and Terminus Sangram: All right. Sure. And as you said, I started to cofound Terminus about four years ago and prior to that I ran marketing at Pardot, which took me to this to acquisition within a year of Exact Target acquiring Pardot and then Salesforce acquiring Exact Target. So all of a sudden I went from running marketing for 100 people company for 10 million revenue all of a sudden to running it at Salesforce which was just incredible. It was a moment where I think I realized, I think I understood the meaning of scale. At Salesforce, I really had no idea before that. Kathleen: Trial by fire, right? Sangram: Totally. Totally. It's an incredible machine. And then co-founded Terminus. Ended up writing the first book on account based marketing that was published in 2016, believe it or not. So I'm about to write my second book this year and along the way started and really built this community called #FlipMyFunnel, which is all about challenging the status quo of marketing and sales. We have about 10,000 people in that community and a lot of really fun. It's awesome to see so many people doing some level of account based marketing. And I'm happy to share more through examples or stories of how incredible things are happening in companies. Kathleen: I was really impressed with the community that you all have built. I had Nikki Nixon, who was the head of the Flip My Funnel community, on one of my earliest episodes and community is something that we at IMPACT are very focused on and so it was really interesting to me to hear that story of how it got started and how particularly through some of the events you've held, that community has grown over the years. Sangram: Community is something, I have a saying on the #FlipMyFunnel podcast we talk about is really that without a community you are simply a commodity. "Without a community you are simply a commodity" - Sangram Vajre Click to Tweet this quote And if you think about anything like Hubspot for example, is an investor in Terminus. And I remember spending time with both Brian and Dharmesh then they became an investor in our company and I asked him why are you spending so much time and money on inbound? And they said, look, if somebody has to go build somebody that's going to compete with Hubspot toe to toe, first thing they need to go need to go and do is build a 20,000 plus community and hundreds of thousands of other people that are not even at this event but are online, they have to go build all that moat around them in order to even start to begin to compete with them at that level. So there is so much power in community and so do and Salesforce and Drift. And so I don't think we did anything new. I just felt like we definitely stumbled on this idea and thankfully and gratefully have been able to nurture it. Kathleen: Yeah, and it might not be something new, but I am amazed at how much we as marketers talk about the importance of community but so few brands and companies actually bother to truly invest in doing it. Kudos to you for following through. Sangram: I appreciate that. What Is Account-Based Marketing? Kathleen: So #FlipMyFunnel, I've always liked that name, too, because to me it so perfectly defines in marketing speak at least what ABM is in a way that anyone can understand. But to to rewind a little bit, let's go back to account based marketing. That's really what I wanted to talk to you about. How do you define account based marketing? Because I've heard it defined many different ways. Sangram: Yeah. So I'm not gonna give any analysty kind of definition. I think everybody can find a million different answers for that. I think quite simply to me it is focused marketing and sales activity, and that's all it is, really. So if you were in B2C where you are selling Nike shoes to any and everybody in the world, it makes sense to go after any and everybody in the world. But if you're selling to, let's say Fortune 500 financial services company for your supply chain product, guess what? There are only maybe 50 of them. So why in the world do we want to create content and qualification and all the processes that we all have created that has a roadblock to it? Why not start with the best fit accounts to begin with and then expand within the reach within them and then engage them and then turn into advocates. Why not focus on the 50 as opposed to 5,000 to find the 50? B2C has that problem. B2B thankfully does not have that problem. So that's why I think ABM is so cool. Kathleen: Yeah, it definitely makes sense that that larger transaction value that small audience, or the small audience within the bigger marketing strategy. So Terminus as a platform enables companies to more effectively do account based marketing. For the person listening who is either familiar with ABM or maybe not familiar but interested in learning more, tell me a little bit about what kinds of successes you've seen companies have with it. And honestly like how does it work? So if somebody says, I want to do focused marketing, what does that really mean at a practical level? Sangram: Well. So let's walk through an example of your document before we started to record, which is a company called Masergy is great customer of ours. They are in cloud communications and computing so I think most people can relate to that as a technology company and Malachi who runs their marketing is a phenomenal guy. We had him speak at a lot of the conferences and podcasts and all that stuff. So let me walk through almost status quo ABM 1.0 if you will and ABM 2.0. And I think as audience is listening to this and maybe they can figure out where they belong in this journey that you may be or may not be right now and trying to figure out to be on. So Malachi was in one of these incredible inbound marketers where he generated 25,000 leads, got 25,000 leads and he heard all the time from the sales team is like, well, they're not qualified. They're not relevant. They're not the right people and as you might know, Forrester came out with the research in 2016 I think that less than 1% of the leads are turning into customers. Kathleen: I was going to say, I'm pretty sure every single marketer that is listening has heard exactly that complaint from their sales team before. Sangram: And that's purely because we are going after again first trying to get any and everybody and then try to qualify it as opposed to going after the right people. So the problem is something that I think we have to own that we have created to begin with. So in a status quo world, I feel if you are marketing it and that's how the challenges you feel like at think of it as the status quo, that is pretty much what's happening in 90% of the company and it's unfortunate. I think we all need to wake up and look at it and think like, hey, it's not really sales problem. It's actually a marketing problem that we need to fix. So that's kind of where I feel he found himself as well a couple of years ago. Then he moved into this, what I would call AB 1.0 where I think more and more companies are finding themselves now who are jumping on the bandwagon of ABM which is saying, okay, well that's not working. Sending these 25,000 leads is not working. What do I do? Let me find the right people. Let me just go and select top 100 accounts that my sales and marketing team can focus on. That might be on a vertical, that might be based on sales stage that you are having difficulty converting, or it might be a sector or whatever it might be. So I think most people are now finding a top 100 accounts that I want to focus on. And to your point like, well how do you do it? What you really do and most companies are doing, they're running one to one campaign for each one of these hundred accounts. That means they'll have an ad that talks to that exact company and all the people in that company. So you're running advertising through platforms like Terminus and Google or whatnot. Then you are taking them to a landing page that doesn't ask for their mother's maiden name. It actually gives them the whole information about how you can actually help their industry and them and others in their industry be successful. So there's no gating of information. It's actually now your customers are going to spend more time on that page because you're literally taking to a page that is custom made for them and then you can add direct mail or stuff like that, too, to kind of engage them. Now you can do all of these things because you're only focused on top hundred. You're not focused on everybody. So you can do a digital advertising, you can do a Linkedin campaign, you can do a direct mail campaign, you can have a landing page that is focused on them, a stream of content videos for them. It's all possible when sales and marketing is working together at 1.0 level. And the results of that one, just in case of Malachi and Masergy they have over 250% penetration rate within the accounts they want to go after compared to any other account that they're targeting. Right? I think they knocked off a month in the sales process. So now they're closing deals much faster. Now you can imagine what kind of revenue impact you have in your organization when you're actually taking one month off your sales process. So how many more opportunities can your sales team work on? So their results are fantastic, but that's just because they're able to focus on the top hundred accounts. Right? Kathleen: So if I understand correctly, I'm a company and let's say I want to land Coca Cola as an account. I might set up ads via either Google or Linkedin or what have you that are targeted just at people who work for Coca Cola and then those ads are going to direct them back to a landing page that's either about the beverage industry or I guess it could specifically be about Coca Cola. Sangram: It actually should be. It could literally say your company plus Coke equals whatever because we do x,y,z. Kathleen: Yeah, and then potentially as you said, other items like direct mail, et cetera and the goal of all this is to get in front of and raise brand awareness amongst as many people within Coca Cola or at least within the right parts of Coca Cola as possible. Is that accurate? Sangram: Exactly and the reason you want to do that at that level is because we all know in B2B the decision making is by committee where there are five, seven, nine, 10 people are the decision making process. If all 10 people have heard about you and have seen your message and they may never fill up a form but they all have some sort of input in the buying process. Well if the CFO, the CEO, the head of sales, the head of procurement, and all of them have seen your brand chances as are you going to have somewhat of an in in that company because of the brand awareness you've created, but you can't create that level of brand awareness unless you are focused on them. Kathleen: Now, how do you do this without having the intended target feel like it's creepy. Sangram: It's creepy beyond creepy. But I think we all have sold our rights to privacy in many ways when we sign up for Facebook, when we signed up for websites that have over digital kind of body language to it. So in many ways, I'm one. So we do Terminus, one of the things beyond analytics and all this stuff that we do for canvas marketing as a platform, but one of the things we do is we do is digital advertising and I'm not someone who typically clicks on a lot of ads or digital advertising. I actually hate it. And I've told the founder of this company, but I loves ad when it actually does and serve a purpose for me. So for example, if I am looking for something and if I get the right message at the right time, it is an awesome thing. Otherwise it's annoying to me. Kathleen: I was just saying this, I was taking the train home on Saturday from a week away for work and I had, this is such a side story, but it's relevant. For Christmas, I wanted this one pair of slippers. Sangram: Yeah. Kathleen: And I didn't get it. And all of a sudden on the train, on the way home, this ad pops up and the slippers are on sale and darned if I didn't buy them within like five minutes of getting the ad. And it's exactly what you're talking about. I mean, this is it more of a B2C example. But yeah, I mean they knew I was interested. It was the right time and it was immediate, it was an easy yes. Sangram: Yeah. Kathleen: And I don't like ads either for what it's worth. Sangram: Exactly, none of us do, but we all value whatever is timely and convenient for us or the needs that we have. So I may not like a cupcake ad that pops up randomly for me, but I would love an ad for the right book or the right thing that I want. And B2B software is no different. If you're looking for it and you find the right connection, then you will spend time. So a company like Masergy is finding true success because these people are not converting on their website like the status quo thing. They're actually spending more time looking at oh this is good, this is great for our financial. They seem to have a great case study with a similar customer in our industry so they get our problem. They know what the messaging is exactly what you would create because you know enough about Coke so the messaging is going to be about it so they care. Like those are the feelings that you invoke in your future customer that standard marketing doesn't really do. So that's 1.0. And 2.0 sorry, go ahead. ABM 2.0 Kathleen: Yeah, no, that's what's going to be my next question is, all right, so what's 2.0? Sangram: If that's exciting enough for be people. If you're dipping your toes that already may feel overwhelming, but the reality is that if you truly care and if the deal size is big enough and if you can truly forward the velocity, it's really worth it. Now, if you're a transactional business where you're spending like 10 bucks a month subscription, it probably is not worth doing all the effort on it. Now ABM 2.0 is really interesting because now you go from this silo approach off like everybody and anybody and I need to go in and figure out who I need to go after and see less than 1% of the customers to the top hundred accounts and now it's super targeted, super engaged and connected and all that stuff. But now I'm getting proactive around my outreach and all that stuff is to this idea of running my entire business like that. Right? Imagine all of the target accounts that you want to go after now, not just hundreds, but maybe let's say your total addressable market is 3,000 accounts, right? And you know that your product or service is suited for those 3,000 accounts. Imagine having the ability to have a fit and intent score where you will say, okay, these 3,000 accounts have fit. These are great accounts. I just want to know whenever there is intent to buy any of these accounts somewhere online, if they're researching on G2 Crowd for a similar software. I want to know if somebody in that company is reading articles that have the keywords that I care about, I want to know. Right? So the fit and intent if you can combine that beyond the hundred accounts and say of these 3,000 accounts, any account that is the right fit and intent, I need to be alerted so that my sales can be prioritizing the experience for them. And then the same play that we talked about at 1.0, I can replicate it in a prioritized way for the accounts that are in market right now. And I think that's when you're running your business on a very hyper targeted, hyper personalized at scale. Kathleen: Now how do you, you talked about intent and some of the examples you gave were things that would happen off of your own web assets. So not on your website. It might be like you said, G2 crowd, for example. How are companies able to access this kind of intent data? Sangram: Oh, there's tons of providers right now in the market place. Like G2 crowd themselves would provide the intent.  Terminus connects with like you know Bombora. Bombora is another good one. DiscoverOrg would give you that information. Linkedin will give you that information now. Even G2 crowd as a set. And so there are tons of companies who are starting to pull all this information together and we as a platform, we are trying to hook up into all of them and say, okay, well we can run this for 100, but the beauty would be then you can run this for 3,000 and not leave anybody out there who's the right fit and has the intent right now because that's when you're going to win faster at a much higher level when you know the company that's in market. So all of these companies, they're more and more companies actually coming up with this data. Kathleen: That's interesting what you said about that you're really trying to hook up with all these different platforms. Because the first question that was going to come into my head was, I'm hearing a lot of companies talk about using CDPs, customer data platforms, in order to tie together the data they have in all different places. But it sounds like the direction you're moving, that wouldn't be necessary. You essentially would be the CDP. Sangram: Sure. I mean that's exactly right. Like we, I remember the really early days. Initially our thought was, hey, we're going to look at all the people in everybody's CRM and start helping them do advertising to them. What we quickly realized, everybody's data is shit. Like it's crap. And there's nothing in there. Like a lot of them are not updating data and there's all kinds of, there's the same companies alert seven different ways in CRM, like we all have the same issues. I'm like, okay, that's not gonna work. So we only get the names of the companies from our customers and the type of persona they want to target. Then we use our own intelligence by partnering with Linkedin and D&B and NetProspex and so many different data providers so that we have a clean set off information and then we are proactively targeting them and giving intelligence back to our customers. They're like, whoa, that's great. So I think you're absolutely right. I think we are relying a lot on good data from third party sources because most CRMs and most marketing automations, the data is not clean. Kathleen: Amen to that. It's terrible. It really is. It's my biggest pet peeve is just the garbage that's in these databases. Sangram: Yeah. Kathleen: So interesting. Okay, so it sounds like the key shift there from ABM 1.0 to 2.0 is in 1.0 you're manually creating your target list and in 2.0 you have a system in place that feeds your targets to you that is essentially automated. Is that accurate? Sangram: Exactly. Right, and now you're going back to okay, you want to automated, but now you want to automate it or you want to create this personalized experience, but now you are creating that personalized experience for anyone that is in market that has the right fit as opposed to this arbitrary hundred companies that I have decided because they sound great or my sales team said that this is important. Now I'm actually running my business on the smart content. What Will ABM Look Like In the Future? Kathleen: Well now I'm really curious to hear what your predictions will be for what ABM 3.0 will look like. Cause I have some ideas that I've gotten as I've listened to you talk and I'm curious to know if they're going to be similar to what you come up with. Sangram: I don't know. I just came up with 2.0. I don't know what we get going. Kathleen: I mean the first thing I thought of was if the second step is the system basically feeds you, these are the companies you should go after. In my head, I'm thinking, well the third step is then you have a system, an artificial intelligence system, that just spins up the landing pages. Sangram: Oh yeah. Kathleen: From your relational database. It says, oh they're financial services. Well we have that template. Pop their name in and then it's really truly the robots are doing our jobs for us. Sangram: Oh you, you are spot on when it comes to personalization of this whole experience. I mean right now people are throwing bodies at it. Kathleen: Yeah. Sangram: Hey, you know what? Go create 50 landing pages. We have a customer Snowflake for example. They're running 500 one to one campaigns. 500. They have 15 people now I think six and by end of Q one, so by end of Q one they're supposed to have 15 people with the title of account based marketing. So you can think about how they are because they're like, well, does every one of them have regions and then helping to personalized experiences for it. So we are actually in some ways putting bodies in place because we don't know if there is a way to automate all of this experience because it's so rich and so valuable and so unique in many ways right now. Kathleen: I'm sure we're not far off from it. Sangram: Oh, no. Kathleen: So talk me through the one thing we haven't really touched much upon. We've talked about ABM from the marketer's standpoint. Walk me through at what point in this process in an ideal world, should sales enter into the equation and what does that hand off look like? Are they involved the whole way? The Marketing To Sales Handoff In ABM Sangram: There is no handoff. I think that's where we got it wrong. I feel like some of the blame is on me as well as part of that, that old group of people. I feel like there is no hand off. Sales and marketing hundred percent has to agree on the way this is going to work. Otherwise you can't create a personalized experience. If the sales person's not going to call as soon as the direct mail is hit to the right person, then you know it's not gonna work. If the sales person is not going to follow up when they see an increased activity of the right accounts on your website because you have get rid of all the forms and now you have five kind of right people on their website if they don't do that work that's needed to follow up on, then in the B2B world, it's still not going to work. People are not going to just come and swipe credit cards if you're selling a $100,000 product. So sales are super important. What's bigger difference I think if you want to go the predictions route is I think marketing is going to own the process of figuring out who to go after because they're going to have fit and intent data. So imagine as a marketer and you could say, hey, we want to open an office in, we want to expand our business, great. Based on the information that I have from all of these different technologies that I'm able to cobble up together, I can see that in Boston there is the highest concentration or best fit future customers. There is a lot of intense action going on over there, too. So we should open a sales office in Boston and put two people in there because based on the quota that we are hitting, it makes sense that two sales people. So imagine that a marketer can set up sales quota and not only that, a marketer can figure out the forecasting of which deals are going to close. Because a lot of times the sales would say, oh, I think 30% of them are going to close. And a lot of times, quite honestly they have no clue. Nobody has any clue why somebody went dark or what happened there. Right? But now marketer can say, hey look. And we have seen this happen at Terminus and a lot of customers say, look of these 10 deals that you planned that they're going to close this month, let me tell you, 7 of them have not even spent a minute on our website in the last month and a half. So let's get rid of the bullshit. There are only 3 that we can have a full opportunity to close. Why not just focus on these three? We know there's interest in there. Let's do more campaign. Maybe do a in house dinner over there and try to close the deals with these three because the seven, the chances are they're not going to close this month in the next two days, right? So that level of intelligence in the front portal, from fit and intent and then forecasting, is unique and new and I think the marketer is going to be in the driver's seat. Kathleen: I feel like all the sales people who are listening are going, "No way. Marketing's not going to set my quotas." Sangram: I think they want it. If they are smart to recognize the power in this thing, I think they would want it because they can actually have a higher quota at a much higher velocity and they would actually be doing what they're the best at, which is influencing the deal and closing it. But marketers can now, we are all going to be more of an intelligence provider. Here's the intelligence of who you should go after. Here's the intelligence who can close faster, so maybe focus. We are really helping sales team to do their best and I feel like the future really is going to be where sales fully embraces marketing's role in helping them win more deals. ABM and GDPR Kathleen: Interesting. One thing that came to mind as I was listening to you describe all the disparate sources of data, especially the intent data, the first question that came into my head is how does this all fit within the increasing movement towards giving users more control over their information and privacy and GDPR? Can you talk a little bit about that? Sangram: Yeah, I think it's great because you're no longer emailing people without their permission. And the advertising that you're seeing are proactive advertising and interest that you have already shown interest for, which is why you bought those slippers because you kind of wanted that. Kathleen: They had my number, I'll tell ya. Sangram: They had all information that you have willingly provided to them. So I think as long as it is helpful, I think people are going to be okay with it. I think the reason GDPR is actually good is because people are spamming, right? People send a newsletter which is all about it and people want a newsletter that's all about who is getting the email is coming too. So it's such a different thing. I think all of that is happening because we just don't know who can bite the bullet. We don't know who's going to pay the bill. We don't know who's going to buy the product or service. In this model, because you're focused on a few that actually matter, that's why you heard me never say or use the word "prospect" in the process. You're prospecting is dead because the only prospect that you don't know if they're going to be a customer or not. In this case it's all future customers because you've already done the homework to figure it out if they're best fit and can you serve them or not? Have you served other people like them or not? If it's not best fit, you shouldn't be spending any time with them at all. Who Is Account-Based Marketing Right For? Kathleen: Yeah. So there are a lot of companies that are practicing account based marketing. Tell me a little bit about who this is right for in terms of the type of company, because they're obviously, it does take a certain degree of manpower to build out these assets. There's an investment on the front end especially if they're going to buy a platform like Terminus. Sangram: Yeah, totally. So I think there are two ways of thinking about that, Kathleen. One is the organizational readiness, because no matter how many resources you have, I've seen it fail tremendously in many, many ways. And one of the one was that the organization is not ready to adopt that. So I'll talk about that in a sec. And then the other way is also to figure out like are we selling and do we know who we're selling to and as the audience really open to it? So I'll get into that as well. So organizational readiness, meaning if you have a sales driven quota or marketing, sales driven culture or marketing driven culture, then this is not going to work because it has to have a "one team" kind of mindset. This will only work when organizations fully understand the importance of doing it. And believe it or not, it starts with the CEO, not CMO or CSL. It actually starts with the CEO because it's a business transformation that we're talking about. We're talking about clarity around having aware of what your total addressable market is. I'm sure if you ask your audience right now, I would guarantee, majority of them will not know what their total addressable market looks like. How many exact number of customers they can potentially sell to this year. That was like, these questions are not something marketers jump into. Typically they are like siloed in the sales world or maybe. Like everybody, the CEO to the board, to the CFO to the CMR, everybody has to agree on the total addressable market and that's organization readiness. So if you don't have that kind of stuff, I think it's going to fail and I've seen it fail. It might succeed. but I've seen in fail more than not. And the other part is around the idea that are you selling like let's say you're selling $50,000 product which has an annual subscription which you can upserve in the next couple of months or a couple of years to $100,000 or $150,000, ABM is perfect for you. That makes perfect sense. But if you're selling for like 10 bucks, Dropbox kind of subscription fee kind of stuff, unless it has a tremendous potential then it won't make sense for you to do it because the cost of acquisition will go off the roof. So this is really for accounts that that do matter and have a higher revenues. Mid market, if you're selling to mid market and enterprises, even if you're a small shop, so this is, I want to really clarify, I've seen companies that are really small, like 10 people shop be wildly successful because they sell $100,000 $200,000 worth of services or product. And I've seen companies that are big companies, even public companies that are selling to SMB, they are not successful at all because if your target audience is smaller and it just won't work, you'll have to scale so much. What Kinds of Results Can You Expect With ABM? Kathleen: Right. And what about results? Like do you have some examples of what companies have seen as a result of doing these types of campaigns? Sangram: Well, I mean, some of it, what we talked about Masergy where their engagement rate and I think penetration within the right kind of targeted council is up by 250%. They knocked off a sales month from their entire sales process because they were able to do that. To me, that that sounds like millions of dollars. Even beyond that, 85% of their revenue came from one product and they have three more products to sell. So they have to figure out a way to upsell the other two products and they just were trying to create awareness. So now you're going apply ABM to customer marketing. So you already know the customers that have this one product, let's say cloud computing. You say, okay, now I want to run the same ad to other business units or other personas in that company making your customer like somebody in their company look like hero and show how you're helping that business owner. So if you're selling to GE and you have one business unit and you want to sell it or the business unit, it's awesome. Like that's a hundred percent ABM. So what they found out that they are creating more sticker products line and business line for them, but most importantly, and this was this was the best, that they found that their NPS score, which is the net promoter score for the customers who bought more than two products after they launched the ABM because they knew so much about them already as the best fit, went up from 70% to 90%. So think about that for a second. You're not only serving your customers and upselling your own process services, because you're serving the right people and because your focus again is on the right people, you're able to serve them, you really are able to solve their problems so you're not trying to close more deals, you're trying to close the right deals. So they're going to be more delighted than ever before because they're not going after everybody. Kathleen: That is really interesting. I have never actually heard anybody talk about using ABM for upsells and cross sells. Sangram: Actually that is the best use case than demand generation. I think because we're in marketing, we think we need more acquisition. It's actually parsed into three - acquisition, pipeline velocity and customer marketing. If you were to start ABM, if you have never jumped into ABM at all, I would say jumping into pipeline velocity or customer marketing first. Pipeline velocity, which means if there is a deal in play and you know when it's going to close, let's say 30 days or 60 days, perfect. Your sales is going to be cooperative, the finance team is going to be looking at those deal, your CFO, CRO, everybody's in it. So if you can show movement there, you get by in there, so that's the best place to start 100% because that's where you're going to see you already have a good customer, why not get more of the from the good customer? But pipeline velocity, Kathleen I think is a very understated area of focus and if you're piloting with the top accounts, it's not actually acquisition, that's the last place you want to go because you have no idea when they're going to be ready to truly buy. Pipeline velocity, customer marketing, I think that's where gold is. Kathleen: Yeah, the customer marketing stuff is so interesting to me, because we always even, I mean we're not a huge, huge company. We're probably 65 people. But we always have this challenge as an agency when we offer a new service for the first time of how do we, you know, yes, can we send an email to every client we have? Absolutely. But what's an effective way to keep reminding them that we do this now? Like for example, in the last year we added a full fledged video production and training department and some of our clients are really aware of it and others aren't. And it's just interesting to think about even just running an ad to clients saying, "did you know we do this" and directing them back to a landing page for customers only. Lots of ideas spinning now. Sangram: I think that's beauty. ABM is not a tactic. It's a strategy. It's not a tool. If somebody says that, "Hey, we use Terminus and we're doing ABM" I would say you're not, because we're not doing direct mail, we are not doing call cadences. We are not doing a lot of the other things, the landing pages. So that's not it. We're not ABM. We play a wider role in helping you enable an ABM program, but ABM is a strategy that you and your organization need to really care about and focus in the area of that you need the most help. And your use case of saying just, I mean that's the cheapest, the amount of, if you were looking at a dollar return, that's the best place to kind of put in. But we end up putting more money in acquisition than actually getting more from our own existing customers. Kathleen: Absolutely. And if you have a tiny targeted audience, it's worth spending more per click or whatever the metric is because they're warm, so interesting. So you mentioned a couple of companies. Was it Masergy? I want to make sure that everyone knows how that's spelled so they can see it. Sangram: Yeah. Masergy and Snowflake is another company. Phenomic is another company. We actually do something called internally called customer in the office. So every month we try to bring in a customer and have them share with you. That's why these stores are so fresh for me because every month I'm hearing from them literally how it's transforming their team, their sales and marketing relationship and their organization. Kathleen: I love that customer in the office thing, that's great. Keeps me really close to not only the successes but some of the challenges people are facing. So definitely if you're listening go check out those companies to see some examples. It might not be obvious on their site, I'm guessing, because a lot of this is sort of happening behind the scenes under the curtain specifically directed towards their target customers. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Changing gears for a minute, I have a couple of questions that I always ask everyone who comes on this podcast. Curious to get your take on this. The first one is company or individual? Who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Sangram: Well, I mean the company probably comes to mind is Drift. I'm sure others have mentioned that as drip, like what David Cancel and David Gerhardt are doing. I feel like they're building a great category and it reminds us a lot of what we have done in the past, but I feel like they're doing it better then what we have done to be very honest. So it really, really feels good to see what they're doing. Kathleen: Yeah, their names definitely come up a lot. And I did get to interview Dave Gerhardt. I was like, "I keep hearing your name, you have to come on the show." Sangram: He's great and the team is awesome over there. Kathleen: Second question, with the world of digital marketing changing so quickly, we kinda touched on this earlier with ABM even changing so quickly, how do you personally stay up to date and on top of all these new technological advancements and trends in marketing? Sangram: I mean, just like you, I feel like I have, I think the podcast is a great way to learn. So I listen a lot of podcasts. I listen to Inbound. I listen to Donald Miller's podcast. And I almost sometimes go back to we need older books but instead of newer ones, because I think what hasn't changed is that we are all humans, thankfully, and what hasn't changed is the emotions and the feeling. And I feel like the more I go back to that, the better it gets. So like podcasts is like the radio. It's back to radio. You're recording this thing and it's going to go live. That is crazy that it is the new thing right now. So I feel like podcasting is like the new white paper of the world. Videos are like the new blogs of the way. In many ways you're just going back to some of the older ways of communicating just one to one in a very authentic way. So wherever that authenticity line goes, I try to follow that. Kathleen: Right. And thank you for mentioning the specific podcasts that you like cause I'm always on the hunt for new ones. Sangram: Yeah. Connect With Sangram Kathleen: So I'll definitely check those out. Well, if somebody has a question, wants to learn more about Terminus, or has a question about ABM, generally, what's the best way for them to find you online? Sangram: Well, so I post on a very regular basis on Linkedin, so just find me, Sangram Vajre on Linkedin. Terminus is terminus.com. You sort of join the community, #FlipMyFunnel. Kathleen: Great. And I'll post the links to all of those things in the show notes. If you're listening and you found value here, you know what to do, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice. And if you know somebody who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at workmommywork because I would love to interview them. Thank you, Sangram. It was great talking to you. Sangram: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Bryan Wade, CEO of Sigstr (sigstr.com), provides an overview of email marketing and outreach, and how his company is helping businesses maximize their marketing efforts and bring in new accounts. For over a decade email has been Wade's sandbox; he has a wealth of experience in the areas of email marketing, sales, and new business development. Wade was highly involved in the expansion and success of ExactTarget, the email marketing behemoth that was eventually acquired by Salesforce. At Salesforce, Wade served as the chief product officer of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Now, as the CEO of Sigstr, the Indianapolis-based email signature marketing platform, Wade seeks to continue his work in helping businesses and corporations get their message and vision out to their customer base, to expand into new markets, and never miss a single opportunity to market successfully. Sigstr's mission is to convert every employee email into a successful marketing campaign. And with Sigstr's dynamically targeted CTA banners, businesses can highlight their important events, promote their content, and align their brand with targeted audiences that get results. Sigstr's platform offers many options for businesses and companies seeking to expand their marketing outreach, penetrate new markets, grow their operations, and connect with value customers. For account-based marketing, Sigstr provides a home to view target accounts and get a better grasp of how your efforts are impacting account penetration and development. Sigstr allows users to create targeted promotions to drive accounts and guide them.  For event marketing, Sigstr will ensure that you are always targeting the right audience for a particular event or gathering that is on your upcoming calendar. Sigstr will help you track attendees and make sure that your exclusive VIP list is on your preferred guest list. And for sales and content marketers, the Sigstr platform assists with sharing your premium marketing content through employee email signatures, achieving greater visibility with your highest regarded accounts, and tapping into new networks. As the most valued relationships exist right in employees' inboxes, Wade explains how the Sigstr platform can ramp up your marketing efforts with powerful products such as Sigstr Pulse and Sigstr Campaigns.  Wade discusses the nuts and bolts of how their system works, from the initial gathering of data, which includes names, titles, phone numbers, etc., to the marketing aspect, where specific dynamic banners are created that sit below the signature to garner attention and generate responses. He breaks down the particulars of what their dynamic banners address, from call-to-actions such as invitations to events and webinars for new prospects on your email list to new product launch information, etc. for customers. Wade describes how Sigstr's platform is customizable and is processed centrally by Sigstr, allowing marketers to simply connect, while Sigstr does the work to update, change, or inject new information into outgoing emails.  Wade outlines some of the exciting features Sigstr's platform can implement such as the use of animated gifs and click-through analytics. Through extensive research, Wade's team at Sigstr has sorted through massive amounts of useful data and testing to zero in on the most successful methods email marketers can implement, and incorporated it all into the Sigstr platform. One of their findings was that human faces or call-to-actions within the email received higher click responses than any other data or imagery. And as Sigstr is customizable and expandable, Wade states that their clients are able to run dozens of different campaigns concurrently, to put their metadata to work, and thus maximize outreach. 

Luke Ball is a product leader at Salesforce. After studying computer science in school, Luke started his career in front-end coding and UX. He’s worked as a consultant, an independent contractor, employee #1 at a startup, and, for the last eight years, as a product and UX manager at Salesforce. At Salesforce, he was on … Continue reading #010 – Reimagining Your Product with Luke Ball The post #010 – Reimagining Your Product with Luke Ball appeared first on Ardent Development Podcast.

"Everyone knows at Ford that quality is job one. At Salesforce, equality is job one" - Marc Benioff In this special episode, we discuss perspectives on diversity and inclusion, and what that means in the tech landscape and the Salesforce bubble. Links & Endorsements Tech Inclusion: https://blog.techinclusion.co/yelps-rachel-williams-why-diversity-doesn-t-matter-without-inclusion-a3560c4b3b07 Diversity at Pintrest: https://hbr.org/2017/07/what-we-learned-from-improving-diversity-rates-at-pinterest Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls (Kickstarter): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/timbuktu/kickstarter-gold-good-night-stories-for-rebel-girl Hidden Figures: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4846340/ Managing Bias @ Facebook: https://managingbias.fb.com/

Heike Young, Content Innovation Lead at Salesforce, joins the show this week to talk about podcasting. She shares some great insights she has learned with the launch and maturity of the podcast she co-hosts for one of the largest software companies in the world. Heike started her career in the publishing business working with the For Dummies books. Later she joined an agency and started to build momentum in the content marketing space. Moving from the agency, she started working for ExactTarget on the content marketing team which later became a part of Salesforce during an acquisition. At Salesforce, she has one of the most amazing roles I have heard of, and more marketing teams should consider it. Her role is to try new things and help lead the charge into new forms of media for their content marketing efforts. Podcasting is one of those media types she has invested heavily.Throughout the show, we talk about the technology, strategies, content amplifiers, statistics, tools, and formats of podcasting. We had to stop recording, but this show is not over. We can’t wait to have Heike back to continue the conversation.Resources: •Please, Please, For The Love Of God: Do Not Start a Podcast by Ryan Holiday•Edison Research 2016 The Podcast ConsumerName/Title: Heike Young - Content Innovation Lead, SalesforceBio: As content innovation lead at Salesforce, Heike seeks to inspire Salesforce customers with content that helps them do their jobs better. She hosts Salesforce's award-winning podcast, the Marketing Cloudcast, and manages content creation for e-books, blogs, and interactive websites. Heike is a former book editor and social media manager. Her writing and quotes on marketing have been featured in Forbes, VentureBeat, Entrepreneur, and beyond. You can find her speaking about digital marketing at events like Dreamforce and Connections.Full Show URL: https://enterprisemarketer.com/podcasts/enterprise-marketer-podcast/show-05-heike-young/ Additional Links:•Twitter: https://twitter.com/YoungHeike •LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heikeyoung •Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/youngheike/ •Website: http://www.heike-young.com/ •Podcast – The Marketing Cloudcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-marketing-cloudcast/id1034077637 •Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/heike-young-salesforce/marketing-cloudcast

Scott Dorsey is the Managing Partner @ High Alpa, the startup studio that both builds and invests in some of the most exciting SaaS companies today. Prior to HighAlpha, Scott was a successful entrepreneur who co-founded ExactTarget and led the company from start-up to global marketing software leader. ExactTarget went public on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2012 and sold to Salesforce.com in July 2013 for $2.7 billion. At Salesforce, Scott worked directly with Marc Benioff to execute the ExactTarget vision within Salesforce.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Scott made his way into the world of venture from founding ExactTarget? 2.) What was it like to work directly for Marc Benioff? What were the biggest learnings and takeaways? What were the biggest challenges? 3.) With a startup studio producing companies and a fund investing in them, how does Scott avoid the negative signalling that is inherent within these 2 structures? 4.) Having seen so many successful SaaS startups, what does product market fit look like to Scott? From the studio, what are the biggest challenges his startups face in hitting product market fit? 5.) What are the fundamentals that all startups should focus on in the quest for product market fit? What are the challenges? How should this be measured? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Scott’s Fave Blog: SaaStr Scott’s Fave Book: Good To Great by Jim Collins As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Scott on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver – whether it's time for you to buy a new car or not. RearVision is our first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl RearVision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10minutes to install and is completely wireless because it's solar powered. Since RearVision is software based, we're able to push updates and new features over the Pearl App in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone. Pearl RearVision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes. Pearl RearVision is $499.99 and available at PearlAuto.com. It's also available on Amazon and through Crutchfield. Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device.When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at xero.com/20vc

Kyle Lui is Principal at DCM Ventures where he helps entrepreneurs scale their companies and advise on product development across IOT, consumer internet and mobile and enterperise Saas. Prior to DCM, Kyle was Co-Founder at ChoicePass, a enterprise perks and rewards Saas company backed by prominent angel investors, later acquired by Salesforce.com and Rypple. At Salesforce, Kyle served as Director of Product Management on the founding product team for Work.com, growing the business to over 1,000 enterprise customers. Items mentioned in this episode: Learn Python the Hard Way AnyPerk Eaze In this episode you will learn: How Kyle made the leap from Startup Founder to Venture Capitalist? How did Kyle learn to code? How did Kyle feel on selling ChoicePass to Salesforce? What was it like working in such a large company, such as Salesforce? How did your role change when Salesforce was acquired? What was the most difficult element faced by Kyle in his time at ChoicePass? Where does Kyle see the future of incentivising employees and how important is this aspect of corporate life? When investing in a company what aspects really attract you to a deal and what can be a real red flag? Are University and College degrees necessary for you to invest in a founder? Is Kyle concerned that a potential increase in regulation could damage his investment in Eaze, medical marijuana delivery startup? We conclude today's show with a quick fire round where we hear Kyle's thoughts on what Kyle would do if all he had was a laptop and $100, what advice Kyle would give to entrepreneurs starting a company? For all the resources and items mentioned in todays show, head on over to www.thetwentyminutevc.com If there are any VCs you would like us to interview, send an email to harry@thetwentyminutevc.com and we will arrange it!

Fyllo with Chief Commercial officer Jeff Ragovin, today on Grassroots Marketing only on Cannabis Radio.Tech pioneer and industry veteran, Jeff Ragovin has a proven track record of leading and scaling technology platforms. Co-founder of Buddy Media, Ragovin played a central role in guiding the company from start-up to the largest enterprise social marketing software in the world. Founded in 2007, Buddy Media empowered brands and agencies with a SaaS platform to organize and control their social marketing programs globally. Buddy Media enabled companies to publish content, place and optimize social ads, and measure the effectiveness of social marketing programs. Salesforce acquired Buddy Media in 2012 for $745M, making it one of the largest tech exits in NY history at the time. At Salesforce, Ragovin served as the Chief Strategy Officer. Today, Jeff is the Chief Commercial Officer at Fyllo. Fyllo is leveling the playing field for cannabis companies with the Fyllo Compliance Cloud, a suite of enterprise-grade software and services powered by RegsTechnology, the largest database of cannabis laws and regulations at the federal, state and local level. We deliver advanced data, media, and compliance solutions that are built for the complexities of the cannabis industry today. From local dispensaries to large MSOs and traditional CPG companies, ambitious cannabis brands and industry professionals choose Fyllo as their partner to go bigger and grow faster with trust and confidence in compliance. Jeff is a sought after speaker sharing his experiences and insights at leading industry events worldwide including: SXSW, CES, Digital Hollywood, Internet Week, Social Media Week, Dreamforce, MasterClass Series, Forbes, Startout and many others.