Lukas Lunow: 2024 Marketing Champion on Evolving with Salesforce, Leading a Global Team
Anthony Lamot: Hello, and welcome to Heroes of Marketing Cloud, the show where I interview Marketing Cloud experts. My name is Anthony Lamot, I’m the CEO and co-founder at DESelect, and today I’m talking with Lukas Lunow.
Anthony Lamot: Lukas has had a tremendous career, including being an architect for many years at Salesforce, and for over a year now, he’s been a Senior Engineering Manager at Maersk, a global logistics company, leading a team of engineers and architects. Lukas gives great insights on how to think about architecting, designing, and strategizing your Marketing Cloud and beyond, and he also offers advice, like how a great architect listens. On that note, I hope you have a great listen. Sit back, relax, and enjoy.
Anthony Lamot: Hi, Lukas! Welcome to the show!
Lukas Lunow: Hi, Anthony. Thank you, and thanks for having me.
Anthony Lamot: It’s such a pleasure. We’ve exchanged messages for quite a while online. I’ve been following you for a long time, so it’s super cool to have you here. I’d like to start off with the question: what inspired you to become a leader in this space? I think it will be interesting for people on the call to hear about your career journey and how you found your way into Marketing Cloud.
Lukas Lunow: Yeah, that’s a good question. My adventure with Marketing Cloud actually started more or less exactly 10 years ago. I was working with a media company in Denmark back then, and we had just acquired what was then ExactTarget. I went to Indianapolis for my first Connections conference.
Anthony Lamot: Can you still hear me, Lukas?
Lukas Lunow: Yes.
Anthony Lamot: The last thing I heard was 10 years ago, Indianapolis, your first Connections, and how Journey Builder had just been announced.
Lukas Lunow: Right, 10 years ago I attended my first Connections conference in Indianapolis, the hometown of ExactTarget, now Salesforce Marketing Cloud. That was where Journey Builder was announced, and you’d think Journey Builder has been around forever, but it’s actually relatively new. I still have photos and recordings from back then—it looked nothing like it does today.
After that, I joined a marketing agency and then became a Salesforce partner before joining Salesforce itself, where I stayed for more than six years. I was super happy there, had fantastic customers, and traveled around Europe, inspiring people and building some really nice Marketing Cloud implementations for global customers.
But at some point, you want and need to try something new. I wanted to see how successful I could become building my own organization and inspiring my own employees. So with all the knowledge and experience I gained, I wanted to pass it on to those around me and watch them grow.
I joined Maersk over a year ago, where I’m responsible for a team of engineers and architects working on not only Marketing Cloud, but also cross-cloud projects across multiple Salesforce clouds, always in the context of marketing—like lead nurturing, lead acquisition, and digital journeys for new and existing customers. It’s a huge, global impact at a multi-billion dollar international logistics company, so it’s been super exciting.
Anthony Lamot: That sounds awesome! I think the only thing that hasn’t changed over the years is the ExactTarget URL, which is still in use, hilariously. I’m sure our audience would love to see some of those older Journey Builder photos, I know I would!
Lukas Lunow: Yeah, I can find them and share them with you. I also found a reference to the recording of the Journey Builder keynote from back then—super nostalgic and fun to watch. It’s still online on Marketing Cloud’s YouTube channel.
Anthony Lamot: That would be great! So, you’ve had a fascinating career. What was the transition like moving to Maersk and leading a global team?
Lukas Lunow: It was, and still is, challenging. When you’re a consultant, you come in with specific tasks, and most decisions are already made. But being part of an organization means ongoing efforts—not just building what’s planned, but contributing to planning: what do we build next year? What resources do we need? Do we build in-house or buy from a vendor?
A lot more time is spent on discussions and meetings. As a consultant, your hours are valuable, focused on delivering immediate results. But now, it’s more about long-term value rather than just building something here and now.
Anthony Lamot: I hear a lot about alignment and long-term value—this resonates with me as I’m building an organization, too, though in a different context. Thanks for sharing that. If I can go on a small tangent, you mentioned in passing the build vs. buy decision. How do you approach that?
Lukas Lunow: It really depends on the complexity of the solution. For a simple integration, like connecting Facebook lead forms to Marketing Cloud, you might choose to use something like Zapier—straightforward, quick, and effective.
But for more complex projects, like building a Customer Data Platform (CDP), things get trickier. Let’s say we commit 20 engineers to building a CDP. After six months, when it’s done, Salesforce might have already released new features or capabilities in Data Cloud, leaving you behind.
It’s about weighing whether the effort to build in-house will keep pace with advancements in the market. Sometimes, it’s just more strategic to buy a solution that evolves rapidly.
Lukas Lunow: You only committed to have these 20 people working for half a year on this project. But then your target is actually moved further away from you. Do you continue allocating them? Do you actually want to put many more engineers on this task? That’s, I think, the really important consideration, and not so much can you build it, but can you build and keep on improving that? You have various data sources—Facebook can change their API, you can have another application changing their API—you always need to adapt to ongoing changes and fix stuff.
So what do you prefer? Do you prefer to have a company like Salesforce, Microsoft, whoever provide something for you as software as a service? You don’t need to worry about your roadmap; it’s being taken care of for you. You don’t need to care about maintenance; it is taken care of for you, and you only need to focus on driving value out of this, right?
Anthony Lamot: Makes all sense to me. I’ve seen customers do both—buy or build. Now, sometimes I do think there’s sense in building when it’s super industry-specific or super customer-specific, and the vendor will never give in to such customization because they have to serve a large base, right? That’s, you know, for a vendor like us, too—we need to take into account what all our customers want. We can’t just cater to one single customer. But having said that, the mistake that you point out that customers make or teams that want to build their own stuff make is that they sometimes don’t factor in not just the maintenance and hosting, which is also a real thing, but the ongoing support, the ongoing development. Because the reality is that probably a ton of your stuff is gonna come up afterwards. I know it was in my own CRM, too. We implemented that, but then tons of little small requests and changes do occur over time. You need that support foreseeably.
Anthony Lamot: Lukas, you’ve just been named Salesforce Marketing Champion, so hey, welcome to the club.
Lukas Lunow: Thank you.
Anthony Lamot: But you’re also a Salesforce Forum Ambassador, and so that’s something that I’m actually not even familiar with myself. So I think it will be really interesting for our audience if you could just briefly highlight the difference between these two denominations?
Lukas Lunow: Salesforce Marketing Champion is a title given to people who are passionate about their technology and are eager to share knowledge with the rest of the world by contributing with their own blogs, being Trailblazer community group leaders, or similar around Marketing Cloud, whereas Trailblazer Forum Ambassador is more about people who are active in the Trailblazer community online.
I started off by posting answers on Salesforce Stack Exchange, but the number of questions has been declining over the years, and now I mostly contribute to the Trailblazer community groups on Marketing Cloud. Forum Ambassadors have that extra privilege—they can delete questions, they have some authority on the forums, and they can be the extended law enforcement of Salesforce beyond their own staff, who is also, of course, monitoring these forums. My main agenda, or one of my key agendas, is to improve the quality of the questions being posted. We often really need a lot of context when people ask about specific problems. Sometimes it’s just a single sentence. I expect people to do some research before they post something—I don’t want people to basically post, “Hey, do this for me.”
The other item on my agenda for being the Forum Ambassador is—and I know I’m fighting a losing battle—but it is to fight answers that are clearly generated with LLMs, like generative AI or chatbots. I see a lot of examples where people just take the question, paste it into a prompt on ChatGPT, and then paste the response into the community groups. And it’s often really, really rubbish—it doesn’t address the actual point of the question, and it’s often misleading. We’ve all heard about AI hallucinations, where it suggests you use script functions that don’t even exist. It’s a bit funny, but also super annoying, because if you’re new to Marketing Cloud or don’t have experience in AMPScript, you might take it for granted that this is an accurate answer. It looks legitimate, so you might struggle for some time to make it work, when in fact, it will never work.
Anthony Lamot: That’s so interesting that you’re fighting against that. So for people browsing such forums, what will be a telltale sign, you think, that the answer is Gen AI-generated?
Lukas Lunow: I think the main giveaway is that the AI-generated responses often have a lot of specific formatting—bullet points, bold words at the beginning of an item list. You can read it, and it’s kind of addressing the question, but it never questions the question itself. It never says, “Are you sure this is the right thing to do? Have you considered this versus that?” It just says, “In order to solve this specific problem, these are the steps you can follow,” and then lists steps below. It often finishes with something like, “Should this not be effective, you can always reach out to your Salesforce account executive or support to get more guidance.” It’s always the same formula. When you start reading through the content, you can start seeing that the answers are quite poor.
Anthony Lamot: So Lukas, aside from being the guardian of the Trailblazer community against Gen AI-generated answers, you’re also very vocal on LinkedIn. One of the things that I noticed you’ve talked about a few times is that companies will often rush into Marketing Cloud implementations without strategy and preparation. Especially for someone with your role, you probably have a few interesting insights you can share on how you think about strategic planning. Maybe you even have an example?
Lukas Lunow: Yes. Sometimes I see that Marketing Cloud is being oversold by Salesforce. People suffer from the Dreamforce effect—they’ve seen a lot of fantastic use cases by Coca-Cola, by Heathrow Airport, or whoever, and they think, “Wow, if we can just get our hands on Marketing Cloud, it will solve everything for us.”
There are two things that go wrong—well, many things can go wrong—but two main issues are: people might be using another tool today, for instance, Adobe Campaign or Eloqua, and what they do is they just do a lift and shift. They take the data they put into Eloqua today and use the same integrations to put it into Marketing Cloud. They copy the same types of journeys, the same types of emails, and paste them into Marketing Cloud. Often, the problem is a combination of the platform and the entire system landscape. They might not have a specific system of record for customer identity, they might not have uniqueness in their leads and contacts, so you can have five leads with the same email address because they’re not being deduplicated when people submit a form on the website. If you just do a lift and shift, the issues will prevail. Even with Marketing Cloud, you’ll keep struggling with the same challenges.
It’s really important to team up with an experienced architect who not only knows Marketing Cloud but also understands enterprise landscapes, and address the entire system landscape before even considering replacing your marketing automation platform.
Lukas Lunow: Yeah, I think logistics. And this came as a surprise to me when I joined this case—how complex logistics products are. It’s not just about shipping a container from Singapore to Rotterdam, or from Los Angeles to Vancouver. It’s about capacity planning. If you’re not in need of a shipment to be at a specific port at a specific time, you can buy an option that says, “Well, we might or might not load you on this ship.” If others are willing to pay more, they’ll go first; you’ll go on the next one.
You can buy a lot of value-added services. Right now, we’re focusing on providing a complete solution in logistics. It’s not only about sailing from Port A to Port B with your container—we can also pick it up from your warehouse and deliver it when it arrives at the port of destination. It’s super complex, with many factors to consider. There are different types of customers—huge ones shipping tons of cargo weekly from Asia to Europe or North America, with big contracts. And then there are smaller customers, like expats needing a container for furniture or a bicycle.
We try to cater to everyone. Imagine the complexity of digital marketing: you need to explain all the options and the complexity of our products to advanced customers, while also making it easy for someone just shipping a container once every five years. The whole customer journey is a challenge, especially with big accounts, where the consideration phase might take six months and involve many different roles—from C-level executives to logistics managers.
It’s crucial to understand who to involve at each stage of the decision process and what messaging to send them. C-level executives don’t care about tracking and tracing; they care about price and reliability. Operations teams, however, may need integrations with our systems. The vast attributes of our offerings are demanded by different people at different stages, which makes the journey and content design challenging. But it also gives us value from first-party data, allowing us to intelligently drive these dialogues over months of lead nurturing.
Anthony Lamot: Super interesting. There’s actually a parallel with my business. A significant portion of our revenue comes from enterprise customers—companies with over 10,000 employees—and the sales cycles can be six months or longer, especially in complex industries like financial services. One challenge is the handover to sales, where marketing takes a backseat and focuses more on sales enablement. I’m curious about how you see that handover between marketing and sales, and how marketing continues beyond that point.
Lukas Lunow: Yeah, it’s a complex transition. Looking back to my consultancy days, I’ve always seen big companies struggle with aligning sales and marketing. I might become unpopular with salespeople, but I’ve noticed that marketing tends to better understand how sales works, more so than the reverse. Sales often sees marketing as the team that handles banners at trade shows or old-school branding campaigns on television or YouTube.
The key is aligned KPIs between sales and marketing. It doesn’t help if marketing is tasked with delivering 100 marketing-qualified leads per week, but sales doesn’t pick them up promptly. These leads won’t stay hot forever. Sales needs KPIs that measure how quickly they act on leads, ensuring consistency throughout the funnel to drive conversions efficiently. If marketing and sales have separate KPIs without overlap, you’re not setting up for success.
Anthony Lamot: That makes a lot of sense. Having done both marketing and sales—initially while bootstrapping our company—I can say sales is an underestimated craft. But marketing is complex. It’s the most data-driven function in our company, and everyone has an opinion about it, whether it’s the color or shape of a logo, making people think it’s easy, but it really isn’t.
Speaking of your role, Lukas, how do you see it evolving in the next few years with all the technological advancements? You have so much experience—how do you think Martech and your role will change in the near future?
Lukas Lunow: Yeah.
Lukas Lunow: You know, I think I for sure need to become… You know, I see myself as Mr. ExactTarget, you know. I know all the dirty tricks I can do on Marketing Cloud.
Lukas Lunow: But it is a technology. It’s a platform that is not native to Salesforce. It’s been acquired back then, and it’s been developed. It’s quite well integrated with the other clouds.
Lukas Lunow: But it’s really clear to see, especially after this year’s Dreamforce, that the future is revolving around Data Cloud. The future is revolving around Salesforce’s own technologies and technology stacks—Data Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and so on.
Lukas Lunow: I’ve seen this for well over a year now, that this is a transition I need to embrace. I love ExactTarget. I don’t want it to go away, but I also see myself that if I just stick to being fluent in ExactTarget and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, I will not be that relevant in maybe only 2 to 3 years from now.
Lukas Lunow: So, I’m really digging into all the other technologies, trying to understand Einstein, trying to stay on top of my certifications beyond what’s only relevant for Marketing Cloud. Because something like Integration Architect, which is a Salesforce core certification, talking about Bulk API, Apex callouts, and so on—well, suddenly, it might not just be a Sales or Service certification. It might also be relevant for marketing.
Lukas Lunow: So, I don’t want to be in a situation where I tell myself, “If I had only started studying with a broader perspective a year or two ago, I wouldn’t be in this dead-end street.”
Lukas Lunow: So, I really embrace ExactTarget and Marketing Cloud, but I also acknowledge that I probably will stick to the Salesforce ecosystem. I have too many connections. I have too much history there, so I don’t want to flush it out and suddenly become Adobe or Oracle or whoever. But I know I need to adapt to how the development is going now.
Anthony Lamot: Makes sense to me. I think the good news is that, especially from our Marketing Cloud engagement—so, ExactTarget—my forecast is we still have many years to come. Because it’s so much more deeply woven and so much more complex than anything else. For Pardot, these days called Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (mouthful), that will happen much, much faster. I think we’re actually already seeing that.
Anthony Lamot: And I’m sure even for Marketing Cloud Engagement, there will be some new features that become available on core. But I think we have a little bit more bandwidth. That said, us two are working very closely with Salesforce for our product lines’ segments—not so much because that’s a challenge very specific to ExactTarget and SQL—but Engage as a send frequency solution relevant for any marketing automation platform.
Anthony Lamot: So, I find it actually very exciting to see this development. I’ve seen demos. I’ve seen early access demos of features from Marketing Cloud on Data Cloud or Marketing Cloud on core—depends on who you talk with, you hear a different phrase—but in any case, the new Marketing Cloud products that are on core, I think are cool. It’s just very sharp. Some of the other layouts are a little bit dated. And, you know, there’s strong competition from HubSpot, and they’re very sharp and developing very fast. So, I think it’s a really good development for Salesforce to do this.
Anthony Lamot: But Lukas, I feel we could geek out about this probably for many hours, but we do need to round up this call soon. I just wanted to see if you have any advice for people just starting their career, or maybe for those who want to go more on the path of an architect. What would be some of your words of wisdom for them?
Lukas Lunow: Yeah. I think a good architect listens more than speaks. This is what I’m seeing both in the community and with people I meet. Going back to the Trailblazer community, I see a lot of questions where answers are just, “Oh, you need to do this and this.” But listen: what is it that this person is asking? How can I do this? But is that what you want to do? What do you want to achieve? Because achieving something might come through a different path than what you initially thought you wanted to do.
Lukas Lunow: So again, understanding the underlying problem, understanding the actual ambition, and not just solving a task—that’s really important. And also, you need to be a hybrid person.
Lukas Lunow: Good marketing architects (and I’m not saying Marketing Cloud architects but marketing architects) are unfortunately a very rare breed. You need to understand both marketing processes—why is it important what the email says, that we are relevant, that we have dynamic content that can adapt to what you’ve been browsing on the website—but also be able to speak with the tech people. What do you expect in your REST API call? Or how does this XML file look? It’s really a challenging span of competencies you need to possess.
Lukas Lunow: And I’m not saying that you should start reading up on everything at once. But if you are looking for a North Star vision, you should be capable of equally speaking with the CMO and the CIO, and actually be able to translate what each of them is saying so the other one can understand.
Anthony Lamot: I think that’s fantastic advice. Architect with the end goal in mind.
Anthony Lamot: Lukas, thank you so much for your time today, and thank you for coming on the show.
Lukas Lunow: Thank you, Anthony. Have a wonderful day.
Anthony Lamot: You too. Bye.
