Digital innovation and Salesforce’s roadmap, with Eric Stahl

Anthony: Hi, Eric, welcome to the series.

Eric: Good morning, thanks for having me.

Anthony: We are very happy to have you, thank you for making time. So I’m sure that many of our viewers have actually already seen your posts on LinkedIn cause you tend to share a lot of interesting Marketing Cloud content, but just to be sure could you please give us a quick intro to our viewers?

Eric: Sure, so I’m Eric Staahl. I run digital here at Salesforce. I’ve been here for almost thirteen years, which is kind of incredible to see Salesforce grow from just a few thousand people to the company it is today. I’ve had a lot of different roles. I started off at a relational database software company. I worked in it at a middleware software company and I came to Salesforce in 2008. I worked on our platform, I’ve worked on our Marketing Cloud, our Commerce Cloud, our Community Cloud, I helped with Mulesoft for a while getting them on board, and when they joined the company I was over in London for a couple of years running our EMEA product marketing team. So I’ve had a lot of different roles and for the last year or a little more than a year. I have been rethinking our old digital strategy and rethinking the platform and the Org, kind of how we operate. How that’s all going to manifest in a completely different and really exciting new digital experience.

Anthony: I’d love to dig deeper there, but it was one thing that you mentioned which was you know, Salesforce wasn’t a company it is today when you joined 13 years ago. What was that excited you back then to join them?

Eric: It’s a great question because it was very specific I remember. So I worked in an on-premise Enterprise software back in the late 90s the mid-to-late 90s. So you would get a server and you’d have an operating system and you would load up all these you know the whole stack on your local on-premise hardware and back then I was working for Informix Software, which is a database like Oracle or Semantics. And the big players in tech were like SON and HP and Pyramid in SGI like these big hardware players that were the center of the universe and yeah there were software companies like Oracle, but you know, you don’t hear about them these days. So I worked for on-premise software vendors and middleware come to call BAE Systems, you might have heard of Tuxedo or Wet Logic and you know, Java and j2ee came along and I just saw the cost and the complexity of buying, installing, and configuring a whole software stock and then all of your custom code on top of that and just what a complete Dark Art, it was to get all that working properly, you know, very few people are very few companies could do that right? Maybe big Banks or you know, big government institutions. But like this is not that long ago this was the late 90s. And coming into the early 2000s Salesforce came along and they were like don’t worry about any of that stuff. We will host the CRM around at the time. It was just Salesforce automation, don’t worry we’ll host it for you, you just log in and don’t worry about the back and it was like ‘wow, that’s a totally different approach’ and you know for big Enterprise applications that were a novel concept back then and Marc Benioff said why can’t enterprise software be like Amazon.com where you just go to Amazon and you just buy stuff and you know, like why can’t Enterprise be that easy and I was like, ‘oh my gosh’. Enterprise software is a nightmare to manage and run and configure and do what you wanted to do. That is a really big idea. And so I looked at a keynote Marc Benioff was doing about the platform and how you could not only use the Salesforce applications, but you could build custom applications on top of the Salesforce platform. Not only could you do that, but you could also do it with clicks not code. Just kind of point-click-create a custom object, move some things around on the UI, and boom a non-developer could create an application and deploy it and a hundred thousand people could use it the next day and I was like, oh my gosh, that is unbelievable.

Anthony: Gamechanger.

Eric: I just remember thinking. That is a big deal and it was before the term cloud computing was popular like it is today. It was before, you know, all those kinds of Workday and all the other applications came along and I was like that’s unbelievable. So I joined the company and I’ve been here ever since.

Anthony: It is interesting that the game-changer that attracts it’s also the philosophy we felt we needed to adopt. So we also developed our own software that plugs into Salesforce obviously, so plug-and-play and drag-and-drop so completely aligned with that. Now a large part of your career has actually centered one way or another around Marketing Cloud. How did that begin specifically?

Eric: So, in my different jobs at Salesforce. I remember I was in London and I came back to the States and I worked on our website back in 2011 and we had a Marketing Cloud at the time but it was just two small acquisitions company that was Radion6 which was a social listening and analytics company called BuddyMedia.

Anthony: Oh I remember the acquisitions. 

Eric: And they were like, ‘hey, will you work on Marketing Cloud’ that was kind of a new concept at the time, and I was ‘sure’ and I came over. I was like, well, these are two very interesting products. And by the way, we have some amazing leaders at Salesforce to this day who came from these acquisitions. So they’ve had incredible value on this company, but they’re very narrow in terms of the full scope of like Marketing Cloud marketing spans a lot of things. Social media tools and then one day in June of 2013 we announced the acquisition of ExactTarget and ExactTarget was you know, a huge player in email marketing and they also acquired Pardot which was a B2B marketing automation company and at the time it was our largest acquisition ever. It was like…

Anthony: 2.3$ billion.

Eric: Yes, something like that. People were like that is crazy that you guys are spending that much money on this company and, boy, that was really truly one of the most successful acquisitions this company has ever made.

Anthony: double-digit growth since then I think.

Eric: I’m sorry?

Anthony: double-digit growth since then I think.

Eric: Oh yeah, more than, very healthy growth. And it took us a long time, it was a publicly-traded company with thousands of employees and thousands of customers, but you know, it really pushed us in two dimensions. One, it made us a more credible player in marketing because email marketing as we all know it is the workhorse of digital marketing, and ExactTarget was deep very very large complex accounts with very very deep capabilities and scale. And so that was good and then it also pulled Salesforce towards consumer, kind of the consumer universe, in the past our earliest days we did B2B primarily B2B sales automation right sales reps selling to other companies and they needed a place to keep track of their accounts and contacts and leads and opportunities and cases, it’s very B2B. And then ExactTarget, and then some of our subsequent acquisitions like Demandware for Commerce and really pulled us in the direction of consumer marketing and so that has also had a profound impact on the company and the bigger we’ve gotten over the years the more we realized that most companies of size do both B2B and B2C and you need to have all the right tools in the tool chest to be able to engage customers the right way whether it’s you know, an accountant to contact an opportunity or whether it’s you know, what the consumer who needs, you know kind of a transactional email or in the email newsletter. So anyway back to your question, that’s ExactTarget and then we acquired Datorama and Krux and lots of other companies and so I was very close to that for many years, and only in 2019 did I leave the Marketing Cloud to take on the digital team and kind of restart to rethink our own digital stock team methodology and experience.

Anthony: This actually brings me to the next question. I saw that recently you were promoted to VP and GM of digital experience. So congratulations on that first, but could you tell us a bit more about the goals that come with a new title?

Eric: Thank you. I am just a small Cog in a very big machine here at Salesforce and I’m truly humbled to lead this team. We have got an incredible team. We are going to do some incredible things together. We have some big ideas that we’re excited to work on. Couple of things have happened over the last year for one and it kind of leans into this idea of a general manager. For one, I think Salesforce is like a lot of companies. We had marketing. Digital marketing capabilities spread out across many different teams and email teams in one org and analytics team in another org, a social team in a different org a web team development team in a different org like things were just kind of all over the place and I was sure it’s like this in many companies. So one thing we’ve done recently is consolidated not all of that but a lot of that into one organization where I now have the Architects, the Product Managers, and the Developers who are building the platform experience. As well as the production teams that are using the platform and the experience to run the business. Whether it’s the website or e-mail or some other areas and so we consolidated the large parts of the organization to give us a common it’s a V2Mom in Salesforce language, but a common vision and values and methods and you know the budget and all the things that come along with that.

Anthony: Oh, yeah. I’ve read the Trailblazer I’m familiar with the terminology but maybe for the audience, we’ll put the link of the video.

Eric: Great, there’s also a Trail on Trailhead about that. The other thing that we’re doing is that there is a big mantra that we’re going to build our digital experience Like we build our products. Right? Salesforce knows a thing or two about building software, right?

Anthony: Oh I’m sure.

Eric: And so. It was like we had teams building the Sales Cloud, the Service Cloud platform, and Marketing Cloud over here. And then we have teams building our digital experience over here in a very different way. And basically what we’ve concluded is let’s adopt all of the roles, tools and methodology used that we used to build our products to build our digital experience and that’s been a really simple but powerful guiding principle for us in terms of how we are organizing scrum agile teams. It’s an important concept for us in terms of the tools that we usually use an internal tool called Gus for building our products we’re going to use Gus for building our own digital experience and it goes all the way down into a lot of the org, structure, the roles, the role names, role definitions how we manage the roadmap, how we manage sprints, you know, we are fully adopting all of the Salesforce product team methodologies, wherever we can we will make exceptions if we absolutely have to but that Mantra has really helped shift the mindset for how we’re approaching our digital experiences. And by the way, it’s not just marketing experience marketing its marketing, its commerce its support. It’s helping training, it’s how we integrate with Trailhead and it’s how we integrate with the AppExchange. We have a really big vision for how all these things are going to come together in a more integrated and dynamic and personalized way vs. what you see out there today.

Anthony: It’s an interesting way, it’s like a great shift and in an interesting way somehow it reminds me of Toyota where I’ve seen shifts of what used to be silo being grouped into what they call customer experience similarly just like you guys can learn a lot internally from software making they are applying the techniques such as Kaizen and continuous improvement which also influenced Benioff’s thinking.

Eric: Yeah digital is moving to the front especially during Covid. You know, we’re in a time where there’s never been a better time to work on digital because in-person events are not possible in-person meetings are not possible flying around is not possible taking your customers golfing is not possible. The only thing really truly possible in 2020 is what we’re doing right now, which is a virtual experience through this recording but that should extend to all of digital and you know, I’m optimistic that things are going to turn and get better soon, but it’s really made digital the focus and Salesforce, you know is deeply committed to not impose our org chart on our customers which we do in many ways today, but we’re really investing to rethink all of its stack, the data strategy, and the front-end experience in ways that are centered around the customer and not around our org chart.

Anthony: You did touch on Covid-19 how did it actually impact how you personally organize your work?

Eric: Well, welcome to my home office. I live in San Francisco. I used to go to the Salesforce tower downtown every day. So we, like everybody, have been working from home. Salesforce has a very conservative approach to it. I haven’t been to the office since February and I don’t think we’re going to open our offices until the vaccine is very widely distributed and I’m up again hopeful that it will be sooner than later, but we had to rethink a lot of things we’ve gone through a lot of change. One of the interesting things for Salesforce was the recognition very early on that the world has changed and we need to change and I’ll never forget because Marc Benioff is so actively involved in so much of our every aspect of the business, you know, he uses the word relevance and if we’re out talking about our products and we’re not talking about Covid and the shelter in place and quarantine then we’re not relevant. We can’t pretend life is normal, life isn’t normal right now. So we’ve adapted our business in many ways, and we’ve adapted our message in many ways, and you know to be relevant in 2020 you have to be thinking about the impact of Covid, and quarantine some of our industries, the industries that we sell to are impacted. Profoundly in you know, if you’re an airline or you’re a hotel right now, if you’re not really, you know, thinking about a new CRM system, but if you are you know, a government rolling out, you know public service is whether it’s you know, relief or healthcare services or other vaccines we can help them with that and lots of other businesses are investing in digital right now and it does give us an opportunity in certain other areas. So it’s been a big year of change. We have adopted the org we’ve adapted our strategy and so far so good. So we’re looking forward to better days and hopefully, there are not too far out but it’s been impressive to see how Salesforce not only adapted our products but adapted to the company, the company itself to kind of recognize that this is a new reality that is now going to work. You know, we’re probably never going back to the prior world. I just want to give one final example of how well people adapted to working remotely. I think that’s going to have a very profound impact on office space, remote workers, our ability to recruit in places other than San Francisco, and how we’re going to think about, you know, distributed workforce forever, vaccines or not. I think that is going to really stay with us.

Anthony: Oh, I agree. I think some of these changes are going to stay for better or worse. I do think that now many countries are forced to think more digitally. They’re going to rethink the way they engage with their own teams or customers and overall. I hope it’s at least some more efficiency that extends into the future. Are there some tips and tricks of things that you found helpful? Like you mentioned earlier that you can’t take your customers golfing anymore. So are there other alternative ways of engaging with your customer or your own team that you found particularly helpful?

Eric: Oh that’s a tough one. I’ve got people on my team who are constantly going to try to find good ways to re-engage the team, keep them motivated to keep them connected. A person on my team just constantly organizes get-togethers that have nothing to do with work whether it’s cocktail-making or you know pasta-making or she’s been so many I can’t even think of them all but, you know, really trying to keep the team connected. She also does a wonderful job sending out physical, you know packages so that people can feel a connection. We are really gathering as a by policy now and so I think anything we can do we’re also working very hard to set expectations that we need to take care of ourselves. And we need to take care of our families as our number one priority and that should always be the case, but it’s never been more important during Covid. I tell my team all the time we’re working very hard but Covid is impacting us each differently. I don’t have kids, I don’t have sick parents, I’ve got a lot of flexibility in my life right now. I work with people who have very small children crawling all over them during meetings. I have co-workers with very sick parents who they’re trying to take care of whether it’s Covid or something else. The job one is in wellness and us being mindful of each other. And you know, I always tell people don’t wait for me or someone else to look out for your wellness. You have to set your own boundaries of what you are capable of doing during this very difficult time, especially for people with children who are homeschooling etcetera. Set your own boundaries and we will flex in and out around that and if you can help someone else who’s in a more difficult situation, that’s great, too. But I think you know if we can’t maintain wellness and by wellness, I mean mental health and kind of physical health. I personally prioritize exercise very very highly. I have it on my calendar. I’ll do it and you know if Stephanie our CMO or Marc Benioff wants something I’ll cancel my workout but it kind of has to come from that altitude for me to forego what I consider to be a personal priority. Not just physically but helps me psychologically get through such a crazy time.

Anthony: And if you stay well, you’ll perform well anyway.

Eric: Yeah, absolutely.

Anthony: And for those of you who aren’t in California we’ve had Covid, we’ve had crazy politics, we’ve had fires in California that were just darkening the sky with smoke and ash everywhere, and then we all have our own personal things going on. So, you know, it was, it was a challenging year and people need to be well above all else and we as the company need to make sure that that is the priority beyond that we can work out kind of what work we prioritize what we can get done what we can’t get done but that’s been another really key theme on 2020.

Anthony: I think it’s a great message, Eric. I’d like to switch back now for a moment to discuss the software itself throughout your career. You’ve been involved in different sales products. As you already mentioned. I was kind of wondering if there was something that sets Marketing Cloud apart for you.

Eric: So I was new, so Marketing Cloud. First of all is a broad umbrella of products including the DMP and Datorama, and lots of things. So that’s the first thing, I think you know, Marketing Cloud is not a specific thing. It’s a broad portfolio of products. Are you asking kind of the email of Marketing Cloud or are you asking about the whole portfolio?

Anthony: Well I find your answer in itself interesting because I think most customers think Marketing Cloud, they are thinking about Email Studio whereas of course there’s Datorama, of course, there’s a social studio that is connected to it, but we can focus on Email Studio here. 

Eric: Okay. Email Studio is part of Marketing Cloud and by far the biggest part of Marketing Cloud is really laying down the foundation for the CDP strategy that is a cross channel. Email, SMS, push notifications, custom audiences that we can advertise to, etc. All that comes from our friends in Indianapolis and ExactTarget and I learned a lot when we acquired ExactTarget. I learned a lot about email marketing. I was not in that space before I thought “email marketing how complicated could it be?” and it turns out there’s a lot to it.

Anthony: It’s really hard.

Eric: It is hard indeed. The power of Email Studio formerly known as ExactTarget is in the ability to set up relational data model to do very powerful scripting for personalization and to be able to do all the kind of deliverability things that you need to do to get an email into someone’s inbox and I didn’t really appreciate that prior to ExactTarget but you know if you’re a small corner, a pilates studio and you want to send out an email newsletter to your people, it’s probably not the right product for you. It’s way too complex for a very small business that wants to do very simple things. Where the product shines is high-end, higher complexity, data-driven personalized email at scale and that is the sweet spot for the product nicely into our broader concept of CRM where you know through the magic of Email Studio we can embed lots of data within an email from a kind of a CRM system or other places. We can include personalized content. We can include product recommendations and we can do all kinds of interesting things. So there’s still work to do on that product to bring it closer into the core kind of Salesforce stack. There’s work to do to make that product easier to use. There’s work to do to make it smarter and more kind of AI-driven around, you know, send time optimization or you know, multi-channel journeys, etc. But it’s a very powerful product and has been very successful. It’s got a huge following and we’re just excited to keep that investment going.

Anthony: And so are we since we build on top of it. Most viewers know we are DESelect. We offer a segmentation solution for Marketing Cloud and we are very happy to build on such a strong platform like Salesforce and be listed on AppExchange by the way. So here’s my next question being an independent software vendor or ISV as it’s known from the digital point of view. What role do you see the AppExchange and actually ISV partners in particular play in the years to come?

Eric: So you know, the partner ecosystem and extensibility of Salesforce products have always been incredibly core to who we are as a company. We provide as a company a base platform, we provide a base of applications, and then we have literally thousands of partners who customize or extend on the platform and solutions. We will never be able to do it all and so we invest in facilitating that kind of partner ecosystem. We want to drive awareness and drive to help you be successful in your business and we want to help our customers find the solutions that help them be successful in what they’re trying to solve. It’s always been near and dear to us. All of our partners on the AppExchange, which is like the equivalent to the AppStore and that team is very very busy working on a big vision for how to continue to make an AppExchange better for both partners and the people buying products from it. And so yeah Salesforce is also tripling down on our industry strategy and, you know, every permutation of every industry solution across Sales Service, Marketing, Commerce, etc. It is just something we will never attempt to do ourselves and our partners like you guys are critical for us to be able to help our customers succeed and what they’re trying to do. 

Anthony: Maybe a fun side story. Today I’m onboarding someone new to our team, he’s actually new to the ecosystem and he was asking so why do you guys exist actually? Well, I’m telling him that Salesforce is counting on us to fill this little niche needs because I think that’s the beauty of the whole AppExchange platform. You guys can solve so many different needs in collaboration with ISVs. But looking at your own offering and especially digital offering. What are the solutions that you’re currently excited about?

Eric: So Salesforce is very focused on this idea of Customer 360 and it’s been around forever but no one has ever really truly successfully solved it in terms of a package solution that companies can buy and actually deliver on and by Customer 360. We mean an actual single source of truth for every prospect and customer that a company has; it drives a more personalized experience on the front end across Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, and Custom Apps. As well as better insights and engagement on the back end with your sales teams, your support teams, your marketers, etc. And so that is our strategy as a company. To really build out a kind of core data model that allows you as a company to build a single view of your customers to build better experiences and better engagement. And so we in Salesforce digital are working on exactly what we’re saying, okay, where is our single source of truth? How are we stitching together lots of different back end systems into this kind of golden record that we can use to personalize the website, personalize emails as well as personalize, you know, ‘Hey, here’s some training that might be right for you, here’s a community group that might be right for you, here’s an ISV app that might be great for you’. So our vision at Salesforce digital is to put the customer in the center of everything we’re doing. Break up these walls that we currently have today and really understand who you are. Who you are, where you are? What industries you’re in, what segment you’re in, what role you’re in, and instead of you having to find a trail on Trailhead or a community group on the community or a nice ISV app in the AppExchange or an article on our blog what if we could just push all that to you and push that to you through our website, push to you via email, and other places. That is what is exciting today and we are working on that as we speak to build the truth profile to stand up our content in taxonomy internally to stand up our personalization engine based on another Marketing Cloud product called Interaction Studio and to surpass all that through kind of multichannel experiences. And that’s my work cut out for me for the next couple of years and we’ll see how this all plays out. But that is what I get out of bed thinking about every day.

Anthony: It sounds like you’ll keep busy for the next few years. I’m just trying to paint a picture here so if I’m a customer as you mentioned, I might be working multi-channel some of my activities might still be a silo. To be more concrete, I might be using paid ads on Adwords, I may be using Facebook ads are these also things that would be integrated into this CDP? 

Eric: So CDP is really kind of the data layer. We want to be able to create audiences. We want to be able to activate those audiences across channels and those channels include paid media. So yes 100% that you could also include email. It can also include the website and so yes, we want to be able to create experiences. That includes the website email paid media. As well as other channels as they come up. 

Anthony: I mean, it’s been a struggle even in our own company today to be honest. But I’ve seen that many clients when I was still a consultant of getting the complete full picture of a customer sure, you can maybe see like the lead source of someone coming in the lead form for a little bit better. You can even do a bit of tracking on the website, but what you want to know as the SAAS vendor, for each dollar I earn how much the paid ads did that contribute, how much the sales contribute, that’s so hard, it’s tricky.

Eric: So multi-touch attribution is a very very difficult problem. I’m as a practitioner think about that a lot. We have certain capabilities internally. We have some big gaps and I think we can close some of the gaps. I think that the frustrating thing with marketing is there are some things that are just not quantifiable and you just have to live with that reality as a marketer if someone comes to your website and then calls a sales rep. It’s very hard to attribute that back to the website. Some of the digital things that you can kind of associate a campaign and track it all the way through are more tractable. So I hear you I think marketing is both Art and Science and we want to get the science part. You know, we believe in science. We believe in data, we believe in data science and all the things we can do around that. There will always be a part of marketing that you can’t measure as much as you want and a more subjective part of marketing it as well.

Anthony: It’s very interesting. You’re the second person today to call Art and Science. Although the other person, he’s actually a CEO of a very large well-established ISV as well. He was talking about sales, It’s Art and Science. You can have as many KPIs and metrics but there’s a certain art to this profession in this case sales, but on the marketing side. I had the same discussion today with my co-founder like we should invest more in brand awareness. How do we measure that? Well, that’s hard.

Eric: We have those conversations every day at Salesforce.

Anthony: That’s a relief though that you’re facing the same challenges. It’s not just us. 

Eric: On the practitioner side so we have lots of challenges. We’ve managed to be very successful over time, but there are a lot of things that we’re not able to measure as well as we would like to in a perfect world. That’s said I think you just have to move on from some of that and you know, we can attribute how much traffic comes to the site where that traffic is coming from. Is it paid? Is it organic? How much of that traffic converts to a lead? How many you know, we have core offers, likes, free trial, view demo, contact me, inbound call, chat. Like we have a lot of metrics around those core offers. We can look at things like lead to opportunity conversion rate by offering, tight, and trace those from you know down the stages of the cell cycle down to an ACV which is our booking metric. So, you know some days I think oh my gosh, it’s so hard to really deeply understand all this, on the other hand, I think we have a wealth of data and we can optimize for that funnel which I don’t think was really possible 10 or 15 years ago. And so, other days I’m very thankful for all the incredible metrics we have and just now let’s use that and we can maybe AB test and optimize that forward. And we’ve been really successful doing that so just depends on which side of the bed I get out of each day to shape my thinking on that. It can always be better. We can always do better. It’s never done. But I’m also thankful for all the hard work the team does to provide us with the insights and the analytics that we got. 

Anthony: Maybe it depends on which time of the day it is, which side of the brain it is, do you want to have better branding, positioning, color schemes like even to that level, or do I want to jump into the lake of data and metrics we have, right? This one specific question that I would be interested in knowing more about personally. It has to do with paid ads because at least in my experience and with what I hear from other people who run SAAS businesses it’s sometimes hard to get the immediate return especially if you’re doing B2B Enterprise SAAS, but it seems to help especially with retargeting and so on but this is us comes back into the whole campaign attributions / multi-touch issue we just spoke about. Is there a way that you gauge the effectiveness of the Paid Ads yourself?

Eric: So we spend a lot of money on what we call paid media and it’s a critical part of our marketing motion to track traffic to the site that we attribute back to paid and then we can track it all the way back to leads pipeline and ACV and so yes, on one hand, we measure very closely because we spend many millions of dollars on paid media on the other hand. There’s always an argument from the paid media team that paid media has a larger benefit than what we can measure indirect attribution that they feel strongly and I understand this argument that paid impression or many paid impressions could lead to someone just typing www.salesforce.com in their browser and also they show up in our organic metrics and I totally get that and so we’re currently having a lot of discussion about this and we said well, let’s run some experiments in to see if we can quantify some of the best where we kind of turn certain things up and down and look at the downstream effects of things that we can’t do direct attribution on because we are literally spending tens of millions of dollars in certain places. It’s important that we have a kind of directional understanding of these things rather than just guessing.

Anthony: It’s literally worth finding out, I’d say.

Eric: It’s worth finding out, it’s a lot of money. And so we’ve debated some of the things for years and we’re like well, let’s do some tests and let’s accept the fact that you know, the test might impact the business in the very short-term, but that might give us an insight that will help us do the right thing for the long-term. And so we are literally in the middle of a large discussion about some of that right now and we are taking up some tests and we’re going to try to look at causality which is really hard to do because how long do you run it? How can we interpret the data? But we have some very smart people looking at this and we’ll see what happens. 

Anthony: That sounds super interesting, I can honestly say that. But as we round up do you have any closing thoughts that you would like to share with our audience?

Eric: No, I would just like to thank you for the opportunity to share our story. My goal is to be really transparent about our digital transformation at Salesforce. I’m happy to share what we’re doing. I’m going to try to share what’s working and what’s not working, try to share some of the things we’ve learned about the organization, the methodology, the tech stack, the design. I want to try to be radically transparent in our own journey. It is going to be a multi-year journey. So if you have any questions, or if you’d like me to post on a specific topic, I’m happy to do that.

Anthony: Okay, fantastic. For our audience are there any specific places where they should follow you? I know you’re very active on LinkedIn any other things that we should know about?

Eric: No, not really, I am not. I know I should invest more time and, I’m pushing my team on this, to instead of just cranking out a quick post on LinkedIn to actually do what I should do as a digital marketer, which is write a blog post that goes on our blog that drives traffic to our site that potentially converts to leads and opportunities to drive our business. And so I’ll say that giving myself a hard time, it’s just easy for me to open up Linkedin and write something out without really thinking about it. But that is where I want to go. I want to actually start blogging more formal communications about these things but haven’t started yet. 

Anthony: Well shout out to the audience, if you have any questions for Eric feel free to comment on YouTube, LinkedIn, wherever you’re following, and Eric the pleasure was absolutely mine. Thank you for being on this episode, and thank you so much for your time. 

Eric: Thank you.