Anthony Lamot: Absolutely and what you said about that book that you wrote, I think is interesting. I was reminded by Bobby Gina, your CMO for Marketing Cloud, or the CMO for Marketing Cloud, that you wrote this pretty notorious book, I think, back at the day, and it it was kind of interesting, so Kate feels a bit more about that.

Martin Kihn: Yeah, I was. I was a management consultant in New York not in the media business. I wanted to be in the media business. But this was right after the like. 2001, there was a big recession like the market crashed the Nasdaq had had gone up Fivex during the dot-com boom, and it crashed so it was not a good time in business, so I ended up mostly consulting in the consumer healthcare space.

Martin Kihn: And I didn’t like consulting. I I thought that people were phoney. I I felt they were s trying to sound intelligent, but they weren’t, and I had a bad attitude. Essentially so. I wrote a book about it called House of Lies, and it was supposed to be a dictionary. It was like, con consulting to English dictionary cause I’m like, I’m gonna tell you how, if you’re taught, if you’re listening to your consultant, this is what they’re really saying, cause they try to sound smart, you know. They say, you know, leverage going forward, and, you know, push back, and all this stuff and

Martin Kihn: but they’re they’re not English words. They’re they’re the words that consultants use just to sound smart. So, anyway. Then it became a memoir, and then it came out, and consultants hated it, and but I was quitting anyway, so I didn’t care. But everyone was mad at me, and you know they were. They thought I was an evil man. And then, some years later, it was actually turned into a television program on Showtime starring. Don Cheadle. Don Cheadle plays a character. It’s called House of Lies.

Martin Kihn: Plays a character in Marty Khan is based on me, Marty Kihn. That’s my name, Marty Kihn. And when that show came out all of a sudden. Consultants love me, and I was like the most popular guy around, and they wanted me to go back to the reunion, and they forgot completely about how mean they were when the book came out. So like, that’s very interesting, you know. If you’re associated with Hollywood and show. Business people love you, but if you’re associated with like truth, telling and satire

Martin Kihn: and the written word, and people don’t. So I learned something.

Anthony Lamot: It’s a somewhat sad and cynical reflection on society as a whole, but I do.

Martin Kihn: And they’re superficial.

Anthony Lamot: Yes, yeah, it can be. It can be. And unfortunately, social media doesn’t always play well out there, either. I’ve definitely seen that a play out too in the consulting space where it can be somewhat pretense and and yeah, pretending you know it all, which you don’t always do, and I can say it is as a former consultant. Now, having said that I do have respect for certain consultants a lot, I do think they can be good

Anthony Lamot: central storages of knowledge because they have that unique opportunity to have exposure to certain problems more often than other people. But yes, there can be quite a bit of.

Martin Kihn: Well, no, I mean, in reality, there’s some very smart consultants, and some who are experts, and actually probably better than most practitioners. But I was. I was doing a satire. So it’s kind of skewed the other way. It’s comedy, you know.

Anthony Lamot: That makes sense. Yeah, I asked. You can always pull the comedy card there, I guess.

Martin Kihn: I guess so. Yeah.

Anthony Lamot: So you are also active on social media. I’ve been following you for quite a while, actually, and something I remember seeing was a post about Taylor Swift. I think this has been a while ago, might have been a year, even 2 years, so I wanted to ask you. Do you still consider Taylor Swift a master marketer, and are us 50.

Martin Kihn: Oh, yeah. Well, I’ve been accused of putting Taylor Swift into every one of my presentations every year, and it’s true. Unfortunately. I I really should move on.

Martin Kihn: But I started when I was a gardener, so I joined Salesforce almost 5 and a half years ago. We’ll say 2018. I think I was looking at Taylor Swift as a brand. I’m like, how is she so popular to so many different types of people as is possible, because she is, you know, universally beloved by all people on the left, people on the right, people in the North, people in the South and in Europe. And

Martin Kihn: so I did some research into her. And basically the the short story about that is that she she herself nobody really knows her, at least at that time she was a blank space. We were projecting ourselves onto her. So people saw in her basically more about themselves. So then I thought, well, that’s really genius brand marketing. Because if you can be the kind of brand that has

Martin Kihn: the definition sort of, but is flexible enough that people can see themselves in you. Then you have a much bigger audience. You can have it like a mass audience.

Martin Kihn: because people are ultimately quite selfish. So that’s what she does. Very well. And I I thought that was some. It’s just genius, and she’s even bigger now, you know, she’s just even she’s exploded since then. So.

Anthony Lamot: She’s extremely popular. What I think is interesting, though, that she managed to essentially be this kind of mirror. That’s what you’re saying, right? Just reflecting what our people project on her, whereas so much in branding and marketing is effective because it’s not that because it’s polarizing, a lot of things are very effective because you take a stand because you’re opinionated. And you know, you’re gonna

Anthony Lamot: lose out on some audience because of that. But the rest of the audience can be more engaged because of it.

Martin Kihn: Yeah, cause she she’s a mass brand, like she’s trying to get everybody, not every brand is that way. In fact, that’s not a smart way to be because it it takes an enormous amount of effort and time to do that. And

Martin Kihn: you know investment frankly. But if you’re like it, like Patagonia, for instance, is staked out of claim to Eco friendly. They’re gonna alienate people who are anti green. And there are people out there. That’s okay. They’re like, I’m gonna give up on those people. But I’m gonna really super. Serve the other audience. And that’s perfectly fine.

Anthony Lamot: What would you say? Is it that someone like Taylor Swift, and does to to avoid having to polarize people and still manage to get to capture so many bands.

Martin Kihn: Well, it’s the last year has been a little different cause. She’s she’s made hints politically. She’s sort of to the left, you know, which I value, but but she has alienated some people on the right in the US. Particularly cause we’re so polarized, and the other thing is the whole football thing. So I mean I that hasn’t hurt her career. I think. Now we know she’s a football fan, you know, big deal. So.

Martin Kihn: But she? She just never took a stand on anything. Historically, we didn’t know her opinion about anything to be honest until very recently, and she still doesn’t, really. She kind of hints she’s like, get out and vote. And you have to read between the lines like, Oh, maybe she’s liberal. I don’t know. Maybe. Yeah.

Martin Kihn: but that that’s what she does doesn’t take a stand.

Anthony Lamot: Gotcha. Well, beyond moving on beyond. Taylor. Can you tell us a bit more about a recent project or initiative at Salesforce that you’re particularly proud of, and why it stands out to you.

Martin Kihn: When I started in 2018, they hired me. I was hired by Bob Stuttz into Marketing Cloud in the product team like it was a role called product Strategy, which doesn’t exist and didn’t exist. Just me. But he hired me in, and it was like, well, I was a Gartner. I was looking at Marketing Clouds, and I started to cover this area called Customer Data Platforms, which was new. People talked about it a lot there. There wasn’t a lot of adoption at the time, but a lot of hype like an enormous amount.

Martin Kihn: So the question at Salesforce was, do we have a CDP, do we need to acquire one? Do we need to partner what is going on here? Basically in the marketing space? So I did. I did part of that analysis in the beginning, and my my thesis right away was no, we need we need to at least either acquire or build CDP. Cause you we don’t have it at Salesforce if CRM, it’s net new.

Martin Kihn: And so that was, you know, five and a half six years ago. There wasn’t an acquisition that made sense cause, as you may know, acquiring company and trying to bolt it on, can be more work than just building it from scratch and more difficult depending on the technology. So Brett Taylor Co. CEO at the time decided, you know. See, the CDP is so central to the enterprise. It’s like customer data

Martin Kihn: that we need to build it on the Salesforce platform, on CRM sales, cloud service cloud

Martin Kihn: Data Cloud. What’s now Data Cloud.

Martin Kihn: and that was a brilliant decision. But it it made us it made it take longer. There was like, Why is why is Salesforce so late to the CDP market. Well, the reason is because we were actually building a CD. We had a head start because we had the platform metadata and all that. But it took time. And now it’s three, three and a half years out. And Data Cloud is is huge. I mean, it’s a big product.

Martin Kihn: I I tried to do some research into. Is this the fastest growing software product ever taken on its own?

Martin Kihn: And the answer I got was, Yes, it is, but I can’t really prove it. So I you know, I

Martin Kihn: I don’t make that claim. But I hint that that’s the truth.

Martin Kihn: And I mean the fastest growing software product to, you know, 200,000,300. And beyond.

Anthony Lamot: Well, that’s of course, also because you guys already have such a tremendous portfolio of customers.

Martin Kihn: Yeah, we had advantages. Yeah, we’re not a startup. Yeah.

Anthony Lamot: Absolutely. I also think that something similar happened with Marketing Cloud. Maybe because I still believe Marketing Cloud has been your most successful acquisition in terms of return on investment.

Martin Kihn: Yeah, probably.

Anthony Lamot: Yeah.

Martin Kihn: Yeah, but I mean Marketing Cloud it it was I. I talked to a guy who was at Epsilon, Epsilon, competitor at the time of Marketing Cloud City email.

Martin Kihn: And the guy was like, well, we thought of exact target, which was the acquisition as a you know, pretty good competitor, but definitely not, you know, number one in the field, and but once Salesforce acquired it, it got into the jet stream of the the sales channels it just took off. And so there, there’s a real advantage to being part of the Salesforce kinda sales machine. And I know up on the inside it’s a machine. I mean, they are very disciplined.

Martin Kihn: So you know, that helped.

Anthony Lamot: Absolutely. I’d be curious to learn if you still think Data Cloud to be a CDP, and I’ll you know, justify that question. So I remember initially, when you guys surveyed your customers about, you know what CDPs are using, they answered, oh, we’re using you. Whereas you guys didn’t even have a CDP. As you point out yourself. It was a CRM so clearly there was a lot of confusion market about what a CDP should be, and I I know it. Go went back to an initial white paper, I think back in 2016. It was also a major fast-moving consumer goods company out there that that sent out an RFP for that that triggered a lot of stuff but you guys did start building it.

Anthony Lamot: But over time the name has changed a lot which has, let’s be honest, a bit of a mixed response in the ecosystem. But today, it’s called Data Cloud. And it almost seems that it does more than what a CDP does. That’s what some people have suggested. So I’m kinda curious, especially given your role especially given your history. What’s your take on that? How do you think about Data Cloud? Is it a CDP, is it something else? Is it more than a CDP.

Martin Kihn: It’s I mean, it’s hard to say. An analogy would be CRM, you know the CRM space. So that’s customer relationship management. It appeared in like the nineties, and Gartner in particular, was a champion of CRM.

Martin Kihn: And then CRM became CRM for Sales CRM for service, CRM for field service CRM, for I don’t know medical devices in China, whatever there’s now, there’s oh, probably 3 or 400 different.

Martin Kihn: many categories of CRM. And so Gartner doesn’t even have a magic quadrant for customer relationship management. It’s too many different things. I thought from the beginning CDP would be the same. It’s you know, it’s customer data. It’s so core to the enterprise that it’s going to be adapted to whatever the enterprise is.

Martin Kihn: So it’s not a. It has certain characteristics.

Martin Kihn: and the CDP Institute has done a nice job of defining what those are. But even those characteristics are changing. But one of them, for instance, from the beginning. David Rob, he actually invented the CDP category.

Martin Kihn: It wasn’t me. Someone’s asked me if I did. It was David, ROM. 2013. But, he said, one of the main, you know requirements of a CDP is that it has its own database, that is, you know, you ingest data into it and it stores data.

Martin Kihn: And but now he’s saying, well, actually, there are things he might call a CDP that don’t do that. The so-called composable CDP, where the database is the Data Cloud. It might be Snowflake, or whatever.

Martin Kihn: But is that a CDP or is it not? It might do all the other things, but the data sitting in the in the cloud, it seems to me it probably is a CDP. But it doesn’t fit the definition of a CDP.

Martin Kihn: So to answer your question, my roundabout way is saying, I would say, Data Cloud is not a CDP. It would answer a CDP RFP. But it does more, and its ambition is to do more. And the most important part of that is that it serves the entire customer experience from end to end, from acquisition, through loyalty, through commerce, through service, through sales

Martin Kihn: and marketing, by the way and marketing, but not just marketing. So it’s more ambitious Data Cloud.

Anthony Lamot: Absolutely and naturally, we are very interested in the marketing piece. I see what’s gonna happen with Marketing Cloud Growth for us is very interesting cause. It opens a whole array of possibilities as a software vendor to but maybe before we go there you mentioned Gartner? A few times in passing that. And obviously, you, you know, it was a big part of your career, too.

Anthony Lamot: You guys have recently been named a leader the leader actually in on the quadrant for for a CDP. So congratulations, 1st off, and and secondly, I wanted to ask, like, how important is that relationship with Gardner, and and what effect does it have? On the market? From your point of view.

Martin Kihn: Well, it. This is. This. Evaluation was particularly important.

Martin Kihn: and I think it was important because it was the first major analyst firm that had done an evaluation like a detailed, careful evaluation of the CDP market, and it included most of the actually all of the companies that we would consider major competitors in the CDP space adobe segment teleium.

Martin Kihn: and there were a number of them almost 20. So this was the first evaluation. We took it very seriously. And, in fact, if you saw the questionnaire and the requirements it was. It was a lot of work. They asked for 10 customer references, you know, all of these vendors had to come up with 10 people who would would talk to an analyst.

Martin Kihn: and you know the questionnaire itself was was voluminous. So it was. It was more work than the typical magic Quadrant.

Martin Kihn: We were hopeful. I thought I thought we’d be a leader for sure. We did, really? Well, and I think that that’s just a Testament to. I think a lot of it is the vision like how we articulated where we’re going, and it’s related to the customer experience end and CX.

Martin Kihn: But we did. We came out, you know, highest on both axes. It was and in terms of the response to the market. It’s been very. It’s been very helpful. There been. There were a lot of RFPs in the past where we were up against another CDP. Who was making claims that may or may not have been true. And we’re making different claims that are, of course, all true, but the buyer would have a hard time assessing, you know, who’s telling true. So they want to do a POC. And this just helps. We can say, well, look, here’s an independent source that says that validates some of our claims.

Anthony Lamot: So super interesting. And also given your role. Given your history and the different positions you’ve had to look at the market. I’ll be interested as a software partner to Salesforce. Where do you think could be the opportunity? And maybe, if it’s if it’s too good of an opportunity, you can tell me after the interview after the recording, so other people won’t hear it. But.

Martin Kihn: Yeah. Well, I mean there as a partner.

Martin Kihn: there are things that Salesforce doesn’t do. This isn’t helpful to you, maybe. But like, for instance, we don’t sell data.

Martin Kihn: People are surprised to hear that we actually don’t sell data. And then we don’t sell media.

Martin Kihn: But these are things that users of Data Cloud want to do. They? Wanna, you know, do ad campaigns. And they, wanna you know, append data onto this onto their customer records and their account records. So we have

Martin Kihn: successful partners in those areas. Media partners, we’re a major source of demand for some of the so-called walled gardens and that’s the way you can activate 1st party data and an advertising contact. So you send it over to Facebook and Instagram and Google and Amazon. And those guys are working with us very closely. And we have good connections with them. We send them a lot of, you know business, basically. And so they’re very good partners on the ad side. And then on the data side, we have dense su, we have axiom. And the the, you know, the usual suspects. But they are. We have Co customers with them a lot, so that there’s that area. And then there are

Martin Kihn: there are other areas like the emerging AI space. We we wanna support AI, we have AI features. But I think that most of the user Data Cloud can think of it as source of data repository of data. And you can apply all kinds of stuff to that data. And one of it might be verticalized AI models. And so I think there’s an ecosystem of partners that are arising in that area to use the data and Data Cloud and kind of extend it in different ways.

Martin Kihn: And then, of course, on the Si, the partnership side, we we’re not really a services firm. We have some services just to help the products. But we are very supportive of. And you see, most of the sponsors of connections were actually firms, you know, services firms.

Martin Kihn: Sis, and agencies. Yeah. Actually, McKinsey was a big sponsor of the CMO events. So I take back everything I said about consultants earlier. It doesn’t apply to them. 

Martin Kihn: I mean, they recognize, you know CDP is CDP is not, it’s not all about marketing. It’s about the enterprise, and it’s it’s it’s a major kind of C-suite decision. And it, it would involve a lot of kind of high level thinking and strategy. And so I think everyone recognizes that.

Anthony Lamot: Absolutely. And if you, if you take a step back and look at the market ecosystem as a whole you know, just recently the the the next the latest market landscape publication was done. It just keeps baffling. My, how many more solutions there are! How many more vendors there are, and sure there is, some consolidation, but there’s also still more proliferation so how do you think it will evolve over the next 5 years. And, of course, what role do you envision salesforce playing and shaping that future.

Martin Kihn: I mean, there won’t be–there’ll be acquisitions, you know, because acquisitions, I always think of that when a big strategic acquirer and salesforce has done this not so much recently, but you know it’s it’s almost like there’s R&D done in the market. And so this startup these kind of scrappy startup will appear doing something.and it will succeed. 

Martin Kihn: And so then it gets the notice of a big strategic acquirer, and so they’ll acquire it bring it on. So they’re bringing on the talent, the technology. So in a way, it’s been market tested so that there’s that kind of acquisition. And that will always happen. There’ll always be people with good ideas that will get acquired. But I don’t think that will lead to any consolidation. There will always be more and more and more and more more Logos. And the reason is simple. Scott Brinker said it. He’s like who complains about. You know too much choice in the Itunes store, you know, in the app store. Nobody, I mean. You may not like most of it, but you’re not gonna complain that you have to, you know. Too much choice. Oh, it’s overwhelming. Maybe somebody would. But but that’s not how it works. 

Martin Kihn: You basically want more is more because you have more choice. And with Salesforce’s role, I mean, I think, that the acquisitions that Salesforce makes over over the years have become bigger. So and there’s still there are below the radar. There are smaller ones, particularly in the in the analytics, and the AI space have been a bunch of little ones but our plugins like there’ll be companies that will be on the AppExchange, that kind of reach, critical mass. And we realize it would actually could fold in nicely because it already works with a lot of customers.

Martin Kihn: And but they’re the big ones. And these are kind of big strategic investments like Mulesoft and Tableau and Slack, which was enormous. $27,000,000,000 at the time. And so I think going forward, Salesforce’s role will be to make some of those not very many, very carefully. What they’ll be I don’t know. They didn’t tell me. And then these other ones folding in, you know. But I think that probably the the path to success with Salesforce is to have joint customers and to have customers who are using us together. 

Martin Kihn: And so that’s when the acquisitions make the most sense. 

Anthony Lamot: Absolutely so. It needs to be some prerogative and need to be some track record and history and just good collaboration. I would assume.

Anthony Lamot: I also think that something similar happened with Marketing Cloud. Maybe because I still believe Marketing Cloud has been your most successful acquisition in terms of return on investment.

Martin Kihn: Yeah, and proof that it works together. It’s like, well, velocity is a good example that was like a verticalization of snow, of Salesforce. You know, it was built on Salesforce, basically. And so it made a lot of sense. We would acquire velocity. So now we get of industry clouds.

Martin Kihn: Yeah, but I mean Marketing Cloud it it was I. I talked to a guy who was at Epsilon, Epsilon, competitor at the time of Marketing Cloud City email.

Martin Kihn: And the guy was like, well, we thought of ExactTarget, which was the acquisition as a you know, pretty good competitor, but definitely not, you know, number one in the field, and but once Salesforce acquired it, it got into the jet stream of the the sales channels it just took off. And so there, there’s a real advantage to being part of the Salesforce kinda sales machine. And I know up on the inside it’s a machine. I mean, they are very disciplined.

Martin Kihn: So you know, that helped.

Anthony Lamot: Absolutely so. So, going from the market landscape as a whole is zooming again on Marketing Cloud. Specifically, what would you say? Our sales, forces, goals, what we can share? In terms of goals for market cloud, specifically in the next few years. And and how might they transform customer interactions.

Martin Kihn: Well, I think Marketing Cloud is you know, it’s a successful product. It’s a growing product. I think that it’s from the inside of Salesforce our goal.

Martin Kihn: particularly since I joined. I don’t give myself credit for this. I think the vision has been there.

Martin Kihn: But actually, Steve Fisher get the he’s our kind of product strategist he was. He’s a friend of Mark Benioff. So we was hired probably 3 years ago or so he worked at ebay. He was retired, and Mark kind of brought him in out of retirement.

Martin Kihn: Brilliant man, you know, and he’s a strategic thinker. But his point was, you know, we need to make everything we need to take all of these applications and break them down into services and build them all on the same platform, you know. So basically, that’s a big effort behind the scenes. We are in the process of kind of decomposing the applications, including exact target and into its components and then putting them on Salesforce platform, which is, you know, hyperforce and then Data Cloud. Now is the data layer, and then the analytics services. The other like flow services on top of that. And the reason to do that is just so that the clouds, the clouds, which will always exist work better together.

Martin Kihn: So that you know you can do things in the same way through the same UI and marketing and service. So then your marketing service teams basically can serve the customer in a way that’s kind of invisible to the customer. That’s the goal. So I think ultimately, you know, it’s a year, and we’re on a journey. Year by year you saw Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, which was kind of a mini version of Marketing Cloud which was built on our platform that use flow instead of Journey Builder.

Martin Kihn: So that is a taste of you know where we’re going, I think in the long run the customer shouldn’t notice it, they should just notice, it works better but behind the scenes things will be changing.

Anthony Lamot: Absolutely, and I think it’s a really exciting change, and it’ll be helpful. And, as I mentioned, we also consider as as I mentioned before. In other places we consider Marketing Cloud grow like super interesting, because it’s yeah. It present. It presented itself a new opportunity for us to

Anthony Lamot: in those shorter term, even because it does address more SMB needs. That’s how it’s positioned. But in the longer term beyond that, I think as well

Martin Kihn: We also wanted to, because there’s companies out there with product-led growth, you know. Think of Hubspot, so you can sign up for Hubspot as a relatively small business, and it’s easy, and then you grow with them. So then, when you become big, you know, if you become big, then you’re still a Hubspot customer, so we wanted to make that it wasn’t so easy with Salesforce. We were expensive. We were large, we were. You had to call the salesperson

Martin Kihn: couldn’t use your credit card, so we wanted to make it easy to have an entry and then grow.

Anthony Lamot: Yes, absolutely. And we’re also huge fans of PLG and product-led growth. So for for those who don’t know what that is, it’s usually something like a premium model where people get to try your product for free for a while or indefinitely, but at the limited usage. And then basically, you get hooked, and you start using the product more and more until you take out a credit card or or whatever and so we’ve we kind of have done that always because we have made this free plugin called DESelect Search for the Marketing Cloud. A. That’s a search part to it.

Anthony Lamot: although I would typically think more of it as a lead magnet. But it’s been a tremendous lead magnet for us. But we’ve actually also started to create a free version of our segmentation solution for the Marketing Cloud.

Anthony Lamot: DESelect Segment, so people can now install it for free and and and work with it. And and it’s interesting. It does take a lot more work and discipline, I would say then, as as a SaaS company initially think of, because there are no services, there is no support. There’s no training like the product needs to be

Anthony Lamot: like super self explanatory and and and the learning portals, and whatever needs to be really there. So there’s definitely been a journey for us to to, to appreciate that.

Martin Kihn: That’s a good point. You can’t do. Hand holding. It’s too expensive, so has to be intuitive. Yeah.

Anthony Lamot: Exactly. There’s also a growing emphasis, emphasis. Excuse me on on 0 party data and and gaining traction. How is Salesforce equipping marketers to effectively collect and utilize zero-party data within Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud.

Martin Kihn: Yeah, I mean zero party. I mean, it was zero party. And first party, I mean, first party CRM is mostly all first-party data. So that’s it’s not new to Salesforce. Zero-party would be. You know, you’re trying to collect it from customers actively. I think that in the past four years there’s been a lot more interest in that. It’s been almost a. There’s been a sense of urgency that kind of at times felt like panic that

Martin Kihn: customers didn’t have enough first-party data, and particularly in the consumer product area, where traditionally, they they don’t have direct relationships with customers. And

Martin Kihn: and these are big companies, you know, and and a lot of them were quite concerned. And then they were concerned about the regulatory and our our answer to all of that is it. It will be different for every company. Some, you know, in a in every case going forward without third-party cookies. Someone will have to have first-party data

Martin Kihn: it. It’s either you or you can. You can use a like a retail network, or you can use the walled gardens or so there, but someone out there. And you see so many know that retail media networks appearing, which are basically companies like Uber, that have, or Marriott that have first-party data, and they’re just making it available, you know, for advert. You can rent it essentially to do targeting.

Martin Kihn: But zero-party data is important, and I think that we made the acquisition of Evergage few years ago, which is a personalization platform and it what it does, is it in the session? It will make the experience more relevant. And it ultimately, it’s trying to get people to engage with the website, with the app.

Martin Kihn: That’s what it does is personalization platform. And a lot of that is about trying to get them to give them enough value that they give you an email or some kind of first-party data so that you can build a relationship with them in a profile. And that that’s that was very popular. You know, it’s it’s been a very successful product for us personalization.

Martin Kihn: It’s getting closer and closer to Data Cloud because they’re related the data that’s collected. And the personalization needs to reside. We hope in Data Cloud ultimately.

Martin Kihn: And so you can. You know, it’s gives you a more complete picture, because I think that early in the journey you don’t know somebody. So you’re using a first-party cookie or nothing.

Martin Kihn: and you’re just trying to personalize, based on behavior in that session. And then, as you, as you get their email and you get a deeper relationship, you get a better profile of them over time. And that deeper profile is something that should reside in Data Cloud. Ultimately.

Anthony Lamot: Seen it firsthand at some larger implementation projects where

Anthony Lamot: the prevailing IT and marketing leaders had the initial inclination to use sort of legacy data from older ERP systems to do their marketing campaigns for their brand new marketing automation platform of choice. The customer I’m thinking about right now was using at the time. So name part of it now, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.

Anthony Lamot: And from what I’ve seen, that just doesn’t work because all of the data is super outdated. There might be a massive disconnect between the people who generate those lists and the marketing teams. So you really want to get this sort of actual constantly updated stream of data of based on how customers really engage with your brand to drive your marketing from. From what I can tell.

Martin Kihn: It’s true. I mean, there are some characteristics that don’t change much over time, but not very many.

Martin Kihn: I mean, I’m always. I’ll always. I’m a male, you know, so I guess I’d be buying men’s clothing so that won’t change. But, on the other hand, the most important determinants of a of purchase are things that are in the moment a lot of it is, how much time do I have to decide? So that kind of stress factor.

Martin Kihn: What up? What’s what do I need right then? Like, what am I actually literally looking for? Am I looking for credit card or or home loan, and you wouldn’t know that unless you’re observing me in that session, or you, you learned it somehow. But that that’s the most. That’s the most important information. And then the other stuff. That kind of doesn’t decay over time is less important. It’s also most likely to be known by your competitors. So it’s less differentiated as well.

Anthony Lamot: That’s a good point on the competitive side. So it’s almost as if the ability to capture real-time engagement and and buy intention whether it’s in B to C or B to B, is super important. I also see it in my business, after all, right? So finding out what could be the ideal customer. And ICP is really important, especially for our own outbound strategy, which we do have.

Anthony Lamot: but being able to surface buyer signals, even if anything beyond the obvious hey, giving me a demo is also really important to get to be successful.

Martin Kihn: Yeah, that I mean, there’s even data about where someone is having an impact on their purchase it like, are they outside or in the office. They’re different kind of mindsets.

Martin Kihn: So there’s all sorts of information that you could. If you have it, you can do much better marketing.

Anthony Lamot: Absolutely.

Martin Kihn: You have to collect it. Telemetry.

Anthony Lamot: Have to collect them, for sure.

Anthony Lamot: And there’s another important term with zero in it that I wanna address because it’s a more recent announcement from Salesforce. And it has to do with Zero Copy Data.

Anthony Lamot: Of course. So which is not to be confused with the thing we’ve just discussed. So can you please elaborate on what it means, and explain to our audience.

Martin Kihn: Well, it’s highly related to Snowflake in particular cause. They developed a technology number of years ago people and underestimated it actually. But it was. It’s an ability to it’s, it’s very advanced technology. But now it’s widely used. But basically, it’s ability to have data, two data stores. You can have more than two. But as an example, two, you have Data Cloud. And then you have data in Snowflake.

Martin Kihn: and you can literally access data and Data Cloud or the data in Snowflake either way without moving it. So when I say access, it means, you know what’s there. You have visibility into it, and if you do a query, you can use the data that’s sitting in this other database. But you’re not lifting it and shifting it into the new environment which saves a lot of time and effort and money. You know.

Martin Kihn: computational costs and all that. So it’s very useful. And it also helps in terms of data discipline. There’s information that you’d want to reside in the cloud. All your product data, maybe a transaction data

Martin Kihn: in Snowflake or in Databricks or BigQuery. And then in Data Cloud, you have other information about customers, but maybe not all your product information. But you’d want to know some of the product information if you make recommendations about products. So it’s relevant.

Martin Kihn: But you don’t want it all. So it’s it’s a way to kind of connect. And it’s it’s just gonna get more and more rel, more and more prevalent to the point where maybe in the future there won’t. There won’t be any databases. It’ll all be this kind of virtualized environment where where data sitting in hundreds and thousands of different places. But it’s all available centrally.

Martin Kihn: Who knows but.

Anthony Lamot: So you just have an application layer that taps into these data lakes using zero copy in that sense that it will be kind of funny if for some customers, not for all. If for some customers, Data Cloud gets to be used as a composable CDP, because it could be possible.

Martin Kihn: Could be, yeah.

Anthony Lamot: Figure.

Martin Kihn: I mean, we compete with composable CDPs, and they say frankly untrue things about us. There’s one recently that said, there are there. We? We make copies. It’s not zero copy, which is not true. It it’s it is zero copy. It’s also zero ETL. But I mean, you can make a copy. Then sometimes there’s an advantage to making a copy. So but you you can. You can use Data Cloud. I mean, we don’t describe it as composable CDP, but you can do composable use cases like you can have data sitting in your in your data warehouse and still use segmentation in the Data Cloud. So that’s sort of proposal.

Anthony Lamot: Very interesting, would you? Is there an example that you have in mind when you say that there could be advantages to storing or not storing the data. I think it could just make it a little bit more concrete for the people who are listening.

Martin Kihn: Oh, yeah, definitely. Well, like for instance, in

Martin Kihn: in Snowflake, Snowflake is is. And I keep using them as an example. But it could be Databricks. It could be BigQuery, you could. You could have, you know, all of your transactional data

Martin Kihn: like every single transaction that’s made in all of your stores and all of your place, all of your online areas. And some of it is connected to an individual, maybe through a loyalty program. So there’s a person label on it. Some of it isn’t.

Martin Kihn: But you wouldn’t necessarily want all of that to be copied and transported into Data Cloud. If you’re a big retailer, you might have millions and millions of records, even billions in a couple of months.

Martin Kihn: And does that belong in Data Cloud? It’s still relevant cause. I want to do a recommendation or even segmentation based on the products someone has bought.

Martin Kihn: you know, in the past, or even trends in their product purchase, so that might be relevant to I put them in this segment or I wanna, make a product recommendation based on purchases that made recently. And I want it to be exhaustive. I wanted to include all the stuff that they did offline. I wanna stuff that’s done online. So I want access to the purchase data. But I don’t. I don’t. Doesn’t make sense for me personally to store it all in Data Cloud. So this zero copy is is a way to make that happen.

Martin Kihn: you know, to make that feasible in a way. And in the past it would have been, but it

Martin Kihn: transporting. There’s a lot of costs involved if people will know in it. People in marketing don’t realize this. But there’s there’s a lot of expense involved in anything where you transform data, computational expense or store data, there’s a storage expense, believe it or not. And then moving data is both storage and a computational expense. So it’s. And also you introduce risk. There’s always mistakes that happen. You know, things that aren’t copied right? Or there’s errors that are introduced.

Martin Kihn: And then there’s also a time lag. It doesn’t happen instantly. So then you have a later copy of the data sitting over here doesn’t sync.

Martin Kihn: So there’s issues with copying always.

Anthony Lamot: Yeah, thank you. Appreciate you. Elaborating on that example makes a little bit more concrete, I think, for for people who are not as familiar with these technologies yet. We’re getting close to having to run up this really interesting conversation. But one thing I wanted to ask you is, what advice would you give to aspiring more tech leaders want to make a significant impact in the industry and specific skills? Maybe a mindset concepts frameworks that you think are really crucial these days.

Martin Kihn: I mean, I always think that in conversations I have with people who are, you know, like myself, farther along their career. Looking back, and I think it’s good to have technical knowledge. Now, you don’t need to have a PhD. Or be a master’s or anything like that. But it is like, if you’re in an analytical area, you know, take a class in python and actually do coding

Martin Kihn: or SQL. Or even though you think computers will be doing it. It’s not important, the this, the whole exercise of learning how to do this, to think how to do it, to be structured will really help.

Martin Kihn: and I found, like I did a sequel boot camp. I didn’t know any sequel, and I did that. I don’t do it. I don’t use it in my job.

Martin Kihn: But I can ask more intelligent questions. I can understand things more concretely, and it’s all because I kind of know how that works. In a way, I’m not an expert. No one would hire me to write sequel for them, but, on the other hand, I don’t know nothing, so I think that’s always very helpful. Any anything, actually, especially with AI. Now, you know, get to figure out how it works. I mean.

Martin Kihn: it’s not that hard.

Anthony Lamot: I actually love that answer because I I studied psychology and I went into consulting whoops kidding, but along the way I taught myself how to code, and it indirectly led me to to the founding of my company, because if I hadn’t understood the technologies that I taught myself how to use, I would never have been able to come up with the idea. And today I don’t code at all. But it’s been a while since I did, but I did at the start. But

Anthony Lamot: again, if I hadn’t learned the technical skills I wouldn’t have been able to see the solution, even though I am more on the quote, unquote business side. So I love that answer. Marty, it’s been such a pleasure. Such an interesting conversation. Where can people connect with you? Where can I follow you and find you?

Martin Kihn: Well, I’m you can reach me at Salesforce, m.kihn@salesforce. I have a website martinkihn.com.

Martin Kihn: and yeah, Linkedin. Happy to help. Talk about Data Cloud, yeah.

Anthony Lamot: Absolutely. Absolutely. We’ll make sure to add those handles in the description, too, of the interview. And yeah, once again, thank you so much for being on the show, and hope to see in the future.

Martin Kihn: Thank you. Thanks, Anthony.

Pato Sapir: I think one of the greatest strengths of Marketing Cloud is the number of ways you can solve a problem, but at the same time, it can be overwhelming because you have too many ways to solve one problem. The main challenge is defining the set of best practices and how you’re going to teach people how to use the platform. Creating a path for adoption and learning based on industry standards and your own company’s way of doing things, tailored to the audience, is crucial. Ensuring that users adopt the platform and know how to use it is a big challenge.

Anthony Lamot: And so you’ve already highlighted the specific standards that might apply within your company. Now, throughout an implementation project, the onboarding, and even the support afterward, there’s usually some form of collaboration needed between the more marketing/business side and the more technical teams. What are some of the best practices, tips, and tricks you can give for collaborating between these two sides?

Pato Sapir: Aligning first on what success looks like, which has nothing to do with the technology or the marketing strategies, is crucial. Sitting down with the team and mapping out the use cases we want to solve for our customers and organizational goals is important. Understanding each other’s KPIs, indicators, and motivations helps. It’s also important to recognize past challenges, as IT might want to control certain aspects based on previous experiences. Getting alignment on organizational and departmental goals and use cases is key. When challenges arise, they come from a place of understanding where the other team is coming from.

Anthony Lamot: Absolutely. And it’s actually very recognizable to me as well. We also try to set very clear success criteria or map out the use cases when we start working with our clients. I’m curious if you ever also see some alignment around KPIs, even if the marketers themselves are typically held up to things like engagement metrics or marketing-generated revenue. Sometimes technical marketers or IT are indirectly responsible for enabling these. Is that something you have seen in projects?

Pato Sapir: Yes, I think so. From the IT side, usually what’s thrown is technical debt. It’s not a measurement or a KPI, but it’s more like a consequence. I think what I see is more behaviors or standards that need to be followed, like keeping a log of all active journeys and automations, storing important code in repositories, and documenting functionality. These practices ultimately affect the bottom line, as reworking functionality can delay new campaigns and impact organizational goals.

Anthony Lamot: Absolutely. And I think it’s really interesting where you highlight the importance of avoiding technical debt and how automations running without being useful can impact performance. Let’s talk about the biggest challenge in the Marketing Cloud community that nobody is talking about.

Pato Sapir: I think learning continues to be the biggest challenge, partly due to the lack of access to tools for trial and error. Unless you pay for a license, it’s hard to learn Marketing Cloud. This was one of my motivations for creating MC Snippets, to give developers a way to learn. I would also like to see more content around strategy, like mapping out use cases and journey experiences, rather than just technical how-tos.

Anthony Lamot: Absolutely. What do you think are some of the best topics to follow in the Marketing Cloud ecosystem? What’s developing rapidly and interesting to follow?

Pato Sapir: I love seeing new perspectives and documentation on solving issues, like activating audiences from Data Cloud or extending the platform with WhatsApp. Seeing new faces contributing to the community with content, like mini-courses on SQL or using WhatsApp, excites me.

Anthony Lamot: That’s really nice to hear. Specifically, do you have thoughts on the recent announcement for the Marketing Cloud Growth edition?

Pato Sapir: It’s exciting that Salesforce is taking steps to unify the experience in one core platform, especially with Data Cloud. However, it seems like it will take a long time for Marketing Cloud Growth to match what Marketing Cloud Engagement can do. There are many steps to implement it, like setting up Data Cloud and updating permissions, which makes it feel like an initial MVP. I’d like to see a roadmap at Connections to understand where it’s headed.

Anthony Lamot: For sure. It’s always interesting to see how new products pan out. Lastly, what advice would you give to new marketers or trailblazers in the ecosystem?

Pato Sapir: Find support in the community. Connect with trailblazers, attend events, and join community groups. Don’t wait for a client project to get hands-on experience. Create your own use cases and practice on the platform. Making mistakes is the best way to learn.

Anthony Lamot: I totally agree. Getting your hands dirty is essential, especially with complex marketing automation. It’s often underestimated how complex it is. Pato, it’s been super interesting. Can’t wait to meet you again at some Salesforce events. Thank you for being on the show.

Pato Sapir: Awesome. Thanks, Anthony. See you soon.

Andrea: Yeah. I mean, I think, we bring just sort of a been there, done that expertise… because I mean there there are two types of knowledge that come in really handy during implementations. One is like the day-to-day like pressing the send button as you reference like day in and day out like how are you gonna be using the platform? And then there’s like the upfront configuration work. So, how to migrate data over, how to structure, like what fields on what objects, how to set up your campaign hierarchy? And I will say that some like one-time setup stuff, you may only get exposure if your client side, you may only get exposure to that like one two, three times in the span of your career. So whereas being a consultant, like we do that hundreds of times a year. So, I, we bring kind of both categories of expertise like we’ve walked in your shoes as a day-to-day user, but also like we’ve been through the implementation and best practice decisions during that process many times.

Anthony: I love that. And I think it’s just a great to point out that for some of these things, you definitely need the expert of the third party just because on the client’s side, you get only a few chances throughout your whole career, maybe to do actually in implementation. So it’s very hard to keep up with the tech, know, what works, what doesn’t I don’t follow this up with maybe a little bit more of a cheeky question, Andrea, if you don’t mind, but how do you decide what kind of organization makes it good or bad client?

Andrea: That’s a tough question. You know, I think I would say the vast majority of our past clients, we’ve been blessed that they fall into the good client camp where we have a really good report and like we get through the like even really tough projects we get through together and come out the other side with everybody feeling good and successful outcomes, in the bad client camp or the bad outcome camp. I guess I would say it’s really important to be realistic about what it’s gonna take to do a big complicated project. So, where I do see projects going south or folks being unhappy is if they walk in thinking this is gonna be a piece of cake. This is gonna take two to four weeks to implement.

And then they not really being willing to accept like, okay, this is actually a much bigger elephant than we virtually anticipated. So I’d say that realism is a very important aspect and also just maintaining open communication with your provider. So like trusting some of the things that they’re telling you, sharing as much information as you can to kind of inform the overall project plan. Those I would say are, the two biggest things.

Anthony: Yeah, we listen, realism and having good expectations, I think, is good on the client side, managing expectations. Also a skill that I remember was very available back in my consulting days.

Andrea: Yes.

Anthony: Right. I wonder, you know, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce, in general, the ecosystem develops so fast. There’s so many new features. And of course, the ecosystem as a whole mark like as a whole develops super fast. What are you to do up to date with the latest features updates? And I guess it will be interesting to know how you think about that for your team, for your organization? But I’m also curious, so to see, how do you do that personally?

Andrea: Okay. So in terms of like how to stay on top of updates, what I found is, I mean Salesforce always includes release notes with any new changes that they’re putting out. But that’s always like the like 10 percent of the story. Like, you have to really get hands on and try it and like hear from others that are using it to really get a sense of like, okay, this is gonna be super valuable or this is buggy, not really ready for public consumption yet. And so I find different user communities very helpful. So in the Pardot side of things, “Pardashians” is a Slack community that has amazing dialogue about what is and what isn’t working and How To SFMC on the Marketing Cloud side, great places to get ideas, and hear what’s new. LinkedIn, I have mixed feelings about LinkedIn. There’s some really good content out there, but it’s gotten kind of noisy. But there’s some good content out there that from time to time. But then in terms of like staying in touch like CEO level, like what’s changing in the broader ecosystem, like trends in business. I’m a member of two groups, one called EO (Entrepreneurs Organization), and one called YPO, Young Presidents Organization. And then also like I said CEO Round Table of a few other Salesforce companies. And, I find that just like peer-to-peer sharing, like what are you seeing? What are you hearing is like similarly like, you read headlines about, okay, here’s, what’s happening in the business world and sometimes they match, what your experience is as a CEO. And sometimes it’s like, yeah, I’m not really seeing that we saw that a bit last year with all the doom and gloom talk about the state of tech and the economy and like, our clients were thriving. And so like comparing notes with other CEOS and just saying like, okay, what are you seeing? Is this painting out this way for you or are you having a different experience is really helpful to just kind of gut check like what’s going on in the world?

Anthony: Tons of good advice. Just being more on the Marketing Cloud side, I would definitely second How To SFMC as a community and just the people behind are really nice. We had some of the people behind on the show already. And yeah, getting peer-to-peer network around yourself regardless of your role, definitely as a CEO to super helpful. Although I also agree that you have to be careful when you’re comparing notes benchmarks, or like benchmarks. And in the end, it’s what’s happening right in front of you and your business. That of course, is the real truth.

Andrea: Yeah. And, I feel like, in all of these spaces like you also have to be careful to find people who are gonna tell you the truth because a lot of times, I don’t know there’s definitely a persona of person who wants to look like they always have it together that the world is always perfect, that nothing bad is happening. And like to me, I find those people kind of exhausting. Like I really appreciate people who are willing to say like this is super hard or this isn’t working the way that I thought or like I’m having this issue with a client. And I’ve seen that happen in How To SFMC, same thing in Pardashians. So like finding a group of people that will be open and vulnerable and honest is super critical.

Anthony: Yeah, it makes total sense. Love how you said that when you think about… the future, of Salesforce for marketers, I’ll put it this way because I know you guys are working across different clouds. How do you think that the platform is going to evolve to meet the change needs of your clients?

Andrea: So, I’m super excited about, the vision for the Marketing Cloud road map like where things are gonna go in the future. And I see it being driven a lot by, the frenzy that was AI last year… like, the pitch that was painted at Dreamforce, and the pitch that many others are painting of, okay, you’re going to log into this marketing tool. It’s gonna tell you like this is the ideal customer for you to reach out to. It’s. Going to know like the next best product to suggest to them. It’s gonna use gen AI to like write your subject line and your campaign brief in your e-mail and it’s going to send it out and it’s gonna like notify customer service and it’s going to notify sales and analyze everything for you. And it’s all automated. I’ve been looking at stories like that and just thinking like whose data is that? Like whose systems are really that integrated to make a story like that possible? And so, what kind of, the latest news from Salesforce about Marketing Cloud growth in the idea of like building parts of Marketing Cloud on the core Salesforce platform. I really think that like connected vision is what’s driving it. So having shared infrastructure with the same tools that sales service commerce are using. It feels like the future direction, of the whole platform. And I’m really optimistic about it because, I would love to see our customers able to take full advantage of all that AI and some of these new advanced sets can do. But I think getting data connected is sort of the missing link to make all of that possible.

Anthony: I am also super excited about Marketing Cloud growth, the fact that it will finally be on Core and tapping into, you know, newer features such as those offered by Data Cloud. If you think about, it is something that was always lacking ever since the… ExactTarget and Pardot acquisition that became Marketing Cloud. And while to my knowledge that those acquisitions are still the best performing acquisitions for Salesforce, I saw that in the investor notes, I think last year… it’s also true that, you know, it comes with a lot of legacy and tons of integration work and it makes it harder to tap into the rest of the power of Salesforce too. So really exciting what Salesforce doing there? I think there’s a very interesting vision. What do you think will that mean for the customer base? Because they’re positioning it as B2B SMB. But we’ve all seen the price tag too. And then, you know, they already have a few products as well that do marketing. I know we’re getting a little bit on thin ice and it’s very speculative. But what are your thoughts on that if you care to share?

Andrea: Yeah. I think the two biggest hurdles that Salesforce is going to have with Marketing Cloud growth is one figuring out how to adopt the pricing model, and two figuring out how to roll their existing customer base like into the future of the platform. The pricing model, I don’t envy them that challenge because I mean, something that they have to think about is like right now they are competing in the B2B SMB space. So they have like other competitors there to benchmark against. But they are also giving customers access to data cloud which can come with like very heavy like actual consumption costs to Salesforce and they kind of need to balance like, all right, they got a price so that they can actually get into customers but not price so low that like they’re totally like getting their entire like value eaten by like actual Data Cloud consumption. So that’ll be kind of see how that evolves as they move up market and where they land with that pricing model because, I mean, we’ve also seen Data Cloud’s pricing model change several times already, in the short lifespan of that product is just a really hard challenge. And then with regards to like the existing customer base, I do think there’s gonna be confusion for a while on, okay, Marketing Cloud engagement, Marketing Cloud account engagement as Marketing Cloud Growth, like which of these three tools is right for me? And for existing customers, what I’ve heard is that their plan is to basically like as new features are released in growth, they’re giving existing customers access to those features. So the decision is less like when do I switch tools? And more like, okay, I’m grandfathered into these like cool new features. Is this something I’m ready to experiment with or not versus like having to redo contracts, change skews kind of thing.

Anthony: Yeah, definitely interesting challenges related to pricing. I know first hand for “tech heads”, it’s really interesting, really have to find out which parts of your product really provide value and then build your pricing around that. I do think you have a really good point when you say Marketing Cloud Growth because I mean I’m reading between the lines essentially you’re saying Marketing Cloud Growth might have somewhat of a higher pricing than competitors, but you’re getting so much more because you can tap into Data Cloud and that’s super powerful. And I think that is, you know, rightfully a competitive advantage that Salesforce has there. So we’ve talked a little bit about, the future of Salesforce. What about the future of Sercante? What do you envision for the future of your company as it continues to help others implement optimized Marketing Cloud, Pardot, and I’m assuming soon Marketing Cloud Growth as well?

Andrea: Yes. Yeah. So I don’t know if you saw that our website got a face lift last week and, we wrote figure out all the copy on the site, totally new brand, look and feel. And I think that kind of the next phase of our evolution is to date, we’ve been really focused on the needs of the marketer. So all things for marketers on a Salesforce platform. But what we’re increasingly seeing is that marketers, it’s no longer just like the marketing department that they influence and are responsible for. They’re getting into, okay, how does this influence sales? How does, our customers experience post-sale like factor into how we should be thinking about marketing? Are we doing customer advisory boards? How are we like building longterm loyal relationships? And so we’ve changed our messaging slightly to focus on like delivering seamless digital experiences for customers, recognizing that marketing is now sales marketing, customer service. And that’s the whole umbrella that marketers get involved in touching?

Anthony: Makes sense, if you look at, you know, from scale-ups to post IPO companies, a vast amount of revenue is. So in some cases half of revenue in a new year is basically expansion into existing accounts. I’m talking mainly from the B2B space, but you have similar trends in B2C. So just maintain the customer relationship is just a huge revenue driver and also more capital efficient typically. So I love the shift. It makes total sense. And I actually also saw the announcement that you guys wrote. You wrote a very thoughtful piece on what is behind the brand identity. So I’ll make sure to add that link, in the description of this of the show of this episode. Awesome. Andrea. Another thing that I’ve noticed on your background is that you’d like to give back and you’ve been heavily involved in the community. Can you tell a little bit more about that?

Andrea: Yeah, that’s a huge, I guess part of who I am and also something I think we built in to second culturally. One of our core values is generosity and we actively encourage our whole team being involved in the Salesforce community, but also like, the actual life communities where they live and work. And I guess like a few ways, that I get back. So like I think earlier in my career when I was just learning things or just figuring things out, like I would just reach out to ran of people on LinkedIn and say, like, hey, do you have time to grab coffee or can I pick your brain about xyz? And probably about 20 percent of those like they just said, yeah, sure. Like let’s do it. And so when I’m on the flip side of that, like when people reach out to me, I probably not 100 percent but pretty close to 100 percent of the time I say, okay, yeah, let’s chat. Let me see if I can put you in the right direction. So I guess that’s one way and then also getting involved in supporting other entrepreneurs. So, I think I mentioned EO, Entrepreneurs Organization. They have an accelerator program for businesses that are like just getting started and trying to scale up. So I’m entering other aspiring business leaders through there. And then also just again folks in the Salesforce community that a, that are starting their journey as an entrepreneur.

Anthony: Nice, really nice. I personally also like mentoring because I find that it helps crystallise my own thinking. So there’s definitely just, it feels good. It’s a good thing to do, to mentor, but there’s it’s also interesting at least to me that… it helps you see things more clearly because you just have to rephrase it in a way that makes sense. Is that something you recognize?

Andrea: 100 percent agree. It’s it’s fascinating to me how people process the same information in such different ways. So I…It’s also just great. Like, I feel like I get a lot of learning at in venturing others also because like you see how they’re seeing the worlds, the questions that they’re asking. And sometimes it’s just, it reminds you where, you have blindspots of your own.

Anthony: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, it’s very interesting. Well, we’re almost coming up on time here, but could you give us a sneak peek into some of the exciting plans you guys have for this year? Events? Anything else?

Andrea: We’ll definitely be at Connections. So, we always throw a big party there. So we’ll definitely be at that. Definitely looking forward to Dreamforce and our team will be at a lot of Dreamin’ events, World Tours, kind of ongoing things over the next few months. And then MarDreamin’, of course, is I always got to plug that, but that’s not gonna be until November. So, we got some time there. 

Anthony: MarDreamin’ is definitely a great plug, So glad you pointed that out. as for the World Tour events, and Connections and whatnot, I will just second that it’s a great party, the Sercante party, we will definitely be there as well. Andrea, it’s just been fantastic. I really appreciate your time on a Sunday by the way. I hope to see you soon.

Andrea: Thank you!

Jyothsna Bitra: Hoping to see advancements on that front.

Anthony Lamot: Yeah, yeah. And I’m sure we’ll see a lot more and especially with so much effort in the Marketing Cloud space of Salesforce going towards the Data Cloud which sits more on their… the same platform. The CRM sits. I’m sure we’ll have more capabilities there too. So, hey, JB, you’re wearing this very awesome hoodie, those in the ecosystem will know as, the Golden Hoodie. So, can you tell a little bit more about how did you earn this illustrious Salesforce Golden Hoodie?

Jyothsna Bitra: So… there is no secret recipe for this Anthony. To my knowledge, nobody knows who is going to get, who will get, but my understanding is that someone who has shown who has been outgoing, helping out people, has shown their leadership capabilities and learning capabilities. I think they are the ones who can be identified as the Golden Hoodie recipe recipient. But as I have heard from people just like contrary to the MVP MVP, we have some set standards like generosity expertise and leadership and so on. But for the Golden Hoodie, I think it’s for the people who go out and help people and who have been leaving an example of a Trailblazer.

Anthony Lamot: Yeah, I think that makes sense. And we’ve had a few other Golden Hoodies on the show including people like Kaelan Moss, who do a lot of things. I would say educational, right? They put out a lot of content on how to, you know, how to learn to work with Marketing Cloud. On that notice. I also notice that you are the founder of the Marketing Cloud Learning Camp. Do you think that has something to do with the Golden Hoodie maybe?

JB: Maybe. So a few years ago, I started helping out the women Trailblazers, the even the Trailblazers-like women who were in a break or who haven’t started their carrier. So those are the people who I knew through my community neighborhoods. So I found a need for the women to get together, have a support system. So that’s how it’s all started. So. And then, I extended it and introduced Salesforce. And I have continuously done some sessions every weekend where I introduced to the head and we did some modules together. I help them clear the certifications. And it makes me very proud to see the success of the people who never thought they can go out and they can explore the world of opportunities. So whatever progress that they make, whatever success they have achieved, it feels so great to feel that I’m also a little part of it. So that, that’s one thing which I think which qualifies me for the Golden Hoodie and that deal continued so with the Marketing Cloud. And as you rightly said, MC Learning Camp. So I started it to help the people learn the Marketing Cloud. So when I started it, it’s like three years ago, there were not many resources for somebody who wants to learn Marketing Cloud. So from that time on, I’ve been continuously doing some boot camps and the various topics. So the journey is continuing and, it makes me feel very glad so that the purpose of my life, whatever I think that it’s a purpose for live purpose driven life. So seeing the success of the people, like I see some posts on the LinkedIn or people reaching out to me saying that they have cleared the certification or they are venturing, they’re starting their learning in the Marketing Cloud and they go to place, is the YouTube videos that I have been posting or the MC learning camp sessions that I’ve been doing. So it’s ultimate satisfaction for me. So all the efforts that I have spent, I feel like it’s worth spending.

Anthony Lamot: That’s fantastic. There’s a few things actually there you said are really interesting in word exploring more, maybe we can start by on the women Trailblazer group that you refer to. Can you just for the audience they’re say, explain a little bit more what that group is about? And what I would personally be really interested to know is obviously, most people working in tech or male, right? I think even at Salesforce, and they’re above industry standard. There’s about 34 percent women at my company. It’s about one third which again, is pretty good concern considering the industry as a whole, but of course, it’s still a far cry from being truly equal, in the sense of being 50 50 split between male and female. So, as a, you know, as a founder and executive, I would also be personally interested in learning what strategies you found to be successful in getting women more excited about a tech, or just making women successful, in a tech role?

Jyothsna Bitra: So when I got the thought of starting a group, I have seen the troubles and the hardships faced up by people who have integrated to the U.S. and also someone who is dependent for everything, at least if they wanna go outside of if they want to purchase something, they are coming into a new country and also having language barriers and also cultural differences. It’s hard to go out and do anything of their, on their own. So, I have seen many sad stories. So, the intention of starting the group, I was initially to provide a support system, so to gather at least once in a week, give a friendly support that’s how it started. So. And then it started with knowledge sharing some sessions. And then I thought why not Salesforce because I was working on the Salesforce core at that time. No, I was working on the Marketing Cloud, but I was helping out different people on the Salesforce. So I thought why not introduce them? They’re very, there’s a long way to go for them to actually think of taking a job. But then I thought why not introduce, and then people who are interested who can spend some time, they can pursue that. So I started spending some time, I see a lot of interest. And, I also observed that the people who weren’t break and people who were trying to come out of their situation, so they have more passion they were, they will be ready to do any kind of hard work. So I have seen that personally and the women that I have helped, they have spent days and nights even without taking a break in between spending 19 hours a day investing on the head modules, learning and clearing the certifications. So I was very much in admiration for them what the hardware they have been putting. So I believe in that, the Karma philosophy, right? So if we put in the hard work, the results will eventually come. So they have done their hard work and the situation came that at my work position I was… I found some opportunities open opportunities and I help them join us the interns. And then they were working now in IBM and some great companies. So it’s…

Anthony Lamot: They started as interns?

Jyothsna Bitra: The, they started as a Salesforce developers and then they’re not working in good companies. So what I have seen different with this group of people is the passion and the commitment and the hard work. So they really and especially with the women. The more dedicated, I wouldn’t classify the women and the man. But what I have seen in my personal experience is they’re ready to go out to break the sale glass ceiling and then spending extra time and effort to achieve what they plan for.

Anthony Lamot: Yeah, it’s almost as if, the women who consciously and intentionally do that are… maybe you can be at an advantage compared to their male counterpart just because there’s so much more driven, and they do a purpose and with intent and they know also what they’re up against. So they’re kind of better braised for the battle so to speak, if that makes sense to you.

Jyothsna Bitra: That, that exactly makes sense Anthony.

Anthony Lamot: I also like how you mentioned working away with interns. It, it just caught my attention because when we were still a start up initially and we were a bootstrap company for a while, so we had absolutely zero money. It even took a long time before I started paying myself a salary. We DESelect, and we started working with interns initially as well because in Europe, there’s a great program call called the Erasmus program and it’s for 10 interns to go abroad. I did it too when I was a student. So that might Co-Founder, Jonathan. And so we thought this could be a funny way. And actually that was one of the things that really accelerated us as a company to start even though obviously had to train them a lot. And for some of them, it was the first time working in a company. It was so cool, to get a sense of all these people, you know, are learning, they’re growing in their roles, are growing as people. It’s, very satisfying. And on that note, you in passing alluded to purpose early kinda curious. What is your purpose? Because it sounds like you are definitely a woman with purpose. You mentioned getting great satisfaction out of seeing people learn and so on. So, would you say you have a specified purpose or how do you think about that?

Jyothsna Bitra: I would say in my family especially my dad used to give a lot of stress importance to education. So always used to say that of all, the things that you give to the people to share with the people knowledge is the is of utmost valuable because it is not something which will be spoiled or it is not something which we give it to somebody who is not worthy of it. So, I invested so much in the education and also helping out. And initially when I just started out my job and I just started my little earnings, I used to help out students who were having some difficulties in the finances. So I used to give the money and later I was helping in different ways in the, I was part of various nonprofits and, years. So was I was helping on different ways, different platforms but not really like going ahead and teaching someone. But then as I’m already in the Salesforce ecosystem then I thought why not teach somebody? Why not help people make their careers? Because it’s like it’s like helping them changing their life. So from where I started to how it’s changed, I pivoted to helping people more with the Salesforce and running the sessions. So I see the direct results as well. So if giving money, they may use it or not use it or they may be more, they may be dedicated or not. But with the Salesforce and these sessions, I can easily make out who is really interested. And if I’m really spending time on the worthy people or not. And, and also seeing directly the results of what my efforts have been link.

Anthony Lamot: Of course, of course. And, and… I think there’s something very candid what you said about people wary, of the knowledge and teaching because it’s so much more energy giving working with people just absorb everything like a sponge and are really driven to learn. Whereas if you’re talking with people who are just not motivated to learn, that can be very draining and this kind of the opposite of what you want. But now also understanding your motivation for education and knowing how much importance you attach to this kind of explains probably why you have, I think 16 Salesforce certificates. Is that right?

Jyothsna Bitra: I think it’s 19?

Anthony Lamot: Okay. Yeah. Then I think then because I saw it on your LinkedIn profile, but I think you’ve been scoring a few more than since you had.

Jyothsna Bitra: Yeah, I updated. So I think all almost all of the places just say 16.

Anthony Lamot: Sure. Okay. So this is the first time that the audience knows that you actually have 19 already. Do, do you have already have an idea what will be your twentieth certificate? Because I assume you’re not going to stop?

Jyothsna Bitra: I’m planning to give one by this year end. So I have one month, not even one month. So, I hope I can clear it. So I have the date scheduled. So I have to see.

Anthony Lamot: Okay. And which one is it?

Jyothsna Bitra: Integration architect.

Anthony Lamot: Integration architect. All right. Well, I wish you good luck. I hope that I don’t know if you take a holiday break, but I hope you’ll find some time, to study for it.

Jyothsna Bitra: Thank you. So I’m just banking on the holiday time, so I get some free time at that time.

Anthony Lamot: Great. Yeah, there’s a way to do it. So moving from education to your actual project work throughout your career. What would you say was, your most interesting, maybe your most fun project specifically for Marketing Cloud that you’ve done so far?

Jyothsna Bitra: It’s hard to say which one is the, because I see each project comes its own challenges. So I can say the projects which I worked on the healthcare because given the security and… safety that we need to follow. So that’s one thing which I found challenging. And also some of the projects that I worked on the data and the tools, the complexity of the tools that are being used, and the number of marketing tools that are being used. As we see here in marketing landscape, we have like 13,000 plus marketing tools available. I have come across a client ones using 300 plus marketing tools and at least some of them, at least 10 of them were integrated with the Marketing Cloud. So they wanted to even they were frustrated about so many tools. And if somebody on board the need for the new person to get a client to get trained on all these tools is also go ahead. So they were also frustrated with the number of tools used and the number of places they have to go to get some information. So they were planning to optimize the usage of the Marketing Cloud. So that’s when I was on that project helping them find out which one they can get rid of and which one is the optimum that can stay. So that’s something. Because while working as a consultant, different projects, different tools, and also the migration from different tools. When we’re migrating from a different tool, we need to understand that tool as well. Besides working on the Marketing Cloud. And if that is a mature organization, if they have invested so much, they have already performing so much of sense. I using the marketing tool, it’s very hard to switch to migrate as well considering all the data, all the tracking information, and all the campaigns getting migrated. And also making sure that the live sense are not impacted. So they have to go as planned as scheduled. So that’s something which I felt challenging and any more just to talk a few the migration projects I feel are somewhat challenging.

Anthony Lamot: For sure, for sure. And so this one project that you alluded to, I think was really interesting if I understood correctly, you have one client that had more than a whopping 300 more tech tools in house. And was the goal of that project to get rid of some of those tools, and migrate functionality and campaigns to the Marketing Cloud. Was that the idea?

Jyothsna Bitra: Yes, kind of, so they were having or they were having Marketing Cloud and for SMS, they were using something else and were advertising, they were using something else and for analytics unit. So, some of the external tool. So it’s like multiple places. I, it’s hard just to think about it. I’m going to multiple places. It’s it’s hard to envision that as well. So the plan was to get rid of some of the ones optimize the usage of the Marketing Cloud.

Anthony Lamot: And could you help us understand a little bit like how do you, how do you approach such a project? Could you walk me through like the different phases and some of the biggest challenges, in those phases that, you came across, you already mentioned when you have to migrate away from one tool to the next, you also have to kind of have to know what that tool does, but just affect that. They had so many different tools in house doing so many different things. How did you? Yeah, how did you tackle such a project?

Jyothsna Bitra: It involved a lot of discussions, a lot of meetings. And also you may have experienced this while working on different projects. When people are working as a team, so many stakeholders will be involved and it will be hard to get a buy in from everyone. So some people will be for it and some people will be against it and pulling all the people together and convincing them and explaining them the benefits of moving over from one tool to another tool. One thing which I have faced big challenge is people don’t want to migrate, they get used to some one tool. And even though they know the advantages of migrating to, the advanced tool, they’ll be hesitation or they will be, there will be a lack of resistance. I mean, like they’ll be resistance to move to the other tools. So that’s one thing which I have seen so with a lot of discussions and then proper planning ahead of the meetings, what kinds of information that we need. And also for me, it was challenging as I mentioned before to learn, I learned a lot of tools, marketing tools. It’s like a high level knowledge of what each tool does and how integrated with the Marketing Cloud and how that data is all flowing through from one system to another system. So that background work and I have spent some time to research and what each tool does and in the companies context and how they’re utilizing it and what feature they’re actually using it. It’s not necessary that they’re using all the features of a specific tool even though they have it’s like they have budget and they purchase the tool but they’re not using all the benefits of what the tool can do. So they were using only a few features of the tool. So what features are being used? What data is being used? That’s also something which I have analyzed and then putting together everything and comparing giving them the pros and cons of a specific tool, what can stay? What cannot need not stay? And it also required some effort on convincing different teams. So multiple meetings, I say again, so different teams were involved and convincing them and explaining them. So finally we were able to provide some recommendations and some were taken and some as I said, resistance were there. So maybe in the future they may finally choose to migrate again.

Anthony Lamot: Super interesting. Yeah. Some of the things you said were super recognizable. I think one of the first things you mentioned in getting people around the table having meetings and getting alignment, I would say getting they’re buying one great consultant that I once used once worked for, sorry, he used to phrase “coalition building” especially in the larger enterprise organization where you would try to identify one or two people who really want to get align with the project. And then from there a few other people, a few other people. So that by the time he actually got to the big meeting, everyone was actually already on the same page. The coalition had already been built and, they didn’t have to be convinced them or within the meeting. I thought that was really insightful. It was almost like probably a good course on how to be a politician. The, the other thing, that you said to is people get used to tools. There’s just massive resistance to change. So was that something was that strong in that project? To the want to 300 something tools where people are just very attached to their old tools. 

Jyothsna Bitra: What I noticed was there was only one particular team which do not want to move, but all the other teams involved. Now five other teams. They were pro for it and they were actually supporting, they were actually pushing it to get the buy in. But for that one specific team, they do not want to because they were already frustrated that they had to learn so many tools. And now that they learned one specific tool, they got used to it. And now they have to go and learn the other tool. And under the Marketing Cloud, the common challenge that people face that what I heard frequently is that the UI marketing cloud has, it makes it difficult for people to learn if let’s say Pardot or any other app that sits on the Salesforce, if they’re used to work on the Salesforce, it’s easy for them. The knowledge is not too much, but for somebody who is starting with Marketing Cloud, the UI is completely different and the process as well is different. So they have some hard time learning and that’s where I felt the teams do not want to start using Marketing Cloud.

Anthony Lamot: Yeah. Also something that I have experienced at a project working in the past, and still something we control with DESelect. Obviously because, we replace one of the most technical parts, with some of our solutions and we make it a little easier, to understand. But I think, you know, this is just a kind of trade off you have in a platform as powerful as Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It is a Ferrari and you can do so many things with it, but you have to learn how to drive it. Otherwise, yeah, you’re not going to be able to, and I think, yeah, that’s just the downside of having such a powerful platform.

Jyothsna Bitra: Yeah. And, and we have a distributed marketing. So we went that route and we provided them the options and the capabilities of distributed marketing and the flexibility of using that within the Salesforce UI itself. So it worked out. So… for one client, we proposed distributed marketing and, that was taken, and for another client, so they have the similar issue. So they have a big team. What we have done for them is they wanted some other advanced capabilities more than what distributed marketing can do. So they wanted to create emails. They wanted to have the flexibility to choose between different journeys, the multi step journeys, and also add the campaign members from everything within the Salesforce. So what I marketing can do plus lot more. So that is all done as customization on the Salesforce with a lot of communication happening between the Marketing Cloud and Salesforce and for the SMS they were using and the tool. So it’s like Salesforce is the data source and Marketing Cloud is only used as the sending engine. And on the customization, they were able to do from within the Salesforce itself. And they don’t even need to log into the marketing cloud for the distributed marketing. Some admin has to be there in the Marketing Cloud, and they have to set up the journeys. They have to create the e-mail with some dynamic content. So the people on the Salesforce, they can go and choose between different elements. But with the customization in the Salesforce, there’s more flexibility on those parts.

Anthony Lamot: Yes, for sure. I’ve seen that setup to happen before where the maybe not necessarily master data management but at least, the master of record and the core data is kept in the CRM. And, a lot more automation can be built in the CRM. Obviously then in Marketing Cloud. And then Marketing Cloud is almost like an execution channel as there may be other channels too, for communication. To… now, one thing that I started to wonder about JB while we were talking is kind of, how does your brain work to dissect a new market tool? Because I’m here, I’m thinking well, you have 19 certifications. You’ve done many of these projects where they had many… there are tools before Marketing Cloud to which you sometimes have to migrate. And as you mentioned, you do have to kind of understand what these tools do. So given the fact that you’ve been exposed and had to investigate so many tools. I wonder if you have some kind of methodology or some method I’m basically trying to figure out like how does your brain work? If I, you know, show you a new tool tomorrow? How do you approach that? And, and this is something other people can learn, and use, for their own project work?

Jyothsna Bitra: There’s no secret formula, Anthony. I would say YouTube. So if I want on high level overview, I would just go and watch some videos. So it depends on the type of integration the tool has with the Marketing Cloud. So earlier, I was working on migration of the campaigns from responses to the Marketing Cloud.

I needed an indepth, understanding of how everything is organized within responses, how everything works in the responses. So I have to go a step further and see more videos and try it for myself in the responses system or, and… have to figure out what just like the way we have different data extensions and e-mail at one place and the journey in a different place and the responses as well. The data is all scattered. So it’s not that easy to navigate there and understand the things. But by the end of the project, I got a good handle that that’s what I believe I learned some new tool. If I were to start creating some emails and the responses or do some sequel or set something up in the responses, I can say, I can do, I can start with. So my go to place will be YouTube and any other tool specific learning content also is there. So I would go and check that.

Anthony Lamot: Okay, great. Yeah, I think it makes all sense by the way. But sometimes, the most simple solutions are the best. So thanks for sharing that, we have one other thing except for, you know, doing Marketing Cloud projects. We have one other thing in common that is that we are about Salesforce user group leaders and I believe you’re the Phoenix Salesforce user group leaders. So I was kinda curious what’s been your most fun get together or your most, your favorite memory of, you know, being a group leader?

Jyothsna Bitra: There are many actually. But the inaugural event is always the most memorable and also the inaugural boot camp. So I started doing the administrator boot camp. I think it’s in 2019 or 2020. So when I started, it was my first time handling that such a big event, it was like a 12 days session happening every alternate day. And then when I started with, I got 100 registrations and in just one day, it reached 300 or 400. And I was, I started wearing at that time. So, I am that kind of person who do not want to say no for somebody who wants to learn who are passionate to learn. So that made me worry that I had to say no to the people who wants to attend the boot camp. So it was like in 24 hours, it was like the thing I continuously kept, it kept receiving the messages notifications that registrations are happening and this much of count is happening. So the end of the day, it made me worried. So, I did not, at that time, I did not know, how to say no to the people?

So, Linda was there for my support and she helped me out with the first boot camp. So I was very nervous at that time handling so many. Such a big audience also was, it made me a bit nervous. So Linda was there for each and every session and she provided a lot of support. So it was the most memorable. And the other boot camps, it’s just the same way they follow this week.

Anthony Lamot: All right. And, and in the end, how many people actually took the boot camp of all those registered people?

Jyothsna Bitra: The first station, I saw a lot of attendance and, by the time we reached the last day of the boot camp, I see the attendance decline. But the first one is-

Anthony Lamot: Normal, of course.

Jyothsna Bitra: Yeah, 75 percent admins or something.

Anthony Lamot: Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. Well, I didn’t realize you guys, it’s such a big boot camps link to the user group. Was there a special occasion for that? Or was that, where did the idea come from?

Jyothsna Bitra: So I took the admin certification at that time, Marketing Cloud Administrator. And then I, I’m already leading the group and I thought that why not have a session for people who wants to give the certification? Maybe I can share some tips. So it was a joint meeting with Atlanta user group on my group. So I gave a session that was just one hour. Then I thought one hour isn’t just enough to cover the whole aspect of the Marketing Cloud. So the, no, I thought why not take complete full-fledged boot camp that can be helpful for people who wants to learn Marketing Cloud as well. So administrator is something which a beginner also can start with. If they want to learn Marketing Cloud, they can start with the administration concepts. So that can be helpful for both for the beginners and for the people who wants to clear the certifications. So that started like that. So that, the initial idea was to do one session and it turned out to be 12 sessions.

Anthony Lamot: That’s amazing. So it just game very organically and then it kinda started to live of its own. It seems well, very, I mean, very impressive. Great job on that. I’m kinda curious, on a somewhat different note, you, you’ve alluded to having to work with SQL before and you’ve seen marketers work on different projects with Marketing Cloud, you know, at different companies, are there some uncommon use cases where you’ve seen marketers successfully use unique segmentation strategies or a different way to as it is, you know, have you seen very interesting targeting or segmentation being built at customers? It’s it’s a subject that, you know, for us at DESelect, where we have a segmentation solution on the Appexchange. It’s it’s a topic that interests us a lot that’s us a lot.

Jyothsna Bitra: Yeah. As we are talking about that, I like my, Segment and the Engage as well. How the tool has been helping. I have seen some clients use the Engage and Segment. And I myself use Search to find out data extensions. It is as I have to say, and this is, this tool is like savior when I want to find some data extensions and there were a large number of data extensions out there on a complicated folder structure. So apart from that, I have seen clients, it varies from client to client, but I have seen clients using segmentation on a granular level to identify the people. So I have seen a client who sends out the e-mail or who do their service based on, the conditions and based on the type of insurance or the type of vehicle they have. So, in such scenarios, segmenting on the location and on the weather depending on the weather. And also based on their licenses based on their subscription level. And also the kind of a it’s something that makes it complicated. And I have the invalid, apart from, DESelect Search… I found the tools within in the Marketing Cloud. The features also help for the segmentation features. Apart from the Salesforce, the SQL, the engagement split to analyze opens and clicks, and also the Einstein features that are available out there. And for clients who have integrations with the person, MCP, the personalization, I have seen, they have effectively used the segmentation in the personalization and then get that data integrated into the Marketing Cloud and run the journeys from the Marketing Cloud.

Anthony Lamot: Yeah. Interesting. I like how you first off, thank you for the compliment for our products, much appreciated. But then, yeah, there are some of these interesting features in Marketing Cloud that you kinda can also use for segmentation. Like within like an engagement split is one way of doing it. The other thing you mentioned briefly is Einstein that’s a great. Let’s say bridge to the next question. There’s been so much a I innovation within Salesforce, but obviously also outside of it with open a, I really leading the efforts, but other companies like Google and Microsoft quickly catching up or following, you know, pursuing the same thing? This is a hard question but I don’t think anyone can really have the answer. But how do you think marketing will change? Or how will marketing teams look like maybe a year to three years from now with everything that’s happening in AI.

Jyothsna Bitra: I’m very hopeful of what comes in the future with all the advancements already happening in Marketing Cloud. All these features being added so quickly. I’m hopeful that many more changes are to come. And I’m hoping for something like a I driven automation with streamlines the entire marketing operations. So just like the way we have the journey templates provided within the Marketing Cloud, I am envisioning something like a whole end to end process, right? From starting a campaign to all the steps that goes within the campaign, the e-mail creation, the AB testing, the Journey creation, the analytics and all the steps that goes in between. So I am hoping some process will be there so easily. Even if begin a, we do not have much knowledge. We’ll be able to set up the code is taken care, the e-mail bills not taken care. So that, that’s what I am envisioning. So even I am excited to see and can’t wait to see what the future holds.

Anthony Lamot: So, so an end to end process for a campaign. So I wonder what that feature would look like? Would it be something like a prompt where I would say, so for instance, if I wanted to use this kind of automation for my own company? And for instance, we recently just announced, our MOP. So I could just say something like, hey, Marketing Cloud, build me a campaign for our MOP, and this is what it’s about and maybe give a description. And then Marketing Cloud would maybe make a journey with seven emails, and select audience and everything. Is that how you envision it, or do you imagine something different?

Jyothsna Bitra: Something similar to that, Anthony. So just like the way we have journey templates for someone who not have…, a basic plan of the journey structure, how it should like, look like they can start with the template and see what they can include, what they can update the same way for a campaign. It could be something like the whole process listed and the end user can select what steps they want and what steps they can eliminate. And also just like an in ap guidance, it can provide some assistance saying this will be helpful. And this feature is something which can optimize the campaign effectiveness. I’m thinking something on those lines.

Anthony Lamot: Sounds very interesting. Yeah. We’ve also been thinking a lot about overall campaign planning especially, with DESelect Engage which now has a big campaign planning feature. It will be kinda cool to have a like a button that so could kind of reorganize their whole campaign planning too. So. And then if you could combine those two ideas, you can get this and state where maybe the whole end to end process of a campaign, is AI generated. I don’t doubt it would still be human involved to QA to make sure that the best potential answers images are taken and there’s no like kind of hallocinations, in what the AI is providing. But then once you have those things and, you multiply the number of times and you also need to have the constant overview and so having some AI driven capabilities that could completely reorganize your planning so that you get the highest amount of conversions because campaigns are nicely spread out and people are not over such rate. I think that’s super exciting. I think that’s really going to be, it’s going to allow us to turn people in marketing operations into, you know, marketing, super heros because it’s going to be, you know, tremendous power.

Jyothsna Bitra: Yeah. So people need not spend much time learning Marketing Cloud. They just need to learn some of the main places where they can go and customize

Anthony Lamot: All that’s left then is just being a great marketer. That will be, that will be fantastic. Maybe a last question before, we round up the interview. So because we have been eluding a bit of and talking quite a bit about the technical side of things. But while people in marketing operations, marketing automation are more typically maybe associated with the technical side of things, the soft skills that they need to be successful, the leadership skills that they need to be successful or also super important. What do you think are these skills? Soft skills, leadership skills that you need to drive in these kinds of roles?

Jyothsna Bitra: I would say as a marketer, it’s very important to be empathetic, resilient and also very important to be at adaptive. So we have seen the pandemic, and we have learned so many lessons from that to be to encourage option, be flexible and creative. So that, I feel as a marketer, it’s very important to be creative and adaptive and flexible enough and be able to pivot whatever the situation is.

Anthony Lamot: So, I heard being adaptive super important and I really like that you also start your answer by saying being empathetic. I think that’s really great parting advice. So, JB, thank you so much for making the time and coming on to show. Has been a pleasure talking with you and just learning more about your background and what you’ve seen in the industry. So, thanks for your time.

Anthony Lamot: Happy to be here, Anthony. Thanks for having me.

Anthony Lamot: No, I definitely recognize that feeling. I don’t do any coding anymore these days.

But in the early days for DESelect, even I did and it, it’s definitely a good medium to enter that state of flow as psychologists would call it. And I do think by the way as it as a, you know, a little side, no, I do think even the best engineers have to do this kind of trial art or something to that works organic. I don’t think anyone can just, you know, A to Z type out a whole piece of functional code that will be probably like a freak of a person. Yes. But what I’ve always found helpful is to, rather than just starting to come up with a good architecture breakdown functionality into modules and then work my way through those modules. And, and when you de, structured like that, then… there’s a lot less frustration, and iterations afterwards.

Aaron Beatty: Yeah, yeah. I would agree with that. I, I’m not always as good at doing that, but I definitely have a smoother workflow, when I have a properly documented plan with requirements and, you know, goals and, you know, pseudo code prior to just kinda hopping in. And then, you know, saving early and often and saving iterations, of codes so that I can go back a step or two if I need to or if I break something, I’m just not always as good at being that organized. And sometimes I just want to hop in and get my hands dirty.

Anthony Lamot: Sure. Well, I still have to stay with this example of this project a little bit long because I’m kinda curious what kind of, what do the data architecture look like? Because I’m trying to sort of imagine what do you need to do a communication like that? So presumably, you need to store per customer their most favorite product categories. So that is based on purchase data, maybe with some sequel updates into a table. But then you want to personalize based on layer product. So do you load a product catalog and does that, is that linked to a content?

Aaron Beatty: Yeah. So I mean, I think you, I think you kinda talked it out there. So it’s largely that. So, the main thing that you need, is a product catalog and, you know, if that catalog has, you know, predefined categories. So like, in their implementation, I think they had like, you know, there’s like patriotic tee shirts, there are like music T-shirts. There are tee shirts by like keywords. So like, you know, if you search for teacher, you might get a, you know, a bunch of T-shirts for what it’s like to be a teacher. And if it’s if you search for engineer, then you might get a bunch of different kinds of funny shirts for engineer. So it was a lot of like keyword based products in a product catalog. And then they always had an image that they would show on their website for all the T-shirts. So I had access as to all of that. So between that and, the transactional data that’s really it. And then, and then the sequel is just looking for each person, their last X purchases and then looking at the categories of T-shirts that they purchased, and then trying to kind of discern their top, you know, however many categories based on whatever it is that we’re trying to do. So sometimes you can just use that… implicit preference based on what they’re purchasing. I have had some situations that are kinda similar to that where we’ve been able to combine the transactional… data along with the preference data from their like preference center, and then combine that with their viewing data based on like the things that they’re looking at on the website and then trying to kind of combine all of that through a series of SQL queries, or what have you to try to kinda guess the top things that somebody might be interested in. And usually, you know, the longer ago that they did that the less impact it’s going to have on your final scores and that kind of stuff. So you can make it as complicated as you want to. But it’s usually some semblance, of those pieces of data that you re-combine into an e-mail…

Anthony Lamot: It’s also interesting that you can combine implicit and explicit preferences. And I would wonder then what actually makes more impact if you would, afterwards, if you would like  AB test it and see if people respond more to their explicit or implicit preferences. I’m gonna guess implicit.

Aaron Beatty: Yeah, probably, yeah, because I think, you know, it’s hard to get really granular when you’re doing explicit because, you know, you can, you only want to show so many options on your page like you wouldn’t want, like if we go back to the Teespring example and let’s say they’ve got a 1,000 categories of T-shirts, you know, you’re not going to have them sift through all 1,000 categories and say, yeah, I like cowboy merchandise and my wife’s a teacher. So I like teacher stuff or, you know, like that’s gonna be really hard to find but you might be like, well, they like T-shirts versus hats. So like you might be able to combine the more broad categories with their implicit… either browsing behavior or abandoned shopping cart type stuff plus the stuff that they actually bought. And, and I think the thing that’s hard with that to really get right, which probably nobody does is like when is somebody gonna buy something one time for a specific use versus that’s the thing that they like to buy? You know, like if I’m on if I’m on the home shopping page and I bought a set of sheets or something like that, that’s probably not going to be something I’m gonna buy all the time. It doesn’t mean I just love buying sheets. It means I needed to set of sheets. I bought them. Now, I’m done with that. I don’t wanna keep getting emails about my next favorite sheets because I just bought them. So like it’s hard to, sometimes it’s hard, to square those edges and figure out… what’s actually gonna make sense in the ultimate e-mail and that’s it’s probably impossible to get right right now, but you can, you know, kinda take a stab at it.

Anthony Lamot: Now for Teespring, they probably constantly have new content available. So how do you make sure that you can actually show the last category winners, to those customers? Is it integrate with some kind of external CMS or is there like a process of constantly updating the latest image for the coolest new shirts? How does that work?

Aaron Beatty: Yeah. I think… this has been, it’s been a hot second. So I don’t remember all the details for them specifically, but generally speaking, you know, if we’re looking at top products, you know, it’s likely not going to include anything that’s brand new because there needs to be data to support that. It’s a hot product meaning enough purchase history or whatever to say. Okay, this is a thing that people like. And so it ends up just being, you know, in Marketing Cloud parlance, it ends up being a data extension that’s getting updated every, you know, probably a day or two with the current most popular items of the different categories. And then you take it from there. So that’s at least how that one worked to my recollection.

Anthony Lamot: All right. Thanks for sharing. We’ll talk about hot products. Let’s shift the conversation a bit to all the stuff we heard at Dreamforce. Salesforce has and continues to make major investments in their data cloud. That’s the name of their CDP, formerly known as genie, formerly known as Salesforce CDP, formerly known as Salesforce 360. But where do you ultimately see Data Cloud going? What do you think about that product category? And what do you see in the market?

Aaron Beatty: Yeah. I mean bringing it to specifically Data Cloud or Data Cloud for marketing. I think it’s definitely where they are wanting to bring the product. I mean, it certainly seems like they’re making a lot of investment into that tool and… I hate to say at the expense of, a, like marketing cloud engagement or something like that, but it does kinda seem like a lot of the energy and, you know, the new AI based tools and, you know, marketing GPT and all that it, you would expect it, I think to be in Marketing Cloud engagement or Marketing Cloud account engagement. And instead it’s in Data Cloud. So definitely they’re making a push to make that platform really attractive. And, you know, announcing that you can now get what amounts to a free trial, of the Data Cloud and kind of taking a look at it basically giving people, you know, their first taste is free for that. You know, the downside of that product right now is that it’s not an inexpensive license and it, it’s at current is really, it seems to me like it’s mostly a way, to solve for how difficult it can be in Marketing Cloud to get segments. And so, it’s a way for Salesforce to sell a product to make that part, of another one of their products a little easier to use. But they are, you know, rapidly advancing, the capability of that tool and I think, the kind of end user… the way that it’s being framed is more, you know, you’ve got your CRM data, but your CRM data is and everything you’ve also got data on the web and you’ve got data based on your social networks, and you’ve got data from all of your advertising. And so you’ve got all these pieces of data in addition to CRM and that, that’s a place where you can bring it all together and create profiles and kind of flatten the data and then activate it through journeys or through… let’s see what it’s called now Marketing Cloud personalization… or back into CRM and so… I don’t know. I’m really torn on it. I think it’s gonna grow into a thing that’s gonna be really attractive for folks, but it’s a little bit of a hard sell at the moment for at least most of the smaller organizations. It’s you know, it’s a pretty big lift.

Anthony Lamot: That’s fair. I think. And for those more well-versed in the Salesforce ecosystem, we all know that Salesforce platform really consist of often different infrastructure, different databases because of the acquisitions it has done over the years. What I do find exciting is that there’s going to be, well, hopefully you’ll become a common ground for all these platforms which will make integration a lot easier if not just completely unnecessary in case of certain capabilities. But I think there’s still some where, you know, there’s still some road to be travel before we get there.

Aaron Beatty: Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think, for those of us that rely on this ecosystem for our livelihood, it’s still an open question for where we should be investing our time and effort and, you know, training and, you know, certifications and all that kind of stuff like where are things headed? It definitely, you know, just based on the things that Salesforce has been saying, it definitely feels like data cloud is one of those areas where, you know, to your point, it’s a common ground for development and, you know, the newer stuff is all coming out of, that same platform. So, I think that’s where things are headed. But man, there’s just so much existing technical structure and depth in all of these other tools that for Salesforce as a company, I don’t know how they begin to bring all that stuff together… but yeah, I think that’s going to be an important part of, their strategy.

Anthony Lamot: Absolutely. Another thing we heard a little about a Dreamforce is AI, it was kinda hard to escape that phrase. You already alluded to the phrase earlier to start a conversation although maybe were you were rather referring to your personal use of AI, I’m not sure.

Aaron Beatty: I mean, it’s definitely right now, it’s definitely the buzz word dire, right? And, you know, my standing joke was walk around and go, who’s AI? Why does everybody keep talking about AI? But yeah, I mean, yeah, it’s inescapable, it’s definitely blown up obviously in the last year with chat GPT and then all the other tools, that have come around as a result. I am of the opinion, that it’s I think it will get us to a place where we can really do that one-to-one marketing engagement. And I think it’s really gonna expedite… that transition like I, you know, I referred earlier is the kind of, the holy grail of art marketing is to be able to have, a marketing segment of one and not have to group people together into these giant groups. And so the scale of data processing, and thinking and I use that term either in the, you know, the sense of a human doing it in the sense of an artificial intelligence doing it. But the, with all the tools and capability we’ve had so far, you just, you don’t have the time and resources, to have a segment of one. So it’s a short hand that you create segments and put people that are similar together under the assumption that they’re going to behave roughly similarly. And yeah, I think we’re just going to be able to get to the point where it’s literally, just this is marketing, for Aaron bad. And it’s based on what we know about Aaron bad and what we know triggers him. And whether he’s on his phone on TikTok or Facebook, or whether he’s on e-mail and we know he’s taken these steps in these actions and what’s gonna be the next action that’s going to be most likely to get him closer to our goal. And so, I think we’re gonna get there pretty quick and that’ll be, really great from a marketing perspective and as a consumer perspective, really scary because… as good as marketers are and as good as algorithms are at pushing our buttons, it’s just gonna get better or worse depending on how you.

So, yeah, that’s gonna be that’s gonna be really interesting, to see that happen. And, and from the marketing perspective be part of making that happen.

Anthony Lamot: Have you also personally doubled a lot with trying out AI tools or tricks with chat?

Aaron Beatty: I mean, I definitely, you know, I alluded earlier to being kind of like, you know, probably imposter syndrome, but just kind of feeling like a junior engineer in, some cases. And, and having a tool that can help me proof read that can help me write code faster than I can on my own or faster than I can with a quick stack exchange, search or Google search. It’s it’s really beneficial from that perspective. And then being, a very small company and then having all the responsibilities of, you know, building a website, having support tools, doing, you know, accounting and all the other things that are really just a function of owning a business. There’s a lot of help that I can get, from tools for copy, writing, for image creation, for writing outlines, for presentations. I mean, on and on, there’s a ton, of benefit to those tools. And then, you know, even on the project management side, we use internally a tool called motion that uses some AI tricks to basically manage and organize the tasks that you have do and putting them on, your calendar based on the time that you have available. So there’s some internal like uses of tools like that are really helpful for time management. And then I’m currently taking a class at MIT remote… for large language models and AI and kind of how to build your own. And, and one of the things that I’d like to do is to start to build some tools based on all of the documentation that I have, all of our kind of internal wiki, best practices and things like that and seeing if we can build something either for internal use or something we could share with, our client partners, and offer them something that can, where they can look at our kind of database of best practices and pull out the information that they need via one of those tools.

Anthony Lamot: Amazing! like some kind of marketing cloud knowledge base with which you can interact through natural language?

Aaron Beatty: Yes. Yeah. So I feel like that’s kind of, the first phase of that. I feel like longer term. I think there is going to be a need to have some tools that will do kind of what I was referring to with the one to one marketing. And, you know, if you take that thought out to its logical conclusion… where I have some kind of database data warehouse data, lake, I get lost in all the terminology, but you have a bunch of data somewhere and then you have some AI tools that sit on top of that to help you to figure out this cookie was when he went to this website. And this, you know, transaction was also Aaron because that’s tied to his credit card number. And, you know, some kind of AI that’s making sense of the data. And then maybe an additional layer of AI that sits on that to kinda analyze it from a, almost a psychological perspective like, a human behavior perspective, plus marketing. This is like they did these things. Now. They’re most likely, you know, kind of getting into generative or predictive AI like this is their next most likely thing that either we want them to do to increase profits or we want them to do to donate to our calls, or we want them to do to go to our university or, you know, whatever the use case is and then to send them a message through whatever channel makes the most sense to try to move them, you know, one step closer to that goal. And if you’ve got a system that can do that, then you don’t really need much in the way of an AI. You don’t really need much in the way of like a preplanned journey or automation. It’s really just the system kind of looking at each person and seeing if there’s any communication we can send to them that will increase the odds of them doing what we want them to do. So.

Anthony Lamot: It actually ties in to some stuff we do as well. We are already integrating a bunch of AI capabilities, you know, into our product. In fact, for this segment, we are already in alpha with people using natural language to create segments and not just that generates the SQL but it’s actually, you know, visible in our EDI. So also non technical users can really understand what’s going on. So it’s kinda cool because we just want to integrate speech to text so soon you’ll be able to just shout at your laptop to build a segment. I can, to do that.

Aaron Beatty: Right. I already do that. Actually, it just doesn’t listen. It’ll so that’ll be great. I’ll be like hang it, do this thing. It’ll be like, okay, it’s done. I’d be like great. That was.

Anthony Lamot: I can see, I can see you go“why don’t’ you listen?” and then it tries to explain very meticulously why it’s not listening.

But one one thing that, that’s also interesting to me is doing more campaign planning and optimization that’s what we’re doing with Engage two people using it now to plan their campaigns, making sure the segments are not being over-engaged with or over-saturated, right? Marketing frequency. But we’re now also introducing not generative but predictive either to allow people to still set rules but to also let the system come up with an ideal send volume per contact. And then even beyond that, thinking about maybe the marketer opens the platform and we can just go hey grade up on all those campaigns. But did you know this specific audience is under served? And then once this, these are the commonalities. And then two, these are recommendations, that we would give to you to do campaigns around like to do a campaign around this product category, probably have this kind of response. So we’re not there yet, but I do think that’s a really exciting vision to work towards. And I think that’s a bit the future of marketing. You wanna offer this… mission control center to marketing operations folks so they can much faster make decisions, and work out your planning. I think that’s really interesting.

Aaron Beatty: Yeah, yeah, no, I think we’re just at, the beginning, of what’s going to be available there. Because if you take, you know, what you just mentioned out as a kind of natural next step, you know, there’s already, you know, chat GPT, and other tools like, you know, Midjourney, and others that can start to create content given a specific tone. And so if you have, a brand tone or a language that your brand uses, but also you wanna make your language unique to the segment that you’re speaking with, you know, it’s almost like earlier when you’re talking about code-switching, for different verticals. It’s kinda the same idea you could do that, for your segments too and still maintain a brand voice, but have it match who you’re trying to talk to. And so you could certainly ask a copywriter to do that. And I’m sure the results would be fabulous. The challenges is the volume of requests and the quantity of segments that you might end up having. And so if you have a tool that can assist with that, even if it’s a first draft, to do that, and kind of go the rest of the way or maybe 80 percent of the way to generating the actual content and then rely on the human being for the last 20 percent to make sure that, you know, there’s not a crazy, you know, third arm or sixth finger… on image and you know, that kind of stuff. And that’ll get better with time too. So, yeah, I think it’s gonna be amazing.

Anthony Lamot: You mentioned that because what I recently did is so, in our team now, I’m still doing a little of enablement and a lot of product knowledge still sits with me. So one of the things, I enjoy doing too is sort of educating our own team. And since we also want to better speak to those codes, to use that same terminology, right? So to have more specific language, I started a little project where I was verticalizing some of our internal documentation. So we have very extensive internal documentation on our products, they use cases and then how that goes into benefits. And I CP, and all that good stuff. But I didn’t have any industry specific knowledge. So what I did was I opened a new session, I pay for the subscription have or significantly better point then I just, yeah, and I just went to our website and I did copy paste all dumped it into like, hey, this is what we do. Read the website and it just reads it. And then I said, okay, now try to think of typical use cases for marketing operations in insurance. And so then, okay, and I do a little bit of fact check like does it make sense? As I understand at I’m, trying to do, okay, now merge what we’re trying to do and explain me in insurance language, what we’re trying to achieve, right? And then I still edited a little bit, but I made that part of our internal documentation. And I’m just going through our, I started with insurance because that’s one of our typical verticals but there’s a number of verticals we serve. So now I’m doing that one by one. So I thought it was a really good use case to use something. Yeah.

Aaron Beatty: Yeah, that’s cool. I mean, and otherwise, it’s overwhelming with the amount of, you know, if you were gonna take that information and create like one pagers, for conferences or take that information and create an e-mail or have a, you know, a subsection or landing page of 

Aaron Beatty: And so if you have a tool that can help kind of, you know, I like the thought of maybe, you know, you put in the first 10 percent, the AI handles the middle 80 percent and then you handle the last 10 percent. Like I like that, it’s like a weird version of the Pareto principle, but, you’ve, got the chat GPT doing like the middle 80 percent of the work and that’s a huge time saver and it’s generally pretty good like, you know, with the proper questions and the right language and the right information the results, are pretty good and you can give it really detailed, you know, requests for what you wanna do.

Anthony Lamot: I did something similar for our page and kind of coming up with target personas and customer avatars and things like that for our business. And, you know, it was telling me that marketing Mike, is looking for help with XYZ and we call the persona “Marketing Mary”. I got Marketing Mary out of chat GPT, and, but like you can dig into, you know, what are, so for this personas, what’s there? What’s their greatest fear? What’s the, what are the things that they’re terrified about? Why? What are the things that they’re that are driving them to make decisions? And so you can start asking it some really interesting questions about what might be driving some of the psychological behavior and like motivations of somebody making a purchase. And, you know, it’s hard to know whether the results are accurate or whether they’re you know, true to somebody’s like psychological needs. But when I read it, I’m like, okay, yeah, I mean, that sounds right? Like I can see myself in that person’s shoes and think, yeah, I’m scared to fall behind in technology or I’m scared with joining with a partner that, that’s gonna just take my money and run or they’re gonna, you know, they’re not gonna give me the service that they promised upfront. And, and so, you know, it’ll lay all that stuff out which you can then turn into marketing and kind of target those behaviors and those thoughts with, you know, we’re gonna solve those problems and not just here’s our product here’s what it does because, you know, most people don’t buy stuff that way. So, yeah, it’s cool. It’s an amazing tool.

Anthony Lamot: You also mentioned Midjourney, I’ve heard several people mentioned I haven’t had looked at it yet, is it significantly better to write content? Because I do find GPT to content it generates can be a little bit generic and dry.

Aaron Beatty: Yeah. So mid journey is more of an image creation tool. It’s and it is, yeah.

Anthony Lamot: Yeah. You referred earlier to some other tool then? My mistake.

Aaron Beatty: Yeah, I can, I did refer to Midjourney but I’m thinking of it more in the context of, you know, if you’re going to build an e-mail or a blog or whatever, and you need both to generate an outline or some content. And then generally speaking, you’re going to have some kind of imagery to go with it. And so Midjourney is a really great tool for that. The weird thing about it though is that it runs through disco. And so it’s a little weird that you have to download like a effectively a chat client and discord, and then install the Midjourney bought. And then you can ask it to do things but, it does a phenomenal job and it, and it’s it craves details. So you can tell it. In fact, you can use ChatGPT to generate a prompt for Midjourney and in get it’s help to get exactly what you’re looking for it to create. So it’s great. But yeah, for me, those are the primary two tools that I use. I know there’s probably, you know, millions of other options out there at this point, but I’m like you, I paid, for, the fancy, your access and, you know, to have API access and I have ChatCPT for and it’s so good. I haven’t really needed, to try any of the other tools yet.

Anthony Lamot: Awesome. Well before we round up, I was wondering Aaron if you have any parting advice you worked with so many customers. You’re taking on new customers? What is something a new Salesforce Marketing Cloud customers should be aware of? Or something like what some good advice you can give to avoid some common pitfalls?

Aaron Beatty: I think, the thing that I see happen all the time… is that… a lot of times a client, a customer will be looking to replace their CRM and build out marketing cloud and do all that kind of all at the same time like they get a nice big budget or grant or whatever to go build this thing out. And what I see happen all the time that drives me a little bit crazy is a ton of time effort and resources will be put into the CRM side of that equation. And then the after thought is, well, what are we gonna do with that information? Once we get it all centralized? And so, you know, inevitably, you know, marketing cloud or some kind of outbound communication thing is one of the systems that will utilize that CRM data. And so as somebody that works in that space, it’s always frustrating when, you know, let’s say a company has a 1,000,000 dollar budget. You know, they’re gonna want to spend as close to a 1,000,000 dollars as they can on the CRM. And then they go, yeah, we also want to be able to send emails and so that ends up being the 10,000 dollar project to the 990,000 dollar CRM project. And it, you know, not to say they should be 50 50, but they’re definitely should be a lot more investment in the, what are you gonna do with the data? And in addition to that, I think it’s important to consider what are you gonna do with the data first? And, and for a lot of these setups it’s last, it’s, the initial investment and time and resources, is spent in what data do we have? Where is it? And how do we structure and organize it so that it’s all in the same place that’s effectively what you’re doing with the CRM, but they’re not thinking about what are we gonna do with it from there? How are we gonna use it? You know, what are our use cases? And, and so I feel like a lot of places get that backwards. They need to, they need to do that first, and then go work on.

Anthony Lamot: I think that’s very sound advice. I would also second that by saying that marketing cloud ultimately is a data driven product. And so you do have to start thinking about the data first. And then all the good stuff can follow. If you start with that, Aaron, it’s been a pleasure. It’s again a great pleasure, to speak with you. I feel there’s so much more we can explore but our time.

Aaron Beatty: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. It was great.