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.