Jonathan: Hey, good afternoon. Everyone. I’m here on the call with Gianluigi. Gianluigi, good afternoon. How are you doing today?
Gianluigi: Good afternoon, Jonathan, I’m fine. I’m super fine. It is a great start of the year, to be honest, and now and we’re looking forward to growing this year and making it better and better.
Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. 2020 wasn’t so great for many people so 2021 must be a great year for everyone. So let’s have a look. Can you give us a quick introduction to yourself, please?
Gianluigi: Absolutely Jonathan. I’m Gianluigi Morselli, many of you know me as Gigi simply. I’m leading a team of strategic advisory and omnichannel strategies for Marketing Cloud. I have experience as a Technical and Solution Architect. I’ve been working for Marketing Cloud with Marketing Cloud and Pardot and other Salesforce solutions for now 7 years of my life.
Jonathan: 7 years all right, so very experienced in the Marketing Cloud space.
Gianluigi: I love it.
Jonathan: Yeah, you love it, absolutely, who doesn’t? So you told me that recently you got in touch with DESelect. Can you tell me a bit about how that went?
Gianluigi: Yeah, absolutely. Having an advisory role, actually, I am continuously scouting for new applications that are not even yet connected to Marketing Cloud to be always on top of things to be always accelerating what our clients are searching for in the marketing automation environment. Therefore, searching in the AppExchange, DESelect was one of the applications convincing me just for the demo and the materials that you have and the support that you give to your clients, and the knowledge shared in general. Then I had the opportunity to be in touch with the CEO of DESelect our beloved Anthony Lamot and we have been in touch for doing a series of interviews that I’m leading. So I invited him to be a guest and therefore I had even the opportunity to try the application and it is great.
Jonathan: So you also have your own Marketing Cloud instance and there we installed DESelect so you could try and play around with it, right?
Gianluigi: Absolutely, to have first of all the freedom to try whatever we wanted and then to consult our clients the best we can and also to push the limits because sometimes you cannot predict what would be a limitation based on the client’s requirements. And therefore you have to commit more and you have also to provide feedback to the company as yours on what could be the next step. And of course, it’s a pleasure to do that. It was a pleasure even to try the application and its extents.
Jonathan: Right and before we dive into your life experiences with our product. What do you see as that your customers are struggling with when it comes to segmentation?
Gianluigi: Well, the first thing is that many clients are not so technically skilled in approaching Marketing Cloud in its entirety, and that’s something that they start struggling with since the first month they go live. Since the first month of their adoption with the platform. One thing that I noticed is that with DESelect, they can, in regards to segmentation, even advanced segmentation, they can very easily implement their use cases like in 2 days they can collect their requirements and then implement it. Why not? Even the go-to-market is the reduction of many weeks. And this is very important in a context where we saw in 2020 Covid, new regulations from the government then you may have to go out with a campaign sooner the day after. And building a segment, building a right segment with such a small amount of time and without requiring queries to technical people. So for other teams, it’s crucial for the companies nowadays. And this is the first struggle and I think one of the most important struggles that the companies have. And that DESelect can solve easily, absolutely. Do you see any other struggles that companies have? Well understanding the relationship is always the same topic, sometimes they are not technically skilled enough but understanding the relationships between the tables, so it doesn’t matter if those tables are coming from Service Cloud, with the standard connection, or from a different database. Okay. So with a custom integration, they are struggling to understand the relationships so they can get the most out of there, out of the data model they have. Having a drag-and-drop functionality where they can see the relationships already but in a graphical way, I would say are super user-friendly. It’s like self-training for them and their adoption and knowledge start raising very immediately I would say. And faster.
Jonathan: All right, awesome. That reminds me, we did not provide you with any training. Normally when we onboard a customer they get multiple sessions of training. That was not the case with you, so did you find it easy to use a product without getting any training?
Gianluigi: Usually, I can manage on my own since I have a very technical background. Nevertheless, yours is a very important point actually. It was very easy to understand how to use it, it was very easy to understand where to get the results. So the new, brand new data extension added is a result of the segment of your segmentation. It was very easy to understand which fields I was taking at the beginning and which fields I want to use at the end for my strategy for my journey with Journey Builder. And also it is self-explanatory and then I will mention another point that is related to this. It was really self-explanatory. The set of functions that you have in the user interface of DESelect. This helped me a lot. Usually, you have to search in the documentation. And so on. No, it was very straightforward at the latest. Last but not least I will say the documentation in the videos on YouTube that you have are amazing. So it’s simply guiding you they are simply guiding you in doing what you have to do. So you spend 3 minutes of your time watching a video, and you already have your segment. Nothing better.
Jonathan: Nice nice. Okay, so I forgot actually if you mentioned this in the beginning but you work as a Marketing Cloud Consultant for a system integrator for Merkle. Now Merkle has also recently been onboarded. Another one of our customers, Merlin, which is the company that is huge in the entertainment parks and we recently just published their customer success story. But then is Merkle and are you personally also looking to recommend DESelect to other customers? And yeah, what would you say to customers that are considering purchasing DESelect?
Gianluigi: Absolutely. I am aware and I’m glad we are collaborating for the customer. But on your first question. Yes, definitely there is a relationship with the client or during a pre-sales activity. You can identify the customer if the company is looking for a quick win, what is the level of experience? Technically, in the marketing automation platforms, in Salesforce of those companies. And you can easily understand what is their level of need for drag-and-drop functionality, for having campaigns running in one month after they go live, for having different layers in the company. Being able to use Marketing Cloud. And to build segments and to interact with their actual marketing automation strategist. Now, based on these different levels of needs that we identify, of course, there is space to suggest DESelect because it’s the right piece sometimes in the puzzle to have client satisfaction first of all, and their happiness and their success that is our success as well. To the last point, let’s say if we are in front of a client if I am in front of a client what should I say regarding DESelect? Well, no doubt, easy adoption, no doubt faster segmentation capabilities, no doubt very nice road mapping. I had the opportunity to speak with Anthony and there are very interesting things coming. I will not say anything. Of course, I’ll leave it to you. So, definitely, it is one crucial piece of the puzzle of the marketing automation, omnichannel marketing automation strategy of the company.
Jonathan: Alright, Gianluigi, thank you very much for sharing your insights today with us. And I’m looking forward to watching some new interviews on your channel.
Gianluigi: I will definitely work on it. Actually. I’m working on it. Thanks a lot for your time and for this interview, Jonathan. I wish you a great weekend. Thanks to you too, see you later.