Eric Stahl: Campaign Attribution, Digital Innovation, and Adaptability
Anthony Lamot: Hi, Eric. Welcome to the series.
Erich Stahl: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
AL: We’re very happy to help you. Thank you for making the time. So I’m sure that many other viewers have actually already seen your post on LinkedIn because you tend to share a lot of interesting Marketing Cloud content. But, but just to be sure, could you please give us a quick intro to your viewers?
ES: Sure. So, I’m Eric Stahl I run digital here at Salesforce. I’ve been here for almost 13 years, which is kind of incredible to see Salesforce grow from just a few 1,000 people to the company it is today. I’ve had a lot of different roles. I started off at a relational database software company. I worked in at a middleware software company, and then I came to Salesforcet. I’ve worked on our platform, I’ve worked on our Marketing Cloud, our Commerce Cloud. I helped with Mulesoft for a while getting them onboarded. When they joined the company. I was over in London for a couple of years running our product marketing team. So I’ve had a lot of different roles. And for the last year, little more than a year, I have been re, thinking our whole digital strategy and re thinking the platform and the, or kind of how we operate and how that’s all going to manifest in a completely different and really exciting new digital experience.
AL: All right. I’d love to dig in deeper there, but there was one thing that you mentioned which was, you know, Salesforce wasn’t the company that it is today when you joined 13 years ago. What was it that got you interested in joining them?
ES: It’s a great question because it was very specific, I remember. So, I worked in on-premise enterprise software back in the late nineties mid to late nineties so you would get a server and you’d have an operating system and you would load up all these, the whole software stack, on your local on-premise hardware. And back then I was working for Informix Software which was a database like Oracle. And the big players in tech were like HP and Pyramid and, you know, SGI, like these big hardware players that was the center of the universe. And, and yeah, there was software and companies like Oracle, but, you know, you don’t hear about any of that these days. And so I worked for onpremise software vendors, then middleware, a company called BEA systems. You might have heard of Tuxedo, or Web Logic… and, you know, Java and J2EE came along and I just saw the cost and the complexity of… buying, installing and configuring a whole software stack. And then all of your custom code on top of that. And just what a complete dark art. It was to get all that working properly. How, you know, very few people or very few companies could do that, right? Maybe big banks or big government institutions, but like this is not that long ago, this is in the late nineties and coming into the early 2000 Salesforce came along and they were like, don’t worry about any of that stuff. We will host the CRM. And at the time it was just sales Salesforce automation. We’ll host it for you. You just, you just log in and don’t worry about the back end. And I was like, wow, that’s a totally different approach and, you know, for big enterprise applications, that was a novel concept back. And Mark B said, why can’t enterprise software be like Amazon? Com? Or you just go to Amazon and you just buy stuff. And, you know, why can’t enterprise software be that easy? And I was like, my gosh, it is enterprise software as a nightmare to manage and run and configure and… do what you wanted to do. That is a really big idea. And so I looked at a keynote and Marlk Benioff was doing this keynote about the platform and how you can not only use the Salesforce applications, but you could build custom applications on top of the Salesforce platform. Not only could you do that, you could do it with clicks code, just kind of point and click, create a custom objects, move some things around on the UI and boom, a non developer could create an application, deploy it and 100,000 people could use it the next day and I was like my gosh, that is unbelievable.
And I just remember thinking that is a big deal. And it was before the term cloud computing was popular. Like it is today, it was before, you know, all, the kind of workday and all the other applications came along. And I was like that’s unbelievable. So I joined the company and I’ve been here ever since.
AL: It is interesting that at that point that game changer attracted you. It’s also a philosophy we felt we needed to adopt. So we also made our own software reach plugs into Salesforce. Obviously plug and play and drag and drop so completely aligned with that. Now, a large part of your career has actually centered one way or another around Marketing Cloud. How did that began specifically?
ES: So, in my different jobs at Salesforce, I remember, I was in London and I came back to the states and I worked on our website back in, I think it was 11 and we had a Marketing Cloud at the time, but it was just too small acquisitions company called Radian6, which was social listening and analytics, and a company called Buddy Media.
AL: I remember. Yeah, I remember the acquisitions.
ES: They were like, hey, well, you work on Marketing Cloud, which was kind of a new concept at the time. And I said, sure. And I came over and I was like, wow, these are two very interesting products. And by the way, we have some amazing leaders at Salesforce to this day who came from those acquisitions. So they’ve had incredible value on this company, but they are very narrow in terms of the full scope of like a Marketing Cloud like marketing spans a lot of things we had to, you know, social media kind of tools. And then one day in June of 13, we announced the acquisition of ExactTarget. And ExactTarget was the, you know, huge player in e-mail marketing. And they had also acquired part, which was a B2B marketing automation company. And at the time, it was our largest acquisition ever was like a to gosh, I can’t even remember.
AL: I think it was a 2.3.
ES: Something like that. People are like, that is crazy that you guys are spending that much money on this company. And boy, that was really truly one of the most successful acquisitions this company has ever made.
AL: double digit growth since I believe.
ES: Yeah. I mean more than double like very healthy growth. And it took us a long time as a publicly traded company with thousands of employees and thousands of customers. But, you know, it really pushed us in two dimensions. One, it made more credible player in marketing because e-mail marketing as we all know is, you know, the work course of digital marketing and the ExactTarget was deep in, very large complex accounts with, you know, very deep capabilities in scale. And so that was good. And then it also pulled Salesforce towards consumer kind of the consumer universe. The past our earliest days, we did primarily sales automation, sales reps selling to other companies and they needed a place to keep track of their accounts and contacts and leads and opportunities and cases and very well ExactTarget. And then some of our subsequent acquisitions really pull in the direction of consumer marketing. And so that has also had a profound impact on the company. And the bigger we’ve gotten over the years, the more we’ve realized that most companies of size do both and you need to have all the right tools in the tools to be able to Engage customers the right way, whether it’s a, you know, an account of contact and an opportunity, or whether it’s a, you know, a consumer who needs, you know, kind of a transactional e-mail or an e-mail newsletter. So, so anyway, back to your question, that was the ExactTarget. And then we acquired data and crops and lots of other companies. And so I was very close to that for many years and after I left the Marketing Cloud to take on the digital team and kind of restart to rethink our own digital stock team methodology and experience.
AL: That actually brings me to my next question because I saw that recently you were promoted to SVP and GM of Digital Experience. So congratulations on that first. But could you tell us a bit more about the goals that come with that new title?
ES: Thank you. I am just a small cog in a very big machine here at Salesforce. And I truly humbled to lead this team. We have an incredible team. We’re going to do some incredible things together. We have some big ideas that we’re excited to work on. A couple of things have happened over the last year for one. And it kind of leads into this idea of a general manager. For one. I think Salesforce is like a lot of companies. We had digital marketing capabilities spread out across many different teams, an e-mail team in one or an analytics team and another or a social team over in a different or a web team in a different or a development team and a different or like things were just kind of all over the place. And I’m sure it’s like this in many companies. So, one thing we’ve done recently is consolidate not all of that but a lot of that into one organization where I now have, the architects, the product managers, and the developers who are building the platform and experience… as well as the production teams that are using the platform and experience to run the business, whether it’s the website or e-mail or some other areas. And so we’ve consolidated a large part of the organization to give us, a common it’s a mom and Salesforce language, but a common vision and values and methods and, you know, budget and all the things that come along with that.
AL: Yeah, I’ve read Trailblazer, I’m familiar with the terminology, but maybe for the audience will put it in the link of the video.
ES: Great. There’s also a Trail on Trailhead about that, the other thing we’re doing is there’s a big mantra that we’re gonna build our digital experience like we build our products, right? Salesforce knows a thing or two about building software, right?
AL: I’m sure.
ES: And so it was like we have teams building the Sales Cloud and the Service Cloud and platform and Marketing Cloud over here. And then we have teams building our digital experience over here in a very different way. And basically what we’ve concluded is let’s adopt all of the roles tools and methodologies that we used to build our products to build our digital experience. And that’s been a really simple but powerful guiding principle for us in terms of how we’re organizing scrum agile teams. It’s an important concept for us in terms of the tools that, we use an internal tool called gust for building our products. We’re gonna use us for building our digital experience. And it goes all the way down into a, you know, the, or the org structure, the roles, the role names, the role definitions, how we manage the road map, how we manage sprints, you know, we are fully adopting all of the Salesforce product team methodologies wherever we can. We will make exceptions if we absolutely have to. But that more has really helped shift the mindset for how we’re approaching our digital experiences. And by the way it’s not just marketing experience. It’s marketing, it’s commerce, it’s support is help and training. It’s how we integrate with trail head, its, how we integrate with the AppExchange. We have a really big vision for how all these things are going to come together. A much more integrated and dynamic and personalized way versus what you see out there today.
AL: It, I find this like a great shift and in an interesting way, it somehow reminds me at Toyota where I’ve seen similar shifts to all these used to be siloed activities being grouped under what they call customer experience. And similarly, just like you guys can learn it a lot internally from software making. They’re applying techniques such as skin and continuous improvements, which obviously also influenced Benioff’s thinking.
ES: Yeah, I think digital is moving into the front, you know, the, especially during COVID… you know, we’re in a time where there’s never been a better time to work on digital because in-person events are not possible. In-person meetings are not possible. Flying around is not possible. Taking your customers. Golfing is not possible. The only thing really truly possible in 2020 is what we’re doing right now which is a, you know, a virtual experience through recording, but that should extend to all of digital. And, you know, I’m optimistic that things are going to turn and get better soon, but it’s really made digital the focus and Salesforce, you know, deeply committed to not impose our org chart on our customers, which we do in many ways today. But we’re really investing to rethink all of it, the stack, the data strategy and the front end experience in ways that are centered around the customer and not around our org chart.
AL: You did touch upon COVID-19. I wanted to ask actually how that has impacted the way you personally organize your work.
ES: Well, welcome to my home office. Used to go, I live in San Francisco and I, you know, I used to go downtown to the Salesforce tower every day. And so we like everybody have been working from home. Salesforce has had a very conservative approach. We, I haven’t been to the office since February and I don’t think we’re going to open our offices until the vaccine, is very widely distributed on and again, hopeful that will be sooner, than later. But, we had to rethink a lot of things. We’ve gone through a lot of change. One of the interesting things for Salesforce was the recognition very early on that the world has changed and we need to change and I’ll never forget because Mark Benioff is so actively in so much of our every aspect of the business. You know, he uses the word relevance. If, if we’re out talking about our products and we’re not talking about COVID, any shelter in place and quarantine, then we’re not relevant. We can’t pretend life is normal. Life is not normal right now. And so, you know, we’ve adopted our business in many ways and we’ve adopted our message in many ways and, you know, to be relevant in 2020, you have to be thinking about the impact of COVID and quarantine… some of our industries, the industries we sell into are impacted profoundly in, you know, if you’re an airline or you’re a hotel right now, really, you know, thinking about a new CRM system. But if you are a, you know, a government rolling out, you know, public services, whether it’s you know, relief or health care services or other, you know, vaccines. We can help them with that. And lots of other businesses, are investing in digital right now. And that does give us an opportunity, in certain other areas. So, it’s been a big year of change. We have adapted the, or we’ve adopted our strategy and so far so good. So… we look forward to better days and hopefully they’re not too far out. But it’s been impressive to see how Salesforce not only adopted our products but, the company itself to kind of recognize that, this is, a new reality that is not going to, you know, we’re probably never going to go back to, the prior world. I’ll just one one other example, you know, when we look at how well people adapted to working remotely… I think that’s gonna have a very profound impact on… office space… remote work, our ability to recruit in places other than San Francisco, and how we’re going. To think about, you know, a distributed workforce forever vaccine or not. I think that is going to really stay with us.
AL: I agree. I think some of these changes are going to stay for better or worse. I do think that now many companies are forced to think more digitally, they’re going to rethink the way they Engage with their own teams or customers. And overall, I hope it leads to more efficiency that extends into the future. Are there like some tips and tricks of things that you found helpful? Like you mentioned earlier, you can’t take your customers golfing anymore. So other alternative ways of engaging with your customers or even your own team that you found particularly helpful?
ES: You know, that’s a tough one. I have people on my team who are constantly, you know, trying to find good ways to re-engage the team, keep them motivated, keep them connected. A person on my team just constantly organizes get together that have nothing to do with work whether it’s cocktail making or something. Gosh, she’s done so many. I can’t even think of them all. But, you know, really trying to keep the team connected. She also does a wonderful job sending out physical, you know, pages so that people kind of, you know, feel, a connection we are really gathering as a, you know, as a by-policy now and so I think anything we can do, we’re also working very hard to set expectations that… we need to take care of ourselves and we need to take care of our families as our number one priority. And that should always be the case but it’s never been more important during COVID. I tell my team all the time we’re working very hard but COVID is impacting us each differently.
I don’t have kids. I don’t have a sick parent. So I’ve got a lot of flexibility in my life right now. I work with people who have very small children crawling all over them during meetings, I have, or with very sick parents who they’re trying to take care of whether it’s COVID or something else. And so… I think job one is wellness and us being mindful of each other. And, you know, I always tell people don’t wait for me or someone else to look out for your wellness. You have to set your own boundaries of what you are capable of doing during this very difficult time. Especially people with children who are, you know, home schooling, et cetera. Set your own boundaries and we will flex and adapt around that. And if you can help someone else who’s in a more difficult situation, you know, that’s great too. But I think, you know, if we can’t maintain… wellness and by wellness, I mean, mental health and kind of physical health, I personally prioritize exercise, very highly. I have it on my calendar. I do it and you know, if Stephanie our CMO or Mark Benioff show up on something I’ll cancel my work out, but it kind of has to come from that altitude for me to forego what I consider to be a personal priority. Sure. It helps me not just physically but helps me psychologically get through such a crazy time.
AL: And if you stay well, you’ll perform well anyway. If you stay well and take good care of yourself, you’ll perform much better.
ES: Yeah, absolutely. And for those are in California, we’ve had COVID, we’ve had crazy politics. We’ve had fires in California that darkened the sky with smoke and ash everywhere.
And then we all have our own personal things going on. And so, you know, it’s a, it was a challenging year and people need to… be well above all else. And we as a company need to make sure that is the priority beyond that we can work out kind of what we’re we prioritize what we can get done, what we can get done. But that’s been another really key theme for 2020.
AL: Think that’s a great message. Eric. I’d like to switch back now for a moment, to the software itself because since throughout your career, you’ve been involved with different Salesforce products as you already mentioned, I was kind of wondering, is there something that sets Marketing Cloud apart for you?
ES: So I was new. So Marketing Cloud first of all is a broad umbrella of products including the DMP and Datorama, and lots of things. So that’s the first thing I think, you know, Marketing Cloud is not a specific thing. It’s a broad portfolio of products… specific to a, are you asking about kind of the e-mail part of marketing cloud? Or are you asking about the whole portfolio? Well, I…
AL: Your answer in itself interesting because I think when most customers think marketing cloud, they are thinking about E-mail Studio, whereas of course, there’s Datorama, of course, there’s a Social Studio, that can connect into it, but we can focus on E-mail Studio here.
ES: Okay. So e-mail studio which is part of Marketing Cloud and by far the biggest part of Marketing Cloud. And it’s really laying down the foundation for the CDP strategy that is cross channel e-mail SMS, push notifications… custom audiences that we can advertise to et cetera. Et cetera. All of that comes from our friends in Indianapolis and ExactTarget. And I learned a lot when we acquired ExactTarget. I learned a lot about e-mail marketing. I was not in that space before. I thought well, it’s e-mail marketing. How complicated could it be? And it turns out there’s a lot to it.
AL: Yeah.
ES: It is hard and, the power of e-mail studio formerly known as ExactTarget is, you know, is in the ability to set up a relational data model to do very powerful scripting for personalization, and to be able to do all the kind of Deliverability things that you need to do to get an e-mail into someone’s inbox. And I didn’t really appreciate that prior to ExactTarget. But, you know, if you’re a smaller org and you want to send out an e-mail newsletter to, your people, it’s not the right product for you, its way to complex for, you know, a very small business who wants to do very simple things where the product shines is high and higher complexity, data-driven personalized e-mail at scale. And, that is the sweet spot for the product nicely into our broader concept of CRM where, you know, through the magic of E-mail Studio, we can embed lots of data within an e-mail from the system or other places. We can include personalized content. We can include product recommendations. We can do all kinds of interesting things. So there’s still work to do on that product to bring it closer into the core kind of Salesforce stack. There’s work to do to make that product easier to use. There’s work to do to make it smarter and more AI driven around, you know, some time optimization or, you know, multi channel journeys, et cetera. But it’s a very powerful product. It’s been very successful. It’s got a huge following and we’re just excited to, keep that investment going.
AL: And so are we, because we build on top of it since as most of our viewers will know, we at least like we offer segmentation solution for Marketing Cloud. And we’re very happy in fact to be able to build on such a strong platform as Salesforce and be listed on the AppExchange by the way. So, here’s, my next question being an independent software vendor or is as it’s known from the digital point of view, what role do you see the AppExchange and actually is partners in particular play in the years to come?
ES: So, the, you know, the partner ecosystem and the sensibility of Salesforce product has always been incredibly core to who we are. As a company, we provide a base platform. We provide a base of applications. And then we have literally thousands of partners who customize or extend, the platform and solutions. We will never be able to do it all. And so we invest in facilitating that kind of partner ecosystem. We want to drive awareness and, you know, drive help you be successful in your business. And we want to help our customers find the solutions that help them be successful and what they’re trying to solve for. So, it’s always been near and dear to us. All of our partners are on the AppExchange which is like our kind of the equivalent to like our App Store. And that team is, very busy working on, a big vision for how to kind of continue to make a change better for both partners and the people buying products from it. And so, yeah, Salesforce is also tripling down on our industry strategy and, you know, every permanentation of every industry solution across sales, service, marketing, commerce, et cetera. It’s just something we will never attempt to do ourselves and partners like you guys are critical for us to be able to help our customers succeed in what they’re trying.
AL: Maybe a funny side story here like today, I’m onboarding someone new in my team and he’s new to the ecosystem. So he’s asking, so, why do you guys exist? Actually? Well, I’m telling him, well, Salesforce is counting on us, to fill this little niche needs? Because I think that’s the beauty of the whole AppExchange platform. You guys can solve for so many different needs in collaboration with them, right? So by looking at your own offering and especially at the digital offering, what are the solutions that currently excite you the most that you’re very excited about?
ES: So, Salesforce is very focused on this idea of Customer 360 and it’s been around forever. But no one has ever really truly successfully solved it… in terms of a package solution that companies can buy and actually deliver on. And by Customer 360, we mean an actual single source of truth for every prospect and customer that a company has that drives a more personalized experience on the front end across sales, service, marketing, commerce, custom apps, as well as better insights and engagement on the back end with your support teams, your marketers, et cetera. And so… that is our strategy as a company to really build out this kind of core data model that allows you as a company to build a single view of your customers to build better experiences and better engagement. And so we in Salesforce digital are working on exactly that. We’re saying, okay, where is our single source of truth? How are we stitching together lots of different back end systems into this kind of golden record that we can use to personalize the website, personalize emails, personalize our page media as well as personalized, you know, hey here’s, some training that might be right for you. Here’s, a community group that might be right for you. Here’s. An, is that might be great for you. So we’re our vision within Salesforce digital is put the customer in the center of everything we’re doing, break down these walls that we currently have today, and to really understand who you are, who you are, where you are, what industry you’re in what segment you’re in what role you’re in. And instead of you having to find a trail on trail head or a community group on the community or an is in the exchange or an article on our blog? What if we could just all that to you to our website, push that you through e-mail, and in other places, that is what is exciting today. And we are working on that as we speak to build the truth profile to and our content and taxonomy internally to stand up our personalization engine based on another Marketing Cloud product called Interaction Studio. And then to surface all that through kind of multi channel experiences. And so that’s my work cut out for me for the next couple of years and we’ll see how this all plays out. But that is what I get out of bed thinking about every day.
AL: It sounds like you’ll keep busy indeed for the next few years. I’m just trying, to paint a picture here though. So if I’m a customer, as you mentioned, I might be working multichannel, some of my activities might still be a silo. So for instance, to be more concrete, I may be using paid ads on Adwords, I may be using Facebook ads. Are these also things that would be integrated into this CDP?
ES: So, CDP is really kind of, the data layer. We want to be able to create audiences. We want to be able to activate those audiences across channels. And those channels include paid media. So, yes, 100 percent, it could also include e-mail. It can also include the website. And so, yes, we want to be able to create experiences that include the website, e-mail, paid media… as well as other channels as they come up.
AL: Of course. Yeah, I mean, it’s always been a struggle even in our own company today to be honest, but I’ve seen that many clients when I was still a consultant of getting the complete full picture of a customer. Sure you can maybe see like the lead source of someone coming in on lead form. If you’re a little bit better, you can even do a bit of tracking on the website. But what you want to know in the end is let’s say if you’re a SaaS vendor for each dollar, I earn, how much… like how much did paid ads contribute? How much do sales contribute? That’s that’s so hard? I really it’s tricky.
ES: So, multi-touch attribution is a, very difficult problem. We, as a practitioner, I think about this a lot. We, we have certain capabilities internally. We have some big gaps and I think we can close some of the gaps. I think, the frustrating thing with marketing is there are some things that are just not quantifiable and you just have to kind of live with that reality as a marketer. If someone comes to your website and then calls a sales rep, it’s very hard to attribute that back to the website. Some of the digital things where you can kind of associate a campaign and track that all the way through are more trackable. So, I hear you. I think, you know, marketing is both art and science and we want to get the science part. You know, we believe in science, we believe in data, we believe in data science and all the things we can do around that. But there will always be a part of marketing that you can’t measure as much as you want and more subjective part of marketing as well.
AL: It’s very interesting. You’re the second person today to call art and science. Although the other person he’s actually CEO of a very large well established is as well. And he said when he was talking about sales, it’s art and science. You can have as much KPI’S and metrics but there’s a certain art to the profession in this case sales. But on the marketing side, yes, I had the same discussion today with my co-founder like should we invest more in brand awareness? How do we measure that? Well? That’s hard.
ES: Yeah, we have those conversations every day at Salesforce. Okay. Well, that’s…
AL: It’s a relief though to hear that you’re facing the same challenges. It’s not just us.
ES: Yeah. I mean, I’m on the practitioners side, so we have lots of challenges. We’ve we’ve managed to be very successful over time but… there are a lot of things that we do not. We’re not able to measure as well as we would like to in a perfect world that said, I think you just have to move on from some of that. And, you know, we can attribute how much traffic comes to the site where that traffic is coming from. Is it paid? Is it organic? How much of that traffic converts to a lead? How many, you know, we have core offers like free trial view, demo, contact me and oncall chat like we have a lot of metrics around those core offers. We can then look at things like lead to opportunity conversion rate by offer type and trace those from, you know, down the stages, of the sales cycle down to a, which is our booking metric. So, you know, some days, I think my gosh it’s so hard to really deeply understand all this. On the other hand, I think we have a, you know, a wealth of data and, we can optimize for that full funnel which I don’t think was really possible 10 or 15 years ago. And so, you know, on other days, I’m very thankful for all the incredible metrics we have, and just, you know, let’s use that and we can AB, test and optimize that forward. And we’ve been really successful in doing that. So, it just depends on which side of bet I get out of each day to shape my thinking on that. It can always be better. We can always do better. It’s never done, but I’m also thankful for all the hard work the team does to provide us the insights and the analytics that we get.
AL: And maybe it depends on depending on which time of the day it is, which side of your brains on whether I, do you want to have better branding, positioning, color schemes like even to that level or do I want to jump into the lake of data, and metrics we have right there’s. One specific question I would be very interested in knowing more about personally that has to do with paid ads. Because at least in my experience, what I hear from other people who run SaaS businesses, it’s sometimes tricky to get a immediate return on paid ads especially if you’re doing B2B enterprise SaaS, but, it seems to help especially with retargeting and so on. But, it comes back into the whole campaign attribution multi touch issue we just spoke about. Is there a way that you gauge the effectiveness of paid ads yourself?
ES: So we spend a lot of money, on what we call paid media. And it’s a critical part of our marketing motion to track… traffic to the site that we attribute back to paid. And then we can track it all the way back to leads pipeline ACV. And so… yes, we, on one hand, we measure it very closely because we spend many millions of dollars on paid media. On the other hand, there’s always an argument from the paid media team that paid media… has a larger benefit than what we can measure in direct attribution that, they feel. And I understand this argument that a paid impression or many paid impressions could lead to someone just typing going to their browser and typing www.Salesforce.com in their browser. And all of a sudden they show up in our organic metrics. And I totally get that. And so we’re currently having a lot of discussion about this and we said, well let’s run some experiments and see if we can quantify some of this where we kind of turn certain things up and down and look at the downstream effects of things that we can’t do direct attribution on because we are literally spending tens of millions of dollars, in certain places. It’s important that we have kind of directional understanding of these things or we’re you know, just guessing and so…
AL: It’s literally worth finding out. I would say.
ES: It’s worth finding out. It’s a lot of money. And so, you know, we’ve debated some of these things for years and it’s like, well, let’s do some tests and let’s accept the fact that, you know, a test might impact the business in the very short term, but that might give us an insight that will help us do the right thing for the long term. And so, we are literally in the middle of a large discussion about some of that right now and we are seeing up some tests and we’re going to kind of look at causality which is really hard to do because how long you run it, how, you know, how can we interpret the data? But we have some very smart people looking at this and we’ll see what we’ll see what happens.
AL: Sounds super interesting. I can honestly say that, but as we round up, would you have any closing thoughts that you would like to share with our audience?
ES: No, I would just like to, you know, thank you for the opportunity to share our story. I’m gonna be really, my goal is to be really transparent about our digital transformation in Salesforce. I’m happy to share what we’re doing. I’m gonna try to share what’s working and what’s not working. I’m gonna try to share some of the things we’ve learned about the organization, the methodology, the tech, Stack, the design, I want to try to be radically transparent in our own kind of journey is gonna be a multiyear journey. So if you have any questions or if you’d like me to post on a specific topic, I’m happy to answer.
AL: Okay, fantastic for our audience? Is there any place that should follow you? I know you’re very active on LinkedIn. Any other thing we should know about?
ES: No, not really. I am, I know I should invest more time and I’m pushing my team on this to, instead of just cranking out a quick post on LinkedIn to actually do what I should do as a digital marketer, which is write a blog post that goes on our blog that drives traffic to our site that potentially converts to leads and opportunities to drive our business. And so I’ll say that giving myself a hard time that like it’s just easy for me to open up in something out and not have to really think about it. But that is where I want to go. I want to start actually logging out more formal communications about these things, but I haven’t started yet.
AL: All right. Well, shout out to the audience. If you have any questions for Eric, feel free to comment on YouTube or LinkedIn or wherever you’re following. And then, Eric, the pleasure was absolutely mine. Thank you for being on this episode and thank you so much for your time.
ES: You bet. Thank you.
