Dayle Hall, CMO @ SnapLogic
Sales & Marketing Stage
Ascent Conference 2020
[00:00:00] But let’s oh, let’s do it. OK. Hi, I’m Dayle Hall, the CMO of SnapLogic. It’s great to be here today sharing some some insights, some ideas. Obviously, being at home is a challenge. You may hear some kids running in the background, may hear the dog moving around in the background, but I’m at home, so I get to wear an England football shirt just because when you’re at home, you can pretty much manage it how you like.
[00:00:35] So anyway, today I am here to talk about what we mean by an automated enterprise. First of all, what it means in general, how we think about it. It’s not logic. But beyond that, I’m going to give you some tips and tricks and things to think about as a marketing leader and the things that I think about around automation itself. So first of all, let’s start at the beginning. Like, what does every organization want? What are we trying to deliver? These are three things. I don’t care where you are in the organization. I don’t care where you are in a business or what your role is. These are three things that you definitely want to try and achieve. If you can nail these three things, you and then your organization, you’re going to be one of the heroes and who doesn’t want to be a superhero in their organization. But we’re all trying to do this. Yes, we want to deliver amazing business results. Of course we do. But we also want to provide better customer experiences because we know if we do, that will acquire more customers, will retain more customers that will ultimately achieve those business results. But even before that, if we have the right data, if we can make the right decisions, we can actually deliver the right products to the market. So these three things, everyone in our organizations, everyone’s looking at them will see first thing went backwards. So. So what’s holding this back? Well, let’s start with this. If you want to deliver better products, all those customer experiences or something like that, the one of the biggest challenge of doing that is how you actually get access to the right information, how you make sure that your organization and your application to set up in the right way. The biggest challenge with that is as we create these different applications in our organization, as we putting more technology, trying to get these things to talk to each other is a challenge. One of the big challenges today is we moved from on premise to cloud. So this was something that’s been happening over the last 10 years. But I’m still surprised how many people are still using on premise applications. So this is where I think you’ve seen the dawn of things like these digital transformation strategies, because everyone’s trying to adopt these new best in class applications, them mainly cloud based. So basically what you’ve got is that you’ve basically seeing an organization that has multiple applications, that they’ve built themselves different new technologies, best in class that they’re trying to bring to the cloud and actually getting them to talk to each other is a massive problem, a massive problem and. A small example, what do we mean by massive problems? Well, do you know how many applications do you have in your organization and guarantee that maybe you don’t want your I.T. team are running around trying to trying to keep on top of them? And this is the problem as you add best in breed, as you move to the cloud, you’ve got this mass of applications and data and a lot of them don’t talk to each other. I’m not talking about whether Marketo talks to Salesforce or something like that. I’m talking about how data is proliferate across every application. Think of the customer journey. Think of how many times a customer touches a single part of your organization and those organize those apps are not connected today. So what you end up with is multiple points of integration and challenges with the data, meaning you’re losing data across organizations. You’re also losing insights because you can’t look all the data together. What does this mean? Someone’s managing it. They’re either writing right in code. They either have a bunch of resources on it or they’re actually just not even aware of the data that they’re missing today. And obviously, that’s. That is literally one of the biggest challenges, how much are you missing out on just because you don’t really know what’s going on today? Well, according to research, that SNAP Logic did early this year with an organization called Venson Volume. On average, organizations have more than one hundred and fifteen applications. You could see from that from that previous slide. So that’s a lot. I’m sure your organization, you’re out there thinking, yeah, we probably have more. If you’re in a marketing team, you probably have 20 or 30 that you’re managing just to try and run the business.
[00:05:04] But a huge concern is that most of them feel like this is completely disconnected from the other. And that start on the right hand side is, by the way, your I.T. organizations. And they’re also very concerned. They actually feel like data that stuck in certain parts of the organization is actually holding the enterprise back 90 percent, 90 percent of 500 of the top enterprise organizations are saying that like they’re one of their major concerns is that you’re stuck in those silos, like we should all be paying a lot of attention to this.
[00:05:39] Right. And why is that?
[00:05:41] Like, this is just a very illustrative example of what we mean. You’ve got organizations that touch different parts of the customer that touch different parts, potentially, partner. Jovani, how you’re managing things like, quote, to cash. Right. All of these are disconnected. So this creates a lot of pain, a lot of friction and a lot of delays, delays in rolling out new organizations and onboarding customers or employees. This is caused because you can’t successfully integrate the data and have these applications all talking to each other. A matter where you view the data you can pick if you want a visualization tool or somewhere in CRM. But it’s really difficult for all these all these elements to all come together so you can get that holistic view of the enterprise. And that’s kind of what we mean by enterprise automation.
[00:06:40] Now, of course, who’s currently carrying the weight of this?
[00:06:44] Well, guess what, 80 to 80 organization that does a lot of manual effort there. Lots of people in organizations that are doing coding or they are running book fixing on the rewiring things.
[00:06:58] They’re typically the ones that are feeling the pain.
[00:07:03] As a marketing leader in these organizations, we don’t see that, but what we see is like, why is this taking so long? Why does it take so long for me to get on board an application? Why can I not see data that I need to that I need to make decisions around what product, what campaigns, what’s going on with the customer? So it’s under a lot of pressure. And then business leaders from functions like marketing, you know, we actually we don’t want to wait all that time. So we’re implementing our own solutions. We’re taking organizations.
[00:07:42] We get I get 200 emails a day that talk about the next best marketing tool. And and I want I want most of these things. But I think it can add value to my business. But I’m certainly not going to wait for it to go through the process and do governance and security and privacy and control like that slows the business down. Me as a as a business leader. What I see is that I feel like that slow my business down. So typically what happens is you may be I don’t know if you’re in it or if you’re in a line of business, but it’s usually not fast enough. So the speed and the times to value, which is critical for me as a line of business, it’s not that. So basically I’m like, you know, I’ll got to figure out myself. And this is where you get this shadow IT organizations or your marketing operations running it in the marketing organization. You get get these pockets of technology and my tech stocks that are not linked back with it. This causes a massive issue. I’m sure I’m sure you all of you have at some point heard some of this. But you know what? That does ultimately not just cause frustration between those two teams, but that kills the business agility, that kills the opportunity for the enterprise to make better decisions. Right. So that’s why you now see this growing trend in that a lot of analysts, you talk to Gartner and they’ll see they’ll say that a lot of the enterprises now are moving to a platform to be able to support this, meaning they’re enabling functions to be able to implement their own solutions. But it’s it’s a challenge. Right. And this this from from one of the reports last year is like they see these enterprises are asking for it. So how do you do it? How do you make sure it happens without making sure that teams are in the background, just sweating on manual coding and scripting and making sure that they’re actually adding value and not basically running around doing fixes for all the technology that the marketing or sales or or are actually implementing. It’s it’s a challenge, not to mention things like app and data process is very can be very complex. And obviously lines of businesses, they they really they honestly don’t want to be involved in that. Did you all hear my dog barking in background? Yeah. Sorry. That’s how you know, it’s that’s so you know, it’s a real presentation. Gordon Anyway, so it’s today’s challenge requires a different approach. And some of these words you will have heard that you have heard across different presentations and different analyst reports and media outlets and so on. So basically, I.T. need to get to the point where they can push some of this work out, OK, less oversight, less governance and control. But really the possibility of the lines of businesses supporting them, not just hindering them, starts with things like local platforms. So business users want the capability but don’t want to have to learn how to code. So a lot of that is available today. And then things like self-service user interfaces that don’t require you to have an engineering or an architecture degree to be able to figure out how those things work. And then finally, the last piece, which is important is automation. Get the low level manual coding, pulling data, get that out of the organization, an automated automated in a way where I don’t get frustrated as a business user. So I actually get access to my data and then I’m not frustrated because they’re not worrying like where the data is going or what kind of applications are being put into a business.
[00:11:38] And guess what?
[00:11:39] Yes, I’m at home where my English, but the age we’re in right now is it’s amazing, stunning change in environment for all of us, but it is accelerating the requirement for this.
[00:11:51] It’s accelerating the need for us to use new technologies to take some of that, that reliance on humans being in the office and coding and checking spreadsheets and so on. How can we get better at this? How can we be more self-sufficient and twilly a very respected company? Did the state of customer engagement report I mean, this this this is a hundred percent. It says 97. It’s 100 percent. I’m going to currently pause that recording because my dog is blocking.
[00:12:31] Very minor, back in normal service resumed, dog is sorted out anyway, look, 100 percent of enterprise decision making, that is 97 percent. There’s no one out there that doesn’t feel like the need for digital transformation hasn’t been hasn’t had to speed up because, of course, of covid, this is where we are as a as a business, where we are as vendors, where we are as customers. Like we need to get to this point where we can get access to better data, not rely on a bunch of coding and people being in the office to to make sure all those things happen. So where do we go from here? Well, this is I talked earlier about the concept of the on premise and moving to cloud. But the next step is this concept of thinking across the enterprise and and looking at automation across all those applications and across what you’ve got on premise and across every data. So this is also where you have the actual power to leverage A.I. because it can learn across multiple data sources. The critical thing with artificial intelligence is that you have data to learn from. If you’re just running artificial intelligence on one piece, on one piece of data from one application, you’re not getting as much as the value. And how about automation across business flow? So not just what we do in the marketing, looking at customer side employee onboarding, you know how many organizations out there have manual processes to to you know, when you start an organization, when you join an organization to to provision your services, to hand over to payroll, to know all the way to actually when you when you leave an organization, a lot of that is manual. And we can actually we can actually get around that. If we if we look at automation across the enterprise, that’s kind of breaking down those silos of silos disappear. It end up being happy because they can still control the key data, but because the applications and data is talking to each other, they’re less concerned about losing control of the organization. And, of course, business users, we get the data that we need to make decisions around what’s the next best campaign, which customers should be worried about, and ultimately that should lead us all to the faster business decisions. How does this look from an architecture perspective? Well, the key thing here is to focus on two things. One, doesn’t matter what organization you’re in or how much of a specialist you are, you could be a data engineer. You could be all the way on the other side, which is a business analyst. So maybe someone and someone’s wearing sales operations or marketing operations and they’re just looking at the data. You don’t have to be a serious technologist to be able to leverage this, because what’s coming through is all the data from all the databases, what you’ve already potentially put in place with things like that and what you’ve got from your data centers, even if that’s coming through, you can still aggregate that information and run run modeling. You can run on it. You can actually use that to potentially create better models because you looking at every single piece of data across the enterprise, like that’s that doesn’t happen today. We may think we’re we’re using enterprise data across every single point, but typically we’re not. Typically what’s happening is we’re looking at a piece and then we may look at a different a different tool that we’re using. And then we try and put that together and make some assumptions. How about if all that talk to each other like that is the massive opportunity? So what do I mean by the challenge for marketing? So we’ve talked about enterprise automation. We’ve got to know what it is, where it can impact. What about marketing? I’m a marketer. I’m a CMO. I’ve been doing this for for many years now. What do you think these numbers are? Yeah, these numbers are basically the average tenure of a CMO. If you look at different different studies, that’s that’s actually eighteen months is is kind of scary, but I’m familiar with it. Guess what, eight thousand is eight thousand is the number of solutions, mainly cloud solutions that are available to that. You’ve all most of you probably seen that Martek landscape with thousands of thousands of solutions on. OK, so guess what. How do I balance the things that I’m looking for? I want to drive revenue for the business. I’m really looking at reputation. So I have my marketing goals. I also have eight thousand tools to to choose from and I’m trying to keep my job. OK, so that’s a challenge. Where could I start? Well, one of the things you could look at is what about the customer journey? How do you make sure that you’re really responsible and looking across all these pieces? I’m going to build this out and we’re going to go into detail, but I’m going to go through some examples in a second. These are all pieces of the custom. Acquisition journey, and they’re all pieces that you can automate through things like flows, so, for example, you want a higher conversion with content, where should you be looking? You should be looking at lead scoring and routing. You should be looking at your nurture tracks. You should be looking at your website. You should also be looking at what sales are using. So I just mentioned three or four things. Then guess what? There’s 14 tools that help you do that. But guess what? Most of them don’t actually talk to each other. That is a challenge, right? We’re all agreed. That’s a challenge. Go further down. Look at something like ask. OK, so how about customer service management? So what customers are raising cases? What are they doing on your community? Are they engaging with any campaigns that you may be running around new products? How do you how do you match those pieces together? If you have the right automation platform, you can actually marry the data from campaigns and current campaigns that you’re running in marketing all the way down to what customer service is seeing around case management. Get a view a a more of a holistic view of what the customer is doing. Many vendors talk about customer 360, if you don’t have this automation across the enterprise, you don’t really you will never really have a a customer 360 strategy. So something to think about. Let’s go a bit further. Let’s give you some examples. Three things that I think marketing can automate today, I don’t mean marketing automation like Marketo or HubSpot. Those are great tools. They already integrate, integrate, Point-to-point and CRM. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about some some broader pulling together, multiple different aspects with not just with CRM. How about we add things like some of the outreach channels and we can actually view all that together. So clearly filling the sales funnel is something that my objective, a steady stream of qualified leads, making sure that that’s pretty much how I get measured suspects. What what translates to opportunities, right? That’s how I get it. So but the volume is massive and variety of sources. Now, these are just a few, right. You can have web channels to this to like that’s it can get overwhelming. So what you have to do is separate the signal from the noise, identify and engage those prospects most likely to buy. So maybe you add a predictive tool or an intent tool like still these are very separate tools that often don’t talk to each other. And you can’t do everything on one platform today. So by automating that that lead management process, you get to have a better view and you get to look at what’s most likely to convert. You get to see what the sales teams are prospecting. And this is where automation really helps.
[00:20:21] Basically, it combines the existing CRM tools with other applications and event platform so you can automate workflows. So, again, remember, this is not just a point to point integration. This is really looking at how you generate this holistic view of a prospect and their intent to buy by pulling all those separate pieces together.
[00:20:45] So that is the first one, and that is lead generation. So let’s go beyond that. What else is marketing’s job? It doesn’t end once we acquire the customer, right? This is what I talk about. We talk about customer 360. We want to help you get immediate value from the product. So how are you using it? Do we get telemetry from a product tool that you may be using? And how do we make sure that we see additional projects that might come up in your organization? OK, this requires very clear strategies to keep customers informed and engaged, not just about new offerings, but understand what they’re using today and make sure that doesn’t overwhelm how to do this ideally in a timely and accurate manner. To get insights, you have to face specific.
[00:21:35] You have to look at these specific technologies so automation will do automation across the enterprise. Again, remember, it’s not one tool to one tool. It brings all these touch points together from sales or support or finance and provides that single source because all the data can get aligned.
[00:21:53] And if you get it right, you’ll see everything from what products or services have been used or not used, which ones are creating the most cases. So when you look at that, you can then cross-reference it with a financial system to how many resources are you using on that customer for that product? Again, you start to really see that. But again, there’s to do this today. A lot of it is manual. A lot of it is being coded in the background and automation and integration and automation tool will do all that manually. So you’re the people that are doing all the coding and just creating the connections they can actually running more models for you. They can actually be looking at new technologies that can keep driving the business forward. And that’s that’s pretty simple. OK, so that’s we’ve acquired customers, we’ve done some lead generation, we’ve done some cross-sell up sell. What’s this? Well, massive impact marketing year around customer retention and loyalty. A lot of it is a marketing thing. Sometimes that becomes, you know, the services support organization. But this is you know, we have we actually have the opportunity here as marketers to do it, to do a better job on this. So. We all want customers for life, and obviously keeping them is important. So with A.I. and automation, we can drive retention and loyalty. So we track that track what customers are talking about, systems of record, things that they may have conducted, surveys. Have they responded in the products? Are you using product telemetry or are they using survey tools? Are they writing reviews on some of these Jita and capturing sites? Wouldn’t be good if you could actually pull all those pieces together, but it’s not limited to to those kind of typical tools. What about things on social media? What about if you could use your your listening and analytics tools for social media to also linked together and really look at do they say one thing in a survey and do they say something else when they’re out on social media? Trust me, I’ve been in organizations where, you know, we we spent hours and weeks and months really looking at what some was saying online versus what they were saying in a product meeting or a cab, for example. So you can establish things like triggered recommendations or when a customer does something well, you can create an automation that then says, please go and review that on the GTA and capture a site. You can actually create that as an automated piece. Imagine that customer likes the product, uses the product, wants to talk about it, gives you some good survey and you automate something that gives them an offer to go to a third party review site and review it. I’m not talking about creating separate campaigns where you’re pulling lists of people and emailing list of people saying please write a review. This is all automated, right? That I mean, that would save I mean, I use that in my own organization where I’m trying to to do things like GTA and Katara. We want those reviews. Right. You’re trying to get those out. But but guess what? If it was automated, I’d have one less person focus on trying to just pull pull customer names and reach out to customers. Like that’s the power of the product. Right. That’s the power that you’ve got, something like automation. OK, those are three things. Again, this is this the thing to remember about this is. Those three things are all things that exemplar markets, the things about. These processes, these interaction points can be automated to take out the manual work that you do to try and link the the systems and data together, it doesn’t matter what system you want to use. You might want to use a CRM. You might want to use an analytics tool to to kind of visualize this. But you can create these automations that happen in the background. So your marketing ops, your sales ops, whoever it is, can be looking at different pieces of data, looking at new tools to actually get more out of make better business decisions because a lot of the manual work is done in the background. OK, we’re coming to the end now, so as I was thinking through this, those are a bunch of different things. We talked about customer journeys, we’ve talked about move to cloud and automation and how you use A.I. because you need masses of data. So as I was thinking about what are the what are the there’s the three things that I think you should think about. So as you look to how do I automate and doesn’t matter which part of the organization but you should be looking at, this is like how do you automate? So so based on that, what should you look at? So three days, three days to think about first A.I. A.I. means how do I start to pull all my data together to get better at making decisions so I can use artificial intelligence to look at models, to look at customer behavior, customer data and actually have have have a tool, an artificial intelligence to give me those insights without me having to run, run foam’s run processes, run spreadsheets, download, do some, do some assessment. That’s a challenge. Second day automation. This is what we’ve talked about for the whole thing. So how do you really look at that? Automation tools, automation processes, automation platforms to make sure that you’re actually connecting the pieces that need to get connected? This isn’t point to point. What I mean by this is this is a way of linking all pieces of data that you might not be thinking about Lincoln today, or you just know that it’s impossible to do. Or, you know, if you’re like me and you get hundreds of vendors, vendor requests each day, they’re all saying you can link you know, you link this back to your CRM, for example, and that’s great. But but all the other pieces are all linked back separately and they don’t talk to each other. So it’s really critical to make sure that you get all those pieces together.
[00:27:46] And finally, anyone, anyone should be able to access that.
[00:27:50] Anyone should be able to use it. You shouldn’t have to be a professional coder. You shouldn’t have to be a data architect or data scientist to be able to use it. Anyone should be able to use this and make sure that the I.T. organizations and line of businesses are talking to each other. And we actually do want to work together. I.T. and lines of business want to help each other. But as of right now, it’s just becoming a challenge because I want to do so many things with data and applications and they want to do so many controls. If you think of it this way and find the right automation integration platform, you can actually both win from this deal. And I think, to be honest, that’s the, you know, being able to to dynamically, intelligently connect the enterprise like there. That’s that’s what we do. And that’s ultimately what we’re trying to do to to be more profitable to to deliver the products because we know what customers are using to make sure that we’re delivering value to the business. We’re not just spending money, we’re actually delivering value because we’re seeing in sight seeing places across the organization where there’s too many service people engaged in this account because I see they’re not using the right product. I mean, think of the possibilities. It’s massive. Anyway, that’s it for my presentation from today. So I appreciate your time. I’m happy to to follow up afterwards. You find me on social media and any other any other public profile. I’m happy to have conversations. And that was great to be with you today. Thanks.