The AI Conversation: What Marketers Should Be Thinking About
Andrea Tarrell, CEO at Sercante, believes all marketers should be thinking when it comes to AI.
(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faiz on CEO of Cast Mein Studios.
I am so excited to have you on stage today
here at the Pipeline Summit at Dreamforce.
How are you?
- Doing well.
How are things with you?
- It's great to have you.
Great to be chatting marketing,
great to be chatting Salesforce
and all the cool stuff you're doing.
So let's get started first.
Tell us a little bit about your role.
- So I'm Andrea Terrell,
I'm the CEO and founder of Circontay.
We specialize in making marketing teams
successful on the Salesforce platform.
So I do a lot of working with customers,
talking to new prospects,
we're considering Salesforce's marketing cloud products
among many other things.
- Yeah, what type of customers does Circontay have?
- So we're all across the board.
I'd say we slant maybe 80% B2B
and focus mostly on customers with considered purchases.
So things that require some back and forth
with a sales rep, a little bit of research
and a little bit longer time to buy.
- And a lot of, so a lot on the B2B side side,
a lot of part on?
- Yeah, part on, we also see plenty of marketing cloud
either alongside part on or depending on the skill
or organization in lieu of part on.
- And then what are sort of like within those companies
when they come to you,
what sort of the burning desire
that they come to Circontay with?
- There's a whole, I could probably call it
like the top dozen, but in the interest of time,
I'll give you like the top three.
The first is probably marketing ROI.
So being able to report on what they're doing
that's actually contributing to revenue.
The second is helping their sales teams prioritize.
So marketing's working really hard to generate leads
by how do sales know who's qualified,
who they should call first.
We spend quite a bit of time doing that.
And then the third thing we're starting to get
a lot of questions about is like,
what should we be doing about AI?
Like it's all we're hearing on the stage at Dreamforce.
Like what should organizations of my size or my flavor
be thinking about when it comes to AI?
- Let's go there first.
What should they be thinking about when it comes to AI?
- Yeah, I think marketers should think about it
similar to how they've been thinking about automation.
So thinking about what are the processes in their businesses
that are not improved by their sales and marketing team members
spending a lot of time on it.
So in the CRM and marketing automation space,
like some very common use cases are like things
like lead routing.
So coming up with an if then type of logic to say,
okay, leads in this industry or leads in this geo
or going to this person, like looking at those types
of functions and how can AI make that better?
With generative AI, the idea that AI is in the right emails
for us, generate content for us.
I think a great way to think about that is like,
what is sort of the non-value added part
that we can start having the machine do for us
so that humans have the role of
finessing, spending time on the like the highest potential
items and really doing what they'd be best.
And zoom in out for a second.
How do you think about your marketing strategy
and how you acquire customers?
- Yeah, so as part of our marketing strategy,
I mean, our main channel that we consult around is email.
So unsurprisingly, we do a lot of email internally.
We also do quite a bit of event marketing.
So getting out at events like Dreamforce,
meeting customers there.
And then content marketing is our other big one.
So lots of blog content, webinars, thought leadership.
- And when, because obviously you're selling exclusively
within the like Salesforce ecosystem,
which is very, very vast and also very unique,
how does that sort of like play into your strategy
specifically like only targeting Salesforce customers
or people like that?
How do you like identify that need or that demand?
- Yeah, so I mean, in the greater world,
it's like a pond within that.
But as you know, the Salesforce ecosystem
is big.
So there's more than enough customers
that we can possibly work with.
But it's usually about like the content
that we're putting out there.
Like what can we share that helps our target audience
find us and then everything else seems to sort itself out?
- Yeah, what are some of those things
that you've seen that really resonated?
- Honestly, the hands on tactical content we share a lot of.
So not just sort of theoretically
like how in a business approach marketing automation
but more like I'm struggling with this exact problem.
How can I solve this from a technical perspective?
Our team does a lot of solution right up saying like,
okay, like here's the buttons that we pushed
and here's the code that we created.
And our audience finds that right away
and knows that that's something special and different.
- So it's just like hyper technical?
- I mean, some of it is,
some of it's more technical than others,
but I would say it's hyper use case focused.
- Yeah. - So yeah, it's like a specific problem
that we're solving for a business.
- That's fascinating.
And then within those like personas,
how do you sort of like filter that stuff is like,
hey, this is for a type of person
and the type of role and then this job that they need to do
and or this like moment of time or whatever?
- Yeah, we do a bit of that.
I mean, in some of the smaller businesses that we work with,
it's one marketer wearing a lot of hats.
So wearing an admin hat, a developer hat,
a business user hat, in large organizations,
they have whole teams that are focused on
some of these sub functions.
So yeah, depending on sort of the level of content,
it can be more specialized than others.
- And how do you create that stuff?
- Our team, we've created a huge culture
around information sharing.
So one of our core values is generosity.
So the idea that if you're getting something
or achieving something,
looking at how do you share that with other people
and bring other people along on the journey?
So it's a culture that we built.
Every single person on our team contributes to our blog content.
Everybody's kind of keeping an eye out for like what solution.
We have a Slack channel called Show and Tell
where we're just sharing cool things
and we're building for customers.
So it's kind of ingrained in who we are.
- Oh, that's awesome.
And because so many different people are,
you know, working with other marketing teams,
I'd imagine you're sharing best practices
and pulling different things and seeing things
that are working and being able to source some of that stuff
in a way that, I mean, it's like one of the utilities
of working with someone like Yelp where,
yeah, you've probably seen every problem under the sun.
And so therefore like you've probably seen it before
and you can easily sort of fix it.
- Yeah. And we also share pretty openly
about what's not working.
So somebody is hitting a wall,
they can't find a solution to the thing
that they're trying to solve.
We have a like very transparent culture
and people will just jump in and say,
hey, I've been hacking at this for two hours.
I have no idea how to solve this.
And then people will chime in and say,
hey, did you look at this?
Did you think about this?
And it's amazing to watch like group problem solving
live on Slack, but that's also another,
another thing that is like pretty entrenched in who we are.
- It's crazy.
We try to do some of that stuff too.
It's so hard though to like do that sort of problem solving
on site here's just like, we just can't only call it together.
And I'll hammer through this.
Any best practices there?
- So we're a fully virtual team.
- We are too.
- And we were fully virtual before it was cool, before COVID.
And we have people in time zones from,
I think Belgium is our furthest east
and California is our furthest west.
So it's been eight hours a time.
So we've just gotten really good at it.
And there are definitely times where it's like,
all right, we got it.
We got to just jump on a call.
I would say the most important times are when emotions
start getting involved or people are misinterpreting
what each other say.
And at that point, that's where we cease to slack.
And it's like, okay, let's just talk it out.
- It's so hard figuring out tone.
- Oh, 100%.
- It's like every single, I always have to remind our team.
It's like, don't attribute to malice.
- Yes.
- What just might be, someone being short with,
because they're like, Kat is jumping on their keyboard bread.
- Oh, they're.
(laughs)
- Or they're in line at Starbucks.
So they just are texting while traveling,
not that they should be doing that.
Yeah, yeah, I'm so angry.
We tell our team to spend a little extra time
thinking about your tone when you're the one
that's writing it.
And then when you're on the receiving end,
cut that person as much slack.
No pun intended about how it's framed.
And just assume that they mean it in the best possible way
and try not to read anything into it.
- That's great. Slack rules number one.
Cut them.
- Cut them slack. - Cut everybody some slack.
So switching back to marketing,
what are your three uncuttable budget items?
- Ooh, that's a tough question.
I would say content,
which is a low budget channel,
but not low budget in terms of time.
- Right.
- I would say events, because building community
and meeting people is really important to who we are.
And then I was gonna say digital for the third one,
but that's a pretty big umbrella.
So, but I'd say website.
- Yeah, tell me about your website and how you think about it.
- Yes, I think our website is the first place
for people to learn more about who we are.
So it's a credibility check.
It's kind of our place to summarize who we are,
what we're all about, what we stand for.
In more recent years,
we've started to treat it a little bit less like a brochure
and more as how do we turn this into an interactive
lead gen vehicle for us?
So thinking about like smart calls to actions,
using tools like Qualified to help convert more
of that website traffic,
we're making some big progress in that area.
- Shout out to Qualified.
I mean, we're here at Atchring Force with Qualified
as a pipeline summit.
So who better to talk about?
But yeah, I know, I think that this is a big shift
from marketers thinking about things being very static
and being very like,
"Hey, just go find information to being interactive
to when someone comes to the site,
to be able to have a conversation right then and there."
- Yeah.
- And it's like a pretty big shift in your team.
It's a pretty big shift in thinking.
As, you know, a mid-says organization
where you don't have unlimited resources,
how do you think about like allocating time
to those type of things to respond faster?
- Yeah, and I think a lot of marketers also used to think
about a website as something that you built once.
Like you hired an agency to do that.
It was a big project, then it was done and dusted
and you could kind of step away from it.
We're taking a lot less of that approach
and trying to be a little more on top of,
okay, this new thing is happening.
Let's put a banner up.
Look, this new thing is happening.
Let's make sure we have a page for it
and just moving a little faster with some of that.
- Do you find that when you are trying to be faster
in terms of response times that you have to like
staff the organization different or just like,
think about things and the reason why I ask is
we've been trying to implement that like five minute
or less type instant response.
Obviously things like qualified let you communicate instantly
which is even better, but being able to have someone,
you know, book meetings real time, do stuff like that.
It's so valuable.
How do you think about just like speed as a currency
and any best practices there?
- Yeah, it's definitely, I mean, speed is huge.
I mean, like we all know that like as individual consumers
when you're bopping around online looking for something,
attention stands are so short.
Like if you don't find what you're looking for,
you don't get the answer that you need,
you're on to the next thing.
So yeah, trying to help people find what they're looking for
is like, I feel like challenge number one.
And then challenge number two is like,
if they don't get the answer,
making sure that they get pushed to a human
as quickly as possible is a big deal.
- What do you feel like is next for marketing automation?
Obviously like so much of how we're communicating via email
still works, a bunch of it doesn't work anymore.
Yeah, what are some trends that you're seeing?
- Yeah, I still think personalization is a frontier
that we haven't quite conquered yet.
- Yeah, we're nowhere close.
- Yeah, I mean, like you see some of the use cases
on stage at Dreamforce about like some of the ways
that big brands are using personalization.
And I look at much of the market
who's like still struggling to even do like first name,
company name, much less like more sophisticated use cases
than that.
But I think things like serving up the next best piece of content,
the next best action for somebody to take related products,
I think there's a lot of potential there
that's that continues to be had tapped.
- I got an email earlier today from an organization
that's sort of like an old school organization.
And it was like, hey Ian, you know,
like we just did this thing XYZ.
And then like paragraph three was like,
at Caspian Studios, I wonder, you know,
if you're doing XYZ and I was like, dang, look at y'all.
Put the company name three paragraphs in.
I didn't know you had it in you.
Like it's still like the bar is still so low.
- Yeah, it's very low.
And I think this is also kind of going back
to the AI piece that we were talking about.
I think this is gonna be a big like separation of humans
in the robots moment.
Because I've been on the receiving end of a few emails lately
that were very clearly written by AI.
And it's like they just scraped random facts off the internet
to like stuff I do with email.
And it's like, okay, that's not personalization.
Like I know what press release you grab that from.
And like that third fact is completely
and really the time business.
So like that's where I think the human element
will still be preserved.
Like maybe we can have AI do the first half for us,
but then we still need people to make it,
make the magic happen.
- So I remember seeing this was years ago
before AI was anywhere near as sophisticated as now.
And it was like AI could predict
with like 85% accuracy, a picture of an elephant.
And the person was like, well, a four year old
can predict 100% accuracy of what an elephant looks like.
But I think that that is true
with some of the marketing copy now,
where you're like, yeah, you're 85% right with this.
But that extra 15% is the partner I'm like,
that's my BS meter.
- Yeah, 100%.
- And so you're like, I see that instantly.
And I'm like unsubscribe or whatever.
So I think that you're right.
If there is that little bit extra
that an actual human can look at and verify
and do that little bit extra,
then I think it's gonna go a long way.
- I like that elephant and it goes up.
- Yeah, is that funny?
- I'm gonna bar that.
- Yeah.
I mean, my kid is too.
And he is just not at 100% for seeing elephants.
There's a lot of stuff where it's like this morning,
you wanna take the rhino within the school
and I'm like, it's like elephant.
I'm like, not an elephant.
- Close, close.
- Yeah.
Both critically endangered.
So I feel like he's on a good path there.
But yeah, I mean, I think that that's part of the thing
with AI is like we, it can't just be sort of,
once I fits all every single problem,
every problem is in there.
And you just hammer it with AI
'cause you're just gonna lose people.
And again, we spent so, so, so much time and effort
to get that person to subscribe to our stuff
in the first place.
But like the last thing we wanna do
is to get them to unsubscribe
because like you pulled the wrong fact off
of like a PDF page.
- 100%.
Our marketing team's using AI for some fun things.
- Go on.
- One of the things that Sarah tried this week was
you needed a discord channel.
Basically like it's a dragon.
Here's a picture of the stuff that we're imitating
and like make it look like a Salesforce character.
And now we have a beautiful sticker that's available
at our booth, so.
- That's, well, and like again,
like even just referencing AI as like,
it's the biggest term ever.
It means a million different things.
- Yeah.
- But AI like as it relates to marketing,
again, extremely vast,
whether it's design or video or, you know,
there's infinite possibilities there.
When it comes to writing copy,
get infinite possibilities there
and inputs that you could put in,
what I find, so I write our newsletter
with the help of our marketing team.
I shouldn't say I write it from marketing team writes it.
And then I go back and rewrite sections
that I want to write to add personal anecdotes.
And so what I found is that when I get responses
to our email newsletter, it's about all the personal stuff.
It's about like my kid or something that we did
or something that we tried or a personal photo.
And like I don't put a ton of that stuff on LinkedIn
like a photo of my kid or something like that.
Am I gonna do that?
But when I, if you subscribe to get my thoughts on stuff
for the Cassey and newsletter,
I feel really comfortable putting that sort of stuff in there.
And to me, that is not personalized to the person
but it allows them to understand who's writing it.
One of the things that we've started doing for our blog posts
is putting a header of who wrote it with the photos of like,
this was written by this person.
And we have a funny thing that Colin on our team
came up with where it's like,
this post was written by this person with an arrow
edited by this person and this person kind of did nothing.
And it's like a photo of me.
So it's a photo of like all three of us.
And it's just one of those things to be like,
this wasn't written with it.
This was written by real people in a way that
if it's something that has information
that you couldn't get anywhere else on the internet,
that that is really valuable.
So like we always thought about that like 80, 80, 20 rule
with personalization where you'd see the like
first paragraph personalized middle section not 80,
or like is 10, 80, 10 on that.
Then I think that there's some of that
that people could start doing with AI that's really exciting.
But again, you need to actually do your research
or to put personal anecdotes or things like that in there.
- Yeah, yeah, I love that.
I feel like that's very humanizing to have like,
hey, here are the people who created this
and with how much has moved online,
like remembering that there's like people
behind the interactions of like people
that are driving some of these things,
I think is important and sometimes forgotten.
- And you, we can all spot the templates now a mile away, right?
- Oh yeah.
- It's like we know what this is, we know what a sequence is,
we know how to like split sequences,
we know how to do like all this sort of stuff.
- Yeah, it's amazing how fast you can go through
like your LinkedIn inbox and be like,
oh, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, like just even like
the shape of paragraphs or like if there's a calonly link
or like you can spot it.
- Yeah, I mean like I'm at the point now where it's like
when I wanna reach out to like people that I like sort of know
or in contact with, it's like less than a sentence
at this point, it's like a broken sentence and that's it
because I'm like, I don't want them to see, you know,
three or four paragraphs because I am not gonna read it
and be like, they don't care.
- Yeah, 100%.
- They really don't.
Any other best practices that you're seeing in terms of
copy or copywriting or things that you're putting
in automations or that people are doing really well?
- I mean, this kind of goes back to something
where we touched on but I think authenticity
is really important.
So if you're gonna take time to create content,
make sure it's something you care about that is meaningful
and not just sort of filler things that,
'cause I mean people can feel that.
And on the automation side, I would say like just taking time
to thoughtfully think through like what is the natural
sequence of information that people need
from your customer's perspective.
So like if I were buying this product,
like what are sort of the logical things
that I would need to follow?
So many companies don't even do that
and that like that's not even a very high bar.
So the companies that are doing that are seeing results
from it.
- Yeah, and so with that like push to your best piece
of content of all time, push to your best customer story
of all time.
I mean, my bias to this is like just share as many
other people talking as you can.
It's like, hey, this is what, you know, this person said,
this is what Mora, the CMO qualified said.
This is what, you know, to me personally like,
you know, we all look to our peers.
I talked to a CMO one time and they told me that
they would ignore a lot of stuff,
but they will never ignore a referral from like no matter,
no matter what, if one of their friends
refers them to something, even cold,
he's like, I'll never ignore it.
And I was like, what about if you saw your friend
in like an ad or a piece of copies,
like I would read that every single time.
- That's a great point.
- Yeah.
- And you're like, whereas like do you care
what Ian has to say on a random Wednesday?
No, but do you care what like your friend
that you worked with at a company five companies ago
says about something that you haven't talked to in a while?
Yeah, I'm gonna go check that out.
- I put on that ad and I'd be like,
hey, what's this guy up to?
- Yeah.
And I think that that is where you get a lot more value
out of like those automations
is to put other people's thoughts in there
rather than your own.
It's like, hey, did you know that our feature X
drives seven X ROI to XOIS?
He's like, no, nobody cares.
Like, hey, did you know that, you know,
Craig, the CEO of qualified said that this is
the best thing since sliced bread.
Like, that's pretty cool.
It's like, or even better, like here's a quote from Craig
where he said, you know, X, Y, Z.
And like, that's the stuff that I think actually,
and you don't need to put a preamble,
you don't need to put anything in there.
Just like give the people what they want as quick as you can.
- Yeah, I think another thing too
that I see marketers losing sight of is like
consistently showing up and being there for like the long tail
'cause like, we talk about right message, right time,
right place, like you could perfect your messaging
and it's like just not the right moment
for that person to hear it.
So like continuing to like send emails
like every week or so and just stay in front of them
by the time they get that referral.
It's like, oh yeah, I've heard of so-and-so
like they've been in my inbox or, and that's,
I'm not trying to make this a qualified commercial,
but like another thing that I think qualified is great for
is like if you had an opportunity that kind of went away,
faded into the woodwork, then they circle back around
six months later, you're not restarting the conversation
or treating it like it's something cold.
You have all the data of like, okay,
here's how they've interacted with us.
And you're in there at the moment that they're ready
to finally engage with you.
And that's a pretty powerful thing.
- Yeah, it's a great point.
So we work with qualified on like, you know,
on like recycle or pipeline acceleration kind of stuff.
And like totally, and like the truth of the matter is like,
you could send that person an email every week,
ready to buy, ready to buy, ready to buy.
And they could say like, no, no, no, no, no.
Or you could provide like value added content
or information or stuff like that, you know,
share stuff on social, hopefully they see you there,
maybe follow them around with some funny ads,
create some sort of artificial touches,
invite them to events, do these sort of things.
And then when they come back to their, you know,
to your website, then it's like,
bam, you're right there, the conversation is restarted again.
That makes that customer for that prospect feel way better
than if you just like banged on their door over and over again,
which is super annoying.
Even if you're like the nicest sales rep in the world,
which like, we started with this customer like,
hey, you said to reach back out, just like checking in,
you know, I don't want to be annoying.
But like that is where the rest of that like,
that, you know, whether it's your warming or recycling
or whatever sequence that you can put them in,
that's cool, like that stuff matters so much.
And then you start this sales conversation
right where it was.
And like you said, they don't have to like,
re-qualify or go through a demo,
or any of that stuff, like just let's get back into it.
- Yeah, totally agree.
- Any other thoughts on things that people are doing
right or wrong as it relates to Salesforce
or Marketing Cloud or part out or any stuff like that?
- I guess one other thought on like the Salesforce,
like part out Marketing Cloud, Arena.
I think one could do challenges like training
and enablement and getting your teams ready
to embrace new technology.
And part of the reason why that's top of mind is like,
with all this talk of AI,
there's gonna be a whole like new sector of jobs
that are created as a result of that.
And getting people comfortable and adopting like things
that are new is a muscle that I feel like all organizations
need to start working out.
So yeah, that's something I've been thinking about
a lot this week.
- We're all gonna be learning together.
- Oh yes.
- And never done.
- No, it really isn't.
And I think, you know, everybody's a little scared,
you know, how the Marketing Sales sounds,
like what does this mean for me?
And I think it's a great point that, you know,
we're all sort of in wait and see mode
of how this all all lines up.
- Yep.
- And neither thoughts on sort of
uncutable budget items, marketing items,
things you are loving right now
or your most cutable budget items,
things you're not gonna be investing in.
- Oh, most cutable budget items.
My VP of marketing is like, don't cut my budget.
Yeah, I mean, I would say like the channels
that we continue to invest in are all focused on community,
growing our audience of people that are like our customers,
like trying to stay as focused as possible.
The things that we are steering away from
are the things that feel a little bit more
of like shotgun style where it's like,
we might reach some of our ideal audience.
We might not like things that are
untargeted are going to the bottom of the list.
- Random Max marketing.
- Yes.
- I know.
- Love that phrase.
- Yeah, if it's not, I was told by one of my mentors,
Chandar, the CMO of Koopa, and he always would talk about,
you get three plays and that's it.
It's like, you can run three.
And it's like, you can't do any more
'cause you can't do them well.
And every single time I put a fourth
into the other marketing stuff.
And I'm like, and then those ones we don't run as well.
And I'm like, gosh, it should have just,
should have just stuck to three.
But, you know, but I think that it's important
to run experiments and to look at things like that
as long as it's integrated into your overall strategy.
But yeah, those random Max and Max marketing kill you.
And I'm like, they'll worst, I love,
I just love marketing.
It's like trying this stuff.
It's like, I just wanna do it.
- Yeah.
Yeah, we've definitely fallen prey
to the random Max and marketing sometimes
where it's like, we have an idea
that we're really excited about.
We invest in building it,
but it's not really aligned with our audience.
And so it gets abandoned or it gets under resource.
And then yeah, it's just not as good as we expect.
But things that we've done that like are truly aligned
with like what our customers want
are the ones that we see having the most staying power.
So like, for example, we created a conference
called March Dreaming.
- So fun.
- Yes, a little play on the like Dreamforce
and the marketing piece.
But it's, we started during COVID
because like Dreamforce wasn't happening
that was a huge pipe-gen event for us.
And so we said, okay, what if we try to get people together
on like Zoom and try to make it into like a whole thing.
And it's kind of taken on a life of its own.
But the reason that it's stuck is because like,
our audience is truly excited about it as an event.
Like they love the content, they love the community.
We don't even really brand it as circontae.
So a lot of people don't even know that we organize it,
but it continues to be a great sort of visibility
and connection engine for us.
- I love it.
That's awesome.
Those type of events, they are worth their money and gold
if they're done right. - 100%.
- Yeah.
- You know, going back to the North Star thing,
and I truly believe that if your marketing strategy
starts with community from what your customers want
and figuring out ways to do that,
whether it's events and getting them together,
whether it's content, whether it's like the useful things
that you're talking about, series, whatever it is,
you're rarely gonna stray into things that don't matter.
It's like when you are dumping my, this is my bias.
It's like the more and more that you dump it to pay,
or it's like you can be,
you can fall too far into the like paying for your,
you know, overpaying for people
that are gonna do business with you anyway.
- Yeah.
- If you had engaged them in those other formats.
- Yep, I agree 100%.
- All right, well, that's it.
That's all we got for today.
For our listeners, go check out circontae.
We'll link it up in the show notes.
If you need any help at all
with Salesforce marketing automation,
with Pardot or Pardot for those.
- Not Pardot.
- I know, I have a limited edition Pardot puppies stickers
from years ago, and I have a Pardot mug
that says podcast coffee repeat on it.
So lots of love for team Pardot.
We're marketing cloud, check out circontae.
Why don't you any final thoughts, anything to plug?
- No, thanks for having me.
It's great event.
- I'm excited to see you guys start the week here at Dreamforce.
- Indeed, you too.
Take care.
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