Experts of Experience - #39 Optimizing Campaigns and Driving Revenue with AI

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

On this episode, Alison Lindland, the CMO of Movable Ink, discusses the impact of AI on marketing teams and she emphasizes the need for teams to adapt to the changing landscape and support their clients throughout their journeys. Alison also shares insights on the company's customer advisory board and the value of collaborating with clients to drive product innovation.Key Takeaways:How Movable Inc. utilizes AI technology to optimize campaigns and explore new categories for individual recipientsHow AI is changing the work and structure of marketing teams, requiring them to adapt and support their clients through change management.Why employee experience is a key factor in delivering a great customer experienceWhy marketing leaders need to be comfortable with change if they want to succeed in the AI-driven landscape.–How can you bring all your disconnected, enterprise data into Salesforce to deliver a 360-degree view of your customer? The answer is Data Cloud. With more than 200 implementations completed globally, the leading Salesforce experts from Professional Services can help you realize value quickly with Data Cloud. To learn more, visit salesforce.com/products/data to learn more. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

The consumer understanding and expectation around personalization has never been higher. We're moving from everybody gets the same thing to everybody gets something specific to them. And there's a huge shift in that where it goes from this is serving the company's needs of we need to move this product to what is it that this individual person needs from us and how can we show that to them in a way that actually helps them make decisions? There is a active quid pro quo that is happening between consumers and brands. Gone are the days where you could passively collect data like you were squirreling it away for a winter and you're going to use it eventually. You need to use that data immediately for their benefit.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, we're talking to Alison Linlund, the CMO, Chief Marketing Officer at Movable Inc. We're going to discuss how AI and agility are transforming customer experience in modern marketing. So let's get into this amazing conversation. Alison, how are you? Hey, Lauren. I'm so happy to be here. Well, I've been diving into Movable Inc. to understand a little bit more about what you all do. And you're one of the fastest growing SaaS companies on the market today because of your unique approach to marketing automation and of course, AI. And so I'd love to understand and touch on

personalization. This is something that is so key in marketing and customer experience today. And it's something that Movable Link has really focused your business around. So I'd love to understand how Movable Link is really approaching personalization in the marketing landscape. Sure. And just to say, step back and introduce Movable Link to those initiated who might not know us. Though it's funny, I joined Movable Link now 12 years ago as the 14th employee. And there was a point when if you had heard of Movable Link, I felt like it was because I had told you or I had given you something at a trade show. And so Movable Link is now obviously a much larger company. We're a New York based, but we're a global SaaS company. And we combine the power of AI powered content decisioning and automated content generation to help world leading brands

deepen customer relationships across channels. And fundamentally what that does is it modernizes marketing workflows and delivers really, really tangible business results. Because at the end of the day, we all have a number, right? And we work with every single vertical. We work with large scale, innovative forward thinking brands. And in fact, just last week in New York, which I know you're in today, we welcomed 700 of our clients to Think Summit, which is our client summit. And we had so many of them on stage. We had Amazon, Meta, Dunkin' Donuts, Samsung, Citibank, Adidas. And so that just gives you a sense of the breadth of types of marketers who are using our products in the tech sacks and the diversity of the types of customers that are reaching our technology. And I love to meet, you know,

sort of friends and new people, whether it's through my daughter's school or volunteer activities and say like, Movable Link is coursing through your inbox and your mobile device as we speak, creating better personalized experiences and driving better experiences for you as a consumer and better outcomes for our clients as businesses. I'm so happy that you guys are doing this because as a consumer, there is nothing more annoying than receiving marketing communications that do not apply to me. And so that's why I was so excited to see and learn more about MovableLink and how you're approaching this topic of personalization because it's just really so important and consumers are tired of the stock marketing content. We really want to see things that are specific to us. So tell us

a little bit more about how Movable Ink is really creating that personalization in your clients' marketing. Sure. And I just want to drill on that for one second, Lauren, because you nailed it. I think the consumer understanding and expectation around personalization has never been higher. And when I started in this job 12 years ago, I think that there was kind of a fuzzy understanding around personalization, but there wasn't even consensus on the brand side. I mean, I would have clients who are saying like, my CMO is not bought in, this isn't the hill to die on, which is kind of quaint to think about nowadays, but right? Like ridiculous.

Nowadays, like that ship has sailed from a business standpoint, but consumers have really ratcheted up their understanding, right? And when I go to, again, like I'm clearly in this phase of life and I go to like a school event, I talk to people about what I do for a living, they will whip out their phones and they'll show me something and they'll say, so, okay, are you guys powering this? Or how come when I got that email from this airline, they didn't know that I had just taken this trip? I mean, that is really offensive. And it's amazing how engaged they are in that transaction, right? There is a active quid pro quo that is happening between consumers and brands. And if you are not harnessing that data actively, so gone are the days where you could passively collect data like you were harnessing it for squirreling it away for a winter in some future period and you're going to use it eventually, you need to use that data immediately against that consumer

for their benefit in an explicit way, or they are going to retract the permission that they have given you. And they are very vigilant about that. And when we do surveys on that, that's not just younger demographics, that's through 65 and over. So that is a real shift in how marketers are entering the arena that consumers are really willing to share. But with this provisor that you got to use this data, you got to use it quickly for my benefit. And that's really exciting. And that's where Movable Inc. loves bringing ideas to the table for our clients. And I think you've also said it, that it's across verticals now. Customers are really excited to, our customers are really excited to learn across

verticals. But so how we're doing this, we have two core products, Studio and DaVinci. And Studio is our legacy product that people might know of as being just called Blink previously. And that really focuses on automation. So creating those real-time experiences and we're of course famed for co-inventing the Spotify year-in-review email where we're tapping into data from any source and creating that hyper-personalized experiences that consumers respond so well to

and that leads to actions of any sort. So if you're looking for a conversion, whether it's to buy something or to convert on a credit card application, or just what we love about those here in Review Emails is they end up creating amazing customer journeys that marketers haven't even thought about just from expressing that brand journey that you've had with a company over the course of a year. So that's Studio. And then we acquired this amazing partner that we've been working with for about five years called Coherent Path. And they had this incredible AI product that was very retail centric. And they had been working with about 15 of America's largest retailers from Williams

Sonoma, the Gap family of brands, L.L. Bean. And they just took off like a rocket during COVID when, of course, there was this perfect swarm of inventory issues, workforce challenges for being able to help people keep up with the demands on the marketing workflow. And then business conditions were changing constantly. So you could not create a linear waterfall email calendar as you had historically. And if you think about the way the email calendar used to run, it's essentially vestiges of like the print production process, which is wacky. There is no other digital channel which is following the print production process.

Like why would there be? You know, it's just nutty. And yet for a variety of reasons, it's still sort of following that rhythm. And so Coherent Paths was, you know, interested in tapping into a larger go-to-market machine. We've been a longtime partner of theirs. Lo and behold, they accepted our removable ink rose

and they joined our company. And it's been three years. And now we're very thrilled. We just announced at Think Summit that we've been pushing them through into other verticals now as well. And what they do is they power that automation through AI. So whereas with Studio, marketers are determining who sees that content. DaVinci powered AI to essentially totally compose that email, tapping into the image library of the brand. And it's essentially a revolution in terms of the way that they're creating the email. You're no longer manually calendaring, which let's be honest, is a really, really arbitrary

way to run your entire email calendar. It's a very political process. It's usually driven by the merchandising team, and it's very, very inefficient. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the consumer's wants or needs. And so what we do is at first we ingest two years worth of data from the consumer on an individual basis, and we optimize to them. And I think a lot of people are living in this kind of suspended state right now where they're using segmentation strategies. And to that, I would say, love that for you, but like one in 200,000, not personalized. I'm still not personalized. Still doesn't know that I live in Brooklyn and I have two tweens,

boy, do I ever. And all all those things are very specific to me. And so again, this is so different from that manual curated print production process where you've got a calendar on a wall and you're seeing Thursday's handbags, Friday's footwear, and that we're not going to do so many emails on weekends because bottom line, nobody likes to work on weekends. Unfortunately, guess who likes to shop on weekends? American consumers. So DaVinci is really just a revolution in empowering marketers to meet consumers where they are and not beleaguer their teams and enable them to get back to doing the smart strategic work that they hired them to do in the first place. I'm so happy we're here. I mean, we're moving from everybody gets the same thing to everybody gets something specific to them.

And there's a huge shift in that where it goes from this is serving the company's needs of we need to move this product to what is it that this individual person needs from us and how can we show that to them in a way that actually helps them make decisions. And it's so important that we're at this place and this is where AI is so incredibly useful because now we can have millions of email flows instead of one or five or whatever it is. And so I'd love to understand a little bit more of like, how are you seeing, obviously this is a great example of how AI is changing the game, but there's also more. How else is Moveable Inc. utilizing AI technology to help companies really deliver great customer experiences? Sure. So we had so many great examples on stage last week,

but when I think to one in particular and the company that's really been going through an amazing transformation at multiple levels is Victory Secret. They're going through obviously a big rebrand from sort of being a mall-bound retailer to really being a full omni-channel pioneer. And so they wanted to switch from that very marketer led approach to an AI driven approach that puts the customer over what we would call like the campaign, which is again, that very merchandising led mindset where it's just sort of like arbitrarily set months in advance and has no bearing on like, I don't know, you know, it's a pretty wild heat wave in New York right now.

Nobody knew last week it was going to be a heat wave. In a traditional email production process, you're doing emails at best three weeks in advance, right? And what's also really heartbreaking about that traditional email production process is you've got very, very talented people, especially the creative team. And I lead a creative team. I know how much work goes into everything from photography to design to the coding process, working on essentially a beautiful piece of art, like a mini website, that gorgeous email and the horrible QA process that happens if something is all of a sudden out of stock or, oh my goodness, we realized the drop shadow in this image is wrong. All the things that happen at the end, you have to go right back to the beginning. But worse, with the open rates that brands are seeing today, you're getting less

than like 5% of your file seeing that email. For what reason? Nothing to do with that email, but because that's just sort of the behavior of your file and maybe people are busy. And then the very lovely email marketer might beg the person who runs the central deployment team, gosh, you know what? This was a really great campaign and it was gorgeous and it deserves another shot, but that calendar is fixed. There's no room for it. It can't go out again. I'm sorry, we promised all the other merchandisers these other dates. We can't do it. So me who would have loved to see that email again, I'm just not going to go because it went below the break line and I'm just never going to scroll back again. It's gone. Yeah, exactly. So the way that DaVinci essentially reignites their file is it knows when to pull in

the images and it will essentially sort of reserve an image within that composite email that it's auto-generating again and again until it's opened. And again, it's auto-generating again and again until it's opened, right? And again, it's auto-generated. So with a lot of guardrails on it, we have something also called prohibited pairings. So for example, some of our clients sell different categories that can never be shown together or different even SKUs or brands that can never be shown together. All the types of things that you've got very clever people running their very tired human brains on, now it's just automated. And what Victoria's Secret saw in particular was double digit lifts in across clicks, conversions, and revenue in an average

12-month period, but it's a four-month payback period for the platform itself. So this is an incredibly quick turnaround on impact to investment. And that's where I talk about DaVinci being like a bit of a revolution. Completely. It's a fair amount of change management, but it's a wild amount of upside, especially when it comes to your team and the talent that you are liberating to, again, get back to doing the smart work that you hired them to do and get out of the mines and that loop, that QA loop that really burns talented people out. I have so many questions. I have so many questions. I have so

many questions. This is so exciting. And so this is really like the perfect use case of AI. I think there's a lot of people, a lot of companies who are thinking, we want to get in the AI game. We know we need to, or we'll be left behind. And where can we really start incorporating it into our business where we can see those efficiencies, not only in our team, but also in our results. And I think I'd love to understand a little bit. So rather than having the old way where we say, okay, three weeks from now, we're going to send out this campaign. We need to create a brief for the design team. We need to get photography. We need to do copywriting, na, na, na, na, na. What is it now? Can you just walk us through what the process looks like now to set up a campaign? Yeah. So first we're going to, when we onboard a client,

we're going to ingest two years worth of data. So we'll understand the file and we will really get to know the individual on a one-to-one basis. Obviously, we are going to hold out the ability to send C-zone campaigns. So that's in the zeitgeist, right? So we're coming up on 4th of July, right? That will always exist in the template. And that portion of the template might also be powered by MoveBlank by our studio piece.

But essentially, there's going to be blocks in the campaign that are reserved for DaVinci-powered elements that are going to be propagating and that are individually powered for that recipient. And again, we are going to be testing into different categories. So one of the biggest benefits of DaVinci is the ability to give them exposure to new categories. What we see a lot with these sort of, they're not as much AI engines as they are sort of lookalike models is that you're going to end up in a spiral. Like I'm being chased around,

I just had ThinkSummit and one of our sort of fun outcomes of the amazing community of users that we have over the years is a lot of people show up wearing pink now, which is our color of our brand. And so I of course was buying some fun pink. And I went on the internet to buy some pink dresses for the week's leading up to Think Summit. I am now being stalked on the internet by every pink dress available. And so that's interesting. But that's a little problematic for, you know, it's noteworthy for me because I'm in this business. If you're a regular consumer, that's a little problematic for, you know, it's noteworthy for me because I'm in this business. If you're a regular consumer, that's really aggravating. And I'm going to begin to like wear out my affection for certain brands.

We see this all the time as consumers where you're just sort of rebounding within a certain category or even within a certain item. Or worse, you've actually just bought that specific item, right? What we do is category exploration, where we are going to use that data and play around with different categories that you might not have ever articulated yourself that you had an interest in. It's like that BuzzFeed survey, right? Where you're like, oh, okay. I am a Kelly of 90210. But you would not have been able to articulate that you were interested in this item, because in the human language, there's only 20 words to express this particular thing. But in the AI world, there's like thousands of dimensions for it, right? And so it knows based on your behavior, based on demonstrated behavior, that you and people like you seem to have an affinity for this.

So we're going to begin to pulse it into that email that's being auto-generated. And we'll just see. And again, if you don't respond to it, no harm, no foul, you won't see it again. But lo and behold, if you do, we're going to see more of it. And this is the you may also like kind of thing. Like I think of, you know, on Amazon sometimes I'm like, what else do you got for me? You know, I don't know. I don't know what I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I think this is the beauty of the internet and that was the promise of, um, you know, this kind of long tail, right? Like Netflix was going to be

showing us art house films from Poland that we'd never heard of, but are they? No, they're just showing us the same. I mean, it's now just turned into like, here's the top 10 things, right? Because that's easy and they haven't quite figured out like that thumbprint yet of your viewing patterns. And in my world, my girls are using my profile. So there's that. Totally, totally. Yes. So exactly, exactly that. When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals, failure is not an option.

At Salesforce, they get it. They've made their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, available to help you with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of your journey. Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. You mentioned change management. And I think with this, like just marketing teams as an example, and this is happening on every single team as we implement AI solutions, the work of that team is changing. The work that's needed

to be done is changing. The structure of that team is being changed. Like one, how are you seeing teams being impacted? And then two, how are you supporting your clients in that if you are? Through change management. You know, when I think back to the beginning of Move the Blank, you know, we sort of our go-to-market promise was really that we're designing a personalization platform. And now we've got this AI solution, which is great. But at our core, what I think we've really kind of caught on to is that we're designing tools for change agents, if I were really to condense it. community of marketing leaders, and some of whom I worked with in their early days, like they're analysts, they're associate managers, and they're getting promoted and they're getting promoted on the strength of being able to recognize a shift in the zeitgeist

and be able to successfully drive change within their organization. And these are people who can influence without authority, who can weather inevitable setbacks, can communicate clearly, even in moments of uncertainty, and celebrate those wins at the different tiers, right? You're not at the top of the mountain, but we're here. We're at a lower peak and bring everyone along for the ride, right? And that when I looked at that audience of 700 people at Think Summit, there were, I'm not exaggerating, hundreds of people who have used us across probably hundreds of organizations who have taken us with them because we are a fundamental part of their playbook in being change agents. And that has been the best part of my job, hands down. You're a real partner, it sounds like.

Oh, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. And my favorite part also is when they come to us and say, I don't know if this is a movable ink thing, but we're struggling with this issue. And it's like, great, let's get our CX team, which is our customer success team in the room. Let's get Brian Wade's product team in there. Let's noodle this and let's make it a movable ink thing and let's solve this for you. And we have driven so many great product innovations that starts for one client and then we can pivot or innovate off of that and learn great things for our entire client base coming out of that. And I have the privilege of leading our customer advisory board, which is a 55% strong group of really our most innovative clients,

if I'm going to be so bold. And it was interesting. Many years ago, we founded it. We sort of had a vision of like, hmm, let's just pick like the biggest names, you know, like, sure, why not? Who doesn't want to like, just invite like all the popular kids to the table? But we found then, A, that like they're, you know that maybe those people are super busy and they're not engaged. What we wanted were the people who were the change agents and were really a little maybe provocative and that would come to us and would push us and provoke us and would ask for more. And we're constantly pinging us with ideas and we're challenging us. And those are the people who are going to help us grow, right? I mean, when you think about in your own career, it's the managers that push

you that you look back on and you say like, God, I didn't love that guy all the time, but boy, I really grew like three levels under that person, right. And so we sort of flipped our spec and it's very actually quite competitive to get onto our cab. We run an internal process where our go-to-market team nominates clients and we have triple the nominees that we have spots for. And then our executive team selects who we put on. And so in addition to it being the brand, it's also the individual actually that we look for. And again, we really look for people who are driving innovation within their organizations and who are just, I really have to say it again, they're change agents and they're going

to push us. And we're going to show them things that maybe we're never going to put into production. And also we're going to invite them into things that are kind of raw. Like the UX looks like this wallpaper, you know, and then we're going to, but we're going to be really vulnerable. And we'll say to them, what did you think? And maybe in front of all those people, they'll say it was great, but I'd never pay for it. You know, it was good, but like you guys got a way to go. And that is how we really

push ourselves to keep learning and keep delivering because this group invests in us. And then in return, we obviously give them access to early things and co-collaborate on projects that they want us to help on. And it's been a great partnership. We spent a whole dedicated day at Bing Summit with them and it was just so much fun. Amazing. Well, for anyone listening, this is such a great example of a customer advisory board and just having the way that you're setting this up and not only making it something that is really important and valuable for your business, but also something that they're

like competing to get onto. Like that's the perfect situation. Yeah, yeah. I'm curious to know what's top of mind for that group today. What are people asking for, especially in this AI revolution? They want to know really how to assess tools and how to get started. I think that there is everybody is sort of toes over the edge of the pool right now. And they don't really have a clear line of sight on what's next. And there are people who are taking off around them and it's unsettling. At the same time, they have what I had when I was at American Express and I was leading

mobile app development, which is the swirl of corporate paralysis and inertia beginning to come down on them. And that is challenging. And that's leadership and also being able to make an investment that is the right partner, the right communication, and to be able to put numbers on the board quickly so that you can show that this was not a two-year investment and we couldn't see any outcome until, you know, two and a half years from now. We need to show that this is born fruit pretty quickly. And, you know, that's, again, what we've sort of designed our product to be. And I think one of the things I mentioned, you know, Moveable Inc. is renowned for is being, you know, kind of a partner that you can like put in your back pocket and take with you as you go to your next role. And like, you've seen the stats, CMO rules are very, very challenging, but it's

just as challenging at that SEP and VP level, right? And you show up and you've got board scrutiny on your outcomes and you've got numbers that you've got to hit, you've got to non-solicit. So you can't hire your team of superstars, right? For at least a year or maybe a little bit less. And so you've also got a tech stack that you just walked into. That's a disaster. Why do I know that? Because you wouldn't have been hired if it wasn't, right? And that's the truth. And so, because if things are running great, why are you there? And you've got to partner with probably a very large procurement and tech organization. And also you showed up wildly out of cycle with the budgeting process. So you're not going to like

knock a multimillion dollar tech stack down. We are priced at a level where you can come in, usually with autonomy below a procurement check you can come in with like essentially found money and put some pretty out and we are also so nimble we've been built in this really modular tech mindset from the beginning so that's a very trendy concept now right there's a monolithic construct right and then there's this modular concept where you know you can sort of plug and play your partners as you choose, which gives you agility, it gives you freedom, and it allows you to evolve as your company and your program evolves.

And, you know, I've seen VPs turn white as they turn to their partners. They're like, yeah, we want to get one of those like Spotify, your review emails. How do we get the loyalty data? And they're like, sure, put it in the queue. Great. How long will that be? Oh, two quarters. It's like, we're all dead in two quarters, guys. So we'll say, okay, great. Who's your loyalty partner? We can plug into that. All you need to

do is give us keys, just give us an authentication key. We can plug in directly. We'll give you that data in real time after the fact. So it's basically like you get this beautiful polished email. It looks like it's coming from your perfect data, like your beautiful data warehouse. You flip that email over. It's duct taped together by like 16 different services. Would you ever know? It's rendering in milliseconds. No, you would never know from a consumer experience.

And again, we're giving you all that data on the end. So you can put it in your data lake or data warehouse whenever that's built, you know, but as a marketer, you can come in, bring us in immediately. And we've had people try and sign us a WSFS like before they start and then put numbers on the board that you can show to your leadership, to your board even. And then again, start to get the things that you want. You want to be able to find a new agency. Launch that RFP for a new ESP. Let's go. Yeah.

You're touching on something that I think is really, I think about a lot in this new AI world that we're living in. It's not just, are we finding a new tool to help us be more efficient? It's actually a mindset shift to an experimental mindset within an organization where we take small steps towards the bigger thing. And we need partners like Movable Ink in helping us to do that, to say, okay, what's the duct tape version of this that we can just do quickly, we can test, we can learn from. And then we can start to think about, okay, what's the long-term version of this? But I think it's really, really important that companies, as we're approaching this change that is so inevitable as we incorporate more AI into our businesses,

because there's so many benefits to doing so, but we have to do it in a way that really brings everyone along for the ride within the organization. And it's going to be scary and it's going to be challenging for some. And by taking small steps and experimenting with AI, that's really going to help us to drive adoption within our organization and actually see what works for us. Because just slapping a tool on it is not going to solve your problems. It really needs to be about, are we solving the right problems for our business that can help us to get to where we want to go? So I could say a lot about that. I know. I just want to double click on that because you absolutely nailed it. And as I always say, I have this wonderful SEP of engineering lead banquets who i've worked with since the beginning

of move blank and um here i always say and it's fun to hear this from a technologist that you know so much of technology is not just about the code it's really about people it's first of all it's a reflection of the people who build it first and foremost but it's also then it's a reflection of people who implement it and so reflection of the people who implement it. And so one of the things that we've learned in the past, I'd say two plus years as we've really gone big with DaVinci is just what you said is that that change management piece is really real. And we live in startup world and a very fast moving organization, but my origins are coming from Fortune Underworld, from American Express. And before that I was at Ogilvy working with big companies. And so it really,

you cannot overstate how much you need to bring those people along for the ride. And, you know, in startup world, you run in like days and weeks and those big companies, it really is much more about quarters. But you know, that is now becoming, I'd say kind of an existential threat threat of an existential threat, like in terms of pace of change. And so one of the things we did early on in the implementation of DaVinci is we assigned our strategy product and it's a SWAT team of former clients and essentially where they originated was you know working on studio and working the customer success team and uh they things are going great we've got a lot of clients i think we're probably close to maybe 300 at that time. But we had a tier of clients that sort of were not reaching escape velocity with our product. And we would have clients that were firmographically identical

to them. And it was really vexing. Sometimes these clients who are doing nothing were paying more than those clients. It was very strange. And there's all kinds of reasons why these things happen. But fundamentally, it usually comes down to work structure, timing, maybe people, you never know. So anyway, I made a pitch to the board and my phenomenal boss and president, Adam, look, I think if we hired a couple of people who were themselves change agents and came from the clients, and we essentially volunteered them in the form of consulting engagements to our clients. And they came along as an assist, like an overlay team with the client experience team. We could really have some breakthrough moments. And so luckily,

the board approved one hire. This is a terrific guy named Julio Lopez. And long story short, this is now six years ago. The team is 25 strong. It's a global team. They cover off every vertical. And again, they're all former clients. We never poach. And we have a variety of productized engagements that are allocated at our discretion. And essentially there's a competitive process internally where the go-to-market teams will apply for their clients to have support by this team. And some of them are really big commitments. Like we offer six to nine months support by this team. And some of them are really big commitments. Like we offer six to nine months led by this team. And sometimes they are going into some of the largest, like we're talking like top 10 banks in the world, top 10 retailers. And they're saying, hey, we know that you're about to relaunch your loyalty program. And we want to help

make sure that you have the best mobile push messaging strategy possible. So we want to give you this person for like a hundred hours. And it's strategy possible. So we want to give you this person for like, you know, 100 hours. And it's totally gratis because we want to invest in this relationship. And lo and behold, great things happen. And it's just been an amazing unlock. So when we launched DaVinci, and we had tons of dashboards where you could see the results and you could see the outcomes. But again, DaVinci is like going from driving car to traveling in a spaceship. The instruments don't

look the same. The language is a little different. The outcomes are amazing, right? Everything is better. All the things are better, but it's a big difference, right? If you were like, you know, kid that by aliens and, you know, didn't see the progression from like cars to spaceships, you'd be like, wait, what's going on here? So we assigned a lot of strategy resources to go in and really guide our clients as they're working with DaVinci

and not just be like typical customer success. And by the way, we have the best customer success teams. We have Off the Charts, Net Promoter. And those teams have big operational jobs, which is flawless success on the campaign level. But being there to handhold organizations that are like Fortune 500 companies through this level of change is a different skill set. And it also requires people who have sort of empathetically been there in those roles themselves. And that's what the strategy team does. And they go in and they guide these organizations through that change.

And they'll go in and they'll talk to the SVPs and the CMOs about like, do you need to do a town hall? What's next? Do you need content for your direct meeting? And bring everyone along for the ride. Because again, it's a revolution. But just like the introduction of the internet itself, it's a revolution. But just like the introduction of the internet itself, it's time to get on board. So I have two last questions for you that we ask all of our guests. The first is that I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with

a brand or a company that left you impressed. Tell us about that experience. So I'm actually going to see Taylor Swift in London this summer, which I'm super excited about. And I was looking online for like tips and what the scoop is about, you know, bringing bags and what time to get there and can you bring water? And they had a really fun interactive guide that had all of her songs interspersed in the narrative. So it was like, so long, London, you know, it's just really, really cute and well thought out. And let's be honest, you're getting more people in a really emotional state when you're reading that guide. Right? Like, they were you're coming in hot when you're looking at that guy, like you're spending a lot of money on these tickets.

Totally. And you know, you, you just came out of a Facebook group where they said, Hey guys, you know, I just heard that you're not allowed to wear shoes, right. Or some crazy thing. And you know, the rumor mill is rolling. Yeah, exactly. It's on fire. And you're like, okay, cool. I can do that. I cannot wear shoes.

You know, she's worth it to me and my daughters. And so you're, you're, you're coming in hot and they just, they just got real smart about it. And, um, I just really appreciated that. So I, we had put so much intention into our experience for ThinkSummit, but I just want to give kudos to Ariel Hernado and our audience engagement team. We continued to really up-level that experience until like the night before. And one of the best things that we really did was, you know, our email game went up and up this year with really bringing out our voice. Because again, nobody wants to hear from sort of like omniscient brand. Like that's not interesting, especially in the B2B world.

So we made it a little fun and cheeky. And we got emails from our clients. We have really high pressure on our email program because we're emailing the best email marketers in the world. And we got emails back from them saying they loved it. They really appreciated it. That was great. But then in terms of the experience, we really overinvest in a lot of touches of the event and our team just went above and beyond it. So small things that you think are kind of throw away really add up and we got great feedback on it, like the food. Our food is just some of the best conference food

probably that I've ever, definitely that I've ever experienced, but that we hear that anyone has ever experienced. And that sounds so throwaway, but we love our clients who are so grateful that they are coming to spend two or three days with us at Pink Summit. And we want it to be a dream and we want you to feel healthy and energized. and we want you to feel like loved and supported we don't want you to leave and go get better food like how what that is a that's an insult you know so the food is just delectable it is some of the best food ever we spend a lot of money and time on the food and again to make it healthy and refreshing and energizing and not like bogged down and cheap and sloppy and a lot of conference food. It's like meh.

And then also on the swag store. So we, you know, you go to a lot of conferences and you leave a lot of stuff and it's meh. It's like bad for the environment. If you're going to give swag, it needs to actually benefit the person who's picking up that bag. A hundred percent. And also if you have the privilege of working with the best brands in the world, why not showcase them?

So we did just that. We gave everybody two poker chips and they could redeem it for an item of their choosing from our beautiful swag store that was all

brands that were presenting. That was genius. L.L. Bean totes, Chewy Dog toys, United blankets from first class. I mean, it was a dream.

People couldn't decide what to buy. It was amazing. It was like a line, you know, hysterical. So that was just so impressive. And it just showed that we love our clients. We're so grateful for them. And we're beginning to get the scores back and the feedback. It's just been really just so touching. Every detail matters.

And just like with the example that you gave with Taylor Swift, like it's a big ticket item. Bring people into your experience fully and your ethos and your values, which it really sounds like you did in your summit last week. So that's great work. Thank you. Thank you. Last question for you.

What is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear? I really think that you need to be constantly thinking about how to get your group and your team and your organization comfortable with change. Whether it is a departure of a team member or an unexpected challenge, that is a muscle that is the muscle that's going to help you succeed the most as a leader, as future leaders. And so to the extent to which you are just constantly modeling that and modeling through how to help people manage complex challenges as they're coming at them and just thinking a little ahead, a little ahead. And as I'm sort of supporting people as they've gotten promoted into bigger and bigger roles, changing that mindset and looking farther ahead. And of course, wonderful if everything's just blue skies and up and to the right,

but managing for those unexpected scenarios. And so much of it comes down to being able to be a change agent, right? And manage towards the outcome that you want and be in control of that narrative. And again, these are all readily accessible skills that most leaders really have. It's about communication. It's about bringing everyone to the table. And it's about really just sort of laying it out and just sort of knocking it down one by one. And so I think it's really exciting to see so many people beginning to take these steps. And it's just been absolutely our pleasure to be holding their hand and be side by side with them. Such great advice. Even if you're in an old company that has been around for a long time, that is not in the startup world, in this age of AI,

everybody is going to change. And it's going to happen quickly and it's not in the startup world. In this age of AI, everybody is going to change and it's going to happen quickly and it's going to happen often. So I think that's such an important thing for everyone to keep in mind that we really need to create that culture of adaptability and experimentation like we were talking about earlier. So thank you so much, Alison, for coming on the show. This has been such an exciting conversation. And I mean, just the way that marketing is changing is so fascinating. So thank you for sharing all of those insights with us,

talking about AI and culture. It's been a great conversation. Oh, thank you so much, Lauren. You are a business leader with vision. You've seen the future as an AI enterprise thriving with Salesforce's agent force, and it is bright. Getting there? It's a little fuzzier. Don't worry. Salesforce CTOs are here to work with you side by side and turn your agent force vision into a reality. We're talking expert guidance and implementation support from the best of the best. To learn more about Salesforce CTOs, visit sfdc.co slash professional services.