Experts of Experience - How Empathy Mapping Replaced 90% of Cisco’s Marketing Output

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

What happens when a marketing leader decides to halt 90% of content output? For Ben Taylor, Director of Revenue Marketing and Customer Journeys at Cisco, it wasn’t a gamble—it was a strategy. In this refreshingly candid episode, Ben makes the case that content marketing is (and should be) dead and explains how empathy mapping, design thinking, and intentional "awkward silence" amongst his marketing & CX teams have become his new north star. We dive into how Ben transformed Cisco’s approach to customer experience by prioritizing deep understanding over high-volume output — and saw 5x pipeline growth as a result. From redefining how marketing supports sales to slowing down in order to speed up, this episode challenges everything you thought you knew about B2B engagement. If you’re tired of creating content for content’s sake, this one’s your permission slip to stop, rethink, and rebuild. Key Moments: 00:00 How Cisco's Ben Taylor Is Redefining Customer Experience03:17 Why Marketing Is Core to the Entire Customer Journey07:23 Content Marketing Is Dead: Here’s What Works Instead13:25 How Design Thinking Transformed Cisco’s Marketing29:36 Can AI Be Empathetic? The Real Challenge in CX Automation36:23 Using Empathy Mapping to Build Better B2B Campaigns38:19 Agile Marketing: Faster Cycles, Smarter Strategy45:34 Hiring for Fit: Why Empathy Matters More Than Pedigree52:15 The Emotional Core of Customer Experience Strategy01:01:56 Breaking Silos: Aligning Marketing, Sales & Success –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their AI strategy with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org

Marketing is the most disconnected piece from the customer experience right now. You have a pretty strong opinion about content marketing. Content marketing is dead. It is a driver of a waste of time. Success with content marketing is a happy accident. How did you bring that philosophy into Cisco? 80 to 90% of our production stopped when I took over the team. We were spending a bulk of our time in production before we're now spending it

and trying to understand what our customers are thinking. How do you get leadership buy-in on something like this? I don't know that all of them would be able to accept that less is more. More volume doesn't equal more bookings, more pipeline. If you're ready to talk a little bit about AI. It's a big topic these days or? Do you use GPT or Claude? I don't tend to use any of them.

What? What I did is tend to use any of them. What I did is I took the metrics of what we were doing and I started to show how we were reaching our customer. And I think a lot of people lean on those metrics and say, Hey, we're reaching our audience. That's fine. But then I took them a step further back and I said, put yourself in their shoes. Do you care about this? Humans make decisions emotionally.

We make decisions based on storytelling and narrative. People build this idea that emotions and empathy cannot be attached towards progress. It forced people to sit in a room in awkward silence and sit there and think about it. We have seen five X, six X growth and what our impact is from there. It's not just like theoretically this would work,

but you've seen the results, you've reported it to leadership, you've got buy-in from your team. What are you betting on now then? Welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lacey Pease, and with me as always is Rose Shocker. Happy to be here. We just got off the mic with Ben Taylor, Director of Revenue Marketing and Customer Journeys at Cisco. He had so many hot takes. And I feel like this episode's gonna be so great

for the boots on the ground marketers. I feel like they're gonna be rejoicing when they listen to it, because having just this expectation of volume over your head and no clear through line, no clear data, just produce, produce, produce is a recipe for burnout and high turnover. Ben is in marketing, but his title, which I didn't read all of it, is also customer

experience marketing, which is sort of a unique title. I don't know that I've actually seen it written that way before. I feel like everything he was saying is just things people need to hear right now. Not only is customer experience embedded into every stage of the customer journey, but marketing's a huge part of customer experience. And as someone who's worked in marketing, I've never thought of it that way. Well, and what he really brought to the discussion that I think a lot of people will need to hear is the power of empathy throughout the entire customer journey. From first time I

see your logo to I bought your product to I'm thinking about renewing to, okay, I have loved this for years and now I'm recommending it to a friend. And he has really beautifully weaved empathy into every touch point for the customer. And the other thing that he talks about a lot isn't just how you can bring empathy to the customer, but how you can bring empathy back to your organization. He's building marketing teams that are going to sales and actually asking them from an empathetic perspective. We need to be talking about how does this actually relate back to the human being that is our customer or is our employee

or is our manager. We need to bring back play and imagination and totally putting on the cap of pretending to be your customer. What do they actually care about? What's actually interesting to them? And then when you're talking to anyone on your team, pretending to be them, what do they care about? What's at stake for them? What are the risks? You know, what reputational things should I consider on their behalf so that way I'm supporting them properly? So Ben brings that all down to in today's episode. He talks about design thinking, why your team needs it, how you can start to implement this process in your organization, how he sort of manages upward a little bit to help bring on leadership and create buy-in there.

And we talk, of course, a little bit about AI and his perspective there. I think he's got a really unique take on how we can mesh empathy into AI in a way that's actually beneficial to the customer and not just making us feel like we've put together this chatbot that talks well but doesn't actually do anything effective. You mentioned doing some research on Cisco and you found some cool things. Tell me about that. Yeah, so, okay, this is really interesting. In the 1990s and the 2000s, they literally had 80% of the internet traffic

going through their routers, 80%. Like they were the backbone of the internet. Wow. Fascinating. And now they've got a $500 billion valuation. So this is a massive company. We're talking about, they operate in networking, cybersecurity, collaboration. They are doing all kinds of stuff, and Ben is helping lead a bunch of their marketing.

So he's just someone that we get to learn from and I'm blown away we even got to have him come on the podcast and talk to us in real time in studio for the first time ever about the stuff that he's doing there at Cisco to like champion and continue to bring forward this brand that's been around for a while, but that is ready for a refresh. All right, enough from us. Let's get to Ben. Stick around and watch. Ben, you told me that you lived in Philly.

I did. So I have a hard question for you. Oh no. Maybe not too hard for you. Okay. Sheets or Wawa? Wawa. Wawa.

There's stories of me coming out of Wawa at three o'clock in the morning. I mean, that is a- I figured. I have to go to Wawa. Yep. Get a hoagie at two o'clock in the morning. I mean, that is a- I figured. I have to go to Wawa. Yep, yep. Get a hoagie at two o'clock in the morning. It's equivalent to a water burger, right?

Like having that option. I haven't even been to a water burger. Are you not from, okay. I'm not from here, no. That's concerning to me. You haven't been to a water burger? No, I have not been to a water burger. All right.

Where are you from? Are you from the Northeast? All over the place. Okay. My dad was in the military, so I was all over the place. You have to. It's the same sort of sense of like, I can get something completely unnecessary at three o'clock in the morning, and that's the place, yeah. You have to, it's the same sort of sense of like, I can get something completely unnecessary

at three o'clock in the morning, and that's the joy of it. Well, I mean, I lived in Pittsburgh, so we had sheets. So that's what we did. I mean, I'm 100% Wawa. Oh my gosh. Every Wawa I've been into, I've been disappointed with. So maybe I need to go to like a better one. They all just seem kind of like, meh, and kind of crummy.

Central Philly ones are different. They're, I don't know, I guess my campus was right in the middle of Philly. So I don't know, I was also probably not the most sober every time I went in too. So that's, yeah. But yeah. So where else have you lived besides Philly and Dallas?

And now Austin. Grew up in Dallas, school in Philadelphia. I lived in New York for a bit, New York City and Manhattan. And then I was in Houston and I've got family out. So kind of all over, but mostly Dallas, Austin and the Northeast. So Philly and New York. Okay, so which city has the best people watching?

People watching New York, just because there's more of them there. Okay, and best drivers? None of them. None of them? I don't know, the best- How about worst drivers? Jersey? No, because I lived on both sides of Jersey. I don't know the best. How about worst drivers? Jersey, no.

Cause I lived on both sides of Jersey. So you see a Jersey player. Sorry for anybody who's listening to this and it's from Jersey, but I don't know. They're different. I'd say Jersey drivers though. Yeah. Worse than Dallas drivers?

100%. Wow. Yeah. Like, no, you get on the turnpike. It's no, I don't even want to. Dallas is pedestrian and mundane compared to that. Wow. Can't confirm having driven through Jersey pedestrian and mundane compared to that. Wow. Can't confirm having driven through Jersey.

Good to know. Yeah, okay, well, Ben, I feel, so there's this thing that I've been noticing in pretty much all CX leaders is that none of them started as wanting to work in CX. None of them were like little kids dreaming. Well, it wasn't really a thing, right? And customer journeys.

Yeah. Or marketing even. So could you tell me a little bit about what brought you to this? Well, I don't, I mean, it's kind of a statement, but I don't think customer experience is like this grandiose concept. It's just hitting on this theme of empathy. It's important that we engage somebody with that empathy.

And so what has happened is you have your consultants and groups that have come in and said, hey, let's define this as a thing and create this sort of engagement. But the idea of it's not different. So I think if you were to ask the question to me younger, do you care about how you interact with people? Do you care about how they perceive you? I think most people would say, yes, it's just that now we have this terminology attached to it. So yeah, like, no, as a kid, am I going to get into CX? No, absolutely not. But do I care about the way that I communicate the way that I impact, you know, what I'm doing for our company and what I do personally? Absolutely. And so I think those existed before it's just now it has a term to apply to it. Yeah. And you we talked a lot about marketing on our prep call. And how you think marketing, like what role does marketing play in customer experience?

Well, one of the downsides of CX getting more defined is that it has kind of become overdefined on this post purchase sort of like loyalty. I mean, you look at CX different things and it's loyalty programs and it's how you have adoption kind of motions and retention sort of motions when at the heart of it, it is about truly the customer experience. Like stop thinking about what it's defined as have adoption kind of motions and retention sort of motions when at the heart of it, it

is about truly the customer experience. Like stop thinking about what it's defined as and think about what the term means and that's engaging with the customer. So some of the challenges that I've had is don't just think post purchase. Don't just think pre-purchase. I'm engaging with the customer. Yes, they're at a different point in their journey, but I'm engaging in marketing with the customer in the same way.

I need to care about their experience in the same way, and I need it to connect through to the back half of that engagement in the same way. So I think for me, marketing is integral. I think sales enablement and engagement and down funnel kind of like actual sales conversations, your adoption, your success motion, your renewal motion, all of those are part and parcel to what customer experience should be. And I think teams tend to, and companies tend to narrowly define that as just, you know, post purchase a lot of times and they don't think about the rest of that customer engagement. So Ben, you started working at Cisco how long ago? About six and a half years ago.

Okay. What brought you to Cisco? An opportunity of a particular role to change it up. I was at Dell before and I had a friend that was here, had an open spot in the service provider marketing team. So it's very kind of like heavy-handed part of our portfolio, very technical part of our portfolio, but it was just something different.

And while I loved Dell, I wanted to get into a company that had kind of a broader portfolio footprint. So nothing other than that, a good opportunity and came over and they let me work remote. So I was okay with that. Oh, that's great.

Or do you still work remote? Yeah, there's a mix of home and office and because of we produce a lot of the stuff that allows you to work at home. So there's folks from all over the country, all over the world that are on my team, that are on, that I work with. So we go in every now and again,

but it's not as much a mandate as much as how do we make this a good experience when we go in? Oh, for sure, for sure. Yeah. And so when you're at a dinner party, Yeah. What do you tell people you do? That's the hardest one to do.

I mean, it's, what is customer experience? I mean, it's kind of like our earlier bit, like it's defined a thousand ways. Now I am responsible also for the services portfolio at Cisco and the marketing revenue demand generation for services. And so that's usually easier because it's been around longer as a concept.

When we talk about customer experience, it can be a bit more difficult to navigate. So I kind of just say, hey, I am there from a marketing sense to engage our customers in a way that makes them feel better. I mean, I know that that's a little oversimplified, but that is how I tend to introduce it and then move on. I do the inter-partying. That's great. That's a little oversimplified, but that is how I tend to introduce it and then move on

after the inter-partying. That's great. That's great. One thing you mentioned to us on your prep call was you have a pretty strong opinion about content marketing. I do. And I want to hear that opinion. I want our audience to get a taste of your passion for that.

I don't know. What's the best way to do it that isn't going to be controversial or is? I would like for it to be controversial. Content marketing is dead. I mean, that's the best way to do it that isn't going to be controversial or is. I would like for it to be controversial. Content marketing is dead. I mean, that's the easiest way. Content marketing should be dead. It is, when we talk about content marketing and focusing on the output, it is a driver of a waste of time and a waste of effort.

And most importantly, you are detached from what is meaningful to the customer. That doesn't mean that you can't land that and become engaging to the customer with your content, but that's not your primary focus. Your focus is on the thing and not the engagement. And that is, it's just a wrong approach in my mind. So how did you bring that philosophy into Cisco? I stopped us from doing what we did

and that was a lot of the content that we were producing at the beginning. So I'd say 80 to 90% of our production, I kind of stopped when I took over the team that I did. And you kind of have to validate that. You have folks that are doing things. They're building social media plans. They're building content.

They're building email nurture journeys. There's a lot of different engagement. Well, it's interwoven into a bunch of strategies. What's that? It's interwoven into a bunch of strategies. Yeah, well, it is every strategy. And like more content, more content, more content. Particularly in marketing, but you see it across enablement, you see it in renewal.

It's like, let's just put more out there. So for the marketing team, you know, it was a traditional marketing team. It was pre-sales, it was the marketing funnel, it was content production through multiple channels and trying to hit a couple different audiences. And what I did is I took the metrics of what we were doing and I started to show how we were reaching our customer

and it was okay. And I think a lot of people lean on those metrics and say, hey, we're reaching our audience, that's fine. But then I took them a step further back and I said, put yourself in their shoes. Do you care about this? And I think that was the hardest challenge is saying, do you actually care?

And looking at the things that we were doing and did they resonate? Not to us, not from our company out, but from the perspective of the personas we were trying to hit. And it didn't, you know, it partially did. And I don't wanna speak ill of the work that we did before it was good,

but it wasn't focused again on does this matter? Are we reaching them in the spots they need to be? We were just kind of populating talking points, feeds and speeds, things that we wanted to communicate without actually stopping to slow down and think, do they care about this at this point? Do you think that kind of like content output hurts brands? I think it can. I think again, if you're focused on it, I think success with content marketing is a happy accident. I don't think it's a process driven success approach, right?

If you're approaching it via the content and you have success, great. But you're not setting yourself up in a way that will systematically get you that success. So what are you betting on now then? Design thinking on empathy map, on the actual experiential part of customer experience, which is do less, reach folks where it matters,

try to put yourself in the minds of what they're thinking. And I'd say where we were spending a bulk of our time in production before we're now spending it and trying to understand what our customers are thinking. We're going to our sellers and having conversations. We're looking at industry studies of what matters. We're talking to more folks and actually putting ourselves in their shoes, which I think every good marketing organization does and every good customer experience organization does.

But I think they tend to look after the fact and not sit there before and think, okay, I have this problem. I am so-and-so bank. I am so, you know, I'm in an industry. I have this problem. I have this fear that I'm trying to address or this opportunity that I'm trying to address. What do I want to see? And that's where I want us to meet them. Not at trying to yank them and

pull them to something that we've created. But where are they naturally going to go? And then talk to them in a way that resonates, that they care about, that helps them. Right? And that drives everything else. Content, tactics, they all become the last thing that we focus on. How are you doing this with your teams? Because I do feel like so many content marketers aren't the ICP. They aren't your, they aren't your buyer. Right. So how do you get into that frame of mind where you can actually create

something that they would want to see? Get out of your silo. I mean, you're right. That if you're looking for an ideal customer and you are just sitting in your echo chamber and having a conversation, you're not going to hit it. So you can do desktop research. You can, uh, see what trends are, but really it's about slowing down, imagining you're somebody talking

to sellers to reinforce that and to folks that are engaging with the actual customer. Or if you have the opportunity to talk to the customer themselves, right. And get some of that feedback. Um, that that's people don't a lot of time for that. They take their 40 hours to 50 hours a week. They have production, they have checklists that they have to do. It's a really hard thing to feel like I'm gonna devote 10 hours this week to sitting and thinking. It's a scary proposition for a lot of people at work.

So for me, it has been about giving them the permission to do that, my team, the permission to do that, holding us accountable to thinking about it and not just holding us accountable to the output. So if you change, I mean, think about it this way, you're an employee, think of an employee like a customer employee experience, right? How do I make them feel comfortable? What are they fearful of? Like

you can do the same exact sort of thing with an employee that you can with a customer. Well, if I give them the air cover and the trust that they can sit there for a little bit of time each week and think about these problems, suddenly it starts to change the whole body of work and the whole impact that we're making. So how are you actually implementing this and measuring that? Because when I hear I want them to think more, I'm like, okay, cool. Does that mean I'm blocking time off on their calendar? Like how am I measuring that they're doing that?

What's the outcome look like? You know, my analytical brain goes to, like I wanna be able to see the metrics on that. I mean, there's a really, we do design thinking workshops. We do empathy mapping as part of that. And then we tie that in. I mean, we also are an agile marketing team. So we kind of run through an agile design thinking sprint.

So, if you're talking really the mechanics of it, we have time boxed periods at the beginning of the release cycle that are focused on design thinking and on empathy mapping. It is part of our process. It is not just a loose like sit here and think about it. It is we are going into our next phase of what we're doing to develop against this use case. We are going to have this be phase one where we're carving out this sprint or this time to actually go into that design thinking. And that happens before we start defining our personas, before we go into our journey mapping, before we go into actual content production. That is actually a really distinct part of our plan and how we actually implement it.

So how are you thinking about using design thinking in your teams and what does that implementation look like? I think step one, you empathize. I mean, if you look at it, there's a lot of different ways to go through this. But for a marketing team, we want to empathize first. And that's the thing I've spoken to. Ideation is what a lot of folks call is the next step. When we ideate, we're sitting there thinking, what are they, and this is where the empathy map does come into play. We think, what are they thinking?

What are they feeling? What are they saying? What are they doing? Right? We do this kind of quadrant. You can Google image search, there's 25 different ways to do this. Some say, what are they talking about?

But what you're trying to do is get to the heart of different emotions of what people think. So that's the ideation piece of that design thinking. And then this is where the software cycle comes into play, the test and validate and prototype. I don't care what order the phase in. For marketing, that can be start to create something and go message test, right? The test may be go to a seller, which we do, and go have a conversation with a customer to see if something resonates, right? We will actually build the empathy map, ideate on what we think that they're doing, and then

kind of check in with the customer to see if that's actually what they're thinking at that point, right? Like it's making it real. So you're not just doing it in a silo. No, marketing is more difficult, right? You can do design thinking in where it's heavily used is in like product development. If you're building something, you got a new car, you do design thinking, you get focus groups, you go have conversations, right? Marketing is trying to move the needle on perception on what is somebody's impetus or

focus on buying, you know, the propensity of buying. So for me, it's harder to test because you have this innate sense of, oh, we don't trust marketers, so we're not going to give real opinions. So we may test against our seller audience and see if that would resonate because they're closer to the customer, right? We don't always get to go test that. Another way to test and validate and then come back in that cycle is in market.

And this is something that marketers have been doing for ever, right? Like you do AB testing, you see where your metrics are at per channel and then you come back. So I think the most important part about how we implement design thinking is that empathize stage. Is that empathy mapping stage so that we have an idea of please put yourself in their shoes and try to understand what they're thinking, they're feeling, they're saying,

they're doing at that time. Yeah. I think that's the most important piece of all of this. Because most people skip to the let's just make something. Not like am I, I think that's the most important piece of all this because most people skip to the, let's just make something, not like, am I actually making something that makes the most sense given my audience, my buyer, the persona I'm targeting? So I think that's really important. All they're doing is testing and validating.

Content marketing just tests and validates. They are doing the empathize phase, that's what you're saying. No, they're skipping that component of it. I mean, it may go into a brief, you may do a content brief, but it's after the fact. Like it's almost inverted. You know, you're thinking about the,

what you're landing on that content brief. You don't think we could do it the other way around? Empathize and then make the content? Well, that's what I'm trying to do. Yeah. Right? Like, yeah, is you want to- That's the reason why you're slowing it down and not doing 90%, like as much content

as you guys were putting out. I mean, really practically, when I am in meetings and people are like, I see a hundred different content pieces that are being produced from across marketing at our company, right? And when you sit down and actually look at the briefs, they all kind of feel the same. Yeah.

It's very diluted, it's less impactful. And that was filled in at the end. They already decided the content, the channel, they've already done some storyboarding and then now they're briefing on what the, you know, what that persona is feeling at that point. It doesn't make sense to me. Then you're trying to force fit something at the end of it.

So again, you're being forced into bad behavior that ends up with bad results. That's the bigger challenge. Yeah, yeah. So you're doing the empathize days earlier, and so you're having, basically you're trying to figure out what is the guest, or not the trying to figure out what is the guest or not the guest sorry what is the customer most interested in what do they want to hear what

they want to see and then you're fitting the piece of content to that right like where that where would they be with the plot what's the platform that they're going to be on that kind of thing yeah the content is even further removed frankly so if I'm going from end to end you know you have your design thinking steps of which empathy mapping is one. The test and validate phase is, we don't leverage that a whole lot, frankly. I mean, what it is is getting that empathy mapping piece,

doing our customer journey mapping. And the customer journey mapping for us is full life cycle. So all the way from top of funnel unknown, I don't know who you are, right? All the way down through the traditional marketing funnel into sales enablement, into the adoption, into the renewal chain and trying to create by persona some hypothetical routes that the customer will take

against a particular use case. Once we have all of that and have an idea, what you're trying to do is glean customer behavior and customer care about at each point, persona by persona, what their care abouts are. Then we determine channel, then we determine the content. And then that all of the brief writes itself at that point. You already know the persona, you know the stage, you know what they're thinking, you know what they're trying to accomplish. Now it's where are they looking for it and trying to land it. So some of the practical things we've done are,

what is it a fault kit? What is it a fault kit of a marketer? Email, web, social, right? Those three things are the major things you do. And you kind of just do it. You check your box, you say you do the three things. We may not need web. Like a seller may have that conversation that we've traditionally used web for before.

So we've changed, we've brought our web presence way or further up funnel. Whereas we had some deep dives before. Because we did empathy mapping, we looked and said, okay, our customers aren't really deep diving on the web. So why are we using it for that? Just because we were checking a box. We've shifted that part of the customer journey more towards the seller. And so we've done some efforts around seller enablement

that we didn't do before, right? We're a marketing team. What are we doing with seller enablement? Sales enablement, what are we doing with the renewal team? And that's the harder challenge is reaching into other groups and saying, hey, we're trying to connect this all, but for the things we own as marketers, changing the elevation,

changing where we're going to do that. Are we going to a third party publication as opposed to owned? Would we be better spent spending our money on programmatic ad buys or on you know a fortune.com takeover for example, right? There's different things that we can do that are informed that all started with that design thinking. Well, it sounds like you're questioning assumptions a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Well, assumptions based on checking the box. I don't even think there's assumptions happening in content marketing. I think you're just doing.

Yeah. I really do. I think you're just doing. But it wasn't the doing based off some initial assumptions. Now people are just copycatting. I don't know. I've seen so much where people have created, thrown it out in the market, and haven't thought about it again.

And then they're on to the next project, the next brief, the next production, the next thing. There's no thinking, right? Because there's no permission to slow down and think about it. Can I ask a question about that? Yeah. Wouldn't you say with like a lot, like high volume content marketing gives you more of an opportunity to illustrate your brand's personality and your values kind of broadly?

Like, is that? Just because there's more volume? Sure. I mean, you're getting more, you're competing with all these other companies that are just, I mean, you are throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, but there's so much out there all the time. So, I could see the argument for, well, we need to compete and have some edge and illustrate what are our values, what are our personality? If you're trying to message test or trying to brand test, maybe. But if you have a sharp idea of what your brand is going to be,

all you're doing is now creating a thousand points of intersection for continuity. And the only way if you've decided what your brand is going to be and you want it to be consistent. And this goes back to old how tighter is brand control going to be. But if you have an idea of what your brand is going to be and you want it to be consistent. And this goes back to old, how tight is brand control going to be? But if you have an idea of what your brand is going to be, now you're creating a thousand points of failure. You're creating dilution. You're creating, you know,

more time internal spent towards coordination on those brand components, right? Like how is the brand marketing going to connect to down funnel marketing if you're sending out a thousand things? Now you've got these disparate teams trying to do things and you actually have increased brand risk with more volume because there's less control over the brand

and that brand equity that you've got attached to it. I mean, Cisco in particular has brand measurements. Yes, there's quite a few out there. Has a pretty strong brand, has know, brand measurements. Yes, there's quite a few out there has a pretty strong brand has a pretty controlled brand. It's not Apple level, but it's not like this disaggregated sort of thing. It's pretty controlled and pretty calm and it's fine.

But when we go out there a thousand ways, you lose that control. And then you start to really risk your reputation and market by doing that because you have so much going on. Do you think it's easy for legacy brands to have that kind of operating model? Like a startup might need to, you know, lean a little bit more heavily on broader content marketing

that maybe doesn't have as clear of a through line just to stay relevant. I think it goes to how confident you are in the brand image that you're trying to convey. If you aren't confident, I can see some benefit to going out there and seeing what kind of lands. But, um, you know, I think of another awesome company here, Canva, canvas, got a very distinct brand and they're a startup. And I would say that they are fairly consistent in the way that they

go to market. And I don't, if I were them, I wouldn't want a thousand touch points either, because again, the risk is diluting. If you have that much content, you have to have a very robust sense of like a brand kit and guidelines and approved agencies and the overhead becomes incredibly difficult for me. So, I mean, I can see the benefit.

I just, if you're asking me to make a decision on it, I think the brand risk outweighs the opportunity to get feedback with that much out there in market. But this process doesn't mean no risk. Like you still might take some elements, certain risks for like, I don't know, different types of campaigns or things like that, right? Doing less if you're saying to do- Like even if you're doing less content, you might still have, still might be taking some

risks to, you know, like do a comedic drive or have like, I don't know, some sort of funny like B2B marketing thing. Like, this doesn't mean not like just playing it safe constantly. Right. And that's more to do with the brand's acceptance of risk than it is to do with the approach. But you're saying the risk, the risk of dilution is much stronger whenever you're doing. Well, yeah, but it's harder to measure and it's harder for people to understand. Right. I'm saying the risk of dilution is much stronger whenever you're doing your content.

Well, yeah, but it's harder to measure and it's harder for people to understand, right? Like what matters in marketing? Okay, contribution to pipeline and bookings, essentially at the end of the day, that's what the business leaders care about in the company is how much are you contributing to revenue, essentially. And the real risk for us internally by doing less

is not feeling like we're able to articulate that we're contributing as much to pipeline and bookings. Whereas the reality is the dilution I'm talking about is there's a idea among marketers that doing more equates to more bookings and pipeline, yet it's not backed by numbers usually. If you look at actually what impact is, more volume, it's really hard.

More volume doesn't equal more bookings, more pipeline. And so for me, it's saying, okay, let's still measure pipeline. Let's still measure bookings. Let's still look at those things. But the strategy of how we implement it is way different than the volume equals that yield. Say goodbye to chatbots and say hello to the first AI agent. AgentForce for Service makes self-service an actual joy with its conversational language anytime on any channel. To learn more, visit salesforce.com slash agentforce. How do you get leadership buy-in on something like this?

Cause it does feel like it's a pretty big shift. You know, we work with some pretty large B2B companies that produce lots of content. And I don't know that all of them would be able to accept that less is more. Yeah. It's easier for a company like us that have a longer sales cycle. It's not just, you know, a B2C style floor pop. You know, you've gone out with a programmatic campaign, it's not just a B2C style, floor pop, you've gone out with a programmatic campaign, you get a click, you get a purchase, right? There are arguments to be made for volume and placement, having yield there.

For longer sales cycles with complicated buying patterns, the way that I've done that is just communicated the reality. Like going back to that empathy, is sitting there and asking leaders the question and saying, okay, we've put out this, this and that, and we have 15 different things activated on each of those three threads.

Let me show them to you. Do these resonate with you? Do you think they resonate with our customers? And you're kind of putting your own work out there and challenging it for your leaders. And the responses I've got is, okay, not really. And then you bring them along and say, I'm not trying to do less from an impact standpoint. I'm trying to reach them with higher quality engagements where they're at.

And that tends to change the mind of leaders because you're focused on, you're still focused on impact. You're still focused on bookings and pipeline and trying to move the needle for the business, but you're just articulating a different vision for how to do that. I think, I don't think a whole lot of leaders have a very, especially non marketing leaders, don't have this baked notion that more equals more. I think that's more marketing thing than a business leader thing. So, if your entire existence as marketer is precipitated on doing more equals more, and that's your existence and that's your mindset, you're going to fail in that leadership move.

But if you truly believe that engaging with higher quality content is going to improve that customer experience, is going to improve that velocity of a customer moving along, then you can easily convince somebody. I mean, it's no different than marketing. You're just marketing to the business leaders in that case. So more of the right content, not just more content. Yeah, I mean, that's the whole, we're going back to customer experience.

That's the whole idea of it, right? Relevancy, empathy, impact. I mean, those are the things that matter. And stop thinking about the things, think about the why, think about the feeling that people get when they engage with you. And it will drive a lot better behavior for what folks are doing from a marketing sense. I want to switch gears a little bit if you're ready to talk a little bit about AI. Yeah, because I think fun, this will be it's kind of a conflict, right? We talked about a lot

about empathy. It's a big topic these days or? Yeah, I didn we bring it up on like literally every single conversation we've had in the last six months? Yeah, probably. I think we talk about it daily for that. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Well, what I think is interesting is you've talked a lot about empathizing, right? And so many people I've heard speak recently are talking about like creating this head and heart combo for AI where you're actually trying to teach AI to empathize. You're trying to teach it like you would teach an employee. Yep.

What are your thoughts on that? Just out the gate. I think empathy needs to be part of AI, but I don't believe that AI can truly empathize. So the real risk there is I don't want people know they're talking to AI. If you have a chat bot, for example, they know you're talking to a chat bot. So, empathy is not in language to me as much for AI as

it is getting closer to understanding the problem that somebody has. I don't care if you articulate that in a very kind of, you know, austere AI-driven way that you're very clear this is a generated response, empathy is a layer below that veneer of conversation. It is engaging and having this interaction know and identify my problem. And that, to me, is empathetic by action, not by language. That's way more important. So, if you're focusing on how you're building out AI, if you've got, you know, limited resources and you're building a chat bot, you're building something for responsiveness or agentic that is trying to help somebody for whatever the problem is,

and you're focusing engineering resources and time towards the interaction layer, the way it speaks, the way it talks, the way it looks. I think that's less important than how accurate is the response that it's giving, no matter how it's communicated. And people will think of that as an engineering problem and they won't think about it from the empathetic layer. But I mean, what is, you're not from the South, right? Not originally? No. So what is the old phrase, bless her heart? Right? Like an insult with bless her heart. That's kind of what AI is like.

If you have this like nice veneer, but it's not relevant. It's like, okay, well, for what reason? What purpose is that? You know, like, okay, you've said it to me nicely, but you have no idea what I'm talking about. So you lose trust, you lose that connection. I'd rather have my time focused with chatbot, agentic sort of development being on getting closer to what somebody cares about. It's no different than what we do in marketing

right now. That's great. Do you use GPT or Clid? What's your preferred? I don't tend to use any of them. What? I don't. Oh, my goodness. And it's not for I am an early adopter. I'm a geek. I love it. I find right now, especially marketing. Look, it has AI has purpose in like heavy telemetry, a lot of data sort of distillation.

I think it's incredibly useful at that. It has it's there. For marketing, especially we do a lot of top of funnel kind of thought leadership marketing, you're just spending more time correcting what the output is. And then, you know, I actually ran an exercise yesterday with GPT where I went to my team and I got chat GPT to basically give me three different positions on the same topic with veracity, with like a lot of fierce language. And I'm like, so what is it doing right now? It's articulating your thoughts in a different way. And it can be used to challenge and kind of create, you know, as a thesaurus, as a language kind of differentiator or a tone changer, it can have some value. But for that ideation phase, I don't trust it right now to give me something that truly stays empathetic

to what people are trying to do. Feels like it mirrors whatever you do. Yeah, it mirrors the data, right? Okay. Pre-AI, I'm at a big tech company. You go out there, we're all using the same terms in the same language all the time. It's just this muted noise, right? Okay. Ruthless prioritization. I don't know. All these phrases that you hear from big tech companies all the time. That's the fear with AI using it for ideation. Okay, is somebody else at the other company using the same sort of model,

trained on the same information that's bringing you the same sort of language. So there's a level of human engagement, especially on copywriting when you're doing things at the top end of the funnel that have short pithy commentary. If you're doing things at the top end of the funnel that have short pithy commentary, that if you're relying on AI, you're going to lose some of that individuality. **SARAH PIZONER** My husband's working on a patent right now. We're talking to our lawyer about this.

I was asking, is there a patent tool, an AI patent chat tool we could use to help write the patent for us so we don't have to pay you, you know, have much money to do this for us. That was his problem is it's basically going to feed in all the same language of existing patents. If everyone is using the same patent AI tool, we're all going to have the same patent language being used. Yeah. And then the differentiator is going to be the one who's not using it. This isn't to say that AI doesn't have value in marketing. I think have value. I think it can and I think it does in certain ways deployed in certain ways. AI has more value in a lot of, you know, I think heavy and I said this for heavy telemetry, heavy data set, distillation, understanding, especially when it's proprietary or first party data that you're not sharing outbound

that you want to kind of get to something faster. I think it's an accelerant for some of those problems that are heavy analysis problems. I don't think it is at the point where you're engaging human to human. And humans make decisions emotionally. I don't care if they have a veneer of rationality and logic to it. We make decisions based on storytelling and narrative. I mean, the Gen Z term vibes. That's what it is. I just put a post on LinkedIn this morning about vibe coding. I don't know what it is. Everything is vibe now. That's all it is. Vibe is this generation's language for engaging on emotion, right? Like how does it look and feel? People know that inherently.

So why are we pretending that we don't need to address that particularly in marketing and how we engage? So I don't know, I'd rather have three things out there that kind of break the monotony than a hundred things that reinforce the monotony. So, that's a huge focus for what we do. What type of content are you betting on, then? So, whenever you're talking about, like, when you're in this design thinking phase, you guys are kind of coming up with different

things you want to build or do. What are you leaning into right now that you think is working? Well, we don't focus on the content at all in the empty mapping and the design thinking. That all actually kind of sorts it out. So, the content is actually driven by the channel and where they're at. So, if we know that they are I'll give you an example. We have a technical decision maker who is feeling concerned about implementing an AI use case, right? Maybe they're going to Reddit to look up things, or a practitioner. Maybe they're going to Reddit to figure things out. And if we've determined that, our goal is then to get in front of the individual where they're at.

So if it's Reddit, is it a post? Is it social listening? Is it an ad in Reddit? Is it something about, you know, seeing where folks they're using as sources of trust and trying to influence that? It can drive a whole lot of different behavior and activations. It could be an analyst briefing that we do that then trickles down into that engagement. It could be a series of short content, but it just depends on what that person is seeking at that point that drives that engagement. So the design thinking is less around the content ideation and more about the ideation of what the thought process is of the customer at that moment. So that the content, I really mean this, if

you land how people feel, break them down by the stages, their concerns, do that empathy mapping along each of those stages, the content, the channel, they write themselves. So, when you ask big bets, I hate that I don't have a clear answer, but it really depends on where that's at. It's almost more precise. It's a scalpel instead of a scatter shot to try to hit everything. And that scalpel can look a thousand different ways. So, we have to be a very flexible team and we've got great agencies and internal teams that we work with to kind of deploy things quickly. I wanted to ask about that because it does feel like this in a week, two weeks,

six months, like all these things are shifting and changing. So, the plans that you're making, how often are you guys like reevaluating what maybe the type of content you're making, what platforms you're targeting, or even that process that you described to me of like this person has this problem and then they want to solve it this way. How often are you guys redoing that and refreshing that? Every two to three months, pretty much. It's almost like guerrilla style. I mean, it's agile. It's agile marketing. It's guerrilla style marketing in the sense that if we're spending six months getting something to market, it's going to be irrelevant by the time it goes into market. For sure.

I mean, that is a constant challenge that we've got. So if we do the work upfront to be more relevant and then we're able to turn quickly on something imprecise and MVP 90% of the way, not a precise content that's gone through, piece of content that's gone through 25 approval layers and 84 messaging docs, Docker visions, and then finally lands on it, v7 underscore v3 final dot PDF, right? Whatever it is. I mean, you're laughing because we've all lived that. I know.

I've got three of them on my desktop right now, right? Like changing that behavior and saying, okay, legal clear, brand clear. Let's not go throw things out that are gonna get us in trouble, legal, clear, brand clear. Let's not go throw things out that are going to get us in trouble, but legal, clear, brand clear. A message out in market that has had some empathetic mapping to it and is kind of relevant is way better if it's sitting there for three months than something that goes out four months later and everything's changed. You're playing constant catch up. So for us, you know, that's where the agile comes play. We deal with our marketing in a kind of similar to how agile

product management teams do it. We have a product and our product is our journey that's aligned to a particular use case. And our releases, we call them waves, but there are release waves. And that wave will have elements of design thinking, elements of content, and then content production, and then publish. So we're not shipping these off to different teams. It is a controlled release of a product. And we'll look at the existing touchpoint strategy

or the existing customer journey. We'll analyze what's changed and then quickly move to what adjustments do we need to make based on that revised design thinking or empathy mapping. Has the sentiment changed in the market? And if it has, what are the adjustments we need to make at those points along the journey? And that is a much quicker cycle than doing a six-month plan where I've got these major topics and you go do the strategy work, you go do the content, you know, mix work,

you go do the production, and then we're six to eight months later, essentially. Yeah. If not longer. Or you've abandoned it, which happens a lot. Like you go through, you go through strategy, you go through the ideation phase, you start to plan, you start to build,

and then it's no longer relevant. And then what do we go back to? If you're content marketing, you now feel that your entire value is tied towards producing something. You spent four and a half months building something. It's no longer relevant. What do you think they're gonna do?

What do they do? They're gonna publish it. Oh yeah. They're gonna publish it. They spent four and a half months doing it. They're a content marketing focused team. The last thing you can do is- I've seen where they don't publish it,

but then those people, I feel like their energy is slowly tearing. The amount thing you can do- I've seen where they don't publish it, but then those people, like, I feel like their energy is slowly like tearing. Like the amount of care that they have in their company just goes downhill. Well, that's at, see, that's at hidden risk. Is attrition and burnout and contribution. And for folks that view their work contribution as deep value drivers personally,

if you've now spent four months on something and then you're just not gonna ship it, that's a terrible thing to go through. It's incredibly hard to spend that time. So especially creative work. I mean, creatives get so tied energetically to that. So yeah. Yeah. So what are you going to do?

Put it on. We've had situations where folks have completed stuff and it's like, what are you going to do? Put it on a resource page as link number 17. It hurts. It hurts, it hurts. So changing the whole ethos away from the content is the lead to the engagement is the lead, changes the whole way that the team perceives

what they're doing and how they measure their success on that day-to-day work that they do. Do you think your team is liking this process more than maybe what was in place before you took over? I don't know, does a team ever give honest feedback? No, I love my team, and I think that they are happier for it. I'll tell you, when you shift away from content on specific offer level stuff,

and you focus more on engaging a customer against their use case or their outcome or their problem. The other benefit is that changes less frequently. How you may solve for it changes more rapidly than the problem itself changes. So if you talk to somebody about solving their problem, it has a longer shelf life in the first place. So on top of meeting somebody at their emotional needs

from a customer experience basis, meeting somebody at their emotional needs from a customer, from a customer experience basis, meeting somebody at their emotional needs and focusing on how they feel in that driving the content means that you have longer shelf life for relevancy and you don't have this quick change all the time that happens whenever you're focused on, you know, a ton of stuff and moving on. You spend more time thinking about it. It's more relevant. If there's a slight change, it's still more relevant than if you just had thrown out a hundred other pieces before that. So, just overall, there's less churn. There's less change, right? You're going faster. There's less change. You're not as burnt out because you're not doing as much, like, check

the box content. You're still working. You're not not working. You're just, you're spending more time caring about people. And that is, I don't know, for most people, that's more fulfilling than spending time doing a revision on something that may never see light a day. Talk to me about where this passion for empathy comes from. I don't know. I think I'm happier at work and happier in life when I'm doing things that make

people feel better or helping solve problems. So for me, it wasn't like a hyper tactical decision to change because that's what the market is saying to do. It was because, well, if I'm going to spend 40 hours a week doing things, I'd rather do 40 hours a week trying to help folks. Yeah. I mean, I'm not, we're not curing cancer, but we're solving problems that cause people to feel fear. That feels good. I mean, for me, that feels good. So I think, I think helping is a natural tendency for me. I think if you can lean into that and find success and impact that way, it just makes everything a little bit easier. Work, personal, all parts of life. When you're thinking about team building now,

I'm sure you've gone through a lot of hiring processes and all that in the last couple of years. And I'm sure that things have been changing a lot with what you're looking for now that AI is becoming more of a thing. Or maybe it hasn't. So what are you looking for whenever you're looking at crafting a team, especially if you're bringing

on new folks? It's a beat. It's a broken record, right? Uh, I lean into fit and empathy and drive vibe. I lean into vibe. Um, I mean, pedigree background experience, they all matter. They do, but you can teach skills. You can teach mechanisms. I mean, frankly, that what matters in marketing in particular and across the chain of customer experience changes frequently. So really, what good is discrete experience on things when it's

going to change anyway. So what's more important than what I found to be a greater driver of success is that how do they fit with the team? What do they think about? Like, and so when I interview them, I give them challenges on how do you feel about this? How do you think about this? What do you think a customer would think about this? Because I'm more interested in their thing and how they work through thinking in somebody else's shoes than I am about what they think the right answer is. If somebody has two hours to devote towards something in advance of an interview, I'd rather them

not go to Gartner and Forrester and other groups and IDC and look up the details. We can do that. I'd rather them try to position themselves in that customer or whoever it is in this prompt that I'm giving them shoes because we do projects sometimes and think about what they're thinking about. If somebody can demonstrate to me that they're willing and able to think beyond their own kind of interpretation of things, that's usually a really strong indicator of success for me. That's awesome. Yeah. Is there an example of a question or a pain point

that you would ask somebody in an interview? Like, how do you feel about this? Or do you give them a customer pain point and ask them to kind of illustrate it for you? Yeah, I mean, a good example would be, we'll take a customer problem. I mean, we still have to be practical in our questions, right?

We're a technology company. So if you've got a data center that is older technology, it's not set up for AI use cases, and that's one of the big use cases we're driving right now, I would ask an interviewee, hey, how would you think about engaging a customer to address and kind of move the needle on this problem? And I would give them some constraints.

I'd say break it down by who's involved, what they're thinking and what you would do at that point. And usually I'd ask them for five to 10 minutes of their thinking on it. So that what I want to do is not see like, frankly, hey, I'd go do this. I mean, look, I'm not gonna kick somebody out of the room because they lead with content, but if they lead with content, then I know they're thinking that way. So then the challenge I've got as a leader is,

okay, I have to kind of disabuse them of this idea of content being the lead. That doesn't mean that they're not able to do it. It's just, that's how they've been trained to think about these things, not how I'm going to engage at what point. We do the same thing with agencies. When I go to creative agencies,

I challenge them with the same sort of use case and problem that I do somebody that I'm interviewing. I say, how would you guys approach this? And if I will tell you that 95, I keep using percentages, these are not real. Like there's no footnote on these percentages, but of agencies I've engaged with, 95% will come back with a menu of content

to go just that they can help you build. And like, well, we'll do this and we'll do this and we'll do this and we'll do this. Like here are the 24 tactics and the piece of content we're gonna go do. And I'm like, you didn't give thought to the actual problem of what folks are thinking about at this point. And I'm less, what's the right word,

I'm less accepting of an agency coming back that way because I'm employing them to for sure have an output. Whereas you don't want to teach them something. No, and actually the agency selection I've done has been heavily leaning on that piece, which is I don't want to spend 20 hours of my week coaching the agency to how we think about the problem. I'd rather meet and there are agencies out there that do this in a way that is more empathetic and think about the problem. And so that just is simpler for me.

I don't have to spend that time bringing them on board. A person that I'm interviewing on the team is a different story because there's a whole lot more that goes into that. It is a soft science kind of art on hiring people. There are some things you can do to kind of weed folks out, but I've had success with folks that I didn't think would be the great fit. I've had terrible times with folks that I thought would be a great fit. So it's not, it is an imprecise science and bringing the folks on board, caring about them and helping them kind of come along is an easier prospect for an employee than

it is for, you know, an agency that you're engaging. Sorry, I know you asked that question, but. No, yeah. Do you find that this commonly throwing people off? What? Is it often that it's throwing a candidate off kind of, and they come in kind of needing to unlearn some more action-oriented mindset?

Put yourself in their shoes. If I said, I mean, I'm also not like, this is not a test, right? I'd go back and say, hey, think human. Like I'm gonna help them in that prompt. I don't want them to have this native answer. Like I think any person in any room with rare exception can be told to think about how it makes you feel

and how it would make them feel and they're able to do that. It's just getting them to do that and having them actually like take the time to think, no different than my team. Carve them out, give them time to think about it, make it part of the process, make it the first part of the, you know, that first sprint in that cycle of that release

that we're doing towards devoting, you know, whatever you want to call it, time boxing, you know, giving them space to do that is no different for an interviewee or an agency or somebody that works for me. You've got to devote the time to build it into how you're going about that day to day. Yeah. Would you say that's one of the biggest challenges in your role? Like having to help people unlearn things? No, I think people want to. That's actually one of the easier things.

Giving them permission and saying, think about how people feel and care about things is such a natural human thing. Yeah, it's innate. They want to do it. So that's not the problem. It's the leadership question. It's the, hey, this is going to yield results

because I am attached to numbers and numbers equals output equals. It's getting that idea away from leadership and getting the space. So, it's usually managing upward for me, frankly, that's more difficult. It's not as much the folks that are actually I'm asking to go do the work and think about these things that way. They're willing and able to do it. Okay. I mean, let's give a real example. What's easier to do? Go tell me how you think that person is feeling and help me validate it

and go talk to them. Or like give me a Or give me a very needle moving piece of content that's going to drive revenue on this thing, which is a question that gets asked. It's like, oh, I don't, I mean, I kind of know, but let's start to think about it. And it's so much easier to sit and think about how people feel and think about things. We were talking to a woman recently who said that emotions belong in the boardroom. And I'm wondering how you might feel about that. And we work in creative land, so we are constantly telling stories and thinking about emotions. But I do wonder for these larger companies if that's something that you have to reset and refresh them and remind them on that, no, these are people that we're selling to,

and we have to think about that and encourage them to engage with their emotional centers. I think you need to back it with logic because most people think that, I mean, everybody thinks they make logical, rational decisions, particularly in a C suite and a boardroom. When what you have to do is articulate, hey, in reality, we make emotional decisions and by addressing the emotional and empathetic needs of folks, we are having that impact. So it's just it's not so much as saying, hey, be emotional in these places as it is if we ignore it, we're missing the primary opportunity to actually move it forward and showing them,

look, this is not a new concept. I was in school and we were reviewing case studies talking about engaging with folks in an emotional way. It's just people kind of build this idea that emotions and empathy cannot be attached towards progress. And it's just not founded on anything. There's no foundation for that. Like this Vulcan style, Star Trek, this Vulcan style appeal towards no emotion being like the highest end of corporate success is one of the biggest con jobs of of like corporate environment over the last 25 years. And I think we're seeing some of this rotation back towards

well until recently, but some of this rotation back towards empathy. So yeah, for the boardroom, for the C suite, I would contextualize empathy in the way that it can cause and create impact for the company. And then I would defend with passion why that is, because it's not just about it having good impact. It's an opportunity cost thing. This is going to be better than going after like old school kind of set methods of approaching. And I'm comparing those two and I'm putting my bets on the empathetic less volume approach.

Not less engaged, because I think it's more engaged, but the less volume approach to it. So what metrics are you looking at then? Because you just talked about when you're in the boardroom, I need to have a little bit of logic and you build back up these claims. What are you looking at? And what have you thrown out the window?

You're like, I actually don't care about that metric that maybe other people rely on too significantly. We can't throw anything out because it's still a big company and people wanna see certain things. So you've gotta have it, but I've deprioritized, I think is the best way to frame it. I've deprioritized consumption metrics. So page views, opens, click rate, et cetera.

We do it for AB testing, we do it for resonance. Like is this message resonating? We'll still look at that. But we've simplified at least my team scorecard to be more about pipeline and bookings and logic on what that sales cycle looks like and kind of just focus on that component. The other challenge we've got with, I mean, you asked a question earlier about what are the, when do you kind of get into the tactics and content mix that you're going after? Well, because we kind of move fast, that can be wildly different quarter to quarter. So just the sheer operations of measuring something that is like, okay, this quarter we're going to do a high touch round table

and invite certain accounts to, you know, an engagement to have a conversation. And next quarter we're going to do, you know, Reddit programmatic ads and that changes so frequently that there's no set standard of measurement on that's another reason we've deprioritized is because I don't want the KPIs to dictate the actions that we're taking. Because then you just want to keep increasing that number quarter over quarter. Yeah. If your apparatus for reporting is based on page views and email opens and click rate or click through rate and shares and likes and the like, you are informing the behavior.

Yeah. So you have to be very careful with what you're measuring that you are not kind of forcing the behavior. No different than creating a, I mean, I have this argument a lot with leadership where we look at metrics on customer stories and the metric, I don't want to be the number of customer stories.

Some sort of engagement, maybe some sort of, that's a tough one to measure. Customer stories are measured, but there are some consumption metrics I'd rather look at engagement or maybe go out and message test and see if you've got a some sort of response that you can get from message testing. But stay away from the production

numbers because it drives that behavior 100%. Yeah. I'm wondering if you'd be willing to give sort of a concrete example of like, you've walked us through a little bit here thinking through, you know, so and so is going to engage in this way. That would be on Reddit. Customer stories are relevant in this way. I think just like a concrete story of like, okay, we were doing it this way, or maybe you don't want to talk about like we were doing it a certain way. But if you could sort of paint the picture of like, this is something that we've implemented recently. Yeah, I think the one that is most pertinent for me

is we are a services organization. That's kind of our revenue drivers, the services component. So professional support services for what we do. And when I took over the team, we were focused on our explicit offers and kind of going to market with a lot of content around those offers, which is fine. It's a great approach. It's kind of going to market with a lot of content around those offers, which is fine. It's a great approach. It's kind of that content marketing approach there.

And when I sat down with the team and said, Hey, is who is the persona we're going after? Is this even addressing their problem? What are we talking about? That's where I started. Yes. Question, I started to break down a challenge, the, what we were doing to show impact. We had no real measurement on pipeline and bookings. We were having kind of minimal impact on pipeline and bookings, yet we were putting out a lot of content offers explicit. So I actually went through it's like a six to 12 month kind of, and this goes back to the retraining question. And honestly, it goes back to the change of behavior question. But we went through the six to 12 month, shut it down. Is there an impact change? There wasn't a whole lot of impact change to the

So you just stopped it for six months to see what would happen. Well, I have 40 hours a week from somebody. So am I going to have them keep the lights on on something or am I going to commit to a change? We committed to the change. That led to shutting it down, you know, the trickle, some of the audience, some of the engagement, that's fine, but we weren't putting any new effort towards it. And we immediately shifted towards this model

that I've been talking about, this empathy mapping, engaging with the customer journey to see where they're at. What that led to is now what we've got today, which is about 18 months later, which is this approach towards we have customer journeys. We have reached into sales enablement and created content that lands for a purpose, at a point towards a persona with impact because that's what we think they need at that point, because we did the mapping.

So we've got email nurture again, we have web again, we have organic social again, but the tone, the tenor, what we've talked about has completely changed. It is not just this offer centric feed speed, I've got my columns, we've done it, we've put it out there. And we are measuring pipeline and bookings and have seen growth from that

because we're more relevant, right? Like the whole thing has lined up to it and I won't give numbers, but we have seen five X, six X growth and what our impact is from there. And that is based on starting with the, do they care? What matters? Are we talking in that right way? And so that was really scary for the team. Honestly, that was really scary for the team because they had been...

Was it scary for you? I don't know. I'm kind of a risk taker. I mean, I have to be mindful for my team that, and that's where I come in with my own empathy for my team and say, guys, we're covered. I believe in this, I'm committing to this. I will top cover, I will talk to leadership about what our changes are going to be, but this is the right thing to do

and we need to engage this way. And so that gave them a little bit of sense of confidence that if we're not, I mean, there was a period for three or four months where we had nothing new going on, like nothing new going on. And that's the whole step change in behavior on how we engage. And now I think we are just moving wave after wave, right, of what we're doing from a production sense and not production of content, but production of these releases that are outcome aligned, empathetic adjustments to our customer journeys that

are driving, you know, engagement for the business and finding that impact. What I love about all this is you've sort of shared your philosophy and every step by step process you guys are implementing, but you also have results. It's not just like theoretically this would work, but you've seen the results, you've reported it to leadership, you've got buy-in from your team. It's really cool. One thing you did share throughout all of this as well is that you've been working cross teams, right? So sales enablement and marketing and sales, like everyone coming together. What has that looked like? Because that's not easy. And I feel like there's been this like marketing sales clash

for as long as time goes on. So what was that process like getting buy-in from all those different teams? Well, think about what we're doing now. We're engaging more on what the customer cares about. We're going to sales and asking them their opinion more. I mean, to be brutally honest with you, it's not just saying what they need.

If I'm looking at the customer journey, full life cycle, like I mentioned before, from full marketing funnel into that sales engagement, instead of just pretending that we know and handing off the baton to sales, and here's the message, how does what we are doing tie directly into the handoff and then the engagement that sales is having? We are helping craft sometimes over the top, sometimes, you know, supplemental, sometimes all of it, sales enablement collateral for these use cases, these journeys that we've built. And sales loves that, right? I'm not trying to go at them with 17 different things and content and then give them this

digest that says, here's the 400 things that we've put out. Here's the noise. Good luck. Like, what are you going to find that's relevant for your customer? I'm saying we did seven things around this topic. We've continued and talked to you about what the handoff would look like from that piece. So it really creates less friction in my mind with the other bodies. Now, within the organization, the real challenge is walking that line

because I don't own sales enablement. I don't own our customer success motion and our adoption motion. I don't own our renewal motion and engagement from that side. I don't own the other product marketing teams and the other groups within Cisco that are doing traditional marketing.

We have to always kind of merge that together. And so there are challenges in saying, we are coming in to connect, help map what this experience looks like, give our thought on why we think that it should go a certain way, work with the other groups and see what they're doing to find success.

And it's about over the top, additive adjustments or additive components, content, enablement decks, whatever it may be that that team needs. And if you go to another team, like sales and ailment, they know their audience better than anybody else. They know their sellers better than anybody else. So they know what they're looking for.

So if I come to them and say, here's what we've built, aligned to what the customer actually cares about, what do you guys have going on for this topic? What can we provide that carries through the message that we've tried to establish and the value that we've tried to build in the upfront to then augment and change? That's where we come in and we're not trying to change their whole process. We're trying to say, can we inform? We've done a lot of work.

We have expertise, we have message testing, we have product proximity, so we have roadmap proximity to the types of things that we're putting out into market. How do we help you with all this work we've done, tie our expertise to your expertise and create one or two things that creates momentum. And then we measure that. So you're not dictating to them. Here's our things. Use them. Why aren't you using them?

You're coming in like, I'm supporting you. I'm here, I am trying to support what you guys are already doing and here's some of the information we have that might help support the goals you guys have. So it's like empathy layer coming in internally as well. Yes, every single interaction being empathetic. And I think this is one point I did wanna hit on

around the theme of customer experience. It has to be the full customer lifecycle. How do you have a customer experience and not look at the entire lifecycle, including before they've reached the point of sales. People think about it from sales forward, you know, from, from close of deal forward a lot of time. And that's just, it's a complete mess. Experience starts well before that.

They have preconceived notions of your brand. They've had some experiences. They have folks that, you know, folks that are seeing a Super Bowl ad or seeing out of home. We have a big ad in Heathrow, T5 in Heathrow. And you see that, like there's exposure that happens to our brand. What we're trying to articulate is our value to you.

And how in the world are you going to build a customer experience practice that is not a combination of marketing, sales, sales enablement, success, renewal, adoption and renewal. Yeah. You have to connect those. So that on its surface is not a hard thing for people to consume and say, oh, that makes sense.

They'll usually say it makes sense. The harder thing is then what does that relationship look like? And to your point, not dictating. Coming in and saying, I have some expertise, some knowledge in this area. You have expertise, some knowledge in that area. How do we start to merge those things together? It's so funny to me though,

that the idea that the experience doesn't start when they first see the logo, like how is that news? Because I mean, like in our personal interactions, it's like, first moment I meet you, I've got like 10 seconds for you to decide whether or not you like me, like there's a reputation belt, right? It's the same thing with a company. So it happens the moment that they see your logo for the first time, wherever that might be. So it's just so funny every time I hear that's like from sales onward. No, the experience started that, that moment.

Yep. I think marketing is the most disconnected piece from the customer experience right now. Um, and. Look, I'll pick on marketers instead of the other side of the house. Right. If you go to a marketer and ask them, what is the, what, why does sales enable to exist?

They'll give you kind of a top level answer of like, well, they enable sales. They help themselves. I mean, that's kind of the answer, right? They, they help themselves. I mean, that's kind of the answer, right? They help you sell. Good definition. But have they ever spent time and sat down and thought about what they're trying to do? Why do sellers care? Well, they're trying to feed their families like everybody else. They're trying to make more money. They're trying to be successful in their jobs. So

again, forcing my team as much to box time out to think about what the other teams are doing means they're going to show up in a sales enablement meeting, in a adoption meeting, in a success meeting. Having some sense of what they're trying to accomplish and being able to empathize with that group makes the engagement that much simpler. It's no different. We're asking people to be human. We're asking them to be human consistently through that experience. So it needs to go both ways.

Post sales needs to reach in marketing marketing, you need to reach into the post sales side and and just make incremental progress, especially the bigger the company, the slower the progress. That's fine. But incremental progress is the name of the game. And from a customer perspective, it is really awkward and weird whenever you have this great experience in one spot of the company, and then it doesn't carry through. Like sales was great, but now customer success sucks.

Like why can't we carry through this message the entire way? Well, let's go even more surface level. You don't always have treatment that's the same, creative treatment that's the same. You've got one look at top of funnel and thought leadership. That's like this grandiose sort of vision. You've got some, you know, cookie cutter, BDM deck or at a glance that that's great,

but has a certain format and style to it. Suddenly you've got this random PowerPoint deck and a sales name. Like you have this disjointed kind of step-by-step experience. And I'm not talking about our, like we do a decent job because we have tight brand controls. But again, that goes back to the point of

if you have a thousand things going out there, you run brand risk because you have a thousand different ways of things. I have seen so many cobbled together things across that life cycle that it's like, if we just spend a little time getting our steps together, that customer experience you're talking about is gonna be so much better, even if it just feels the same, right?

The talking points may be five words different or 10 words different, depending on who's talking or slightly different. But if you talk to anybody at our company and you know you're talking to somebody at our company and you're buying into what it is that we're trying to pitch you from both a relational relationship standpoint and a value standpoint and a product standpoint. That's just less you have to kind of have to overcome. I think, do you read fantasy? I do. Okay. So I think about it like a fantasy author, Brandon Sanderson likes to talk about you like Brandon Sanderson. Okay. He does fantastic, like hourslong lectures on YouTube that you should definitely check out. I haven't seen them. If you haven't seen them, they're for free on YouTube. But he talks about how you should be

able to read a character's voice without seeing who's talking. And you would know exactly who's talking because the tone, the way they talk, the things they talk about are so distinct. I think about that with brand. No matter who's speaking at the company, it should be such a distinct voice that I can tell that it's Cisco. Yeah, tone of voice, creative treatment, colors, type font, where you're positioning things, what your lockups look like, all those. But tone of voice is one that probably falls by the wayside

more than it should. And you're absolutely spot on right. I mean, I always look to Apple because they have such a strong brand, but. For sure. You know when you see Apple. I kind of know when I see IBM because I'm a little older, so I see IBM

and I see the typeface and I'm like, oh, it's IBM. I know what they're doing. And there's these things that, and then it lets you reinforce the brand. It lets you reinforce, and it's not even reinforcing the brand. What is your brand? It is who you as a company are innately perceived and that means you're not having to overcome that perception. So if you've got a strong brand that carries trust,

or carries empathy or look at Southwest for 30 years or kind of like changing that now, but look at Southwest for 30, 40 years. Like they were the heart brand and the love brand, right? You knew them and that was implicit. You didn't have to figure out who they were. You knew who they were. So that's less work you're having to do. My whole job is about not creating complexity where there doesn't need to be complexity, not creating a gap where there doesn't need to be a gap of understanding. Like let's meet people, let's reinforce it, let's be consistent. And let's talk to them about what they care about. I can none of these are like novel, crazy concepts.

It's just slow down and think about it. Yeah. Day to day. Yeah. Slow down to speed up as Jim Collins would say, that's that one. That one kills me. I use that with my team sometimes. And I think they roll their eyes at me. Yeah. And I say that. But it's true. Like if you don't have I get this a lot. We don't have time to plan. It's the same thing. It's like, OK, so you're just going to like meander aimlessly.

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, you're you're busy, but busy at what? Right. Like spend a little time thinking about how the three hours you're devoting on the upfront is going to impact the long-term overall benefit of that. Yeah. Well, and as you explained, that energy put in upfront, basically negates the energy you have to put in at the end because it's already kind of outlined exactly

what you need to do, what actions you need to take. What's the old psycho, the old, the kid deferred, I don't know, where you put like, you can have one lollipop four year old now, or you can have like five of them. Yeah, although it's the marshmallow test. Is it marshmallow? Yeah. Yeah, so they took a bunch of kids and they, yeah,

put a marshmallow in front of them and they're like, you can have this one now, or if you wait however long, you can have two. We as adults are not any better at it. And it's just in a different context. It's like, okay, you can go put out your blog now or we can spend three hours and then you have, maybe it's not a blog, it's two and a half other things,

but you have to slow down to do it. It's the same concept. And that's the buy-in is like, you're going to yield more over the long run, whether that's impact or happiness or whatever it is by just slowing down and thinking about it and thinking truly what is going to have impact, what do people care about?

I wish that customer experience hasn't become so defined as it is. It is this TSIA is an organization, like I said at the beginning, loyalty program thing that has now over rotated into very specific contact center and chat bots and wait times and loyalty cards and all that. And I'm like, it has lost its meaning. It has become so defined in certain senses that it has started to lose its meaning. And so for me as a marketer, which traditionally people don't fully think of as part of that customer experience component is reattaching it. That's why I'm in that experience. Like Cisco thinks about customer experience as that is the full customer experience. It's not just marketing. It's okay. It's marketing

and purchase. And now you're using your product. Now you know what the product's supposed to do. Are you actually achieving that? That's why the customer success motion is part of it. So, you know, we, as a company have tried to re-expand to that definition, to think broadly about it, which confuses a lot of people why I'm in marketing and doing customer experience. They just don't kind of get that component all the time. And so that's the main thing I want to talk about is, is that connection and try to get folks who listen to this to think a little bit more broadly about what that concept means. An AI agent that your customers actually enjoy talking to Salesforce has you

covered. Meet AgentForce for service. The AI agent that can resolve cases in conversational language anytime on any channel to learn more, visit salesforce.com slash agent force. Well, what I think is interesting is I think by defining things, like they lose their meaning. Yeah. And there's lots of spiritual books I've been reading about that, right? You know, so we can get like real woo woo there, but also just with like strategies. So if I distill something into step one, step two, step three, step four,

now it just becomes this unemotional process, which is what I think where we've had this problem with so much content being created is now I know step one, keyword, step two, this, step three, that. And then I just get into this robotic delivery tool. We're just these AI automation machines repeating these strategies. So, yeah, I think bringing back into the experience, like, full all around this empathy, this, like, thought, this human perspective and not trying to distill it down into this, like, step-by-step strategy or defining something really significantly. It can be a step-by-step strategy, right? But you have to not lose sight of it. And you're absolutely right.

Folks that take a concept, they want it to be successful. They need to share it. They need to create some sort of operational model, organizational structure to how to kind of scale it out. And that's what, to your point, has become this thing. But also, to your point, it dilutes it. You lose it. And if the person who wasn't there five stages ago, who was like, hey, this is the reason we're doing it, is no longer part of why you're doing that. You're now in this cycle that why we're having this discussion. We have to ground it.

Yeah, you have to really ground it. It's why I have a design thinking stage and the empathy mapping stage on the front end of what we do on our cycle. That's still a step, that's a process. One, two, three, four, I don't know what the steps are. But that's still a process, right? We lead with that. And then we build. But you're not just checking the box of the process. There's a reason why you're doing

the process. And sometimes that reason can get lost. Like if we were to take Ben out of Cisco or take you out of your team, you know? Yeah. Right? I know, I mean, yes, it's not like I am a cog in a greater motion that's trying to do this. I am very much trying to lead this sort of idea across the group. And I've seen different levels of success across that,

but you're right. Like, without, I don't mean it to sound that way, but if you take me out, who's trying to heavily drive it, I don't mean it to sound that way, but if you take me out who's trying to heavily drive it, I don't know how long that persists. But this is true across a bunch of marketing campaigns. You know, like there's so many phenomenal marketing leaders that just, for whatever reason, maybe they switch jobs, they leave, whatever it is.

And then the heart of that company feels like it's lost. And then it's kind of floating around until someone new comes in and plugs in. It's their modified version of that company feels like it's lost. Yeah. And then it's kind of floating around until someone new comes in and plugs in. And it's their modified version of that, which isn't the worst thing always, especially if they're close to the original meaning. But again, you're relying on them to understand what the original meaning was and what that original intent was. But even in that six months of them being gone, the whole mission goal, everything that we'd set up is like lost. Like, wait, why are we here? What are we doing? We're like, oh, we need to remind you. Like, okay, you hired us if I remember correctly.

So it's, it's interesting to see how just even someone being gone for a little bit can lose that goal. If you don't properly articulate it to your team. Well, I'm trying to get my team to like, I am a true believer in the empathy approach to things and all that comes from that. And I, I'm fully malleable at what that shift may be, but I am trying to create essentially evangelists of that approach because one, it's more natural, more human, I enjoy it more, but two, it's more impactful. And so if I can make believers out of them,

and I've already seen them actually, I haven't mentioned this, but it makes me really proud to see hearing those sorts of questions that I may be asked on day one and seeing them ask those questions when they go to other groups, right? You're creating empathy missionaries to go out into the world and create this idea across different silos and groups in the company. And honestly, that's the thing that's made me the happiest is seeing that buy-in and

seeing people independently slow down and think about it. And that's so, like, it makes me very proud. Like, if you want to talk about what brings me joy at work, that brings me joy at work. When I see some of that, it's not the results, it's not the impact. Sorry, bosses, it's not. I mean, it's great. I love my, you know, great, let's have the company be profitable. That's my objective. But when I see folks kind of evangelizing this idea throughout,

it really makes me feel like I'm doing the right thing and doing a good job. Yeah. I feel that way too. Like when I see all the numbers of what we do, it's like, oh, that's great. That's cool. But like, what really makes me feel proud is when someone tells me Reaches out and says, Hey, I heard this and therefore I did that. Yeah. And I'm like, wait, that feels so much more rewarding than millions of downloads. Like just numbers feel heartless. I mean, you've made the whole pitch for why certain consumption KPIs don't matter. I mean, that's pitch it to the execs, right? Like you go in, if you go into a big company, share that anecdote because that anecdote resonates. Anecdotes resonate at no care what level.

If you share the one that you just did, that's not the same that I did, but it's the same concept of me going into the leadership and having that conversation. It's like, actually sit there and be human for a second. Do you care about this or that? You care about, hey, somebody told me that it impacted them.

I'm just trying to do the same thing at scale with marketing and connect through the rest of the company. hey, somebody told me that it impacted them. I'm just trying to do the same thing at scale with marketing and connect through that, the rest of the company. Yeah. I have a question. Just surrounding collaboration and leadership with remote work. Have you seen, because in my head,

remote work is like very humanistic. It feels empathetic because you're giving people their own space, their own flexibility, autonomy and trust through a lot of work. But then it also it sets this it's giving a separation between you and, you know, your team. I mean, you know, everything is digital and everything's already very digital in our lives. So have you seen it hinder empathy just internally or collaboration or is it the opposite?

I don't think that the mix of in office versus hybrid plays as big a role in the success of empathy as you might initially think. And the reason I say that is hybrid work or remote work and in-person work can take a thousand different appearances. remote work and in-person work can take a thousand different appearances. I worked at a company that was off camera and that created a whole different vibe, back to vibe, that created a whole different vibe on engagement when you're remote and off camera. When you're on camera you see people, when you're on camera all the time and you're coming in t-shirts and shorts and stuff and not like properly dressed for old school environments, you have that trust and it is very similar to being in office.

Yes, you're on the screen. Yes, you're talking to a microphone, but that is closer to a collaborative in office environment. And I've also been in office environments. I'm sitting in a cubicle all day. So I don't think the, the, the physical location is a huge driver of that ability to have meaningful collaboration, particularly, particularly around the concept of empathy. It is more about tone setting with the team, virtual or in person than it is to do with that proximity of the physical body. I mean, I have to believe that. How am I going to do digital marketing

and want to convey empathy without believing that I can be empathetic and have that sort of relationship without being like in a room? Yes, I love being in a room with people. I love when we do off-sites and see folks, but it's not a necessity to accomplish that objective. I think it comes back to intentionality, right? So you just have an intentional meeting.

We're discussing these specific topics. I'm asking you about your grass or your garden, right? And I'm not just checking the box of I spoke to you and got the tasks done that we need done and my camera's off and you actually have no idea what I look like. I had someone I worked with years ago that she had her camera off all the time.

Then when I finally saw her face, it didn't make sense. I made this whole character in my head. It was like you're Sanderson, you know who's talking. You had an idea of what they were. Exactly. Then I saw her face and I was like, whoa, this is not computing right now. Something's breaking in my system. It's funny. Yeah. Then you meet people you see all the time. I mean, there's so many variables to that engagement that it's hard. And I, yeah, I agree being intentional on what were our purposes, saying the words out loud. Think like you're them. Like, don't just expect people to do it. Force people to sit in a room and awkward silence and sit there and think about it. We get a mural board and throw a little sticky notes into the empathy map.

I'm like, okay, now you are a CISO and you're a chief information security officer and you've got to think about threat vectors and all this. And we have marketers, they're not doing this all day. This just sounds fun. But it's challenging and they're like, well, I don't know. What do I care about? What do I feel?

Oh no, I could lose my job if somebody's gonna do this. This feels like workplace D and D. Kind of. Like we got it. We got a D 20 out there. We're good. So it's good. Yeah. So, uh, please. Oh gosh. My team already knows that I'm like, My husband's a DM. So don't worry. You're among friends. Why is he not here like narrating and DMing the conversation? Yeah. No, it is that way.

What is role playing? Role playing is just empathy. It's like putting yourself in somebody else's shoes. I think adults need more of it, to be honest. I have a three-year-old and I watch him the way that he can just make up something. He has a stick and he's got a rock. And he's in his own world

that he's on a race car doing something. And having a wonderful time. He's so happy. Like he's not imagining horrible things where he's like sad. He's like constantly just making up these like fun, cute stories and- So if you catch me outside of the studio- With a stick in a rock.

With a stick and like in a cape on, you're not gonna judge me. It's like, okay, that's good. No, definitely not. Okay, thank you. I appreciate that. We got someone narrating. Yeah, that's okay.

It'll be better, yeah. We're gonna do a fun little lightning round game. It's called relevant or ridiculous. And I'm asking both of you guys so you can both answer. I'm going to give you a trend, a tool, a topic that's going to kind of be all over the place and you can just say what comes to your brain first. Okay. Masked marketing. Think Duolingo. Oh, they're relevant. I Think Duolingo. Oh, they are relevant. I like Duolingo.

I think that's relevant, but like there's so many other mascots that I think are irrelevant. Or like the Wendy's are kind of, I mean, ridiculous. Ridiculous? Yeah. Not relevant. I don't think so. Okay.

Chachi Beauty. Relevant. Relevant. Still relevant. Pickleball. Relevant. It's irrelevant to me, but I know that it's relevant for most people here in Austin.

Do you play? No, but it's hard to avoid, so that's the relevance to me. LinkedIn thought leadership. Ridiculous. I think relevant if it's real, not just AI generated nonsense. Hmm. I have seen LinkedIn devolve.

There's still good stuff there. There is, yeah. And there absolutely is, but I have seen some, it is a Facebook off-thread at times right now. Really? So, I don't know. I can see that. I guess I'm getting other things in my algorithm, but there's some elements where I'm like, I just roll my eyes.

I just absolutely roll my eyes. And so it's hard signal to noise ratio is harder. It's harder to find a good point. Team book clubs. Team book clubs. We're pro book clubs. Relevant. Yeah.

Okay. Is your team, are you reading one right now? Yeah. What, wait, what book have you done? But, oh, I don't even remember the last one we did. I'm terrible at it. Ben's like, I'm not reading it. And I care about it. And you care about it, but I don't even remember the last one. I'm terrible at it. Ben's like, I'm not reading it. And I care about it.

And you care about it, but you don't know the book. My wife likes to say I can't read. Yeah. Like not just doesn't read, but can't read. So that's the joke that she likes to say. The problem I have is when I read, I read like 18 hours straight, and then it's 5 o'clock in the morning because I don't want to put it down.

So I don't pick up a book because I don't want to sit for the next like 18 or 19 hours to go do that, which is horrible to use not to read. But I like book clubs because it's not work. It's something that's like forcing you to think outside of it and it's not work. Yeah.

So that's a terrible answer. Okay. Relevant not to me. 100% remote work. 100% remote work. Relevant. Agentic AI assistance. Agentic AI assistance. Agentic AI assistance.

SMS marketing or SMS CX. SMS marketing or SMS CX. Relevant, not for me as much, but relevant. I think it is. Relevant when it's not annoying. So not political. Oh my God. Yeah, oh my God.

November, I think I was getting 400 texts per hour or something. Somehow I got on some email or SMS list that I'm Tom. I keep getting, Tom, come out to vote. I get them all addressed to my dad. I'm being called Philip in my inbox all the time. I'm like, are you giving my number out? Yeah.

Shout out to Philip. Shout out to your dad. I might've also shared a text or a phone number of somebody that I wanted to get SMS marketing. So, you know. Ooh, that's what I should be doing. That may be why you're getting the other ones. My dad is just setting me up for it.

He's like a emoji use in enterprise comms. Emoji use in enterprise comms. Relevant. It's not on here, but I'm gonna ask a similar question. Gen Z slang in enterprise comms. Or marketing. Relevant when it's not cringey. I was going to say the same thing. What does cringe mean? Hello?

Well, forced. It feels forced. I mean, think of the skateboard meme with, you know, like, hello, fellow kids. Personalize videos. Can you give more context on that one? Yeah. Like when you're like entering a funnel, like as a customer. Relevant when it's not cringy. Same answer as the Gen Z slang. It can't feel forced. Okay. Webinars with 50 plus slides. Ridiculous. Yeah. No.

Never again. Customer journey maps. I think I'm going with relevant on this one. Yeah, I'm shocked. Ridiculous. I'm just kidding. How dare you. Branded podcasts.

Relevant. Relevant. Thank you for saying that. Of course. Great answers. All right. That concludes our lightning round. Thank you, Ben. Thank you.

It was fun. Thanks, Rose. Yeah, you're welcome. All right. Oh, last question. I almost forgot. Okay. We ask everyone this.

Normally we let them prepare and we did not let you prepare. I don't know. We'll see how it goes. Yeah, I'm thrilled with it. What's a baller experience you had as a customer recently that you want to shout out? I love Barley Swine, which is on Burn It. Barley Swine is probably the closest thing Austin has to Austin being non-pretentious, but still that fine dining where they care about you and Austin being non-pretentious, but still that fine dining where they care about you and

they're there without being over the top or pervasive in your outing. So for me, it's one of the best experiences and we've gone there for my birthday every year for the past seven years or something like that. So shout out to Barley Swine because it is to me the best experiential dining in Austin. What kind of food? It's your kind of like American fine dining mix. So you're gonna get a steak with, you've got like these like shiitake, not shiitake, really got these like mushroom dumplings.

Oh, I see you pointed up on there. That looks good. Yeah. It's very fancy. It looks like small portions. It is. So I've got a really good friend of mine that went to the Culinary Institute in Poughkeepsie, Hyde Park, New York, which is for those who know like one of the best in the country, if not the best in the country and worked a lot in New York. So a lot of stuff I did in New York

was like finding the dives that were great, finding the high-end restaurants that were great. And the one thing that was through all of them that what made them wonderful was that kind of like caring about the person that came in and covering them up and making sure that they felt warm and loved while they're there at that experience. And that's why I like Barley Swine because to me they're that. They're the closest thing to that in the city. Like there's a lot of great places but this place is just you know step above. I will have to check it out. Thank you so much for joining us, Ben.

This was awesome. And I hope we can have you on again. I would love that. It was a great time today. Thank you. Thank you.