Relationship Intel, Data and the Experience Layer + Is CRM the New Hub for CX| S1 EP 25

Chitra Iyer [00:00:18] Welcome back to the talking stack podcast. Today we're joined by Steve Woods who's the Co-founder and CTO at Nudge.AI which is a relationship intelligence platform to help find and grow the relationship that drives sales.  Steve's been Co-founder and CTO of Eloqua the platform that pretty much defined the marketing automation space and of course was ultimately acquired by Oracle.

Chitra Iyer [00:00:45] Welcome to the show, Steve.

Steve  Woods [00:00:47] Thank you for having me. It's great to be chatting with you all today.

Chitra Iyer [00:00:51] On today's show we talk about relationship intelligence in the sales enablement space First and then we move on to the SAP acquisition of Qualtrics and what that means to the experience management space. And finally the Zendesk announcement about its open CRM. Steve tells us where does relationship intelligence fit into the sales enablement landscape? we have CRM, KAM ABM social selling and whatnot. Where does this fit?

Steve  Woods [00:01:23] What we look at nudge with relationship intelligence is we look at what relationships have been built. How have you been effective with all those efforts and relationships aren't art one way conversations run with a sales auto dialer they are a back and forth between two humans .where you You go back and forth and you talk about things and it happens over a long period of time and it dies off if you don't  keep the conversation alive and what relationship intelligence is all about is taking all of these efforts that you're doing with sales enablement the sales intelligence and ABM and CRM and saying what matters? What relationships does your sales team actually have with people who are in the buying committee and what does that tell me about the deals that I have in my pipeline? Where do I need to go with them and are they likely to close? That's really where we're coming at with relationship intelligence is understand what matters to get a deal done and map that against the pipeline that you believe you have.

Anand Thaker [00:02:28] How does a relationship intelligence come into play for the collective group of people and how they work together. How does that change the dynamic of the BDR teams and how they approach various companies or the pipelines that they are prospecting for?

Steve  Woods [00:02:46] That's a great question!. You're looking at kind of a few things there in terms of the team dynamic. One, if you're a BDR trying to get into a conversation one of the most valuable things is establishing trust through knowing who else is known that you can drop the right names if you know that the person you're trying to get in touch with knows somebody else. That's you know the existing customer of yours or an adviser of yours or someone else on the team or if you're in a larger organization knowing that an existing conversation is happening already and using that an as an entry point to start your conversation. But then as you start to expand into that account and you get past the BDR stage what often happens is you get the BDRs, you get sales engineering involved you get the AE's involved. There's a lot of confusion about who's building what relationships with who? Do we have access to this group?. Have we talked to finance and a lot of the internal conversations within a sales team are all around basically shedding light on that blind spot. Who are we talking to in this account.? Who knows who which gets even worse if anyone ever leaves the team. Oh crap. Who were they even talking to? We don't know. You got to pick up the phone and go in blind and say Yeah I think we were talking to somebody here but I don't know who? Understanding that I'm having that data there tracked in your CRM system available both to operationally work with so that you can make that deal happen and then analytically work with so you can see where you're going wrong. It is hugely valuable for leaders of sales teams that are trying to track that team dynamic open.

Chitra Iyer [00:04:35] How does relationship intelligence help with the sales and marketing alignment challenge?

Steve  Woods [00:04:42] It's interesting because my history here with Eloqua comes into this. A little bit if you look back kind of in the 2000 and 2010 era that the idea of marketing and sales alignment was all around the metrics of the handoff of a lead over to sales. Here's an MQL, they've been on your Web site. Hand them over to sales. And that was all well and good when that timing was critical for the salesperson say OK they're interested I'm gonna pick up the phone and I'm going to aggressively go after that lead right now.

Steve  Woods [00:05:15] So sales and marketing alignment was all around the timing and the qualification of a lead but if you look at what's happening today where every buyer out there is just getting inundated with inbound sales effort that is all automated that that idea that you're going to just kind of ramp up the volume of outreach when that person shows interest is a little bit flawed and dated instead of the 2018 environment. What marketing and sales teams that are well aligned today are really focusing on is more about the message, more about the reason to start a conversation and the marketing teams are coming down to sort of lower-level tactical stuff not as much a high level. Hey here's a general viewpoint on who we are in a high-level value proposition but if my sales team is struggling to have conversations with C level operations executives to talk about how the thing that we offer works in an operations environment let's go deep on that. Let's have breakfast for COOs. Let's have a data asset that is really really deep about what COOs need in today's environment. Let's have a set of things that open up the conversation between one of my salespeople and a C level operations executive. That isn't a kind of light lose value proposition it's very very deep and specific and as a conversation starter and a trust builder, the sales and marketing alignment is really starting to happen around those opportunities to have a conversation not timing that the person was on the Web site.

Anand Thaker [00:06:56] Is it possible to truly scale relationships beyond what's normally I guess humanly possible?

Steve  Woods [00:07:04] Well I think there are two pieces to that which are the individuals involved in sales need to be good relationship builders. They need to understand how to build a human connection with people that are they're interested in buying their product. But from a marketing and from a scale and an operations standpoint the business needs to find ways to enable them to build those relationships which means mapping out the buying journey and before that the learning journey a lot better than we have to date. If you basically say you know the old model was here's a Web site with a couple of white papers and some facts and figures and then if you want to learn anything more you're gonna get a demo from sales and you're going to sign a three-year press hard three copies upfront contract. That's not a journey that allows people to build a relationship. If on the other hand marketing and the rest of the business enables the sales team to help buyers along the learning journey whether it's you know different educational assets different data assets face to face meetings and conferences trials of the product whatever that journey is it allows the buyers to start their own education process. And as part of that gives opportunities for the sales team to guide and help and learn and build the relationship and build the trust. I think that's where it really manifests itself is the entire organization needs to say what does a buyer need to get out of us to come to a point where they understand what we're offering they like us they trust us and they're ready to commit more and salespeople are a key part of that but they're not the only part of that right.

Chitra Iyer [00:08:55] So more marketing automation doesn't mean better nurturing. It's really now about the relationship and the experience which brings us to this news item about a SAPs acquisition of Qualtrics. You know it's trying to create a category called  Experience Management. David, what are your thoughts?

David Raab [00:09:14] It was an interesting eight billion dollar deal which was the pretty astonishing price for what's essentially a survey platform. I think that SAP is almost trying to become more relevant in an area where it's somewhat lagged a bit. I mean they certainly are a major player in CRM and even more so in customer service and obviously in all kinds of back-office operations but they have not been perceived as a leader I think in many of the customer-facing bits of things you can know that a great deal of technology and a great deal of excellent technology. I think Qualtrics was a way to kind of redefine the playing field a bit and say hey no there's this new way of looking at things but let's invent this category called Experience Management which is not I think a category that people have been talking about in that name. Obviously, we're doing it. And then try to be very analytical using Qualtrics to measure all those things so. So it's a way to sort of you know redefine the playing field a bit in a way that favors them and use Qualtrics as the major tool to do that.

Chitra Iyer [00:10:36] You think it might have been cheaper to run a really snazzy advertising campaign saying that they're all about the experience?

David Raab [00:10:43] They could have saved oh about seven point nine nine billion dollars.

Chitra Iyer [00:10:48] Yeah I'd say so. You know it's really interesting because I know Steve from what you were saying is when it sounded to me like you know this is relationships experiences all these are human connections it's difficult to measure them. It's certainly difficult to make them consistent across you know an entire organization or entire group of salespeople or even functions it is you know bringing them back to the customer experience management point is it even possible to measure something that has so many different definitions?

Steve  Woods [00:11:28] I think there's no one measurement of it to to your exact question. There's no one measurement of experience but I think in the same way there's no one measurement of the brand. There's a bunch of proxies that give you slight indicators of whether you're doing well or poorly in one dimension of it. But I think what's happening on a macro picture is there's a realization that Nielsen ratings are probably less important and what people are saying about your actual customer experience is becoming more important. So organizations are really shifting their investments to make sure that the overall experience is a better experience because that's what drives their overall brand.

Amit Varshneya [00:12:12] With Qualtrics if you take a look at their customer base it's very very strongly aligned with SAP's customer base which has large enterprises with strong functions in customer  management and these are all consumer brands of have a strong well-known consumer brands and therefore I think the way to me aligns with is SAP's got a strong back office for these brands and now they've got other buying centers as well that are strongly invested maybe it in H.R. or in marketing that strongly aligns with their  current footprint. And so for that perspective, I think it's it's a great strategy for them to now be indifferent buying centers within a customer.

Amit Varshneya [00:12:58] And so it's more of an expansion strategy within their accounts I guess.

David Raab [00:13:04] I think part of what this deal is about and some of the other things that we're talking about as well are about that of sort of quantifying getting past the oh warm and fluffy, yes,This is a nice company because they have you know cute little horses on TV or something. And actually delivering the experience that they want and measuring whether they're delivering the experience and making serious efforts to improve that. So you know in that sense it definitely is something that  SAP is buying into and saying you know we're really going to be very good at measuring the stock and that's going to inform everything else that you do presumably with SAP tools. So that is a new dimension. That we haven't really been covering before in some of these issues about CX We've always talked about improving it. But if you don't talk about how you measure whether you're improving if you can only get so far. So they're saying yeah let's take it to the next level.

Chitra Iyer [00:14:00] And the Zendesk announcement. And it also seems to be about making CRM more powerful across all of the touchpoints. Is CRM the new cx hub is What I'm wondering?

Steve  Woods [00:14:12] If you're looking at it from a layer's perspective. The interesting thing which I think is sort of maybe coming out in a few of these acquisitions and initiatives is if you're a layer 2 player and you're about the experience in some regard you still you need the facts you need that underlying support layer of the facts on the customers. And so you've got a strategic quandary. Do you build your business layered on top of somebody else's business? That is strategically very weak because they can tax you they can block you out they can cause all sorts of problems. So there is an argument here and maybe this is the Zendesk one of saying hey why don't we build the whole stack all the way down and we will own layer 1. The CRM facts and layer 2 the support environment and we'll have control over our own destiny. That to me is just a strategic play that says we're in better hands if we understand and own the foundation layer and the layer we're trying to drive value on.

David Raab [00:15:16] Zendesk is one of the few companies who have a large enough customer base to actually stand up to Salesforce and say you know what?. We're an alternative to you. Our customers can build not on the Salesforce app exchange but on the zendesk app exchange and we're gonna go out and we're going to offer CRM which was part of this announcement. And we're going to offer some analytical tools which are part of this announcement and we're gonna have I think was forty thousand or sixty thousand other people who've already built applications on that.

 [00:15:45] So obviously this was a pre-existing platform this wasn't something that they just announced for the first time in 60000 people popped up overnight like mushrooms. We don't think they did a really great job of pre-sales. So it's very exciting. It was you know because there are so few places or companies to go to look for the platform that those people like Salesforce in a sort of a near-monopoly position. And this is at least opening up the possibility of a major competitor in a major alternative which is a piece of extremely good news if you're a marketer.

Amit Varshneya [00:16:24] Yes I think just in the space of CRM and support and service I think this is that overall movement to really provide a platform that combines each of these touchpoints after the sale or just before the sale. So you know they have a competitor called Fresh desks which became a fresh work which basically does all of these different touchpoints Salesforce, of course, started from CRM and went to customer support and other areas Zoho does the same thing. So it's basically a play in that space to own the touchpoint in the process after or right before the sale all the way till you know a customer engagement and management.

Anand Thaker [00:17:05] Marketing, sales, customer success, product. Those are all blending as part of the bigger go to market platform in a sense or how do we manage that or understand that or whatnot.

Chitra Iyer [00:17:17] How interesting. You know the CRM space is almost in the most mature stage but continues to evolve and reinvent itself in such interesting ways to remain relevant. And we'll be watching that space. Moving on now to our hails and fails we have three really interesting bits of news that caught our eye. First the smart meters from utility companies. Concerns have been raised over the ability of these smart meters do not just track how you are consuming the services but also everything that goes on inside your home including watching what you're watching on TV. But also an opt-out fee to avoid these smart meters. The other hand smart incentives United Insurance which is a health insurance company is offering Apple Watches nearly free of cost as part of its wellness program. So that's an interesting debate about wearables marketing and privacy. And finally, we have ANA that just opened up a center for brand purpose. is it hail or fail if we need a special institution to help brands find out that good for business can also be business for good. I mean it is a tricky slippery slope whether you know to take a political stand or a social stand that is good for the brand or potentially dangerous. But let's start for the moment with smart meters.

Anand Thaker [00:18:32] These smart meters have become incredibly even more powerful. But I think what really you know upset a lot of homeowners is they were mandated to have a smart meter in and you have to pay to opt-out. And that was actually the biggest concern for a lot of people saying why do I have to pay to opt-out what's going on here. And that's what certainly triggered a lot of these interesting conversations. So obviously education total failure of educating homeowners of why this is going on why they have to opt-out or why these are required. And that becomes a really real problem. So is this another avenue for potential privacy issues data leaks you know with utility companies ever sell data to anybody that's probably not likely to ever happen there's they're very much regulated or semi-regulated to do that. But it's interesting to hear these conversations come back again and I think they've come back because of these silly policies and certainly a lot of awareness about customer data breaches as a result of it. and there's a lot of utility companies who want to get into providing better customer satisfaction or see CSAT scores as a result of it.

David Raab [00:19:53]  It Was a fascinating story because you're right and it's like now the smart meter really doesn't know what TV show you're watching except that it turns out that there was some research done back in 2012. Actually, it can figure out what show you're watching by checking the power fluctuations depending on the brightness of the TV screen. And then there's a pattern to that a fingerprint essentially you can match against particular TV shows or movies or such that you actually can figure out if you sample it a two-second interval which was what was going on in that 2012 study. So yeah. OK. You know you're not totally paranoid. And in fact, they can do that and it's not clear why they'd want to bother although I would never underestimate the interest in people selling data.

Chitra Iyer [00:20:43] That has to be the reason right.

Amit Varshneya [00:20:46] I mean, I saw this and I think we've had a smart meter for two years and at this point, I was like I might as well you know just live in a glasshouse. Everything that I do everything is known including the energy meter it also keeps tabs on what I'm doing.

David Raab [00:21:13] There was a program from United healthCare which is a big health insurance company about offering Apple Watch devices as part of a wellness program. Well now, of course, the Apple Watch is certainly a privacy issue.  Yes, your watch is watching you. You're offering to be spied upon by your health care company. It's a clever marketing thing, not the first time that health companies have done this because they want to attract people who are likely to take care of themselves likely to exercise.

Steve  Woods [00:21:46] What I find fascinating on this just coming out is is that as a marketer is the difference that positioning makes you know that the power company gets beaten up for saying you pay extra to be out of the program and the health care company insurance company manages to position it as you get a discount for being part of the program. It's the same thing you're just saying persona who's lazy sits on the couch or wants their privacy they're paying more and the person who gives up their privacy is paying less but positioning matters and the public seems to eat it up. Everyone wants a discount. Nobody wants to pay extra. Even though they're two sides of the exact same coin.

Chitra Iyer [00:22:30] Maybe the utility company needs to get some help from the new center that ANA  launched. David, you mentioned the brand purpose  center

David Raab [00:22:39] That was another news item which kind of like this head-spinning ANA  launched a center to help brands promote or define their brand purpose which seems to mean terms of social purpose or socially conscious advertising and positioning which well that's just so bizarre. Like brands need help with this. This kind of you know one question it raises is why is this the ANA offering to do that and it's been very much in debate about whether brands should be sort of socially active and take political positions and it was kind of odd to see the ANA almost presuming that that's the case and finding that there is enough demand for that help that they need to set up a center  to do that and announcement talked so little about research shows purpose-led brands grow two to three times faster than their competitors which is not really the universal conclusion of the research a lot of the research has shown that it's pretty dangerous for brands to take positions at least on controversial political issues. So I was a little surprised again to see they have come down so firmly on one side of something that actually is quite debatable.

Steve  Woods [00:24:01] Tying back to that sort of common thread around a kind of that movement from facts to experiences as soon as you get into experiences. You are acknowledging that you're getting into this fuzzy realm of not what but why? Why is a person engaged with you and you hear about what do they want. And it is difficult if not impossible to define that without coming back to who they are? What are their values? What do they care about how do they view the various debates in society. That's all a part of why have they chosen to wear your clothing support your product, view things in the same way that you view things and all of those experiential things.

Chitra Iyer [00:24:49]  We can't forget Apple turned pro-privacy quite successfully into a brand strategy recently a corporate brand strategy with Tim Cook talking about it. And then we have a social consciousness as well now as a potential strategy. But you know it all comes back to what we started with Steve which was building trust in relationships. Whether you're a B2B or B2C there are different ways to do it and to tie it back to marketing and Martech. What I'm taking away from our conversation today is that whereas Martech began with the what kind of questions about consumers what are they buying? What do they do on a Web site?. We are moving Martech towards the why kind of questions . why do they behave the way they behave?. Why they may respond to a certain message or experience or not respond to it. And suddenly technologies like A.I. and  ML and customer data management in Martech are all helping move towards that better understanding of the customer.

Chitra Iyer [00:25:51] And with that it's a wrap for us. Thanks for joining us, Steve.

Steve  Woods [00:25:54] Thank you so much for having me. It was a fun conversation.

Chitra Iyer  Thanks to David, Anand, and Amit as well