Speaker 0: And we’re going live. Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in to our MarDreamin day two afternoon keynote panel, blurring the lines, marketing, sales, and customer success. My name is Christina Anderson from the Sercante team, and I’ll be moderating today’s session. As we go throughout today’s discussion, I want to invite you to please go ahead and use the chat and q and a. Engage with us as much as you’d like. We are excited to hear from you. And first off, I just need to give a shout out to our incredible sponsors. Marjorie Men would not be possible without you. And without further ado, let’s meet today’s panelists. I am joined by Alexander Connor from FlexCare Medical Staffing, Mallory Jones from JR Simplot Company, and Alina Vandenberg from Chili Piper. Alexandra, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to everyone?

Speaker 1: Happy to. Hello, everyone, and happy afternoon, happy morning, depending where you are in the country. I’m Alexandra Conner. I’m the senior vice president of marketing at FlexCare, a health care staffing solutions company. Um, over my twenty plus years in health care and tech, um, I’ve built a career of transforming complex marketing challenges into growth opportunities for leading organizations like Walgreens and Blue Shield of California, as well as transformational AI and global tech retail. At FlexCare, specifically, I focus on creating data driven scalable strategies that really fix the disconnects, both internal and external, into engagement, expanding patient access to care. That’s the where my heart is today. But my journey definitely has been more than just marketing. It’s been about reimagining access, building connections, and fostering innovation that really prioritizes people and performance. I’m excited to be here, excited to join my co panelists, and really focus on this conversation about bridging commercial development with human centered approach to care and thrilled to share the insights of how we can collectively shape the future of marketing.

Speaker 0: Thank you so much, Alexandra. And then, Mallory, would you also like to introduce yourself?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. Well, thank you all for having me today. My name is Mallory Jones. I am a marketing operations manager at the JR Simplot Company in our global food business unit. Um, so we primarily support our food service operators, like restaurant schools, college and universities. Anywhere you can purchase food, um, we are trying to sell to them. So, um, on the marketing operations team, we look at the marketing automation processes, lead generation tactics, and how we handed that off to sales. So excited to talk on this subject of how we blur those lines.

Speaker 0: Thank you so much, Mallory. And then, Alina, would you also please like to introduce yourself?

Speaker 3: Hello, everyone. I’m the technical cofounder at Chili Piper. Uh, we, um, our product serves marketers, especially helping them with, uh, leakage in the funnel. And, um, for a living, I organize small intimate events with CMOs. So I’m deeply understanding of all the challenges that come with alignment. And, um, yeah, I’m excited to delve in this topic.

Speaker 0: Thank you all so introducing yourself. And I am super jazzed getting started with today’s conversation. So let’s go ahead and dive right in. Um, I’d like to start out with our first question of why do you think it is so important for sales, marketing, and customer success to be closely aligned? And, Alexandra, I’d like to start with you with this question.

Speaker 1: Sure. I think in the most simplest of ways, uh, because rowing in the same direction is really the only way to build the kind of brand experience that we can all be proud of. Um, all these teams that we’re talking about, they all provide direct connectivity to the end customer and the market. And all these teams cultivate the perception, the energy, and ultimately how customer interprets all these interactions, um, into the impression of what’s it like to work with your brand. So aligning these three functions ensures the consistent and truly customer centered journey, um, that builds the loyalty, that builds the trust, increases efficiency on all the things that foster the growth. Right? And then today’s landscape in particular, it is absolutely critical that we have the seamless exchange of information among these teams so that we truly understand what our customer is all about so we can address the full spectrum of their needs from engagement, um, early on in the pipeline, right, when they first enter the equation to all the way to the post purchase support. I recently consulted an organization that was in its initial stages of, um, understanding of what’s happening in the sales process because they were seeing really strong engagement on the front end and then the sales were dropping and they were not converting as much. And upon further investigation, what we found was that ultimately, they were delivering a very much a mixed message to the market because on one side, the marketing was focused on particular, um, personas and particular, um, need states where sales was playing from a very fixed value prop playbook. So that resulted in a very, very mixed message landscape to the ultimate customer. And at the end of the day, really eroding trust and eroding the understanding of what the value that the company could provide them. So really diminishing the chances for that second date. Um, so ultimately, aligning those audience profiles is just so so important and making sure that sales and marketing and customer success are all singing from the same hymnal. So connecting those stories and behaviors that we jointly deliver is what drives results every single time.

Speaker 0: I would definitely have to agree. Um, I loved how what you said about how it’s the customer is interpreting the interactions among these teams. Um, and one of the things that we also always talk about on our team is how the necessarily think themselves and that I am a sales, marketing, or customer success experience. They just know that they’re forming an experience or that they’re forming an opinion of your brand based on who they’re interacting with. So and I loved how you used the word seamless there. Yes. Definitely. It needs to be a seamless experience for them. Um, uh, Alina, any anything to add there?

Speaker 3: I am observing that the teams that are winning, um, and those that are seeing results in in the market, uh, that we have right now where it’s very fragmented and, like, a million AI bots creating content, are the teams that fully understand how they can use marketing as a strategic department as opposed to a tactical department that creates landing pages and website. And, um, what does strategic marketing mean? It allows teams to use the power of marketers, which is moving people in the funnel, um, a lot more effectively. You can see marketing teams being able to accelerate the deal cycles, being able to improve ups, um, upsell, improve reduction of churn. You have all these touches with your customer that can benefit from a bit of marketing sprinkles of magic, um, that can create for better customers for higher LTV, lowering of CAC, and that can only happen if you do a good, um, look in the mirror and you look at your full funnel and you see all the places where your customers are dropping, your prospects are dropping, and see how you can start multi threading with ads in the sales cycle, how you can start multi threading with, uh, gifts, with events to make sure that your customers have the best customer experience. And instead of looking at MQLs, um, look at creating the kind of, uh, customer profiles that have the higher LTVs and optimizing for that.

Speaker 0: Definitely. Um, I loved what you said about that the strategic marketing is looking at how you can also accelerate, um, the funnel. It’s no it should never ever be where marketing is just throwing leads over the walls to sales, getting them in the door, and then forgetting about it. It needs to be that, uh, big picture look at their full customer journey, and it’s when we are able to really collaborate with these other teams, um, sales and customer success that we’re really going to to win and drive that real growth. Um, Mallory, your thoughts on why you think it’s so important for sales marketing customer success to align.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I think, um, both Alexandra and Alina have said it perfectly. It really is about brand experience. Um, Christina, I think you observed the idea that a customer doesn’t know they’re interacting with a marketer or with a seller. They’re interacting with, for us, Simplot or the brand that they’ve gotten onto the website and given their information, and then how is that handed off. So, um, if there’s not alignment there, we really start to run-in creating a brand experience that we probably don’t want to create for that customer. So we need to do that process work in the front end, the strategy to ensure that the brand is showing up accurately for that end user.

Speaker 0: I love how you just left off with the brand showing up accurately because, you know, I’m sure that we all have in our minds of how we, you know, we want our brand to be represented and to show up right. And when there is that disconnect, it doesn’t leave a good experience for the customer. And then that’s when, to your point about showing up accurately, there isn’t an accurate representation happening, um, because of the disconnect. Um, so, yes, thank you so much for sharing us there. Um, I wanna tie it back to Alexandra. You had already started to talk about this of the negative impacts that happen on the customer experience when these teams are are not aligned. You had spoken about how there being a disconnect of the messaging that was going on between the two teams. Um, so, Alina, I wanna go over to you for this one first. Um, what are some of the negative impacts that you’ve seen, um, happen to the customer experience or just in general when these teams are not aligned?

Speaker 3: I have so many, uh, opinions on this. Before I delve into it, you can also use the chat. I am good at multitasking, so I also respond to chat and interact with it. So I’m encouraging the audience to do that. Um, so I see a lot of, uh, teams making a lot of mistakes on that front. So for instance, assuming that every qualified customer is a good customer is a fallacy. For instance, in our case, we have, like, 300 attributes to measure the propensity to sell. So basic basically, an SDR that can go to a qualified account and they have a high score, the fact that they can close fast does not mean that they’re going to stay in the funnel all the way and they’re not gonna churn. So looking at the down spiral effects, you cannot, um, assume that the ones that are gonna close are the ones that are gonna stay. So refining that process and getting really good at understanding who is gonna stay is like a critical component of it that very few people think about that. Um, I also observe something that customers do a lot. They all insist that they’re unique snowflakes and that, um, we really have to have a junior SDR qualify every single prospect that marketing is sending. And that’s such a such an interesting point of view. The reality is that you can always ask two or three or four questions. And if you’re not clear on the qualification, you can always do a form that can have some additional question if you’re not quite sure if that lead should go to sale immediately. But putting your prospects through the pain of having someone call them twenty four later, twenty four hours later, a junior SDR to qualify them when they’re ready to buy from you. When it comes to your website and say, I want to talk to you and you have them wait and get like a junior person to qualify. That’s such a bad user experience in this. I see so much leakage there. And that’s only because the sales and the marketing can’t agree on what the qualification criteria can be. Um, but usually, uh, you can get it down to a few questions, uh, especially these days when by just having an email address, you can get all the firmographics and infographics that you need. This fits like a business email address. Um, and so I I see, uh, I see that problem a lot as well. Yeah. Those are my the the two big things that I see that don’t pan well in alignment. I’m curious to hear from Alexandra and Mallory as well.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Alina, I I cannot agree with you more. I think there’s so much um, expectation that we as consumers have today. And whether you are a b two b buyer or a consumer buyer, right, our expectations are shaped by our daily interactions with many, many, many brands that are out there. Right? And when we feel that we are not heard or understood or tailored to, we’re done. Like, we’re we’re no longer gonna be interested in interacting with that brand. So I think being able to take advantage of the resources that are available to us in the right way and plug in those insights to truly shape the conversations is an extremely, extremely critical imperative. And I think the other thing that you’ve said that I relate to actually, two things. The snowflake syndrome is alive and well across all the industries that I have touched. Um, I think that’s one of the biggest pitfalls, especially for young companies that are looking to scale. It is a huge, huge pitfall because the minute you start focusing on the Snowflake approach, you’re no longer building for scale. You’re no longer enabling your organization to think robustly enough that all of your processes can be put on a foundation that can truly grow. So I think that needs to be avoided at all costs. But the other thing that we touched on in the first question I think is really critical too is when it comes to brand experience, you’re delivering one. It may be a really, really terrible one or a really good one, but you are still delivering one. So let’s make sure it’s intentional. So, Alina, to your point, don’t pass people on. Once you have a great lead, don’t pass it on to a junior person. In healthcare staffing, one of the things that I see a lot of companies do, they outsource that portion to a third party entirely. So now you have a team who is not dyed in the wool living and breathing your brand principles and delivering the type of experience you need. They’re also not connected to the rest of the sales process. So can you only imagine what kind of abrasion you’re delivering in that experience? And customers sense that disjointedness at the very, very deep level. So that leads them to question your organization’s credibility at the very, very foundational level, ultimately diminishing trust and diminishing engagement. And that’s truly the fastest way to the bottom.

Speaker 3: And and that’s precisely right. And the way I tell that to my team, don’t do things to our prospects that yourself hates being on the receiving end up. Yeah.

Speaker 2: I’ll just add that, like, I think we’ve talked a lot about, like, the brand experience and the trust that we’re building with the brand. I also think within, um, these processes of how we hand off leads to a seller to then go follow-up follow-up in how we nurture them in marketing. There’s also trust in that process as well. So ensuring that when marketing sends over a qualified lead to a seller, they know that it is truly a qualified lead. It’s not someone who just came in through the website. There were processes in place to protect their time and ensure that they’re following up on people who are going to help us reach our sales goals at the end of the day. Um, so we really have to ensure that that process is in place so that we’re not diluting trust there as well. Um, because at some point, if you do, you might have a seller who’d be like, why would I go follow-up on this lead when all you’ve sent me previously is not good people? So, um, you there’s a lot of stuff you have to do within that internal process, not just thinking about the end customer too.

Speaker 3: It’s it’s very hard for marketing team when they’re incentivized on MQLs for sure. If the all they’re looking at is, uh, the number of MQLs that they, uh, have to provide to sales and their goals keep increasing, their budget keeps decreasing, then then it’s a a losing battle.

Speaker 0: 100%. Um, so, Mallory, I loved how you said that, um, it’s about building trust. And when you do start to gain that unfortunately, sometimes as a marketing team, sending over leads that sales doesn’t, um, like, view as being qualified, one, it shines a light on there is a breakdown in communication and a breakdown in process and that there isn’t, um, and that the teams need to continue to really work on that alignment. But when that happens more often, to your point, it dilutes that trust. And, Alina, you started to touch on this as well in terms of when, um, of what defines a marketing qualified lead or what defines a qualified lead, um, because that, like, defining that is is one of the key steps to aligning these teams. And when that doesn’t happen, it it poses a major challenge. So on that theme of challenges, Mallory, I wanted to, uh, kick this one back over to you. So what are some of the biggest challenges that you feel are in aligning these teams?

Speaker 2: Yeah. I think for us, we’re a fairly large company, and our sales team is kind of spread throughout The US. We also have global sales teams too. So we’re not face to face every day or, um, they’re often not even on their computer. They’re driving around to different operators and talking in person. So a lot of times, it takes us a while to hear those complaints. Um, and so we have to do kind of put those processes in place to say, hey. Have we connected with this team? Are we checking in to see how this works? Because we might not notice a break in how they’re following up with people until months after it started. Um, so we have to be pretty proactive to ensure we’re hearing about that. Um, one of the best examples I have recently is we have a pretty enticing call to action on our website, um, which does require the sales team to go then follow-up in person most of the time. And, um, um, we recently did kind of a just pull some data from a recent product launch and found that that wasn’t happening, um, or we weren’t able to see that it was happening at the amount we expected it. So we got in a well, got on a virtual room with some of our sales team, um, our inside sales team who’s responsible for qualifying the leads, and really went through the whole process and said, we don’t know what’s wrong here or what’s breaking. Like, let’s try to solve this together and put into place some actual solutions going forward. So, um, that was super helpful just to get everybody in a room. One of the things that came out was that they didn’t even know this was the process. So, um, light bulb, we probably need to do some more training there and ensure that we’re doing that over and over and over again, um, because we have new sellers every day. This is not their day to day, so they might hear it once. We’ve gotta tell them again to ensure that they’re aware that this is what we’re doing to support them and what they can do to support this process as well.

Speaker 3: And one thing that I can add on what Malaria already, uh, touched upon is that oftentimes we have to put our marketing hat internally and sell to our internal teams on the type of things that marketing can help on and influence on. Because, um, in companies that have bad culture, the executive feels fearful of different ways they might get fired because certain numbers might not look good. So everybody kind of, like, looks out for themselves in protecting those numbers and maybe putting some shield around it on how exactly they’re performing. And in the in those type of culture, I think that the in the long term, the likelihood of surviving is very low because the especially as different kind of employees are taking, uh, over the culture, um, in companies, especially like Gen z and Gen Alpha, that have a lot more, um, trust when things are transparent and when things are authentic, when people show up with the full, uh, picture with the good and the bad, um, then I think that the winning teams are the ones that are a lot more transparent about the things that are working and the things that are not working, the things that they can impact, the things that they cannot impact. And us as marketers, when we talk to sales team, when we talk to customer success team, when we talk to our executives, when we talk to our CEO CEO, if we put that lens on of let me explain to you how I can impact that funnel, let me explain to you how I can help you, and let’s make things transparent so that we can all help each other. It’s just a different game plan. It’s hard because, like, culture is hard to change, but because we have that, um, unique talent to, uh, get people to action, I think that, uh, we can we can make things happen.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I agree entirely. I think it starts and ends with organizational culture because fundamentally, when you think about it, nobody wants a transactional relationship whether you’re you’re at work, whether you’re interacting with a brand. Right? So and when it comes to these multigenerational teams, and we truly are dealing with the with the very, very diverse workforce, um, probably more so today than we even did ten years ago, encouraging that open flow of communication and mutual respect is an integral part of truly impacting the overall customer journey and helping the team see themselves throughout the entire continuum of that of that journey. Um, one of the things that I know I’ve done in several of the companies where I had the pleasure of leading very large enterprise teams and cross enterprise teams is really establishing a go to market key operating cadence, bringing teams together to truly have joint problem solving meetings, but also joint celebration meetings to really understand each other’s challenges, understand each other’s successes, and contribute to solving towards those goals together because that creates almost the natural alignment of priorities that eliminate some of the artificial friction that can exist. Because culture is not built overnight, right, this gives them the right foundation to have the flow of communication that’s truly necessary to build that trust and get everybody on the same page.

Speaker 0: I love how the you all touched on very similar themes in your in your own way. And I think, um, to Alina’s point about, um, internal, like, internal advocacy, almost like internal marketing to your own team and building that communication, I think when you effectively communicate what you do, how you can help your teams, and then how, um, show them the big picture of how we can all work together. Um, the working together and the building that understanding of, hey. It’s not me versus you versus another team. It’s all of us. We are one cohesive unit chasing after the same goal, which is making great experiences for our customers and ultimately growing this business. So, um, and I think what you all hit on there is all of that works together to help to build that culture that then fosters that ultimate collaboration among, uh, sales, marketing, and customer success for the customer to then ultimately feel that connected experience on, um, on their end. Um, anything to add further on that, um, before we head into some ways that you all are working on, um, continuing to blur the lines. Okay?

Alright. So with that, um, you’re all, uh, obviously, on your own teams with your own companies. You experience the day to day that we’re all in on a very regular basis. So I would like to hear from you on the you and your teams are to get more closely, um, to blur between sales, marketing, and customer success? And, uh, Mallory, I’d like to kick it back over to you for this one.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So it’s a great question. I think there it kinda depends on the team, um, but mentioned that one example of our call to action and how we kind of saw the results not meeting the expectations we have had. So we started kind of a working project group. So that’s one way we’ve addressed it with very specific projects that kinda need some of those improvements. Um, we also have some internal working groups amongst our whole marketing teams across the organization. Like I mentioned, Simplus really big. So we have our global food business. We have a global agriculture business, um, and we’re all servicing different customers. Um, but we can all learn from each other in how we’re leveraging these tools, do some share outs of specific examples. Um, and then the third way we’ve kind of approached this is that we are expanding our marketing automation capabilities globally. And, really, there that includes some different customer groups, um, includes different languages, different resourcing. Um, so we’ve really tried to start stepping back as probably a more mature user in our organization and say, how can we build out just global governance capabilities that then any of our marketing teams could take, they could implement, um, and ensure there’s some best practices built in in terms of lead flow and ensuring that you don’t just get the system and hope it works. You actually have to really nurture it as well as those customer relationships.

Speaker 1: You mean hope is not a great strategy? Hope is good.

Speaker 3: Wish it was. I’d

Speaker 1: love to build on that. I think, um, there is a lot of things that organizations do, and I feel like they do them in varying degrees of success. Right? And oftentimes, one of the common things for the organizations to jump to is like, oh, well, we need better tools or we need better processes or whatever. But I think if you boil it all down, we truly need to incentivize the right behavior. Because, um, I think we touched on in one of the previous questions, right, if marketers are incentivized on the marketing qualified leads, they’re like, My job is done. I delivered a great pipeline. You guys knock yourselves out. Sales is incentivized on, let’s say, the volume of appointments that they get. Same thing. They’re like, We’re done. At the end of the day, the customer success is accountable for retention. So they’re like, well, you’re delivering me this front end that is not supporting my goals. What am I supposed to do with that? Right? So that disconnect in incentives alone can drive a really, really strong detrimental impact all the way through to the final outcome of what the customer feels and ultimately for the business, what’s the impact and the lifetime value of that customer. So I think it’s really, really, really important that objectives and key results and the KPIs are actually aligned, and the incentives that drive the behavior internally are also very much connected to the key outcomes that matter so that every department is coming to the table feeling accountable for these shared metrics. So it’s really important on understanding that it’s not about activity. It’s not about more fluff or more vanity measures or measures that are only important to one particular group, because that’s where incentive misalignment really starts and creates this vast disconnect. So incentivize the impact on the customer journey rather than and incentivize the outcome on the and the impact on the bigger picture rather than the siloed vanity metric. It’s gonna help out. I guarantee you.

Speaker 3: Pre precisely. Once you start making all these numbers available to everyone and you help everyone understand how they the funnel gets impacted, um, they are a lot more likely to make better decision. And in our case, we do something a little bit unusual in that, yes, we make this, uh, k these metrics available to everyone so that they can see our CACs, they can see our LTV, they can see R and R, and actually understand what these these metrics mean. But there’s another additional component to it where anyone can make an impact on these numbers. And as a result, there will be a lot more likely to be considered for promotion. And the way we do that is if anyone observes any point in our funnel that can be optimized in one way or another, they can open what we call a decision memo. So they can show the data that, uh, impacts our funnel, and they can propose all sorts of options on how we can solve for that. One option is doing nothing, um, and everybody can contribute to optimization in those, uh, company metrics. Uh, you don’t have probably you’ll hate me for saying that, but you don’t have to wait for executives to take action. Sometimes executives might not see things. Uh, you as an individual contributor are a lot more likely to be closer to the problem and change things. And, uh, once you do, you feel a lot more empowered to potentially, uh, take better action for your company. So we encourage all our AC, account managers, SDRs, uh, ops. It doesn’t really matter where you are in the organization, but you can change, um, those top of the funnel, uh, those metrics that are important to our board, that are important to our executives, and it’s very empowering. It’s very cool to be able to affect a company’s running order once you get that kind of, like, superpowers in your in your pocket.

Speaker 0: Wow. That you’re you’re all giving such great insights. So, um, Mallory, for you, it was all about, um, process. And especially when you are expanding into that global market, um, making sure that you have those processes defined across the teams and that you do have those regular conversations, uh, cross departmental cross departmentally and then get into that virtual room together. And then, um, Alexandra, I loved how you hit on incentivizing on the right behaviors. Um, as I said earlier, it can’t just be throw it all over the wall and my job is done. We need to be looking to see, like, how what metrics are we driving further down the funnel, and then how is that impacting the overall, um, business value? And then ultimately to, um, the growth of our of our customer lifetime value. We also want to be able to be growing the customers that are with us and, um, continuing to deepen that relationships. And, Alina, I think it is so awesome that you you share those numbers across the team and you really empower the individual contributors to, um, take ownership, right, of the company’s success and say, hey. I I can’t make a difference here. I’m not just, like, a cog in the machine, like, going going to work every day and just and just get, um, doing my job. But, uh, one, I actually wanna take a question from the audience that we just got. It was just thrown in the chat. So, um, Donna Redmond asked, how do you celebrate slash share internally when new processes result from ideas generated across the teams?

Speaker 3: I can, uh, take that, uh, because it’s something that I think a lot about because culture on alignment is so critical. Obviously, there’s a good trust component that Marie pointed out and, um, that unification of metric that Alexandra touched upon. Um, but there’s one thing to talk about it, and then there’s another thing to take action on it. And it’s the action that’s going to actually move the needle. So as a result, in all our Friday all hands, yes, we remind people where we are with the numbers. We show how we make progress on those numbers, um, and, yes, we allow people to take action and impact those numbers, but we also celebrate them on all hands. And we do that, uh, we have software that we use for celebrations and we had we have people that submit recommendations for that for awards. And we have two types of awards. It’s the animal of the week and the unicorn of the week. We call it the giraffe unicorn. Anyway, it’s like a unicorn of the week. And the animal of the week goes beyond and beyond to goes beyond to affect our numbers, and the unicorn helps with affecting our numbers. And when you see other people doing it and you see that you can actually make a difference, then you’re a lot more likely to want to do the same.

Speaker 1: Yeah. We do something rather similar. Um, in particular, we have a marketing go to market team meets weekly to review performance and outcomes and program scorecards and things like that. But we always start that meeting by recognizing cross functional partners that are driving impact in the performance of the team. I feel like that’s another area that’s really important is that really thinking beyond the immediate circle of your team or your department or your function because there are so many partners from I think Donna earlier mentioned in the chat, there’s IT, there’s data governance, there’s certainly folks in sales that provide a tremendous amount of the input. And I think that recognition at the human level is extremely important. The other thing we do is we actually roll that up to the board meetings and the senior leader meetings. So folks that are noted, they’re actually celebrated at the senior leadership level as well. And I think that is just an extremely important part of driving that organizational culture of appreciation for every single input.

Speaker 3: And it’s so much easier to get a promotion after you’ve been celebrating in the executive leadership for a ride.

Speaker 1: Absolutely. Well, and that’s the thing. Right? I mean, the goal truly is to foster growth and open doors for people who are making a difference. So let’s make a difference.

Speaker 0: Alright. Um, we have a little less than ten minutes left. So, um, this is, again, a shout out to the audience. If you do wanna submit any other questions in the chat or the q and a, please feel free to do so. But I wanna transition, um, the conversation to the look ahead. And, um, I wanna, like, thinking about evolving in the next, uh, three to five years, how do you see the roles of marketing, sales, and customer success, um, evolving as they, um, become that much more integrated? And, Alexandra, I wanna kick this over to you. Sure.

Speaker 1: Um, I think it’s such an exciting question because I feel like there’s a number of things I can go with, but I’ll start with probably the elephant in the room. Data has been our generation’s oil. Right? That’s the resource that’s been driving a lot of business, a lot of economy, and a lot of decision making with what we do and how we do it. So really unblocking access to meaningful data and using that data as a shared love language across departments, I think is gonna continue being like raising the importance of that to the overall outcome. So when each team has access to the same data, when they’re able to discuss insights from that data, when they’re better equipped to make decisions with that data, we support the overall outcome experience. So I think as these roles continue to converge and the team members are becoming more and more versatile, we’re probably gonna see this expansion of and blurring of the rye of the of the lines in terms of our scope of practice. You’re no longer just a marketer. You’re no longer just a salesperson. You’re no longer just a, um, customer success manager or a TAM. It’s really a compilation of those roles. So I would fully anticipate that in the next couple of years, we’ll see this burgeoning space of customer journey architects, if you will, that are truly focused on holistic growth and enhanced customer experience. So think more full lifecycle type of roles and more versatile roles. Um, I’m actually seeing that across a lot of companies already. There’s a SaaS company that I work closely with, and I know they’re hiring this particular type of role already. So it’s it’s starting to happen now, and I only expect that it’ll continue to grow further because it’s truly understanding and overseeing the client’s journey all the way from acquisition to retention and blending all these traditional roles that we’re talking about right now into more cohesive whole.

Speaker 3: On on my end, what I’m observing is that the bar on our prospects and our customers paying attention to anything that we send them is higher and higher. Emails are getting less open rates. Phone calls are getting less picked up on. Our social media is completely inundated with, like, the louder you sound, the more attention you grab. And, um, we’re all tuning away from many things. Um, there are AI avatars that look like people that we might know, and it’s becoming harder and harder to know who to trust. So the combination of the noise plus becoming harder and harder knowing how to who to trust, the in person component is a critical one for all our teams, but it’s hard and expensive. And I feel that the winning teams are the ones that know how to leverage the in person authenticity of, oh, this person is a real person. I can trust them for marketers and and for for everybody else. And knowing how the audience really feels about you, how they really feel about their job, and being able to resonate so well with that audience that they pay attention. And that’s what marketers are really good at, like, getting that attention. And I feel that we’re going to get a better seat at the table in the coming year for sure.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And then I’ll just add, I think Alexander mentioned that, like, kind of the elephant of the room is data. Um, and it’s good data. I think we all know that AI is, I mean, it’s been here for a while, but the user acceptance of generative AI and AI technology is definitely has grown significantly in the past couple years, and we’ll just continue to do that. Um, but the only way to have good AI, to Alina’s point, is we have to have good data that’s feeding it so that we still maintain that trust with the customer, and we’re not seen as somebody who may just be throwing anything at the wind. Um, and I think a lot of what AI will be doing is taking some of these more manual tasks that marketing and customer success and our sales teams have to do on the day to day. Um, and we’ll take that off their plate a little bit. So how do we then use that new time that we’re getting back from not having to search our content libraries high and low for the right piece of content to talk to this person. Um, now how do we use that time to kind of ensure that we’re expanding into the next realm of sales and marketing processes and how to make that better connection with our customers.

Speaker 0: Um, you all did a phenomenal job answering that question. We do have just a few minutes left, and I want to, um, throw Kizaya’s question out there. Um, uh, Sai asked, what are you most excited about implementing slash changing next? And then, Alina, um, you already throw it in the chat. All your AI agents excite and terrify you. So if you wanna share a few words on that.

Speaker 3: Alright. There’s no secret that I’m obsessed with AI agents. I deploy them on every possible piece of my funnel. Um, and I’m really excited because I can do a lot of cool stuff. So for instance, like last week, we realized that we can use AI agents to uncover, um, many influencers in our customer list. And it’s, like, that’s, like, the gold mine because my customers are better marketers than me a thousand times. Um, and that’s we only did that with AI agents. And then we do, like, also crazy stuff. Like, we scrape events from, uh, with AI bots to kind of give us, like, the target audience and score it and results and all sorts of things like that. And the more I realize the type of things that we can do with AI agents, the more I’m scared because where does, like, that line stop? Like, where can an AI agent stop being better than me? And I have no idea. But I put that worry in a box, and I just fully focus on the type of things that I can do with short term. And, like, the worries are gonna they’re gonna maybe explode, but for now, I’m just putting them in a box and not deal with that.

Speaker 1: I don’t think of it as, like, a a worry in the future. I think we’ll put more as a bumper rails, um, in a bowling alley for the little kid. You gotta be really mindful of how do you not break the trust that you’re working so hard to build with your audiences by diving diving off the deep end with the AI agents. Right? So I think there’s a lot there, but really keeping in mind how do you continue delivering that authentic and trusted experience is where it’s at.

Speaker 3: I love that focus on authenticity so much, Alexander, so much. That’s a good important topic to me.

Speaker 0: Alright. Um, and we are at time. So I just wanted to, uh, thank everyone, um, for coming. Thank you so much for engaging in the chat. And to those of you who, uh, asked questions in the chat, um, that that was excellent. And I also wanna give a big thank you to our panelists here. Alexandra, Mallory, Alina, thank you so much for sharing your insights, your expertise, your advice, and your, like, the the mistakes to avoid and and just, um, sharing your experience with us. It was super valuable. I know everyone got a lot out of it. We’re seeing it in the chat here, all the thank yous and the clapping of the hands pouring in. So, um, we greatly appreciate you as well. And then, um, everyone, enjoy the rest of your dreaming. Um, be sure to attend the afternoon sessions and then also that closing, uh, keynote. Thank you, everyone.

Speaker 3: Have a great day. Thank you for having us,

Speaker 2: buddy. Thanks, Christina.

Speaker 0: Thank you.

Speaker 3: That was fun. And then you had 200 people live, which is, uh, quite impressive. Please, Krishna Lee. Did you know how many people registered? Do you know how many people registered? And because 200 showing up is a good, uh, turn is a good turn.