Speaker 0: Numbers gone in higher like the morning sun. Clicks and leads some checklist, we get it done. Emails flowing smooth like a river stream in a sea of data with a marketing dream. Cash flow’s lighting up like a city night. Campaign’s clicking right, setting our sights. In the cloud, we soar where our data flows. In a marketer’s dawn, tracing the journey from dust to dawn. Analytics dancing in a perfect trance with Salesforce Market, and we take our stance.

Speaker 1: Good morning, and welcome to the fifth MarDreamin. I cannot believe it’s already been five years. As some of you might know, Sercante originally started MarDreamin back when the pandemic, um, happened and Dreamforce was originally canceled. Um, but it’s really taken a life of its own over these past five years. It’s grown so much than we could have ever imagined with the support of the community and with the support of our sponsors. In fact, over the past five years, we’ve had over four or over 7,000 marketers in attendance over Maureen. With that, we’ve been having our attendees across 93 different countries. Um, if you’re wondering how much that is, it’s almost 50% of the world. Yes. I had to Google how many countries were in the world this morning. But 50% of us, um, in attendance at more dreaming, which is crazy. Um, with that, we’ve had almost 4,000 companies represented over these past five years, and we’ve developed over seven thousand hours of content together. And the biggest one, um, that I think we were all surprised at looking at these stats, um, this morning was over the course of these five years, we’ve had 87,000 views across all of this content. Um, so a big shout out to everybody that has been, um, helping us develop more dreaming over these years. Um, we’re continually committed to making this the number one place for marketers in the Salesforce platform to share knowledge, network, and grow, and we’re super glad to have you join us today. Before we get started, I just wanted to say a massive thank you to the Circante marketing team. They are so good at making, uh, putting on this event and making it look super easy. Um, but as everyone here that has ever worked in marketing or marketing tech knows, the hardest thing about our job is getting stuff done while making it look simple outside to everybody else. So thank you to the Circante marketing team for everything that you have done to make this event success. Also, I wanna give a shout out to our sponsors. Um, without them, this event would not be possible. Um, so make sure to visit their content and digital booths this week, um, and show them some love. Um, they are, um, part of why MarDreaming has survived these past five years together. Also, I wanna take some time and give a special shout out to our speakers. Um, the sessions really are the heart of what mar makes more dreaming more dreaming. Time and time again, we hear so much from the community of how insightful, hands on, and real the content is. So thank you all for dedicating both your time and your knowledge to help the community grow, um, through MarDreaming these years. I also wanna take, uh, some time to, most of all, shout out to everybody here. I know it’s not easy to take time away from your day job and life responsibilities. It’s really easy to just say, hey. I’ll watch the recordings later and then never get back to it. Um, so we take your investment and time seriously and just wanna make sure that the next two days are packed with impactful, relevant content that will help you thrive as a marketer on the Salesforce platform. Platform. So thank you all for being here. I’m really excited for our keynote session this morning, um, Now and Next, The Future of Marketing. This session is all about connecting the past to the future and looking where we have been, where we are now, and where we’re going next. As we know, customer expectations have drastically shifted over this past year alone, thanks to technology and how we’re all interacting with brands daily. This session that we have planned has two parts for you. First, we have our CEO and founder of Circante. Andrea Terrell is going to take a look at where we are in marketing today and what’s on the horizon. And then later, we’re gonna be hearing from Lauren Mishke, the director of rev ops at Templafy. She’s going to share Templafy’s own journey and vision, including their experience and plans with some of the newest Salesforce releases. We’ll hear how these tools are shaping Templafy’s approach and customer engagement and growth in new and exciting ways. But first, I have a few housekeeping items for everybody here. So before we get started, um, one of the big things is Genius Bar is back. If this is your first time at more dreaming, you’re not familiar with the phrase Genius Bar, basically, these are one on one consultations with an expert at Circante. So, basically, it’s your opportunity to get some free consulting. If you take a look at the navigation bar, you’ll notice a section there called sponsors and resources. If you go to this tab, you will find a boost specific for the Genius Bar that will have all of the information on how to book an appointment. Um, these are limited appointments, so make sure that you do grab some time before they’re all grabbed up. Um, one of

Speaker 0: the big things this year is we heard everybody loud and clear last year, not wanting to step away from the sessions during the day to grab one

Speaker 1: of these spots. So they are starting earlier and going later throughout the days, and we’ve extended it all week long. So you don’t have to miss out on any of the more dreaming content. Second is, um, we have moved our workshop day to after the sessions. So it’s not too late to grab a workshop day pass. Um, it is happening all day on Thursday. And, basically, this workshop pass will get you access to 13 workshops for you to attend both live and also watch on demand. Um, so huge value there. And lastly and most importantly, louder for the people in the back. Yes. The sessions will be recorded. Um, you can start watching all of this content twenty four hours after more dreaming is officially wrapped. You’ll come right back here to the platform to watch the recordings. Um, there’s one exception to this rule, and that is our product road map happening this afternoon. So make sure to block your calendar off, Um, if you wanna get access to that recording, it will not be recorded, so make sure that you attend live. And, yes, we have swag. It’s the most important piece of a conference. Right? Um, it’s not just apparel. We also have certification vouchers so that you can level up after hearing about all of the awesome new stuff coming to marketing, um, to be able to get your hands on and do some awesome deep dive there. So make sure to participate. So over the next two days, um, we’re gonna be tracking participation, comments, um, q and a sessions. So be here, show up to get, uh, a chance to win, and we’re gonna be announcing those winners at the closing keynote tomorrow, um, evening. Other than that, a lot of our communities our sessions are led by the community, and we also have Salesforce in the house this week. They are committed to, um, giving us some awesome content this week. So later today, like I mentioned, we have the road map session that is coming up, um, so don’t miss that one. We’ve also got a great session talking all about data and AI and CRM in the AI era that you won’t wanna miss, um, tomorrow. And then our closing keynote, we have, um, a few members of the Salesforce community joining us to talk about building relationships across the customer life cycle, and we also have an awesome fireside chat that evening to wrap us up. In addition to Salesforce, we’ve got some awesome sessions, um, throughout the week. Some three highlights that I want to make sure everybody knows about today specifically is we have, um, an awesome session that I’m super excited about, which is real world use cases for data Cloud coming up later. So if you’re a marketer and you’ve been hearing a lot about data Cloud, this is the one to attend to understand how you can take away and and start using that today. Another one here is BDRs or catalyst. So we have, um, Emily Davidson from Sandler joining us to talk about basically connecting sales and marketing and creating synergies there to get the most out of marketing efforts and connecting that with sales. And then later on, we are back at the end of the day wrapping for a panel discussion with a few people of

Speaker 0: the

Speaker 1: community, um, an awesome session called Hot Takes, Marketers, Future, and AI, where we’re gonna be talking a lot about hot takes that the marketing has seen and giving some of our opinions. Um, so make sure to join us for that and check it out. And come back tomorrow. There’s some awesome sessions happening as well beyond what I’ve already talked about. We’re opening up with a demo jam. I’m super excited for this one. We’re getting a different spin on the your typical demo jam this year, and we’re taking you through as though you are a marketer in all the different products that you can use, um, as though you’re going through a campaign that you’re building. So super excited for just seeing all these different products come together. Um, and then later in the afternoon, we have blurring the lines, um, focused on marketing, sales, and customer success. We’ve got three members of the community, uh, there to talk about their experience on collaborating across teams. So with that, enough of logistics and chat with me. I know you’re all curious about the future of data and AI and how that pertains to marketing. Um, so let’s get on with this session, and I’m gonna welcome Andrea Terrell to come up.

Speaker 2: Sorry. It took me a minute there to figure out how to put myself on stage. Sarah, when you said this is the May, I had to literally go back and, like, count. Like, are we sure this is five years? And it’s crazy that it’s been that we’re we’re that far past, um, where we were with the pandemic, so crazy time. Yes. But I’ve talked to you guys about, um, kind of now and next. And if you’ve been following for a while, you know that we strive to keep it real. We get excited about the future. We get excited about what’s coming, um, but we do wanna keep things grounded in what’s actually happening today. What it really takes to get things done when you’re a marketer trying to get campaigns out the door, um, and nailing the art of the possible in the context of the current teams that we have, the current tech that we have, budget that people have available to execute different campaigns. So when I think about now and next, I think about what’s the vision for the future, what’s the work that sits in the gap between where I am and where where I wanna go. So I only have a few minutes of airtime with you guys today, so I boiled this down to five themes for 2025. So we’re gonna walk through five themes that I’m leaning into, things I’m encouraging my team to lean into, and things that I’d invite you to consider consider as well. Um, the first theme is around the long tail of tech, um, and what we do with all of our quote, unquote point solutions. Um, and this is the topic that I personally have done a one eighty on in my career. Every year, we we see a new edition of this slide from Chief Martech, and we bring our hands that the logos are getting smaller and smaller. I don’t know when they’re gonna stop creating this because it’s it’s basically performance art at this point. Like, you can’t they’re like pinpoints. You can’t even see the logos even when this this is blown up to full screen. But a lot has changed since this the original version of this graphic, which came out in 2011. Um, I remember in 2011 trying to convince my CEO that having a Twitter account was like cutting edge innovation. The idea that a personalized ad could follow you around, um, was mind blowing to a lot of colleagues, um, and spray and pray was kind of just the norm for email marketing. But the world has evolved since then, and things just continue to get more and more complex. Cynics might say that this is job security for marketers, um, although the extreme cynics might say that, um, AI and technology is actually coming for our jobs next. Um, but if you look at the number of tech solutions in market over the last decade, it’s been like a steadily insane growth. Uh, but this last year looks like a hockey stick. And I’m I’m not a gambler, but if I was betting, I would I would venture to guess that we’re gonna see more of the same next year. Another wild data point is with those 14,000 MarTech products that are indexed, uh, there are 1,800,000 AI projects on GitHub as of 2024. So throw three zeros on that number, add another 4,000,000 for good measure, and that’s how many AI projects we’re working with on GitHub. It’s absolutely crazy to me. And every year when this graphic comes out, one of the common trains of thought is, how do we consolidate this? Like, is this sustainable? Can this keep expanding? How do we bring things together to to create more of that one platform experience? Uh, we start talking about, like, who’s Salesforce gonna buy next? Who’s gonna buy HubSpot? What tools can we bring together? Um, and while this is fun to sort of brainstorm and think about, like, what solutions could be better together, every time an acquisition gets made, another 10 tools pop up in their place. So in the year 2025, I’m changing my posture on this slightly. Uh, I think we can’t bet on the number of tools ever decreasing. And instead of trying to fight the concept of a fragmented tech stack or the long tail of solutions, looking at how do we unify our team, have a clear vision for what technology we’re adopting, and have really crystal clear business processes so that those handoffs are seamless. Um, so point solutions, I think we should embrace that as no longer a dirty word. In past lives, I didn’t wanna buy tools that only did one thing. Um, and what ended up happening was teams, mostly sales, would just go out and buy things anyway. And so we had a whole shadow IT setup going where things were disconnected. We didn’t really have a clean inventory of what was So shifting gears, like, if there if there’s a tool that adds value to a piece of your process, even if it feels like a small one, I think it’s worth taking a look at. But the caveat is that tool needs to be piping data into CRM or marketing automation. Um, and beyond the technical integration, again, looking at those processes, looking at roles and responsibilities of who’s using what, uh, and having clarity at every step of that. Closely related to this theme, um, it’s time we made tech work harder for us. I would love to see 2025 be the year of buying less technology but expecting more from the investments that we’re making. My impression of the world right now is people are just tired. There’s always one more thing that we’re being asked to do. We had to expand our roles during the pandemic to keep up with demand, keep our jobs, stay productive from home. Uh, but now it feels like the goalposts keep moving and charters keep getting wider and wider. So rather than asking our teams to do one more thing, um, update one more system, take on one more process, uh, 2025 needs to be the year that we recognize that our plates are full, um, and using tech to eliminate noise, reduce steps in the process, um, and fill in that one more thing that we always wanna get to. A really productive exercise is doing a bit of a reality check on where teams are actually spending time. You You can do this with sales. You can do this with marketing. You can do this with really, really any team. But mapping out, like, what tasks are taking taking up time and where do we wanna be spending time and headspace in the perfect world? With this on paper, we can start thinking about what it would take to make a change. So for example, the first line item there, um, customer meeting preparation. Like, if that’s taking up 20% of a seller’s time today, so roughly eight hours a week, and we wanna half that, what what would it what would it take to cut that time in half? Could we ledge leverage agent force to do background research on a prospect and pipe that into Salesforce? Could we use a tool like Binder or DAM to generate content and build personalized materials faster? Those are the things I think we need to be thinking about in this coming year. And once you’ve sort of done an inventory on your time, doing an inventory of your tech. Um, a phenomena that we’ve seen just take take off in the last eighteen to thirty six months is what I call, like, platform stepping on each other’s toes. So things that used to be point solutions, now positioning as a suite of services, and getting into categories where it’s not really clear, like, who competes with what and what parts, like, truly add value to the process. For example, ZoomInfo and Sixense, if you asked me in 2020 if those were competitors, I would have said absolutely not. Totally different categories, totally different products. They don’t do the same thing. Um, but here in 2024, they both have components that handle data enrichment. They handle intent data. Um, so there’s starting to be a lot of overlap. So doing an inventory, seeing where you can clean clean house on that going into 2025. The next theme is our buyer experience. Um, it is still so freaking hard to buy for most businesses. Um, a lot of b to c businesses, but especially in b to b, where we’re seeing people struggle to be internal silos and just do what makes sense for the customer. Um, I had a recent brand interaction that was so good that I wrote it down. Um, I don’t know if any of you guys are are fans of the sunglasses brand Goodr, but recently discovered them and I have fallen in love. Um, the Sarkati team did an all hands retreat in Miami, um, and I realized I didn’t have sunglasses. So as the mom of a one year old and a three year old, I I I can’t remember the last time I went shopping in a brick and mortar store. So after dinner, I pulled up my phone, typed in literally typed in sunglasses because I I don’t know what brands are cool right now, um, and started scrolling while my kids were distracted. And I found the best pair of sunglasses. Like, they were almost the exact shade of Cercon de green. They looked great. But my kids start screaming, so I put down the phone, uh, completely forget about it. The next day, I’m getting ads on Instagram promoting these sunglasses that I saw, promoting a few other things that looked really great. Great. One click buy with Apple Pay. They arrived two days later. Gorgeous packaging, super branded, just amazing, amazing look. Um, I start feeling guilty that I didn’t get some for my husband because he was joining us on this trip. Lo and behold, like, literally two hours later, I get a 20% discount code, um, to buy the second pair of sunglasses. And the next thing I know, I’m getting an invitation to Goodr’s loyalty program, to their referral network, and I’m totally sucked into the vortex of playing their points game, sharing referral links, um, sharing with other friends and family members who also can’t keep track of their sunglasses. And this is a seamless experience. Like, they made it so easy for me to hand them my money and get what I wanted, um, and it was it was great. I don’t know what tech they’re using. Their Circante is not affiliated with Goodr in any way, but I am now their greatest fan because of the level of thought and care that was put into creating a really great brand experience. But the reality is most of us are not Goodr. Right? Like, I would kill for Sercante’s brand experience to be even half as good as the experience that we had that I had shopping at Goodr. And while Goodr might be the next level standard, we all need to kinda take a step back and self assess what the experience for our customers is. So if you haven’t, like, try to find information on your own website. Try to contact sales. Like, do a bit of a secret shopper exercise, and sometimes that can be a really eye opening experience. The friction points in the buying process are the perfect segue into the next theme, which is figuring out how to align your people, processes, and tech around the theme of growth. So we know that customers are getting information and are interacting with our brand in many different ways. Um, some of it’s online. Some of it’s talking to a rep. Some of it’s presale. Some of it’s post sale. And the thing that trips us up in the delivery of the promise of a seamless experience is that these touch points span sales, marketing, customer service, sometimes IT, sometimes logistics. Um, but a customer doesn’t really care if they’re at a sales experience or marketing experience or customer service experience. All they know is that they’re having an experience, and the heavy lifting that we have to do internally is how do we make things feel seamless to the customer even if we know that they’re not even close to seamless backstage. This gets even harder in b two b, um, because we’re a big group of people internally who are trying to sell and market to a big group of people externally. Um, we know that b two b decisions get made by committee or consensus with sometimes as many as 10 people contributing to the decision making process. And most of the time, our sales team isn’t even aware of all 10 people that are part of that buying group. So thinking through, like, how do we make that experience seamless and personalized for each of them? And this is this falls into the easier said than done camp, but we we really don’t have a hope of creating a seamless external experience until we start breaking down some silos internally. We need marketing, sales, and customer success to operate as one team with one process that’s thought through end to end and one tech stack that is integrated across those those three teams. Um, the last theme, uh, before we get into our, um, interview portion, um, is, of course, about AI. We we’d be remiss not to include it. You’re gonna be hearing a lot of stuff about AI this week. You’re gonna see demos of AgentForce, which is pretty freaking cool if you haven’t looked at that yet. Um, you’re gonna see a lot of AI clip art, which you can see on the slide here. Um, it’s not that cool. I I have pretty mixed results of it, but it’s usually pretty amusing. Um, and leaning into AI and getting ahead of the curve on that is is definitely one of our themes for 2025. I will say that the rhetoric surrounding AI, to me, seems overhyped and a little overdramatic. Um, I’ve read so many articles that are predicting, like, sweeping predictions of the death of entire categories, like serum dying, the death of consulting. There’s occasionally some positive, like, save the world stuff, but mostly, it’s a lot of, like, death in the end of a category, um, that I’m hearing about in the in the rhetoric around AI. And while I do expect to see some disruption from AI in 2025, my hypothesis is that it’s gonna be a lot sneakier than what those articles are predicting. I think we’re gonna start feeling pressure around pace and efficiency. Um, and if you’re leaning into AI, you’re gonna see small wins, like small, tiny efficiency gains over time. And as those small things compound, that’s gonna be your edge. You’re gonna be able to get things done faster. You’re gonna be able to increase quality. Um, that’s gonna be kind of your secret sauce behind the scenes. Um, and if you’re not embracing AI today, honestly, you’re probably just fine today. Like, business as usual, things carrying on as normal. But in the next twelve months, I think you’re gonna start seeing feeling some of the things on the slide on the slide that you see on the slide here, Like, seeing team members suddenly work faster than you, seeing competitors suddenly being able to price their services a lot cheaper than what you could possibly agree to. Um, and so just kind of paper cuts of, um, feeling the effect of not not taking advantage of some of those efficiency gains. So there may come a point, like, a tipping point in some of our organizations where somebody comes and makes us use AI. But my invitation to you is, like, don’t wait for that forcing event. Like, figure out how to how to disrupt your own workflow. Like, don’t sit on the sidelines. Like, figure out how you can challenge yourself to find new ways to do things better. Um, it’s a race with yourself, but it can be a fun journey, um, but that’s that’s kind of where my head is at on AI in general. So next I’m excited to introduce our guest speaker Lauren Michke from Templafy. And Templafy is a company that’s riding the wave from now to next and is doing some really interesting things, uh, with their growth ops initiatives. Um, if you’re not familiar with the Templafy brand, um, Templafy is transforming how organizations manage document creation and maintain brand consistency. Uh, so Templafy integrates with tools like Office, Google Workspace, um, even using AI tools to streamline the process of document generation um, and ensure branded compliance across every document that gets created. Um, and Templafy has been on a pretty incredible journey with with its tech. Um, they’ve migrated from, uh, to Salesforce account engagement to better align sales, marketing, and finance data, um, and undertook a major company wide rebrand, launched a newsletter, completely restructured reporting, uh, to include multi touch attribution. Lauren, have also been working on campaign launches, lead generation, nurturing, data compliance. Um, but, Lauren, you’ve you’ve had a busy year, it sounds like.

Speaker 3: Very busy, but excited to be here. Maybe a little tired.

Speaker 2: From what I understand, you’re the director of RevOps at Templafy. I’d love to dig into how you manage some of these initiatives and just your vision for what’s next.

Speaker 3: Absolutely. I’m excited to do that today.

Speaker 2: Tell me a little bit more about the migration to account engagement, the rebrands. What does that journey look like for you?

Speaker 3: Absolutely. So so much of what we were doing, I’ve been at Templafy just over a year now, um, was the first centralized owner of commercial systems. Getting marketing under that umbrella was a major priority for me. It was necessary to be able to sit and look at that tech stack and go, this is a really bloated stack. To your point earlier, lots of duplicative tools, lots of things that were bought for one very singular purpose, and everything was really, really disjointed. So so much of that was to evaluate what we needed, what we didn’t need, and do exactly what we’ve been talking about, which is what are the people, processes, and tech that we’re gonna go to market with. Um, our focus was truly on unifying that tech stacks, simplifying the workflows, and focusing on data. We can’t make decisions without data. And we talk about this all the time in what we do, but actually seeing our teams use it and being practical about our expectations around data coming out of process was a core focus. The other part of this whole initiative was to have a really strong partner. We got really lucky to be introduced to to Circante early on when we were evaluating marketing tools, um, and that has made the biggest difference of all. Something as simple as following up within five minutes of a call with action items and making sure the team gets those things done made our ability to deliver and support this rebrand completely possible.

Speaker 2: Love to hear that. And, Lauren, from what I understand, your space is moving at a pretty quick pace right now. Like, there’s a lot of competitive pressure. Um, and in that fast paced environment, um, what what my team has shared is the alignment between account engagement and Salesforce is opening up new opportunities to refine your sales and marketing strategy. So how do you see Salesforce and your tech strategy fitting into the overall business need to meet and rise to meet the industry changes that are taking place. Can you tell me more about how you plan to position Templafy, not just to keep up, but lead the way, um, with some of this tech?

Speaker 3: Absolutely. It goes back a little bit to some of those data driven insights, of course. But at the same time, it’s about taking that operational motion, aligning it with that data, and then executing in the tech. So so much of what it is to be a scaling startup is to try to constantly reposition yourself to your question. Um, you know, we could go for every industry. You could go for every company size, or you can try to get uncomfortably narrow as we call it internally. We don’t ever wanna close the door on a customer, but at the same time, we wanna find the customers that benefit the most from our product and our brand and double click on that all day. Um, so what we’ve tried to do is, again, simplify everything that we do day to day, sit and think about processes that are just really lean. What does it mean to bring a lead in, qualify that lead, and turn it into a real opportunity? Our go to market approach from a rev ops standpoint, less on the systems, is around bringing our teams together to have that dialogue constantly. We meet every two weeks. We have a pipeline council where we talk about the influx of those leads. What is happening in that attribution model? What does that conversion look like? What stop gaps do we need to put in place? Or even enablement does our team need to convert those leads more readily? Um, in addition to that, what go to market place are working? What’s resonating, and where are we seeing the ability to really expand an account? We could spend all day going after some of these really big consultancies that have a multitude of small entities within them to sell into, or we can start looking at unique accounts to sell into that give us a better story or a unique change in our product. And those are all very viable approaches. But if we’re not talking about it, using the data, and shifting our approach, we’re gonna be lost in the woods. So very much about being able to talk about this as a team and again, use that data and change our systems alongside that strategy.

Speaker 2: I love that focus on simplifying and breaking things down so that all of your teams are on the same page about how things work. When you think about your team and the skills that are needed for this environment, um, what skills and resources and muscles do you find most important for the people in your team to develop?

Speaker 3: This is one of my favorite questions. Um, I love people development. I found so much in my own background just having been a consultant and getting thrown into very random environments, having to solve unique problems, and figuring out that protocol. Um, so what I look for and what we’re building up on the team is data analytics, automation, and strategic program management. Um, it goes beyond just being a coder or being able to write flows or understanding the admin side of Salesforce. Is what problem am I being challenged with? How do I maintain continuity with my stakeholders and tell that story, not only for the stakeholder that I’m representing, but to everyone else around me so that the team comes along with whatever solution it is I’m building? We’re focused on optimizing account engagement in Salesforce to, again, be data driven, but we want it to be agile. So, you know, knowing what your team’s processes are at their core and being able to make small tweaks and changes that really complement that or test a theory is something that we double down on right now. And of course, partners are another part of this. Um, you know, our partners have skills that relate to other clients or relate to experience that they’ve had in other industries. Those are also applicable, but we don’t always have those at the table. I think partners at the table are always critical as well.

Speaker 2: Awesome. I have a biased perspective as a partner, but I I think I agree more.

Speaker 1: As you should.

Speaker 2: Um, so when you think about tech like, advancements in tech, AI, like, things that are coming out in the future, data cloud, Agentforce, kind of, like, that forward looking, um, uh, toolset, like, what what are you most excited about bringing into your strategy in 2025?

Speaker 3: Great question. AI is such a fun one, and we’ve just recently launched Copilot in our tool too. But so much of this is around how you use AI and how you iterate on AI. I think AI makes us smarter, makes us more intelligent in the decisions we make. So much of this is going to drive marketers to become data scientists. It’s easy to ask AI to generate an insight, but it’s the marketer’s job to ask the right questions. Um, I also think things like vanity metrics, um, and chatbots can benefit a lot from AI. We’re using Qualified as our chatbot right now too. And again, an easy way to offset a really lean inbound team and use AI to help that early qualification process. There are so many small administrative tasks that AI can pick up so that we’re transitioning something to someone at a point in time that they can engage in a really strong, deep qualification conversation and move the needle not only for their career, but for that customer’s experience as well.

Speaker 2: Yeah. We are big qualified fans over here too. I think thinking also about creating a cohesive experience for customers, like, interacting with with your customer in the way that they wanna be connected with at the moment that they need information is so critical, um, and Qualified is is such a great tool for that. Um, when you think about I shared my themes for 2025. When you think about your initiatives or themes going into next year, is there anything that stands out that you’re really excited about or you’re really leaning into?

Speaker 3: So many things. Um, one, having less tools in our tech stack. We’ve narrowed that down to about half the tools. It couldn’t have resonated with your opening message more. Um, so less to manage, less to worry about, more focus on the solutions. Um, I think it’s just advancing that data driven go to market strategy too and really building on the sales and marketing partnership. Both of those things require a lot of attention to detail and time with our teams from the RevOps side, but there’s so much value in being able to, again, kind of shepherd the evolution of what we’re trying to do, ensuring that metrics are being used in decision making, ensuring that it’s not just about lead routing, but it’s about quality lead routing. Um, so I think, again, enhancing that go to market strategy, um, targeting segmentation, customer engagement to increase pipeline velocity, and actually measuring those things along the way. And then, again, that partnership with sales and marketing. Sales and marketing is always a really trickly connection. Sometimes they get along really well. Most of the time, they’re a bit adversarial. Um, but for us, we started by saying, let’s wipe the this slate clean. Let’s align on what we want our teams to do and why we have value in it. It’s really sitting here and going, time to touch matters to me, and I wanna track it. So let’s track it and talk about if it’s working for us. And I think continuing to build that out is is gonna be where we see some great success. Um, but, again, that scalable customer centric tech stack is at the core of it, and that was what so much of our work was this year was to be able to do that deeper work, was to have a clean tech stack to begin with.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And it’s so interesting because that that, like, people process technology three legged stool, like, you can you can never, like, let one of those go or the whole thing falls apart. Um, as in marketing ops and rev ops, like, a lot of times we’re really focused on the tech. But a lot of what you just described is, like, hard conversations with leaders coming together and saying, this isn’t working or saying, like, this is something we don’t understand. Like, we need to know what’s happening in our business in this particular area. Um, and it sounds like you guys are really digging into all aspects of that to lay the foundation for growth that you that you need.

Speaker 3: And we’re really trying to be the challenger there too. Um, you know, we got lucky to be able to come in at a time where Templafy needed that. We’ve been around for over eight years. We’ve been organically successful. Again, when you hit that scalability point, you’re sitting here going, okay, what are my goals? If I’m trying to double my revenue, how am I going to do that? You want to do that in a really prescriptive way, and it’s very easy to have a million ideas at the table. It’s another to sit and say, we’re going to tackle this in a smart way so we’re not wasting our time and we’re not exhausting our very lean team. That’s been a blessing to be able to have leaders that are willing to do that and break those things apart, get into a meeting for thirty minutes, and actually talk about lead routing. I know our SVP of sales and our VP of marketing don’t want to do that all the time, but we do it once, and then we’re accountable to documenting that and making sure that we iterate on it. And that’s where there’s some great accountability when you can challenge breaking up those silos.

Speaker 2: I love that. Lauren, thank you for joining us today. It’s been really great to watch your growth from my vantage point and really appreciate you sharing your insights with us on the call today.

Speaker 3: Yes. Thank you. We can’t do it without Serpente, so appreciate it.

Speaker 2: I’ll pass the mic back to Sarah for, um, some closing comments and, um, some final help.

Speaker 1: Yes. Thank you both for joining us. Super insightful. Um, I think we’re all going through the same thing as we try to experience what is AI, how does that apply to marketing, um, and how are we gonna continuously shift with with technology. Um, before we go, again, I just wanna continue plugging our Genius Bar. We have, again, so much awesome resources available to everybody here to get their questions answered. Again, this is free one to one support throughout the whole week. Again, if you’re looking to schedule a Genius Bar session, you can navigate to the sponsors and resources at the top of the navigation bar. Find the Genius Bar booth there, and you’ll have all the information available for you on how to schedule that appointment. Um, in addition to that, I just wanted to also remind everybody again one last time that workshop day is happening on Thursday. You get access to 13 different workshops. You can both watch them live, and you can also watch them on demand. So we’ve got them categorized across all different aspects depending on what you’re looking to learn more about from Salesforce core work, from service cloud, um, sales cloud. We’ve also got some top workshops for account engagement, engagement, data cloud, some of the new growth addition, and also analytics. So a huge amount of opportunity, um, on that workshop day coming up. So make sure to grab your pass if you haven’t already. And then before we leave, again, I just wanted to give one last shout out to all of our incredible sponsors. Um, thank you all for, uh, participating and making dream or more dreaming what it is today, again, you can also visit, um, their boost. There’s got a lot of awesome resources available to you in the Sponsors and Resource section of the event. So we’ve got a few minutes before the next session ends. Go grab some more coffee. We’ve got got awesome breakouts happening, and we will see you guys back on the main stage in a few hours. Thank you, guys.