The State of Pipeline Generation - Spring '24

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Welcome everybody welcome to spring 24 pipeline summit. My name is Craig Swen

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stra. I'm the founder and CEO of Qualified and today

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We have a very special guest and somebody I've known for more than 15 years

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I've worked with this person when they were running platform marketing at Sales

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force

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You then left to become the CMO of Amazon web services

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Followed up by becoming the CMO of Oracle and now you're at the helm or the CMO

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of

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Salesforce and you just join qualified sport of directors Ariel

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Welcome to pipeline summit. Thank you Craig happy to be here

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So it's really interesting when you took the role as CMO of Salesforce last

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year

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You were telling me that in your first one-on-one with your CEO

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He said Ariel your your top two priorities are positioning the company and

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pipeline

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We need 3x coverage and we don't have it and the funny thing is

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Pipeline in our targets is like the great equalizer because when times are

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tough

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Our targets don't change but we have fewer resources and it's harder out there

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and when times are great and you're kicking

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But like you guys are you're now rewarded with more AEs and higher pipeline

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targets

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So now that we're fully into

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2024 is pipeline still your top priority or how do you think about that? Yeah,

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it's absolutely still my top priority

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I mean what I find is when companies doing really well

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You sort of lose the muscle of managing pipeline generation because it just

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sort of comes in and then you have to rediscover it again

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So we always go through the my career. I've always sort of gone through that

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where the company loses focus on it

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But right now it's more important than ever

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I taste a little more focus now as I've been here for about seven eight months

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and

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Really going after the programs that are supposed to be generating pipeline

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But aren't enough in the areas of the world where we may be under invested need

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to put a little more focusing to give the sales people

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They need well you've got a huge scope relative to most CMOs. You're a multi-

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product company

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You're a global organization and I can't imagine the complexity if you could

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kind of distill it down for our audience here today

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What are the kind of like the top three initiatives big initiatives big

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programs that you think are really working to drive pipe right now?

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Okay

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Well, so I'd say first of all like the context of sales forces a lot of the

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pipeline

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We're trying to generate is to inspire our existing customer base to use more

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of our product line

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And so that involves getting in front of the right people with an educational

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message on why this should care about our products

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He's used them before what the benefits are how to get started. So a lot of

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these activities the work or around

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Doing that and it efficient effective and scalable manner

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So doing inviting people to come to our executive briefing center

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And all that may sound like kind of old-school thing to do

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But it's become even easier now because you can get you know if you think about

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before the pandemic

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You couldn't get senior executives big companies to go do zoom meetings. Yep

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now. It's normal. So we do in person do them

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Online those are great and then sort of the opposite of that would be to do a

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count-based marketing programs where we go around a certain topic

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Like let's say our data cloud product. We're gonna go do a

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packaged up pitch of exactly what we know works with a workshop

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We can go and say hey bring all of your people who are interested in this area

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and

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We'll come in and we'll do a quarter half day session and then measure it

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programmatically

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And so it's really about you know

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We'll bring the people to us or we'll go to them or do the same thing digitally

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as well. Okay, so executive briefings

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Those have always worked by the way. How you guys are doing them virtually you

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're putting together these account-based marketing programs

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I think that's really good advice

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Those are things that I think we would all be able to do ourselves most of them

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the folks in the audience and CMOs

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Would think yeah, I could actually do that sales forces like operating at a

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whole different level

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And so for example for Formula one you guys sponsor Formula one the race in

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November

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You had a big sales force brand display on the sphere in Las Vegas and then of

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course you've got commercials on TV with Matthew

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McConaughey talking about trust and AI as

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Part of a team that executes those huge brand plays

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How do you think about investments in those programs as they relate to pipeline

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generation?

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Okay, well, I'll start by telling you what I don't believe in I think people

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try and

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people often try and and use

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math

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for things that they can't actually measure the level granularity they want and

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they delude themselves into thinking they're data-driven and

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Serve a long wind-up to say that I'm not a fan of the sort of full funnel

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marketing planning of going from brand all the way down to demand and

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performance

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And have sort of a math chain of formulas that tell you exactly what to spend

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and optimize it may work for a consumer products company

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Or something that's directed, you know direct a buy online

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But for a B2B business what I found is that you got to manage these things

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separately and

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For brand what I what I tend to use is to pick a percentage of the marketing

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budget that you feel comfortable

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That you can then relate to how much reach you're gonna get

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So if you want to hit certain markets for a certain number of times

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I usually get the team to normalize on like how much does it cost per city per

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campaign?

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to do a normal I said a tactics and spend that amount I'm comfortable and then

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measure on efficiency

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How efficient are we getting to all this people and then on the demand side?

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I try and just run that with as much money as make sense to put it in so I'm a

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big fan of taking

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performance marketing out of the

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discretionary planning marketing budget and working with finance on

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Gate driven things like we're gonna buy at X percent of customer lifetime value

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You know in sort of segment it so you're putting just the you know as much

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money as make sense

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But no more than that and

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Operating with science on those things. Okay, it's really interesting, you know

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Salesforce over the years has experimented in so many ways. Obviously you kind

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of just alluded to a couple of those

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Those campaigns, but you're back in the seat at Salesforce and you spend 10

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years at other companies

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So you have actually I think a really unique luxury of seeing how a high-

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performance marketing organization was operating

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Maybe in the earlier days and now you see it again and my question is how has

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that changed over time?

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Are there certain things that are like tried and true that are just they were

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they were working 10 years ago?

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They're still working today and are there things that are incredibly different

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given

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Either the market or the timing or the scale of your organization

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Yeah, I mean there there's it's just surprising how much is the same?

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I mean it kind of goes back

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I like to sort of just dumb things down to human behaviors

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You're trying to influence you're trying to get people who are busy to pay

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attention to something and understand why they might need it enough

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so they can try it out

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and

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Getting people to you know if you go back 15 years ago when when we were at

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Salesforce together

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It's like someone goes to Google they need to be able to find their way to your

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website

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You need to educate them in a in a quick way and then find a way to get them

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You know to your salespeople or to self-service wisdom to get to get them to

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sign up that is not changed some of the tools have changed

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Obviously with what you guys are doing making a lot easier, but

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The general mechanics of what you're trying to optimize I found have changed

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less than what I would have

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Predicted they would at the time interesting well

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Let's let's dive into that a little bit more. Let's talk about events

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Because obviously live events are back, but virtual events

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I think are here to stay in Salesforce has always been at the forefront of

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events starting with a huge customer conference dreamforce a

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World City tour developer events specific events for you know CIOs or or

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specific job functions

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Are you guys are you guys thinking about events differently? It used to be

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everything in person

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And then it was everything was streamed online, but how are you thinking about?

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Yeah, the mix of events

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I think the mix is something we're thinking about more like I think a lot of

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companies did this where they went all on

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Virtual events and it was amazing that you were able to get all these people

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and then when things opened up

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It's like well, maybe we don't need the virtual events and more and we'll do

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We'll go big on in person

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We're trying to get the right mix because obviously the cost per attendee cost

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I like to look at one of these I like to do that I recommend is to develop a

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apples-to-apples metric between

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virtual and physical events if you think about

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cost per

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Minute of engagement and you can kind you got to sweat, you know take a rough

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swag of it for the in-person events

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But you can get pretty close especially the RFID badges, but

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Then you can look at the ROI of the different programs in an apples-to-apples

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way and it's just about finding the right mix

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So I think both are super important. Yeah, there's no doubt you can you can

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really

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Transform somebody and help them see the world in a way with a physical event

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But just like here we are at pipeline summit

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You can reach an order of magnitude more people who can just tune in online

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from their death do it multiple times

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So like a lot of like one of the problems with the big physical event is it

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kind of assumes that

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That person is in that city and free on that day, right?

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Especially if you're kind of going around the world. So it's almost better to

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be able to do the same kind of programming

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Multiple times throughout the year to the same time zone

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Well, let's pivot a little bit and talk about

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Something that is incredibly important to everyone this year and of course that

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is AI

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Last year the AI tsunami really hit us with chat GPT you guys have been

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building Einstein for almost 10 years actually

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Which is pretty crazy, but now everyone's mindset has shifted all of a sudden.

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It's real, right?

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I can get to my office in the morning in San Francisco in a self-driving car

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That's crazy and if AI can drive me to work. I show up every day going Wow

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What can AI do for my business? So this is a question. I've really been pond

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ering and I want to throw it over to you

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We should really be asking ourselves as CMOs

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What does generating pipeline look like in a world where everything's automated

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and AI is doing the work?

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That's really like the dream. What does that world look like and I think we're

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all here today going like I don't know

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What does it look like so give us your perspective?

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Yeah, I mean I think those are the long-term the short-term and the fullness of

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time

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I mean we should expect to have digital agents as salespeople as BDRs as LDRs

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because you look at what?

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This generative AI is is it's it's language-based and that's what a lot of

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selling is

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It's talking to someone getting them interested answering their questions in

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the next few years though

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It's incredibly exciting what AI can do to make your existing salespeople

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Your existing all the R's more effective

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So a lot of the work that we're doing is is based on the idea of having a

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Co-pilot that augments the capabilities of your salespeople so they could be

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more productive so they can answer questions more intelligently

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imagine plugging in your

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2000 product manuals into

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Your AI system so the questions can get fed to your LDRs to make the customer

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have a better experience

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It'd be more likely to be convinced having the salespeople's capabilities

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scored

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By the AI as a product marketer. You always say well does this message work or

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that message work?

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Or are the salespeople actually delivering my message our messaging with you

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know, we have our Einstein

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Conversation insights some people use gone, but it's more and more

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conversations have been recorded

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But with generative AI you can actually just go ask an LLM

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When customers give this objection?

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What are the top five ways our salespeople are handing them? Are those the ones

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you want?

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Are they working correlating them to close rates?

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So there's just so much we can do now without having to think about can the AI

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do it by itself?

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It's sort of almost irrelevant that probably will come in the future, but it's

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sort of not really relevant for a day-to-day job right now

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Yeah marketers are going to be on this journey of

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You know, we've been talking about in our industry. That's certainly in the

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media the last couple weeks the AI worker

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I'm I might have a an AI developer

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You know ride shotgun with me if I cook if I code or I might have an AI lawyer

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Ride shotgun with me if I'm in the legal profession, but in our world

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It's like I might have an AI SDR or you guys call them LDRs, right an AI SDR

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ride shotgun with me while I'm answering questions and qualifying leads

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I might have an 80 AI BDR helping me

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Source contacts and personalized messages and prospect for me

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I might have an AI rev ops person actually doing analysis of my campaign

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attribution

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And so this is the year do you see it like actually?

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In practice these kind of copilot. Did you say it? Do you see it actually? Yeah

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practice is every CML this year gonna buy?

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Technology that's going to deliver this copilot function. I think they should

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let me it sales force

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We think it's incredibly complimentary to the existing use of our systems

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So if you think about like being able to respond to the customer automatically

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after you talked them on the phone

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Be able to send a follow-up email

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Bay in order for it to be good. It needs to listen to the conversation

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And it needs to be grounded in the customer's data if you want to let's say

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Recommend an event or recommend three things for them to read you understand

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what they've bought before what they've done before

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where they've been on your website and

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You need to be able to ground that in your customer data and customers already

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trust us with that data

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So kind of puts us in it in a good position

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So we're seeing a lot of success with our copilot product at making sales

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people like making their jobs easier

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And then at the same time increasing the probability that they're gonna have

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effective communications

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And I think you know to our audience. I think the AI

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Is gonna be there this year to ride shotgun with everybody in your

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Organization to help them be better at their profession whether it's an SDR or

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a BDR or a content marketing manager

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Or an advertising manager or rev ops person would have you it's gonna be a

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really exciting

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year so let's talk a little bit about relationships because the most important

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relationship for a CMO is is usually the relationship they have with their

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CRO and in your organization as

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I mentioned before you've got tons of products. You've got tons of

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Geos you've got competing priorities. How do you stay aligned with your CRO?

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Yeah, I mean, you know, it's funny

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I'm lucky to have the two things going that either one of them on their own. I

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think would would have

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Been effective. I'd say first of all the trend we see in a lot of companies is

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we have a COO that is managing both sales and

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marketing and so

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The whole sales infrastructure and the whole marketing infrastructure. They

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kind of are forced organizationally to

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To figure out how to work together. It's very easy to say like, oh, you know,

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the org structures matter

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Well, I'll give along but org structures really do matter

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So that helps but also I think it just so happens that myself and Miguel will

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run sales kind of have a similar personality of

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Really being very direct and focusing on what's not working and trying to fix

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it and optimizing not kind of getting

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emotional about

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Emotionally attached to things that aren't working or working just fixing

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problems

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So having that alignment of how you work also tends to be

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important

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But it is it is critical because I see it doesn't matter what how smart your

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programs are if you're not aligned with the sales leader

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You know, it's just not gonna work. You mentioned Miguel. He's your CRO

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How often do you and Miguel connect whether it's like a zoom call or whether it

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's just like on slack?

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How often you guys communicating typically? I mean

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Eight ten times a week all the time time all this I even had an organization

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like yours

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Oh, yeah, you have had a long career as a marketer and you've seen it all you

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've you've executed programs and

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so many different roles within marketing and

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You see the future and I think sales force is great because it's one of those

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companies that always has a perspective on the future

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What advice do you have?

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For CMOs this year it could be strategic or it could be tactical. I mean my

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advice is really focused

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I think we're all in the world where we're being asked to do ten times as many

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things as we have enough

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Resources to do and we have that list in our head of the things we wish we

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could do and so and any

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Success in eliminating the things that don't really matter is a huge victory

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Thanks so much ariel ladies and gentlemen, please think ariel come in for being

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with us today at pipeline summit ariel. Thank you so much