Episode 55

Better Customer Engagement Starts with Better Messaging

In this episode, Des Cahill, CMO at Tipalti, discusses the importance of foundational experiences and adapting to different company environments, crafting a solid messaging framework, and the evolving role of content marketing in the age of generative AI.

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Guest Speaker: Des Cahill

Des has served as CMO at multiple startups, such as Ensighten, Kerio, Samepage and BridgeSpan, while also having successful experiences at companies like Apple and HP. Most recently, he drove global product marketing strategy for Oracle's $1B+ ACX (Advertising & Customer Experience) as Group Vice President at Oracle. 

Episode Summary

This episode features an interview with Des Cahill, Chief Marketing Officer at Tipalti. Des has served as CMO at multiple startups, such as Ensighten, Samepage and BridgeSpan, while also having successful experiences at companies like Apple and HP. Most recently, he drove global product marketing strategy for Oracle's Advertising & Customer Experience as Group Vice President.

In this episode, Kailey and Des discuss the importance of foundational experiences and adapting to different company environments, crafting a solid messaging framework, and the evolving role of content marketing in the age of generative AI.

Key Takeaways

  • A well-defined messaging framework is foundational, informing content across various channels such as websites, marketing collateral, sales pitches, and internal communications. 

  • Organizations can effectively tailor their communications and improve customer engagement through a phased approach to personalized marketing. Starting with a strong foundational messaging framework and then expanding it to specific personas and behaviors.

  • Training AI tools like Grammarly to maintain brand tone and partnering with specialized AI vendors to leverage data in impactful ways can improve efficiency and ensure company communications remain aligned with brand messaging.

Speaker Quotes

“A lot of people think customer experience is about delighting the customer and I disagree. I think most of us, in our day-to-day lives, what we're trying to achieve is we're trying to get the information we want and we're trying to move on to the next thing. If you're marketing correctly, you've captured that signal, you've given them a message and you can always follow up with a nurture.” – Des Cahill

Episode Timestamps

‍*(02:35) - Des’s career journey

*(06:21) - Trends impacting customer experience

*(12:02) - Personalization strategies

*(22:24) - How Tipalti is building practical AI strategies

‍*(35:04) - Des’s recommendations for upleveling customer experience strategies

Connect with Des on LinkedIn

Connect with Kailey on LinkedIn

 

Read the Transcript

 

Des Cahill: A lot of people think customer experience is about delighting the customer and I disagree. I think most of us in our day-to-day lives, what we're trying to achieve is we're trying to get the information we want and we're trying to move on to the next thing. And if you're marketing correctly, you've captured that signal, you've given them a message and you can always follow up with a nurture.

 

Kailey Raymond: Hello, and welcome to Good Data, Better Marketing. I'm your host Kailey Raymond. Today, we're discussing why building a strong messaging framework is the gift that keeps on giving. Serving as a guide for all of your communications efforts a messaging framework ensures that you're driving unified and consistent voice for your brand. That every piece of content from advertisements to sales pitches, stays on message to your target audience. This foundational asset is likely one of the first things you'll wanna audit as a leader because it has the power to drive cohesion and simplify alignment across different teams, enhancing collaboration and reducing the risk of miscommunication. When done right, it also enables marketers and GTM to tailor their narratives to different personas, driving better engagement and conversion rates. Tipalti's Des Cahill and I discuss the importance of adapting to different companies' environments, crafting a solid messaging framework and the evolving role of content marketing in the age of AI.

 

[music]

 

Kailey Raymond: Today, I'm joined by Des Cahill, CMO of Tipalti. Des has served as CMO at multiple startups such as in Ensighten, Samepage and BridgeSpan, while also having successful experiences at companies like Apple and HP. Most recently, he drove global product marketing strategy for Oracle's advertising and customer experience as group vice president. Des, welcome to the show.

 

Des Cahill: Thanks, Kailey. Great to be here.

 

Kailey Raymond: Des, you have a career that spans across some just absolutely iconic enterprise companies as well as these smaller SaaS kind of startups. Tell me about your career journey.

 

Des Cahill: Well, let's see, I had an early career in financial consulting coming out of school and I was running 401k plans for like big companies and I was doing that in New York. And then I was recruited by a rival firm. And so they had an opening in their San Francisco office and I said yes, like before I even asked like what the salary is or the title, I'm just like, yes, I wanna move to the west coast. And it so happened that my clients were Apple, HP and another tech company called Tandem. And so through that move to the west coast in and that job, I started getting exposed to Silicon Valley really at the very early computer replication era. And long story short, I ended up joining Apple to rebuild and run their 401k plan. And then that led to like an almost nine year career at Apple early in my career really learning my basic sort of marketing DNA and customer experience DNA in a culture that was all about marketing and customer experience.

 

Des Cahill: So I think that that foundational experience has serve me really well after nine years or eight and a half so years there with a variety of roles. I was in HR, I was in finance, I was in marketing, I was in business development. I ran apple.com in the early days.

 

Kailey Raymond: Unbelievable.

 

Des Cahill: Yeah, yeah, like we did crazy stuff like webcast The Cranberries from Shoreline or something. And that was in the days of like 4,800 baud modems, we could support 100 simultaneous streams, it was like incredible. Everything always blew up with like too many people. But we were on the cutting edge, which was fun. And then that led into a series of startups as a CMO or CEO and everything. I learned so much at Apple, but then as you join your first couple of startups, you have to unlearn everything you learned in a big company and move faster and be willing to break things and be willing to be imperfect.

 

Des Cahill: And then I kind of went back to a big company, had a long run at Oracle running marketing for like a multi-billion dollar cloud division, the customer experience division. And now I'm at Tipalti and I've been here 15 months and Tipalti is a high growth SaaS B2B FinTech and we help the office of finance or help the CFO make better payments, buy goods through our procurement solution, handle employee expenses, make payments at scale like for customers like Roblox or Twitch, customers like that. So we have about 4,000 customers. We're growing about 40% year over year and I'm privileged to be part of the team and leading a kickass marketing organization.

 

Kailey Raymond: Unbelievable journey. That is so cool. You have such interesting roots and I'm sure you take all of these experiences and then kind of blend and mash them together into what you're doing today from the creativity and the innovation of Apple to like the fail fast mentality of startups and then the huge enterprises like Oracle. Super, super interesting. With all these experiences under your belt, I'm sure you're on the pulse of what's happening as it relates to kind of trends in the market. So tell me about what you are gauging as it relates to marketing and customer engagement. What are those trends that you're following that are impacting marketing and customer engagement? 

 

Des Cahill: Yeah. So I guess I always kind of, as I come into a new company, as you were alluding to earlier, I look back across the experience I've had in the past and techniques that I've worked in the past, the hours of my quiver. And then I also have to look at, well, what's new and what's changed. I think for us right now, I'm looking at five things in particular, one, content marketing and storytelling. And I don't think this ever goes out of fashion. I think most tech companies tend to talk about their technology 'cause they started as a product and they were founded by technologists. And it all makes sense in the early days. Again, finding that product market fit, but making the transition to messaging that's driven by how you provide customer value and having that content across the funnel and expressing that through the customer's lens, if you will, or the customer's eyes, that's the first one to me. And I think that's, again, true everywhere.

 

Des Cahill: And as I mentioned, we have been expanding a lot internationally. So globalization and localization. How do we support spin up in new regions, UK, EU, Canada? Whether that's things like getting the new website up, adapting the messaging, regulation practices, the maturity of the market. The third thing, and this is something I think we're getting into more now as we're finishing up our CDP implementation and other technologies, data-driven personalization. Who doesn't want more relevant content? And we are serving, I mentioned we serve the office of the CFO, but we're serving more distinct personas as we expand our product portfolio. So we started out really with AP and mass payment, now we've added expenses of procurement, different buyers, different pain points. So again, we need to meet them where they are without contradicting storytelling and the personalization, and this kind of goes back to the customer value piece or the content marketing and storytelling.

 

Des Cahill: It sort of supports it and it also supports the personalization, is social proof. So I've just hired a great director of customer marketing and a really strong leader, senior manager underneath Leslie. As we ramp up and invest more in customer advocacy and telling our story through our customers is the best way to tell our story really. And again, that's eternal to any company I've ever been a part of. And then I think the thing that's new, the new kid on the block of course is AI, generative AI and automation. How do you do more with less? How do you become more integrated and more data driven? So those are probably the five top things. There's probably like 10 or 15 more below that.

 

Kailey Raymond: They're all connected in a lot of ways though, which always happens of course. But we talk a lot about value exchange on this show, and I'm glad that you're bringing this lens to B2B right now and really talking about storytelling. One of my absolute pet peeves to your point is when SaaS companies only talk about their features or their, like the actual names of their products, like their customers know or care, you need to tell what the value prop is and what they're getting out of it. And to your point on customers, how you're making them a hero, how you're getting them a promotion. Like that's the end goal.

 

Des Cahill: Yeah. At Oracle, we literally started a program called CX Heroes. And one of the highlights I remember from my career was like standing on a stage at like an Oracle event with like 3000 people in the audience, I'm giving the keynote. But the best part of the keynote was that we picked three of our CX heroes to the spotlight. And we've highlighted not just their use of Oracle products, but their career. And like we told the story of how this customer started out as an admin and then she went to school at night and she was raising a kid and she was a single mom. And we told this whole story of how she progressed and we had the spotlight on her. We had her picture up on this giant screen and it was really moving. It was really great just to see the small impact that we were able to have in her life. But really it's her story and I think everyone really wants to aspire to something and they get inspired when people they know can do that. I think the masters of this are Salesforce. If you go to Dreamforce or anyone who's been to Dreamforce and you see the gold, the glittery, trailblazer jacket and everyone aspiring to that. They've really done a masterful job with that.

 

Kailey Raymond: They have, they definitely have. And to your point of like knowing where you wanna go as a business, like let's talk about, they created a lot of the blueprint of customer marketing of what we all wanna do with that trailblazer community. So certainly a program to look to as aspirational to make sure that you're kind of hitting a lot of those marks. I wanna dig a little bit deeper into a couple of these. So you mentioned personalization in general, especially as it relates to the expansion of this buying committee and some additional perhaps products that you are kinda working with and entering into the market. Tell me about some of the programs, channels, things that you're thinking about as it relates to personalization. We hear this all the time that customer behaviors are really pushing businesses to think about their personalization strategies across every channel and make sure that you're hitting people on the channel of choice with exactly the right content and message at exactly the right time. And just would love your kind of perspective on where to start that journey.

 

Des Cahill: Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. 'Cause I was just gonna say that if you dive right into personalization, you're missing the foundation, which is who are you and what are you about? So the very first major project I started, after I joined here and I spent just a couple of months listening, doing one-on-ones, meeting people, understanding the business a little bit, the very first project I started was building a messaging framework. And that was essentially doing an audit of all of our existing messages because I'd say to a first time CMO or to a CMO joining a new company, you do have a messaging framework, it's just not documented. It's just, it's what your salespeople are saying, what your website says, what the script is at events. So anyway, we did an audit of that.

 

Des Cahill: Oh, and then the most important thing, what is your CEO saying? How does your CEO communicate about the business? So we did an audit internally, myself and Jennifer O'Connor, my head of corporate marketing. And we got executives to buy into it. We packaged it up. I used an outside consultant to kind of help and that has paid off like spectacularly. We've used that to inform to like any agency that we've brought on board in the last year has always said, oh, we can build a messaging framework for you. And it's like, nope, we already got one. Here's your brief. So ad agencies, web design agencies, we just have been redoing all of our sales messaging, our pitch decks, our first pitch deck. And again, we use a messaging framework for that. We are in the middle of rolling out a completely redesigned website, all new content, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

 

Des Cahill: So the messaging framework is the foundation just defining what is our message as a company at a core level and having consistency. So I'm just a big believer in simplicity and consistency of message. 'Cause if you don't define it, you can't get it consistent. And then if you don't get people bought into it, like I can tell the marketing team to buy into it, but if I let them know that they had input into it, the executives had input into it, then they buy into it. So anyway, it's been widely adopted and now we are again, as we've expanded the number of personas we're selling to, the next step that we did was we had a persona deck but we greatly expanded the persona deck. 'Cause now that we're, like for instance, now that we're offering an expenses solution, expense management solution, we not only have to care about the office of the CFO, of the controller, the CFO, the head of accounts payable, we've gotta care about employees who are using the expense tool, right? 

 

Des Cahill: So how do you get good webpages around that and good selling content around that and good ROI stats around that. So anyway, I feel like we've ticked off stage one. Stage one is the foundational part. Stage two is the personalization part and I feel like we're just getting there. We literally just got our CDP segment from Twilio. I'm sure you've heard of it.

 

Kailey Raymond: I've heard of it, [laughter]

 

Des Cahill: You've heard of it? Market leader, another market leader in their space. And we just finished that implementation and in line with rolling out our new website, which we hope to roll out here at the end of Q3 or early Q4, we're excited to be collecting... We're conscious more of what at Oracle we used to call it, and we're using the same language here, collecting signals about like for instance, on our website today, we've got four buttons at the top of the page and you can select mass payment, AP, accounts payable, expenses or procurement.

 

Des Cahill: And that offers the persona that comes to our webpage, they can easily pick their own journey and then go to the right page for their interest, their current pain point. 'Cause I wanna sell them everything, but they've got a pain today that they wanna solve. So I wanna get them as quickly as possible to the language and the solution around their pain, which helps me, 'cause I know what page they navigated to, I'm capturing that information while they're anonymous and storing that. And then when they convert to a known person by downloading an ebook or an asset or filling out a form, I can pull this history together and get a pretty good understanding of their level of intent, their level of interest. And I think the next phase for us will be taking, well, I'll give you another example of like building on that signal gathering.

 

Des Cahill: We just introduced on our accounts payable, which is like sort of our main anchor product, on our accounts payable page, we just did this incredibly innovative project using Vimeo, which is connected on the backend to Salesforce and Marketo. And we've created these chapterized videos. So you've gone through our AP page, you wanna learn more about ap, here's a set of chapterized videos so you can learn as much or as little as you want, but we're capturing what you looked at and how much you looked at and recording that and pushing that all into Salesforce. So if we choose to say SDR, it's time to give a call, we know the level of intent. If we say we're pushing it to Marketo 'cause it's time to nurture. We know like where to start that conversation, where the conversation ended when they left the page. So I think next stage for us, we're still sort of again, getting our feet wet here with CDP, is getting better at cross channel continuity of conversation and personalization.

 

Kailey Raymond: Yeah, then that's the one that's, really it's hard to do, to make sure that every marketing channel that exists and every sales channel that exists and all these things are kind of coming together. And not only are you collecting the data and making sure it's in those unified profiles that you're kind of talking about or alluding to, but you're able to activate that in a way where folks can actually self-serve it and understand it across every team. So there's a lot there to unpack. And I like the way that you're framing this of like, step one, step two, step three, 'cause the trap that I often hear with personalization is like, everybody goes to the real time personalization across every persona and every vertical. And it's like, whoa, like, we have to take this in increments, or we're gonna go nowhere. And to your point, a really solid foundation of messaging and making sure you really understand your customers, is the only way to do this right.

 

Des Cahill: Yeah, that's a great point, Kailey, that I kind of skipped is I just assume it 'cause here we are just like maniacal around ICP. I mean, I'm fortunate to have stepped into such a great company from a CMO's perspective. My predecessor, CMO Rob Israch, is now our president. And he is like a DG Savants, super data driven. And he's been here nine years. And now he's running all our go-to-market and our international. But he has taken the concept of ICP. And I hear ICP not only in the marketing team. I hear from the sales team. I hear from the product team. It's the core of the analysis that we do around new features. And it is so baked into the culture. It's incredible. And yeah, I'm just really building on that foundation and success that was here when I got here.

 

Kailey Raymond: And by the way, that's how you lead to 99% retention rates. Is that what you're saying? 

 

Des Cahill: Yeah.

 

Kailey Raymond: That's unbelievable.

 

Des Cahill: Yeah.

 

Kailey Raymond: It's you're hitting the right person. You're making sure that you're delivering value across the entire journey that you're building for them. And then you're delivering that on the other side because you're super focused maniacally on just the sliver, just these people that you know you can serve and not doing anything more than that, which is great.

 

Kailey Raymond: You mentioned it, so I'm gonna take us there, Des, which is, you know, you mentioned AI is one of these trends that you're kind of digging into. So I'm curious to hear from your perspective. And we can kind of go in a couple of different directions because I'm sure AI is on your mind, not only as like a business application for your teams to be able to build efficiency, but perhaps even with how you're building the product at Tipalti as well. So I'd love to just hear what's going on in the world of AI as it relates to your teams and the way that you're thinking about it and kind of building practical strategies with AI right now.

 

Des Cahill: Absolutely. So yeah, we're definitely using generative AI in the product. A lot of our value to our customers is automating tedious tasks like, oh my God, I went to college for four years and got hired as an accountant so that I could manually input invoices into an ERP. Like that's not no bueno.

 

Kailey Raymond: Shout out to my cousins.

 

Des Cahill: Shout out to your cousins.

 

Kailey Raymond: Yeah.

 

Des Cahill: Yeah. So we're trying to make the office of the CFO more efficient by bringing in generative AI to automate that scanning, automate the coding, and so that they can free up their time to do more strategic and better stuff and less repetitive work. As it relates to marketing and as someone who's been around the valley a while, and I'm sure you've been around technology a while too, generative AI as much as it's overhyped at the moment, I do see it as like a genuine technology inflection point, like the iPhone or even the web or SaaS or cloud computing or all those things. Maybe it's even bigger, longer term. There's still a lot of things shaking out with generative AI in terms of impact on day to day. But I guess what I'll start with is saying, as I think about our AI usage, within the company or within marketing, I break it into like three categories. And the first is like personal productivity.

 

Des Cahill: So, of course, hey, I'm gonna ideate for my blog post or my research before my presentation on ChatGPT or something similar. And then this is kind of cool. One of the projects that spun out of the messaging framework was we were wrestling with the question of, how do we get not only our website and our marketing published content to be more in line with our brand tone and voice, but how do we get our employee email communications or stuff outside of marketing? So we had Grammarly, a license for all of our marketing organization. And what we discovered working with our CSM, was that there was these cool new GenAI capabilities in Grammarly where you can program in, essentially train it on your brand, your tone of voice and your brand attributes. You can even put in like boilerplate, like when we say accounts payable, that means X, Y, Z, or when we say procurement, it means this.

 

Des Cahill: So we bought a site license that we've trained our operations team, our sales team, and our product team. So whether you're doing a personal email, a blog post, copy for the product, a support email, everyone's using generative AI via Grammarly to adhere to our brand tone and voice. So anyway, that's all personal productivity. The next category I'd say are like pure play GenAI vendors. And this is what I call like startup, next generation, young company. We are going to blow away the incumbents. We're the GenAI guys. So we are absolutely experimenting with a number of these companies. And it's cool. There was a company, I was at Dreamforce and I was sitting at a table and I ran into this person and started chatting with him. And he turned out to be the CEO of Bluebird.ai. And it turned out that he had left LinkedIn with a co-founder and they really knew how to use GenAI to data mine LinkedIn.

 

Des Cahill: So we've been partnered with them and just doing these really cool use cases around using changing LinkedIn data to trigger marketing activities. And there are some stuff that they don't do that our incumbent can still do. But there's some new use cases we could never do before.

 

Kailey Raymond: What are some of those use cases? What do those ones look like? 

 

Des Cahill: I would say like one of our customers has changed jobs and gone to a new company. One of our customers has done M&A and they've acquired a new division or started something new, which means that there's more complexity in their financial management and their payment systems, more entities, more ERPs, more need for what we do, more employees, more expenses. So stuff like that, we call them triggered sequences, right? It's not a mass campaign.

 

Kailey Raymond: Very cool.

 

Des Cahill: It's a different form of personalization.

 

Kailey Raymond: Totally. Absolutely.

 

Des Cahill: Right? 

 

Kailey Raymond: And very, very smart to make sure you're going after a champion that used to be somebody that you would sell to at your previous company or, yeah, signal of, I mean, the old one, of course, is like a funding event. But like, we can be a little bit more prescriptive than some of this companies.

 

Des Cahill: Yeah, you can be, again, as you know your ICP more, you can be more specific. So shout out to Kat Dean on that one, my director of marketing ops. And then the third category is AI capabilities in the existing vendors. So this is kind of like the bigger dogs. Again, having come from Oracle, like I saw this movie with machine learning, it's the fast runners of startups are the more innovative and they start with it and then they start getting acquired by Salesforce or Adobe or Oracle or Microsoft, whatever. Or the big dogs start rolling out their own homegrown generative AI stuff. And they're slower to the market, but the advantage is that they already have access to your data and you already know how to use them. They're already part of your day-to-day workflow and they've got a more robust set of capabilities.

 

Des Cahill: We've done a lot of testing with our sales team, co-testing with our sales team of like automated SDR startups. I mean, we found some very... Like they're all very good. But a lot of times it would be like, okay, you guys have a 45 day free trial and we test it. And during the 45 day free trial, we'd be like, "You need to do this, this, this and this. You don't have these features." And they'd be like, "You're right. Thanks for the feedback. We'll build that." And then at the end of the 45 days, they'd be like, "We now need to convert you to paid." And we'd be like, "You still don't have the features."

 

Kailey Raymond: Yeah, totally. Yeah. Like I'm building your product roadmap for you.

 

Des Cahill: Exactly, exactly. So I think with the current funding environment, obviously, I get it. There's pressure to produce revenue and show results. But yeah, so we're experimenting with that. And then the interesting thing there is like, okay, if you've got this third-party solution that sales is buying, again, marketing is involved, but sales is buying, to act as a Tipalti employee, how do you train that solution to use your tone of voice? 'Cause they're not gonna use Grammarly. So we tend to look for third-party solutions where we can give it a corpus of our marketing material from Highspot or for Highspot, and train it. So it's interesting. Like I would just reflect that content marketing is no longer about creating content and coordinating content. It's about training systems to produce content.

 

Kailey Raymond: Whoa. Okay.

 

Des Cahill: Whoa.

 

Kailey Raymond: That's a big one, Des. I keep thinking, like, the foundation that you're laying with the messaging framework as just this document that will obviously continue to evolve as the company evolves. But just literally foundational to every single thing that you're doing. You're feeding that into Grammarly.

 

Des Cahill: I'm feeding it into my sales enablement. I'm feeding it into my PR strategy. I'm feeding it into my PR agency briefing. I'm feeding it into my ad agency. I'm ad infinitum.

 

Kailey Raymond: Yeah. And you're also probably putting it into ChatGPT. You're training your own little LLM on that. So even when your teams are doing productivity research and ideating with ChatGPT that they can bounce ideas off of a system that gets it, that understands for the baseline of what you do and who your target customer is. So it's a really, really smart reminder. Shout out to PMM. That is a PMM foundation for you right now that's shining on through, but I think is really a highlight of this conversation in getting it right. I guess, what I'm wondering is a lot of this stuff too that we're talking about, you talked about CDP implementation, you talked about like the messaging as being the framework. A lot of these I like to think about as like different pieces of data, whether it's structured or unstructured, that we're feeding our systems to be able to drive these use cases and outcomes. And so, this isn't easy stuff that we're doing. It's certainly something that you need to have that strategy of first step, second step, third step to be able to see that longer term two to three year vision. I guess I'm wondering from your perspective, namesake of the show, if you have a definition of what good data is to you.

 

Des Cahill: Yeah, I thought about this a little bit. I would say the definition of good data is that one, the data definition is normalized across the company, and that's something that we struggle with. What is the lead, right? What is a qualified op? 

 

Kailey Raymond: Oh, yeah. For sure.

 

Des Cahill: Right? Is the data accurate? Of course. Does the data have history? Because the data isn't really useful if you can't trend it and go year over year and quarter over quarter and adjust for seasonality. Is the data available where it's needed? Like, it's great if we have the data in Snowflake, but if I can't activate it to marketers, that's a problem. And then on the other hand, if I've got Google Analytics data, that's great for my web team. But if it isn't in Snowflake, I can't share it with other teams, et cetera, et cetera. Or if the data is stuck in the Google AdWords platform or in Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever, right? So the data has to be available to production applications. Other applications got to be available to BI tools. The data set is relatively complete. It's never gonna be perfect.

 

Des Cahill: You can't let best be the enemy of good. And it will start up aphorism there. It has to be good and complete enough and meet enough of these criteria, where it can inform the decision-making process, right? 'Cause if it's not good enough to inform the decision-making process, what's the point? It's not just qual-op to win CVR rate, but you also got to know the ACV. So you got to have that completeness in order to make a decision about, well, did that marketing program work? It raised the CVR rate. Yeah, but the ACVs are 50% and the retention rate is terrible. So...

 

Kailey Raymond: Yeah. This idea about data having history, I think is a really interesting one that I haven't heard before. It makes a ton of sense to me because to your analogy of your career, like you don't know where you're going unless you know where you were. So you can't really understand the benchmark of success. That's a good one. And this concept, this comes up all the time is like, I love that you're bringing up Snowflake. And I feel like that has become a lot of companies' source of truth for data, which makes a lot of sense. Obviously, that market for warehouses has exploded over the past five years or so. But at the end of the day, as a marketer, show me a marketer who understands how to activate data out of Snowflake.

 

Des Cahill: Right. Well, that's...

 

Kailey Raymond: There's not gonna be a ton of them. Des, I feel like I could speak to you for literally hours about this stuff. Unfortunately, we have two minutes left on this. So my last...

 

Des Cahill: It's a two minute challenge.

 

Kailey Raymond: It's a two minute challenge. Okay. So, Des, my last question for you, and I think you can do this in two minutes, I have faith. What are your steps or recommendations that you would have if somebody was asking how they could up-level their customer experience strategies? 

 

Des Cahill: I would probably sound a bit like a broken record and just go back to like, ICP consistency of message. And then more specifically for customer experience, I would break it into pre-purchase and post-purchase experience. And I would, back in the day, the trending thing was journey mapping, which is essentially just taking sticky notes and going to an empty wall and writing on that sticky note all of the touch points that your customer is having with you: Login form, Marketo form, this page, that page, see the demo, talk to a rep, and then look at all of those steps. And you can relate to it at a personal level and say, do I really wanna go through all those steps before I see a demo? 

 

Des Cahill: Do I really wanna give up all that information before they tell me how they're gonna give me value? So there's just sort of like laying it out and asking a question, putting yourself in the customer's shoes. And then there's the exercise of going through and with a cross-functional group of thinking about each of those steps and which could be most easily improved. Like I would think of it like what's the lowest hanging fruit, the least effort that could take the most friction out of the customer's experience. So I think I would do that for journey mapping, for pre-purchase, and post-purchase. And then the other thing I would think about is I would myth bust here and say that a lot of people think customer experience is about delighting the customer.

 

Des Cahill: And I disagree. I think most of us in our day-to-day lives, what we're trying to achieve is we're trying to get the information we want and we're trying to move on to the next thing. So you don't need to send a gift. You don't need to put flowers in every experience. Sometimes it's just keep it simple, give the people what they want, let them move on. And if you're marketing correctly, you've captured that signal, you've given them a message, and you can always follow up with a nurture.

 

Kailey Raymond: Beautiful. Relevance and timing is everything. The concept of not always asking for a demo, Des, that's hard hitting. I feel like a lot of marketers like let that one sink in for a second.

 

Des Cahill: Have a cup of coffee before dinner.

 

[laughter]

 

Des Cahill: Before the dinner date. Yeah.

 

Kailey Raymond: I love it. Des, this has been wonderful. I really appreciate you sitting down with me. I learned a ton. I had a lot of fun too.


Des Cahill: Great. Thanks, Kailey. I appreciate you having me on.

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