Episode 48 – James from CRMNext
The next CMO podcast explores topics that are on the minds of forward-thinking marketing executives from leadership and strategy to emerging technologies. And we bring these topics to life by interviewing leading experts in their fields. The next CMO is sponsored by Plannuh makers are the world’s first AI based marketing leadership.
[00:00:24] Peter Mahoney: Plannuh. And hosted by me, Peter Mahoney, the former CEO of Plannuh along with my cohost Kelsey CRAF.
In this episode, Kelsey and I speak to James Gilbert, the CMO of CRM next, a leading provider of CRM platforms for the financial services industry. James is a deep expert in customer experience and journey mapping, and helps us understand how to effect a transformation of customer service. Leveraging the crawl, walk, run straight.
I hope you enjoy the show.
[00:01:01] Kelsey Krapf: thank you
so much for joining us today, James. I know you’re calling in from right outside of salt lake city, Utah. I’d love to learn a little bit more about you and what you do for serum nuts. Yeah, thanks for having me.
[00:01:13] James Gilbert: I appreciate it. I lead marketing here at CRM next. Both on the us side and a little bit of the global side as well. Main focus though is here in the U S and I’ve been doing marketing for a long time. This is my third stint as a CML.
[00:01:27] Peter Mahoney: That’s great. And tell us a little bit about CRM next, so we can set the table because you’ve got some really fantastic experience.
We’re going to tap into here, right?
[00:01:36] James Gilbert: Yeah, so we provide a CRM solution and that CRM solution is unique to the financial services industry. So we’ve focused mostly on banks and credit unions and really how I like to put it in. We are the data orchestration behind all of your systems. And CRM happens to be the icing on the cake.
And CRM has historically gotten a really bad rap. It still gets a really bad rap. It could be for a lot of good reasons. So I think one of the areas of our focus. The experience behind it. And I think in order to do a well, we’re going to talk
[00:02:07] Peter Mahoney: about that today. Absolutely. What I’m really excited about digging into a little bit more with you, James, is the idea of around the idea of customer experience and how you create and manage great customer experiences.
With technology and even independent of technology, obviously, because I’m a big believer that the at the beginning of customer experience is actually customer understanding. So you have to start by figuring that out. So tell me a little bit first let’s just set the table and give everyone your definition around what you think customer experience.
[00:02:46] James Gilbert: I’m going to be a little different here and I’m going to actually remove the customer from the conversation for a second. And really if we’re trying to nail down what customer experience really is at its core or it’s we’re really making it sure that an organization has good experience to deliver on it.
And I think that’s really the key. I think it’s top down initiative for me, executive. I think it’s cross collaboration across functions. I think some of those details get forgotten because we often. Think of customer experience as like a, it really is a deliverable. It’s an outcome. It’s not something where we can go to our customers and expect them to help us figure it out.
And I think what gets in the way of customer experience is an orchestration within an organization that seamless and streamlined and the work that gets done cross-functionally is really the key to making it all up. So I think
[00:03:44] Peter Mahoney: what’s happened by the way it tell me if you think I’m crazy or not.
Maybe you’ll think I am independent of my question, but I think the expectations of customers around a, an integrated multi-channel kind of experience have gone way, way up. And there’s this expectation that I should be able to engage my brand, whether it’s a financial services. Organization like many that are CRM next customers, or it’s a consumer brand or a B2B brand.
I should be able to come to interact with them, whether it’s on the web on the phone, in mobile, in person, whatever it is through whatever channel and everybody should know everything about me. And is that your experience, have you seen this increase in expectation on the side of.
[00:04:35] James Gilbert: Oh, totally.
We used to be able to get away with all right. I’m not in that industry, so it’s not really applicable. I got news for you. Everybody measures you against Amazon. Good freaking luck. Come on now. They have the best experience of anyone. Now they have retail stores that are creating a better experience than any shopping experience you’ve ever had.
So that’s what you’re being compared to. That’s what consumers they don’t want. They expected. It’s totally different now. And I think we started seeing this shift about almost four or five years ago when really Amazon revolutionized a lot of the experience that we all want as consumers very little touch, easy to access reviews, things like that.
And I think as marketers, we have to start developing a strategy and a structure that hits on all those points, but we have to do it without interrupting the. And that’s the key is so often times marketers become actually part of the problem and interrupting the journey, which is why I say so much of the orchestration needs to be cross-functionally and within the organization itself so that you can create those seamless experiences because otherwise what’s going to happen is you’re going to have.
Moments where marketing’s doing their touches. And I know this happens today because I’ve consulted on this very topic and marketing is doing their touches. Sales is doing their touches. Customer success is doing their touches and now none of them come together. None of them talk to each other and they’re all hitting different messages at different times for different reasons.
And what does that look like to the customer? And the consumer looks like you don’t know what the heck you’re.
[00:06:17] Peter Mahoney: Yeah, that is a huge issue, obviously. And I think especially as businesses get more complex and I think it often comes from a place that is motivated by people trying to do the right thing.
Customer success team wants to reach out to customers and make sure that they’re happy. But at the same time, they may be hearing a different or conflicting message from marketing or sales, et cetera. So it’s a confusing. So it’s you think about is you think about, if you were telling a, going to tell a company how do we start on this journey of creating a a more seamless, better end to end customer experience?
Where should they start?
[00:07:01] James Gilbert: I’m glad you asked. So there’s, I’m gonna, I don’t want to steal this person’s thunder because I truly believe that. Yeah, she is the architect behind this stuff and it really has created a great strategy. Her name’s in that France. I’m not familiar with her follow her. She is the queen of journey mapping, and I believe just like she does.
Because I’ve seen this for sand is the first place to start as journey mapping. Now what’s journey mapping. It’s literally mapping out the entire customer life cycle from the point in which they know your brand. So the point in which they recycle through your brand as a customer, and I think that this is key.
This has been a huge success for me in every stint that I’ve ever been is we start there. We map out our there’s, the marketing journey. Here’s the sales journey. Here’s the customer success. There’s the flywheel that ties it all together. And when you do that, especially within each function you bring in stakeholders, then they understand your process, whether they have direct or indirect collaboration or not, they’re going to understand your process and enough to provide input.
Okay. And then when you also structure the journey map, you’re also able to identify key points in what you need to cash your data. So then you become this smartest people at your organization, knowing where the data is, how it’s orchestrated and how you can serve that. Cross-functionally. And that is the engine behind what creates a really good employee experience, making work simple so that they can deliver on the customer experience for them.
[00:08:40] Peter Mahoney: Yeah, it’s interesting that the you mentioned the employee side because I assume there’s a lot of internal frustration when it comes to employees are trying to do the best possible thing for their customer, but they realize that they’re creating this friction is probably frustrating for them too.
[00:08:57] James Gilbert: Absolutely. And I think that’s why the journey mapping process is so valuable because it does give a level of understanding that people might not have cross-functionally and then they can help each other one example I’ll give that’s unique to the financial services industry.
Okay. When we think about journey mapping and the full customer life cycle beyond these little micro journeys that exist too. Okay. And for a long time, Customer experience has been measured by an NPS score or a C-SAT score. And I’m going to tell you why that’s flawed if I’m a bank or a credit union.
I have multiple products that have a unique journey. So if I go into a branch and I’m like, I want to open up a checking account for my son. Okay. So I opened up that checking account and then I get online and I’m like okay. I’m six months later and I’m interested in a credit card. So I do, I go through their digital journey and apply for a credit card.
And it’s a terrible experience. I got news for you that same micro journey for credit union and the same micro journey for the brand. Get combined into the NPS and C-SAT metric, which is why it’s flawed, because how are you supposed to know where the problem was with the customer experience? And that’s really the key.
When you map out the journey, you understand these micro journeys that exist as well and how you need to measure them differently. And that’s ultimately what gives you an idea of how to fix things within an organization that are falling short?
So what’s their idea then of being able to segment out these two journeys, like where do you start to have that customer segmentation so that you can get to the data and analyze, where are the problems and where it affects them? Not every business has multiple products. So you know, if you don’t have multiple products and you’re really selling one service and one software, if you’re like B2B, SAS, for example, you just need to map out how the handoff happens from like the full journey of mark.
Into the full journey of cells into the full journey of customer success. I really think those are the key core areas that you’ve got to focus on mapping out and every single one of them is going to be unique. Like we just did this exercise six months ago at CRR next and. We got in a room. I had our, I already had our marketing one mapped out but cells needed some help with it.
So it was painful. It was an hour and a half conversation, but I had the sales executives in there and I literally built them out of slack. Just so that they could visualize the journey. And then I did the same thing for customer success. Trust me the hour and a half, watching somebody build a slide is painful.
And we oftentimes think we have to get so detailed so that everybody understands every little bit of the process, but we don’t, we just have to keep a high level enough to where if we were to hand or visualize an animate, a slide okay. That they could understand. Okay. Now I understand what our customers are going through when our prospects are going through.
And it just needs to be high level enough to where if they have a question, they can ask it and then you have additional documentation to back it up.
[00:12:07] Peter Mahoney: Makes sense. And when you think about it, James, you. In your case for CRM next, you took on the onus. It sounds like of creating first of all, your own journey map, but then driving the creation of these functional journeys for the rest of the company.
Is that what you’d advocate do you believe that top marketing exact should be the one who is responsible for the overall customer experience?
[00:12:37] James Gilbert: I do. I think that marketing has more data than anyone. And that alone is the reason why they need to be the ones to step up to the plate and start understanding the rest of the organization at a level that they might not today.
I think that too often, senior level marketing executives get into their role and they get narrow-minded tomorrow. And they have to realize that the impact that marketing has is brand across everything that everyone does. And every touch point that any consumer is going to have with that brand has an impact on the experience.
And if you’re not measuring that, if you’re not tracking that if you don’t have an understanding of that then it becomes really difficult to make an impact long term, especially if you’re at a smaller company. And you’re trying to get a seat at the table as a senior level, mark. This is a great way to do it.
Like you understand the data cross-functionally and you understand how the journey works. Cross-functionally you can provide insights to product for product development. You can provide insights to the executive team for GTM. It becomes a powerhouse of information. And I truly believe, we saw this when I was working for when I was a COO at cloud cherry, and it was focused on the customer experience.
This is where I learned a lot of this stuff. And. We saw firsthand CML is becoming the new title of CXO, chief experience officer. And I think we’re going to continue to see that more and more in the future.
[00:14:07] Peter Mahoney: So there’s a tricky balance that I think needs to be straight. And you laid it out really well there, James, around the idea that you’ve got access to this data and these insights that you can share with the rest of the organization.
What I’ve seen in some cases is CMOs trying to. Use it as almost like a power grab, take too much and say, I own the customer at the end of the day. And of course, some people are going to get upset about that. So if you’re in charge of customer success, if you’re in charge of sales, if you’re, they’re going to think they own the customer too.
So how do you draw that line between ownership of the customer? And ownership of the data around the customer experience and reporting that out and being a steward for the rest of the company,
[00:14:58] James Gilbert: I’m going to be the devil’s advocate. And I actually don’t think that it needs to be ownership sort of single function.
I think it needs to be that’s part of the core that I was just that I was mentioning the very beginning. Is it being everyone’s responsibility to all in that experience, however, where I do think. Marketing specifically can really impact and try to not seem like it’s a power up is how you deliver the insights of data that you have.
If you think about it just if you do a little bit of attribution across the entire marketing funnel and you do that little bit of attribution, that is a lot of data, just some behavior that is that, that I just occurred. In the funnel. So if you’re able to deliver that way ahead to customer success and product even sells, and you do that over time, you can literally predict for them.
And that is insights and outcome outcomes that for other functions of the business, likely don’t have to. And what, so when you’re going to product and you’re able to provide them insight on GTM so that you don’t have to go out and do tons of market research. I saves the company money as well. So you’re certain you’re being, you become almost a service organization to the rest of the functions of the business.
And I really believe that marketing has the greatest power to do that. Not because not because they’re hitting on everything brand will brand wise, but I just think that marketing traditionally are the better communicator. Marketing traditionally knows how to structure projects. Marketing traditionally knows how to simplify things for my contextual perspective.
So if I’m delivering data to a function of a business, I need to be able to be a good storyteller too. And marketing traditionally is one of the best storytellers that accompany.
[00:16:54] Peter Mahoney: So one piece of resistance that I’ve seen in a project like this, where you’re really trying to get. A better view of the customer experience is that it really requires a level of data integration and investment.
In some cases that sometimes the company isn’t ready to prioritize. And especially if you have a very. Technical or data-driven kind of service delivery. So you deal of course, with financial services and there’s a lot of technical platform related to all the systems that are part of the service that they’re delivering.
Absolutely. And sometimes that takes a pretty significant investment to change the way that your business systems operate so that you can instrument them to get all that data. Do you find one that’s a problem and if you do, how do you get around it? How do you get around this idea that it’d be great to know that, but you know what that takes.
Time in my roadmap. And I’m going to make that number 99 out of list of 10 to build into my product to make this possible.
[00:18:00] James Gilbert: I don’t think this is going to be revolutionary to here, but I think you have to bite this stuff off in a crawl, walk, run, and phases, and small phases. And I’ll give you, I’ll give me an example of that.
If we are, if we’re starting with journey mapping, that’s a visualization of how the journey occurs across all functions of the business. That’s your crawl, right? Walk would then be to look at those journeys and start architecting the data behind all of them, whether that’s in your CRM or whether that’s in a different piece of technology, whether that’s orchestrating all the technology so that it can do.
Right then the run is what you get out of that data. And I’ve done this many organizations, some really big ones too. And we would break off into these little mini teams. We’d call them data charters once we’re in the walk phase. So I after we’d done the journey mapping, now we’re in the walk phase.
We do these data charters. This is where you have to have representation from each function on the board. And stakeholders to provide input on their processes that are very unique. And I think if you do it in the crawl walk, run, and in those little phases, it’s not trying to boil the ocean and it’s not too much on whether you’re ready to do it or not.
Everybody’s ready to start journey. And then from that point, everybody should be ready to do data orchestration. And I think it’s gotta be in those subsequent orders in order for you to tackle it as a, as an organization, whether that’s small, midsize or enterprise.
[00:19:33] Peter Mahoney: So you probably have some great examples, especially given the fact that you work with the financial services industry now in banks and credit unions, it’s CRM next.
And that’s something that everybody should understand, right? Everyone can relate to their own personal customer experience at their bank. So can you give us an example of what those three steps would look like? From the customer’s perspective as you go through the crawl with understanding the journey, mapping the walk with looking in architecting the data, and then the running with figuring out how to get more out of the data.
What does it look like for those banking or credit union customers?
[00:20:12] James Gilbert: So from a consumer perspective the crawl phase would look like, alright, they’re sending me content. That’s actually relevant and timely at the right time in the right channel. The walk of that might be okay. They’re sending me recommended products based on my behavior in the past.
Now we have the data orchestrated, that’s giving us real value, right? The run of that is okay now I’m I champion at this company, I’ve become an advocate of this company and I understand how they deliver the content. I also understand how they’ve predicted. Product. This is where I think Amazon has done a really good job.
It’s because they’ve made all of this. You might not even realize it’s there. And that’s the beauty of it is Amazon has done this so well. That we don’t even realize that we’re consuming it in that fashion, we all consume it in a crawl walk, run. You’re interested in a product. You go search for the product.
Then the next thing you do, you go look at the reviews or you look at their stars, right? They’ve naturally done this in the process, but I promise you, they started in this crawl walk on face. They had to map out journeys. They had to understand, if our customers are coming to a product, how do we make sure it’s seamless?
Don’t make it so where they have to go somewhere else to then get to the next phase, which is looking at those stars and then diving into the reviews, which all of us do when we go to Amazon and look for a product. I think that’s the key don’t require additional process or action for a consumer to make, put it there in front of them and allow them to consume it.
Ungated if you have. I have a question on just maybe playing devil’s advocate right here. Cause we’ve talked a lot about the benefits of journey mapping. We’ve talked a lot about, improving that customer experience. What’s going to happen for the companies that don’t implement some sort of plan like this.
Obviously they’re going to fall behind, but what are they missing out on? I think it’s more than just missing out on a and getting behind. Like when we very first talked when we started this conversation, We’re talking about how it’s not an expo. It’s not a nice to have anymore.
It’s an expectation. So it’s the same thing. If you think about it and all this stuff that’s happening in the world today, whether you agree with some of the things or not, like companies now have to take stance on topics. And if they don’t, what’s going to happen. No, one’s going to care about that company.
That’s literally the processor and it’s the same concept around the customer experience. It’s not a nice to have, it’s an expectation that people are going to continue to have with whether you use still a tangible product or you sell a software or you sell a service. It’s an expectation that people have.
People don’t want to ask for things right. They want to know that you already know what they want and need. And the only way you’re going to know that is if you understand their journey. So if you don’t map the journey, then you’re not truly trying to understand the customer and the consumer.
And when you don’t do that, then you’re not fulfilling their expectation of you. And they will. What about the companies that have a hard time mapping attribution, because attribution is something that’s really difficult to measure, marketing influence. There’s a lot of factors that go into it.
What happens? Like how do you, where do you start? I in the B2B world, I am called Mr. Attribution. They call me my stress depression, and I hate it. But I know how to do this stuff really well. And I’m telling you the best place to start is visually mapping out the journey. It allows you to understand what areas of attribution you might need to track.
And if you do that, and that’s why the next phase after the crawl. Interlock is the data orchestration and not enough people spend time there. They figure out the journey if they do that. And then they start sending out a ton of different marketing materials and then they haven’t thought through what happens if we send that stuff?
How do we choose. How do we ask attributed, and you have all these different models of attribution you have first touch, last touch you shake w Z whatever. There’s tough. There’s so many different attribution models. And I think that you always gotta to start with first. There’s going to be things that are going to get forgot about, but iteration is important, which is why everything should be done at crawl.
Walk, run, you can’t boil the ocean. And if you want to get to the point where you have good attribution, I think that you’ve got to understand the journey. You’ve got to understand the data better than anyone. I want you to do that. You can start structuring parts of the journey with your data to cash rate.
And when you do that, then you can start figuring out, all right, do we need a first touch model or last touch model? Maybe that’s where you start. And then you end up with a w or are you right? Ultimately I think all of it boils down to the data that you’re collecting and there’s this notion that’s out there and I agree with it, but I also disagree with it and that’s that you can collect, you can measure it.
And I think that you can get in measurement paralysis. I think that is true. And as marketers, we have to be more methodical about measuring the things that really have an impact by her revenue pipeline, all those things have an impact. So if that’s our true north, then all our attribution should figure out how to tie back to that.
It’s so important to understand the journey. When you map it out, I’ll give you a good example. All review sites from a B2B perspective, G2 crowd, trust radius, you name it. Any vendor out there, all review sites will always be a middle touch. So how do you attribute any ROI back to those software vendors that you’re paying a crap ton of money for?
If they’re all middle touches and you have a first or last touch. You can’t, unless you map out the journey and you understand that then you have data points and you can see attributes. I actually have what we call. It’s not a w or you it’s journey attribution. That’s what we have. So we can see the entire journey of Erika.
Every touch point. They have every middle touch. They have to me, that’s very valuable to our CEO and our board. That’s very valuable because guess what? It helps us develop a better GTM strategy.
[00:26:42] Peter Mahoney: So you talked about a lot there, James, and let me try and pick it a couple of things that I think are really interesting.
Not that all of it. Wasn’t interesting, but I’ll just highlight the most, most interesting ones. So 1, 1, 1 thing that I found, I find interesting is the idea of. You talked about the importance, obviously of focus on revenue and focus on marketers should be hyper-focused on driving business value. But there is an element that’s hard to measure around the customer experience.
We just talked about the fact that the customer experience is a critical asset that should be managed by the. COO. So based on that how should we measure it in? How should we think about defining our goals for customer experience in our marketing plan?
[00:27:32] James Gilbert: I I don’t know that there’s a one answer for that.
If I’m being totally honest, I think that, I think it can be unique to the organization, but ultimately I think you can measure it. The customer experience specifically off of, how well are you being perceived? And every micro journey. So it’s like an NPS metric unique to the micro journey.
I think that’s a good way to do it. I also think that you’ve got to start somewhere, and even if it’s, even if it’s as simple as pulling your customers and asking them what their feedback was, believe it or not is not done very much. So if you started there, that is at least going to get you to the point where you can measure it predictively over.
And I think that everybody should be starting to do that. Everybody should be, talking to their customers more. A good example. You guys, you have, I’m one of your customers I’m on your podcast right now. Podcasts traditionally are not used as an attribution because they’re hard to make. But when you have customers and you have potential prospects, that could be your customer on a podcast and you develop those in the pipeline and revenue, where it came from.
If that’s easy attribution. But the thing that people forget about a podcast is how it can become literally your market research as well. So I think that there’s areas of where you are having a, what is traditionally called as a touchpoint in the customer journey. There are touch points that you’re having with your customers and prospects, and you need to start thinking of them as a touch point.
All right. And when you do that, then you start bringing together and organizing all those touch points. And that’s when you have a real idea of how to measure. That’s why I say, I don’t think that there’s just one way to do it. I think every organization is unique and buffet are inviting people to. Customer events, things like that, or customer round tables, like those are moments where you should be ready and prepared to write notes as fast as you can.
Because that’s gold. That’s your gold mine. And obviously not everything can be translated to an outcome. Like not everything that a customer says is going to be something that you should. But that’s the point as you at least need to measure it and track it. I think that you’ve got to the best way to do this.
Collect the data first.
[00:29:53] Peter Mahoney: We’re really big advocates of the idea of measuring at the right level. And I like the concept that you brought up that you call journey attribution, because that’s an interesting way to think about it. We tend to think in terms of campaigns, broadly big C campaigns instead of little C campaigns, which are really a bunch of tasks.
But I think it’s the same concept. I think what we’re both advocating is that you click up a level when you look at your overall measurement, because the reality is that for most decisions, if they’re reasonably considered decisions, anyway, it’s a pretty complex process that you go through and you’re going to have a bunch of different touches.
You talked about these middle of the funnel touches in mid point mid journey. Touch. With review sites like G2 and trust radius, as an example. And and so trying to figure out the specific value of that individual touch is going to be hard. But if you look at the entire end to end journey or the entire end to end campaign, or maybe both, there’s probably a more accurate way to assess what the total investment is across those things, as well as the total return from those things.
And thinking about that, James, do you think there’s a good alignment possible between campaigns and journeys? Can you come up with a set of campaigns that actually mapped to customer journeys?
[00:31:24] James Gilbert: Absolutely. A good example of stuff we’re doing right now is CRM. Next. We have what we call our overarching big brand campaign right now.
This campaign runs the entire year, but it’s unique to. Us selling and teaching and educating our audience about digital transformation. Digital transformation is like a buzz word, but it’s also a really tangible thing that people are going through. And we know that, but we know that no one can boil the ocean.
And so we had to bite off into pieces. So this brand campaign that we have. Is meant to touch on areas of digital transformation that they can do in little small bite-sized pieces. And we release a new bite-sized piece every two months and every two months, it’s a unique little area of digital transformation.
That’s a focus. And then there’s deeper areas of the journey that we provide. Where are we then send them direct mail pieces to visualize it and create a good experience. That’s a wow moment for them. So that’s one example of what w what we’re doing at CRM next. We call it the year of transformation.
But then in tandem with that, and parallel to that, we run very specific campaigns that are meant to drive unique measures of success like demos. So we have a demo light campaign. We also have another brand campaign that runs parallel to that because we want to be seen as a fun company, color bank, claret campaign.
And a lot of people know about our bank for that campaign because we literally create the coolest experience for people. And, make fun of our competitors and make fun of ourselves. Like you can go to G2 crowd and some of those places and look at comparison reports with your competitors, but it’s very rare to see a campaign that has taken that and made it fun and engaging.
And that’s what we did with bank where, but I think the goal to all of this and the journeys is to ensure that, Just sending people to these episodes of the bank or at having them engage in the emails. That’s great. But creating the wow moments and a journey that they’ll never forget. That’s what’s.
Not only do they engage in the emails and go through the videos, but they get, a rose from us that can last up to five years because we want CRM is about relationships initial last. And when we did this, I’m not kidding you. We had people not even a in our town and in our industry that were focused on that only got this, they heard about.
And we were having people that were totally outside of where we would sell, want to be a part of the campaign. And I think that’s the key to marketing is creating seamless journeys that are cohesive, that people never forget it looks and feels good the entire
[00:34:16] Peter Mahoney: well. That’s great. And obviously you created some really nice connections to the CRM next brand, and you have these evergreen campaigns around.
Digital transformation that help educate the audience. And it’s very similar to what we do. So we create what we call our next CMO brand is a multifaceted brand campaign that includes this podcast and includes the book that we wrote. It includes lots of the content that we create, because we’re trying to do the same thing that you are.
It’s not a digital transformation. It’s a, our operational marketing transformation that we’re trying to help people understand that’s necessary for their longevity. In the career. And at the same time that as a glow over everything, that’s the brand experience. They’re going to have these micro journeys underneath that or regular journeys, and then micro journeys underneath that.
That are part of a campaign that are gonna generate leads for us it et cetera. So that’s, it’s a very similar approach that I think we’re taking in it. I think it is really effective. It can be hard sometimes to to understand the connectivity between them. So there, there has to be you probably have, I’m guessing a CEO who gets and understands marketing.
Because either that, or your fantastic sales person have an idea because you can sell the idea that this long running kind of campaign, which may be hard to individually attribute business value to has an overall impact and is driving a great experience that, that sort of rises all,
[00:35:58] James Gilbert: all boats, right?
Yeah, absolutely. I got to give you guys a ton of credit. Cause I have talked to many CMOs about how great your guys’ content is. And I think it’s fantastic providing framework. There’s just not enough of that. That goes around in developing like leadership and people don’t share their playbooks.
They don’t share their frameworks. It’s super weird. I don’t know why it’s silly to me. Help people. And I love the fact that you guys have done that. That’s what caught my eye. That’s when they made it customer is that right there? And, I think that as more organizations develop the frame of mind of trying to help first.
Rather than sell first. I think that’s really going to have the biggest impact on what we’ve been talking about today, which is the customer experience, because it’s an expectation. People expect it and they expect you to want to help them not to try to sell them all the time. And you’re going to have to make calls throughout the journey.
You’re going to have to say this. Isn’t a salesman. So don’t do it. And it’s tough. It’s tough for cells to be like, oh, I can’t sell them. So I can’t push it. No, don’t push it. They’ll come. They’ll come back. You need to trust the process. You got to trust the experience that we’re trying to create. And if you do That’s what’s going to make people come back.
That’s what’s going to make people remember your name. That’s, what’s going to make them turn into advocates, which is what every company wants. And when you have advocates that back your brand, and that truly understand who you are as people and that you respected them throughout the journey, man you’re gonna.
[00:37:33] Peter Mahoney: I can’t think of a better way to approach the end of our podcast here. Cause we’re getting to the end of our time, James, but you really put a bow on that one. So I appreciate it really well said, and I think it really illustrates the connectedness between your brand experience and your customer experience.
In, in just a couple of minutes there. So that was a, that was really helpful. I think Kelsey probably has one more question to ask, but before she does that, just tell us how we can learn more about CRM next.
[00:38:04] James Gilbert: I would tell you to go to the website, but we’re rebrand and we’re redoing it.
So if you really want to know about CRM next go to our company, LinkedIn page. Look at our podcasts, which is out there as well. And they’ll get to know us a little bit. You can follow me too. I’d be happy to help any of them.
[00:38:22] Peter Mahoney: Great. And we’ll put all those links in the in the show notes so you can check them out.
[00:38:27] James Gilbert: Thank you again, James, this has been an awesome podcast. I learned so much about journey mapping, enhancing the customer experience, but we always love to ask this question and you’re head of marketing. So what advice would you give to those that are trying to be CMO someday? And aspiring to be CMOs?
I would say two things understand the data better than anyone. And number two. I understand other parts of the business better than anyone. I think that is the future of marketers. I love that. Great. Thank you so much for your time today, James, make sure to follow the next GMO and Plannuh on Twitter and LinkedIn.
And if you have any ideas for topics or guests, you can email us at the next CMO at Plannuh dot com. Have a great day, everyone. Thanks, James. Thank you.
nextcmo
10 Aug 2021
