Name: Unlocking Marketing Success in the Salesforce Ecosystem
Uploaded: 2025-09-17T16:30:16.141Z
Duration: 59 min 52 s
Description: Unlocking Marketing Success in the Salesforce Ecosystem

Transcript for "Unlocking Marketing Success in the Salesforce Ecosystem": Welcome, everyone. Welcome. Welcome to another SalesforceBen webinar. Let us know in the chat where you're joining from. We have a very, very global audience when it comes to ISVs and SIs and Salesforce users in general. So it's really cool to see kinda where everyone is dialing in from. I'll give a few minutes, for people to join. I can also go through, a couple of bits of housekeeping, just before we start. So, just so everyone knows the session, will be recorded. So you'll receive the recording in your inbox if by any chance you wanna watch it again. And, also, if you if anyone's registers and had attended, you will also receive the recording in your inbox, which is great. If you've got any questions, please pop them in the q and a box rather than in the chat so we can try to answer them at the end of the session. Or, if we don't have time, we'll respond via email. The other cool thing about today is that we are are pulling together a marketing checklist, about the conversation that we have today with our guests about kinda what's discussed. And so when that's ready, everyone will also receive that in their inbox as well. And then final point is, yeah, if you're interested in a marketing consultation with myself and Ben, please let us know. Contact myself or your account manager in SalesforceBen, and we can kinda get it scheduled. Yeah. Really nice to see the chat starting to fill up. Yeah. Really nice. Lots of people from The UK, The US. Amazing. Excellent. Great. So I'll just kinda give a little review of what we're discussing today. So first of all, we're gonna have a look at 2025 trends, both from a kind of business perspective in the Salesforce ecosystem and from a marketing perspective as well. We'll then talk about getting your story straight, so how to make sure that your messaging is compelling and helps you engage, your audience. We'll then talk about having a funnel approach to marketing and how that's important and and how you go about doing that. We'll then talk about measuring success, so the importance of reporting, how you report in an intelligent and productive way on the results of your campaign. And then right at the end, we'll talk about how we approach, kinda tackling all of these areas as Salesforce Ben. Cool. So I would love to now introduce our speaker. So first up, we have the founder and CEO of Salesforce Ben. He is in the booth right next to me in the office, and it's Ben McCarthy. Hi, Ben. Hey, Claudia. Hey, everyone. Ben McCarthy, founder and CEO of Salesforce, Ben. And really been looking forward to this webinar because I think me as a, you know, head of a media company now, kind of this is why I live and breathe, as well as the Salesforce ecosystem, but, you know, I'm not as technical as I once was. So, yeah, looking forward to chatting. Yeah. Thanks, Ben. It's really nice to have you on. Next, I have Jo Birtle, senior director of corporate marketing at Salesforce. Hi, everyone. Amazing to be here, and thank you for having me. I've worked in the Salesforce ecosystem since 2010, both on the ISV side and now at Salesforce following the acquisition of own backup last year. Great to be here. Thanks, Joe. And then last but not least, we have Natasha Kenyon, head of marketing at Elements Cloud. Hi. Yeah. I'm really excited to be here. Yep. Head of marketing at l m s dot cloud. Really, keen to see what we end up talking about today. Yeah. It should be a good one. It's really different than a lot of the other sessions that we've done in the past. We're talking to, Salesforce marketers rather than users. So we're really excited to share all the insights that we see at the SF Ben team in terms of what works and what doesn't when trying to engage, Salesforce users. So for the first section, I wanna start with Ben. So, Ben, I know that you're really keen to share, some insights and trends that you've seen across the ecosystem, when it comes to kind of business and marketing as well. So I'll hand over to you. Yeah. Thanks very much. So this is something that we speak about kind of nonstop on the on the Salesforce Ben site to our to our community of Salesforce admins and developers and consultants. And that is the fact that the Salesforce ecosystem has changed so much over the past five years, you know, both from a business standpoint, from a focus standpoint, from, kind of a technical complexity standpoint. You know, things are are constantly changing. But the kind of main things, I think, in terms of the ecosystem is, one, revenue growth has unfortunately halved from Salesforce. So it's gone from, you know, 20 to 25% very consistently over the past twenty odd years, down to around eight to 10 at the moment, which, you know, most Wall Street isn't too happy with because they they see Salesforce as a growth stock. You know, historically, it has been growing huge amounts, and and now it's kind of, you know, settling down. And and, you know, people really wanna wanna see more from that. What does that mean kind of for for ISVs? It means that Salesforce is selling less new deals, so there's kind of, you know, ISVs aren't brought into as many deals as maybe they they once were, but they're still bringing 4,000,000,000 a year. You know? Although Salesforce stock is taking a hammering, most people agree that they're doing pretty well from a fundamentals point of view, but people wanna see more from them, especially from Salesforce. There's a lot more increased competition from from ISVs and SIs. You know, if I think back to, 2014 when I joined Conga, which I'm sure many of you know, it was then the Nintex pretty much for document generation. And, you know, now there's probably twenty, thirty different providers. Changing priorities for Salesforce Professionals, you know, this is something that we feel like we're quite well tapped into, but but it's it's very hard to nail down. You know, one minute AI and agent force is super popular, and and the next minute, you know, there's too much content about it and people find it boring and they're going back to more, you know, fundamentals of fixing their org. You know, due to maybe revenue growth, halving, you know, Salesforce alliances, you know, can be very powerful, but with increased competition, and Salesforce revenue slowing down, you know, that that has an impact on alliances as well. The hard pivot to agent forces is, of course, of course, something that we're we're all aware of. But that sometimes means that, you know, sales also aren't focusing on some areas as much as as others, and they wanna see, you know, AI agent force focused products from their ISVs and and from SIs as well. And the AppExchange, you know, again, thinking back to my Conga days, like, 100% of leads were inbounds back in those days. And I think about well, a huge amount used to come from from the AppExchange, and I can't remember how many, but probably about, you know, tens to 50 to a 100 a day leads came from the AppExchange. And it's obviously still a very valuable source of leads, and you need to kind of play it right. But, again, the increased competition, less traffic actually going to the AppExchange, and it's it's kind of changed the way it's formatted in terms of categories as well. It means it can be can be harder to get traction on that. So, yeah, a lot of stuff has changed in the Salesforce ecosystem, but unfortunately, that's not all. A lot is also changing in media and marketing. If we could go to the next slide. So this is something I've been kind of paying attention to and reading a lot. You know, we kind of went through this transition over the past few years from a blog to a media company. We had the rebrand. And as part of that, I was doing a huge amount of research into, kind of media trends and where the industry was going. And I would say, currently, we're in one of the biggest shifts in media since the dawn of the Internet. You know, we we've gone through kind of the the social revolution and the mobile revolution, and now we're going into the AI revolution. And this is kind of having a few impacts on traffic. So number one, traffic from social media is massively down, and that has been the case for a few years. So one of the highest highest profile kind of used, examples of this is BuzzFeed, who I'm sure everyone's heard of. But, you know, they they used to be huge. They were they were valued at billions, because they had so much traffic and, you know, they were gonna be the next big digital media site. But the problem was they got about 90% of their traffic from Facebook. And then Facebook decided to turn off the algorithm that sent people going to, you know, external sites because they wanna keep people on on their website. So, you know, we've seen this on LinkedIn massively. It's so much harder. You know, I'm sure everyone's seen the kind of LinkedIn comments strategy, which is, to avoid LinkedIn penalizing your post because you're sending traffic outbound. So that's something that's been going on already, and I'm sure a lot a lot of people are aware about that. But the new thing is SEO traffic is down. And, again, I'm sure a lot of people on the call have have noticed this, but, the reason for this very simply is because people don't need to click on links anymore. You know, Google has kind of relied on publishers to to create content and and feed it into the algorithm so that, you know, Google can direct people. But now Google's taking all that, summarizing it in a, you know, nice sound bite at the top, and there's absolutely no need to click on, you know, links anymore. And and, of course, that's not a universal statement. Like, of course, people still visit web websites from Google. But we've seen quite a significant impact. You know, we we have prepared for it over the years with, focusing more on email and things like that, but it's affected us quite a lot. But it's affecting other companies a lot more. You know, I've seen some media sites have lost about two thirds of their traffic in the past year. So, this is pretty serious, and, unfortunately, it's it's gonna continue as more and more people rely on AI and, you know, not just Google, but ChatGVT to to do their research instead of kind of the traditional methods. Of course, AI is bringing kind of content as a commodity. So, you know, you know, you had to be you wouldn't really write content if you weren't any good at it before. You know, you had to be fairly skilled. But now, of course, anyone can create content, and there's a huge amount of AI generated content on blogs, on LinkedIn, you know, bots on LinkedIn kinda commenting on people. You know, it's getting pretty crazy with with the state of mark with the state of kind of content at the moment. And also buyers' expectations have evolved. You know, I think this has been the case for a while now, but buyers want a frictionless experience. I think they wanna deal with with, you know, brands that look good and, you know, it's not kind of the classic b to b website from the naughties, which is very gray and not very appealing to look at. You know? Buyers really want the seamless seamless, frictionless experience. So the final slide is so is all lost. Not really. You know? This this this although there's a lot of changes, it doesn't mean that you can't adapt to the the new reality. So while AI may be impacting traffic, it's it's also, I think, creating a huge gap for people that do put a lot of effort into their content. And I don't know if everyone's like this, but if I'm scrolling through LinkedIn or I click on a blog post and, you know, I start scrolling through it, reading it, and if I think it's AI generated, I would just stop reading it and click off and go do something else because it it's it's just I don't wanna I don't wanna listen to, you know, AI. I wanna I wanna listen to people. So it does create a real opportunity for people to actually put a lot of effort into original content. And, of course, AI can be massively used for this. You know, I use AI constantly for research and for feedback and for formatting. But in terms of original ideas, you know, of course, they should come from people and not from AI. And buyers are still out there. You know, this this whole environment, of course, might affect, you know, SaaS products and categories with with AI. I mean, it's already started to do that in some ways, but the buyers are still out there. You know? That that hasn't changed at all. And in person community events are becoming a a lot bigger. You know? Obviously, we had COVID, and and in person events kinda took a while to come back, but they're making a huge comeback. I think people prefer with with all kind of AI and all the kind of digital experiences we have, you know, people kind of crave that in person connection, actually meeting people, talking to ISVs. And there's a lot of ISVs that do a fantastic job of this. You know, they're just everywhere in every event, and they're just making connections with people face to face, which really makes a difference. So, yeah, a lot is changing at the moment, and it can be a bit overwhelming to keep up, and the change is probably only gonna accelerate. But, yeah, it's quite an exciting time to kinda take stock of how you're doing things and, look to adjust for the future. So yeah. Hope that was helpful. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that, Ben. I know we've been chatting about a few things few of these things for a while, but I wanna know from Joe and Natasha, are you kind of seeing the same trends, and is there anything that kind of stood out to you about Ben mentioned that you're particularly, kind of the data you're seeing and that you're kinda grappling with right now? Yeah. So I I can jump in. So yeah. I mean, absolutely, everything that Ben says resonates with me, and you can see it day to day in in what we're doing. Particularly, I think, the declining performance of some of the traditional channels that Ben talked about. And as marketers, we're really under pressure to innovate with AI for speed and efficiency mainly because we're trying to do a lot more than we we used to do, and time is of the essence. And I think when it comes to AI, it's hugely impacting things like search algorithms, organic traffic, and people need to really shift from that keyword targeting strategy that we used to embrace to a much more high quality authoritative content approach. And I think most people understand that and are working their way through that at the moment. So I think to be successful as marketers, we have to incorporate structured data. We have to build brand communities, and we have to ensure that content is trustworthy and comprehensive enough so that it does get in AI generated responses, which we know is, you know, what we're all aiming for. Yeah. Yeah. No. Exactly. And, Natasha, I know that when we were chatting about this, you also brought up the concept of trust. So is this something you're seeing as well, and how are you guys approaching it? Yeah. No. Definitely. It's not just them who doesn't want to read through blogs written by AI. Ironically, AI doesn't want to read through blogs written by AI either. So where people are relying more on doing their research through ChatGPT, Gemini, other LLMs, There's this big focus now, not just on keywords and all your technical SEO that still comes in, but, on that trust piece, and it's looking at your brand or your thought leaders as sort of people. How how does that digital footprint look on the Internet? Is it gonna look at them and go, this person or this business really knows what they're talking about. I'm gonna put their content above someone else's. Like, it's that trust piece. It's making sure online you're seen as the experts, that goes beyond, you know, your own marketing. It's making sure you're out on other channels, whether it's social media, whether it's being part of articles or webinars with people like SalesforceBen. Like, that footprint is becoming more and more important as you try and get your, like, real authentic content to be leveraged and shown through all these new channels. Yeah. I love that kind of author spotlight piece. Any any other trends that kinda jumped out at you guys, Joe? I know that, we often talk about events just because they're just major in the Salesforce ecosystem. How are they changing for you guys? Yeah. And events is a huge, huge part of what marketers do in the Salesforce ecosystem. And they're tough because they are such a key part of the community, but it's been getting harder and harder, I think, to drive event attendance. As, you know, most a lot of the content that we would use to surface at events is now available digitally, and people can find it in their own time. So I think the key really for events is about, delivering a networking experience that stands out from anything else out there. It grabs people's attention and really makes people feel like it's a good use of three hours half a day a day, because everybody's just so time strapped. So I think, really, we just have to change how we think about events. But Ben is right. You know, events are still a huge part of the marketing mix and are something that that we're seeing good good pipeline from still. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely not something that we can kinda scrap kind of out of the marketing mix for sure. Yeah. Natasha, what's what's your take on events nowadays? What are you kind of seeing from your perspective? I think especially in the Salesforce ecosystem because we are so lucky because we have, like, this huge close knit community. The events are important and are always gonna be important, whether that's you're going to things like Dreamforce TDX or you're making sure your user groups and more local things. It's a real opportunity to, like, connect with the community, build relationships. You can't, in this kind of ecosystem, just sort of blast marketing to the community. You really need to market with them. You need to understand what they're feeling, what's happening, and events are your opportunity to do that. You know, ultimately, you hope that they're still lead generating and all of that kind of stuff, but I I don't think you can, like, undersell how important it is just in this kind of ecosystem to be present and, you know, with your ear to the ground. Yeah. No. Absolutely. Great. Thanks, guys. That was a really good overview of trends, and it kind of helped us set the scene really well for the next part of the chat. I know we talked about, you know, creating authoritative content and meeting your audience kinda where they're at. I now wanna talk about the foundation of that content, which is your story and this is your messaging as a brand. And it's something that I think some companies maybe think it's it's fluffy, that it's not that important, but it it really is. It's the bedrock of everything you do, as a brand, and it really helps you engage your audience. And you can't really get your story straight if you don't understand your audience in a lot of depth. And I wanted to bring up a stat that kind of Joe, shared in kind of our chats in preparation for today's session, which is which which is what you see up on the screen. Jo, do you wanna talk to us about what that stat means to you and kind of how you approach, the messaging piece? Yeah. Definitely. So, yeah, this, you know, this shows that what brands and marketers have to understand is that only around 5% of the audience is actually in the market at any one time. So that means you know, if we think about that, it means 95% aren't looking to buy from you at the moment. You know, maybe they're using a different provider. Maybe they're not ready to start that journey yet. But how we engage with those 95% and lay the groundwork to sell to them so that when they're ready, they they come back to you, that is the real key to successful marketing. And I, you know, I really think marketers need to be spending much more time focused in that area. So you have to, you know, to do that, you have to really know and understand your audience. You have to be able to build trust with that audience so that when the time is right and they do want to buy from you, your brand is the first thing that they think of. And I think, you know, it's easy to say, and I think most marketers are aware of this, but actually putting it into practices that are a bit harder, and is a different thing. So the way that we we build trust is by creating awareness and consideration focused content that answers the questions that are top of mind for that audience. It doesn't answer the questions that we want to ask or we want to answer. It really has to be, the answers to the the questions that are top of mind for our audience. So, you know, you're really having a strong identity and having content that engages is really how, you know, you're gonna cut through that noise and and reach that 95%. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly that. And I know that you mentioned trust, and, Natasha, this is something that keeps coming up in our chats as well. What do you think is the role of trust in their messaging? Why is it important? Yeah. I mean, you know, trust is gonna be central to a lot going forward when AI is making it hard to know what to trust. But, yes, I think, you know, Joe Joe said it all really well there. But, yeah, ultimately, when people have to decide who they're gonna go to, you wanna make sure that you are the ones that they trust. A lot of the time, you're not just gonna be selling to one person. You're gonna be selling to loads of different people. You need to make sure that whatever your story is appeals to all of them, whether that's by looking at the problems that they're trying to solve within their business on a wider scale, something that they can all relate to. But also just sort of remembering that when you're selling to these people, even though this is business to business marketing, in a way we have more of an impact on them as a person because we're not just sort of helping them do their jobs. We're helping them with their career. If they come to us and go, oh, I think this is the technology that's gonna make the difference for us, they've gotta then go to their boss and explain that. So make sure you're always bearing in mind that you're selling to a real person and that they have to be your advocate and, you know, ultimately, this is how they're gonna look good within their business and get promoted, and, you know, be successful in the future. So, like, keeping in mind the sort of human side of things rather than just addressing, like, you know, for us, tech debt on complexity. Like, really think about actually, these people have emotions, worries, challenges. Like, keeping that top of mind when you are crafting your messaging and your story is really important. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And I think one of the other things we said was, you know, sometimes brands have a tendency to put themselves as the hero of the story that they're trying to tell. And it's really about making the customer the hero of the story, and the brand is the tool that the hero kind of uses to win or or kind of achieve, the objective that they have. I know that we kinda talk about, like, building a messaging framework, and I know that our audience is very mixed. We have some bigger companies and some smaller companies, with kind of varying numbers of people in their marketing teams or budget. Natasha, do you have anything about how to kind of build a messaging framework in, like, in, like, a resource effective way? Yeah. I mean, so we use StoryBrand framework. Very easy to find. If you go out there, Google it. A lot of it's online or you can get a nice book. Mhmm. And, you know, you don't have to use that. It's not one size fit all. I find it really helpful, especially at an early stage when you first go to market with either a new solution or to address a new challenge in the market when you're pivoting something because of what's going on in the ecosystem to really go back to this sort of framework. You know, it's very focused on the customer being the hero, you being the guide, guiding them through the problem, that kind of thing. But, you know, when you've got at the beginning of of that sort of messaging journey, you've got your stakeholders in the room, and most of them are probably not in the marketing team. They might be leadership. They might be product team. They might be sales. Using something defined like that can really help get everyone on the same page, get you going, and make sure you're all aligned on your messaging before it spins out to become various marketing piece of content, various sales piece of content, support articles, all of that kind of stuff. Like, it's a really good way to just do that as your your core thing. So I recommend it, but just generally defining a framework and sticking to it even if it spins out, can really help. Nice. Thank you. Yeah. I think people will find that really helpful. Great. So for the next topic, when we were kinda coming up with different sections of this webinar, we wanted to really take it back to basics and talk about the importance of the funnel. You know, having a funnel focused marketing approach, starting at the top of the funnel with content that builds your trust and then bringing people down the funnel with case studies and more, bottom of funnel type of assets. But when I spoke to Joe and Natasha, I spoke to them both separately, and they both brought up the same thing, which is, the funnel is not really as straightforward as it used to be. It's more convoluted. People are coming in and out of it in unexpected ways, and it's not as simple as it wants once was to push people down the funnel. And as we're chatting, Natasha brought up this really interesting stat which is what you see on the screen. So, yeah, Natasha, I wanna kinda start with you in terms of, yeah, how do you guys approach having kind of that that that that funnel type mindset when marketing, and and how has the funnel changed in your view? I think I mean, there's two big things with the funnel at the moment. There's there's always been this sort of dark funnel. Like, you don't really know what's happening, but you know someone is doing research, and that's become sort of even more prominent now with the increase in people using AI. So, yes, people consume about 13 pieces of content, from a brand before buying. That could be even more now if you consider how many different sources something like ChatGPT is pulling in when someone asks a question. It could be 10 times that. So it's really want to sort of remember at those early stages. Again, I'm going back to content here, but your content is your first salesperson. Like, that is who they're doing their their initial research with. That's who they're engaging with. So you need to make sure that your content that is being read by LLMs also just on your website. People might hopefully still be reading it there a bit. It's not all gone now. That that that is really important. But then it's also just very much not a linear journey anymore. It probably never really was all that linear, but we like to think it was. So it's absolutely still important to think about things as awareness, consideration, decision. But you need to remember people are gonna go backwards and forwards or where, especially in B2B and sort of the Salesforce ecosystem, most of the time you're selling to more than one person. You might look in a at an account and go, oh my gosh. This account well, they're bottom of the funnel. I'm just gonna, you know, throw a lot of case studies at them because they look like they're really ready to buy. But, actually, three people in that account only just got brought in, and they're not really aware of what's going on. So making sure your content is available, that you are considering those kind of things, and just that you understand. Like, it's it can be really hard to measure, but just knowing that it isn't this linear journey can be really valuable, when you're sort of thinking about your funnel. Yeah. That sounds scary. I actually don't envy you guys in your job. It sounds really complicated. Yeah. I'm hearing from Joe. Joe, do you have you seen the same shift in terms of the funnel, and how do you guys approach that? Yeah. Absolutely. We we definitely have. And it's about your audience seeing the right content at the right time in the journey. So, I mean, I've I've said this, but I don't think we can we can push it ahead enough. Driving awareness with content that's not about your product is our first job. So it's fundamental to be doing that at the top of the funnel, and we always have to be thinking audience first for everything we do, every piece of content we create. And then it's about knowing when to start targeting those audience with more middle of funnel and bottom of funnel content. So we have to in order to do that, organizations have to get much more sophisticated about how they nurture leads and how they move them down the funnel and then really clearly identifying buying signals. So, you know, just one example of that might be, have you seen and can you identify if there's been a surge in multiple people from one organization as Natasha talked about, visiting maybe a high intent page on your website like a pricing page. You know, that would be one signal that we could use. But Natasha is absolutely right. The funnel isn't as straightforward as it once was. And, you know, the dark funnel is out there. So all that research, peer advice, chats going on in Slack, Reddit threads, all of that is happening before someone even hits your site or comes into your awareness and fills out a form. So, you know, you have to be out there so that you're in those, in that purview before they're even really at the researching stage. And, you you know, you can't see that in your CRM, but it's already shaping how people are thinking about your brand. So I think brand presence, and community really matter, just as much as what your lead dashboards are telling you, and that's why the Salesforce ecosystem is a great place to market because it's a community already. And so as Natasha said, we're having to take much more of a a sort of buyer group marketing approach now rather than thinking about individual buyers or personas. And, yeah, you know, we're we need to watch how many people from different organizations are engaging with our content and, you know, how many, how many different people are we touching with our marketing activations so that, we're really influencing an account and not just a single person. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You do kinda have to be in a row these days because of just how many channels there are. And I know that that might kind of prompt some of the people in the audience to think, hey. That sounds like a ton of content. And, again, with the varying kind of sizes of resources and budgets, Jo, do you have any tips on how to create all of these different types of content, all these different assets that you need to kind of be present across all of these different channels in a cost effective way? Yeah. And, you know, I know some of this is rich coming from somebody who markets at Salesforce, but I have been at the small companies as well. So, I totally feel that pain. But I think the key is really about repurposing what you already have to make it work smarter and work harder for you. For example, you do an event, you have speaking sessions, you have a lot of other things going on at an event that should help you to create a blog post, create some shorter videos, you know, record the session content and run it as an on demand webinar. There's there's so much that you can do with that, and always take it back to that bronze story that we talked about before. So find ways within all of that to bring out that bronze story. And be led by the channels that where you know your audience consumes your content as well. So, you know, which content formats do do your audience prefer and which content formats work better on the channels where they're consuming that content as well. So, you know, my message would be you you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time, and it shouldn't feel too overwhelming then. Yeah. Yeah. I know exactly. And that's something that definitely my marketing agency passed is is kind of the approach we would follow. But, obviously, we have new technologies now that maybe weren't available then. So, Natasha, I know they have really specific tips on tip on on the creating lots of different types of content for kind of a reasonable budget. I don't know if it's a really specific specific tip, but, yeah, we we are, you know, fairly lean team here at Elements, definitely compared to Salesforce anyway. But, we're you we're really lucky to have AI at this point, you know, in in the, sorry, marketing timeline, because we can do so much more than we could a couple of years ago. We can digest these enormous amounts of qualitative data, turn them into something that's actually usable. So, I mean, if you can use agents, which, we are, which is fantastic, it's much easier because it's all system inside Salesforce. If not, you can take things like call transcripts for from client calls, anon anonymize them if they're going into chat g p t. If they're going into an agent, you're alright. Trust me. But you can find some really, really valuable insights there where it's completely objective, like, a completely objective understanding of how people are actually talking, the problems they're actually facing, and making sure that your content can then be sort of tweaked to match how people are actually feeling. This is the kind of thing that you'd have needed, like, a part of data scientists to do a while ago because there's so so so much data out there, but AI is making it really easy to use these enormous things and turn them into something actionable. And equally, just just writing content. I think Ben sort of alluded to earlier. You can do so much research, but, I mean, I don't think anything completely written by ChattGPT is ever going to be good. But it is really good at giving you that starting point or that that ending point, to do that final review. I would say always, tell it to be really harsh with you if you're asking it to review something because otherwise it has a tendency to be really polite. I eventually noticed it was always scoring me 9.5 out of 10, and I was like, I don't feel like I'm a consistent 9.5 out of 10. Please be honest. So little tip there. Yeah. That's really funny. I was trying to be nice. I was saying please and thank you. But yeah. No. That's a really good tip. And, Jo, I know you you guys use AI in, like, a slightly different way when it comes to the kind of funnel side of things. Yeah. I mean, we're definitely using AI in the ways Natasha described as well, and it's saving a lot of time. That's for sure. But it is actually also helpful when it comes to understanding where someone is in that buying funnel. So it gives us you know, we should be adopting AI and using it to give us better signals so that we're not guessing. And it means we can follow-up way more efficiently with those leads. So after a campaign, we're only passing leads to sales or to our business development teams that are genuinely ready to talk to a human. The rest, you know, we would put into a nurture journey or we would push towards content that aligns with their interests and where they are right now in that buying cycle. So we're not not wasting anybody's time. So I think, you know, as AI develops, it is gonna be much more than just a content generating tool for marketers. It's gonna help with some of that automation piece. Mhmm. Yeah. No. Yeah. That sounds really cool, actually. And I can see a question about that in the q and a, actually. So we can kinda kinda get into that to the end of the session. We do have one more topic that we kinda wanna dig into, myself and the guest, and that's reporting. So it's something that me, myself, as a marketer, I'm really keen to learn more about, also to kind of be able to support our sponsors, better. So, yeah, I I I wanna know, like, how do you guys go about measuring the success of your marketing campaigns to kinda give you the insights to continue to improve, and to yet kind of build on those results? Yeah. Do I wanna hear from you how do you approach reporting? Yeah. Love this question. So, most marketers' nightmare, but it really depends on your goals. So whether, you know, you're trying to win new logos, most of us are, whether you're looking to grow accounts, whether you're trying to reach very specific accounts, whether you're looking to accelerate deals or, you know, target specific industry or company size. You know, your goals vary, and, you know, what you want to report on will be led by that. So, you know, the other thing to remember is those goals are never static. So, certainly, for me, those goals ebb and flow with the needs of the business from quarter to quarter, and we sort of you know, we always have new metrics that we're looking at along the way. So the metrics that we track as marketers now, I think, have changed a lot over time and continue to change. Reviewing historical data is important. So which channels and campaigns have worked before in the past? Which have you seen a sort of drop off of? What lessons can you learn from some of that? And and we've got to keep innovating. So, you know, I always put at least 20% of our budget towards testing new ideas, working with new parties, you know, trying new channels. Otherwise, we're just standing still. So I think the important thing for marketers to remember is you shouldn't always expect instant ROI, and that's sometimes the difficult thing that, you know, you have to communicate to the business. Some campaigns take time to prove their value. Day to day, we're digging into the data. So where is the pipeline coming from? What and and we can dice that in many ways, you know, channels, tactics, all of those things. What trends are showing up in that data? Where should we double down? What should we stop start do more of? You know, all of those questions are things that that we're looking at sort of certainly quarterly and if not monthly. And it's not just about pipeline. So, you know, the standard marketing metrics are always there, but other things can be powerful as well. So campaign ROI is one. So over time, what actual return are we seeing from our marketing spend, is a good one to look at as well. Yeah. Yeah. There's there's so many ways you can look at it, and there's always a ton of data to digest. Yeah. Natasha, how do you guys, approach reporting, and what kind of metrics do you guys look at? Yeah. I think I mean, you know, fundamentally, we're we're very similar. They're sort of that set of marketing metrics that you just look at. I think an interesting thing I found is because I I have spent time in the past, at other places as well, sort of trying to build this multi touch attribution model to really work out, you know, where where is our revenue coming from, where our leads coming from. And I'll always find, like, you know, there is some insight from it, but never enough that it feels worth going through the pain of trying to build that model if you don't have millions and millions and millions of data points. So I think just really focusing actually on what is going to make a difference to the decisions you're going to make in your marketing and look at those, work back from backwards from there. Always bear in mind, like, you know, metrics do absolutely matter, but sometimes they don't tell the whole story. You might have an event and go, oh, that didn't we didn't generate as much revenue or as many leads as we would have liked from that. But then you look closer and you go, oh, actually, we have this one really good partnership conversation that has actually spun out into being a really big opportunity for us. Identifying moments like that give you an opportunity to go, okay. So if that happened again, how would I have captured that and work backwards from it and then make sure that that's something you're capturing in your metrics to measure success in the future events or campaign at a campaign level. And, yeah, I mean, what what Joe said, I always think, you know, test, AB test things, experiment, is as long as it isn't gonna bankrupt you. It is very it's it's important. I'm always delighted when, SF Ben comes to us with, oh, we've got a new idea. Would you like to be our guinea pigs? So I'm just like, yes. So yeah. Always always try new things, especially in this day and age where everything's changing. Yeah. Under It is really fun to work with sponsors who are open to that. I remember one of our sponsors recently, it wasn't one of you guys, but they basically said, I don't care if clicks go down with this ad campaign. I I would rather the clicks went down than we than we don't test the other angle that we're thinking. And we wanna go away with this with clicks and leads and stuff, but we also wanna go away with insights, which which is really interesting and it makes kind of our job more fun as well. I know that the other side of reporting is, not just reporting for yourself as a marketer but also reporting up. You know, reporting to other, members members of your team or even outside of your team to your leadership team as well. How does that work for you guys, Joe? Yeah. So I think proving marketing's value to senior leadership is a constant struggle, particularly to senior leadership who maybe don't understand marketing quite as well as others. And, you know, Natasha alluded to this, but lead attribution is always a challenge. It's never perfect. Even at Salesforce, it isn't perfect. And we have a lot of sophisticated tools and processes exactly for that. So, you know, don't beat yourselves up if, you know, your marketing attribution might not be perfect. That's the first thing I would say. And I think the metrics that we show to leaderships, we we sort of assume that we have to have these, you know, hard hitting, metrics, and I don't think that's always the case. Sometimes we can use vanity metrics very powerfully powerfully such as key logos that we've managed to engage at an event. You know, that's a really important one. Are we getting in front of the right people? So, you know, they aren't always the same ones that we actually use to steer the ship, but they nevertheless are really, really powerful. And I think success also comes from, down speaking the same language as sales. So this is a this is a big one for me and something I I sort of push myself to do every day, really. If you walk into a sales call and you talk about, you know, marketing has, driven all of this pipe line. You will see their faces quickly drain, and they'll just tune out because they know it's not true. You know, marketing doesn't generate, you know, 90% of pipeline. A lot of that is coming directly from the sales team. But what we can show them is where marketing is helping them to touch their pipeline. So, you know, it's much better to speak the same language as sales and talk about the activity, the counts that you're touching, why that matters, and and build trust and show where you're aligning and, you know, working towards the same goals as sales are and the company as a whole. Yeah. No. Definitely. And it kinda reminds me of what we said before about the funnel being convoluted. You know, you might not have 100% impacted or caused or generated a meeting or an opportunity, but you touched that lead at some point in their journey. They looked at a piece of content, so you've had an impact. So I think that's that's important to to kinda bring up, and I love what you said about working closely with sales. I think that's really important. Yeah. How about you guys, Natasha, Elements? How do you how do you approach kind of reporting up or reporting to the wider team when it comes to marketing? Again, I'm I'm probably gonna echo slightly what Joe said here. But marketing doesn't speak the same language as sales or leadership or maybe even your finance team. And sort of going back to what I was saying earlier when it sort of comes to messaging, you've gotta kind of remember what their priorities are, remember what their motivations are, and then put yourselves slightly in their shoes. So, again, I'm gonna use an event as an example, but, like, an event might not look like a success to sales, but was a massive success to marketing because we've got loads of brand awareness and loads of engagement. And so if you can demonstrate to them that down the line, because often, you know, in tech will have sort of a reasonably long sales cycle or something, this is going to translate into pipeline and put it into their language. That can that can help, and you can sort of just sort of reframe how you would think about it to be in their shoes, whoever is you're reporting up to. Yeah. No. That's a good point. And, yeah, I'm curious to see if if that's kind kind of a struggle for anyone else on the call today. And before we kinda move on to the next session, I do wanna say that we hope that this is the first of many sessions for marketers and good marketers. So if anyone has any topics that we kinda haven't touched on today that they would like to hear about when it comes to marketing in the Salesforce ecosystem, please let us know on the chat. Cool. So before we kinda open up to the q and a, I just wanted to give a quick overview of how Salesforce then can help with with some of these aspects. So if we can move on to the next slide. Thank you. So the first topic that we tackled was how to get your story straight. And I use, actually use a phrase that Joe mentioned earlier in the chat as well, which is think audience first. A lot of the time, we get piece of content through from our sponsors, and there's a misalignment between who that piece of content is for and who it's gonna be seen by and, you know, the angle and the positioning. So what we try to do as a as a team is to really think about, you know, what is what is top of mind for that kind of job role. And I know that that's challenging because in the Salesforce ecosystem, there's tons of job roles and they all want different things. We've got architects, admins, consultants, and some more commercial job roles. And so with our kind of ecosystem knowledge, with the help of Ben and the rest of the technical team, we're kind of always scanning. Second that emotion, I know. It is very challenging. But, yeah, that's why our technical team that's where they come in, and that's where they can really kind of help us understand, you know, what is top of mind for these people? What is the challenge? What pain points, are they facing? The terms and the language is also really interesting because we sometimes get content where, you know, in the title of a piece of content with in an ad, there's maybe, an acronym or a a term or even the name of a product that the audience won't be familiar with. And it's always important to help our sponsors step away from their own kind of perspective of that content and say, hey. Like, our readers won't know what that word is, and they probably will just scroll past. So that's kind of a missed opportunity to to kind of engage that. And then, yeah, just remembering that what you're offering as a solution to your audience's problems shouldn't just be, your product, which I know is something we said, kinda earlier in this chat as well. And here, those are just some examples of kinda how we've helped some of our sponsors kinda boost results both when it comes to ads, when it comes to views for their sponsored post, and when it comes to webinars. You know, we have kind of some goals, that we try to hit, but and we always obviously strive to meet those targets. But I think if the sponsors kind of trust our gut feeling and our instinct, they they tend to get better results, which which is really cool. Great. Move on to the next one. Thank you. So, yeah, we talked about having a funnel approach to marketing. And here, it is really tricky because we kind of just work on Salesforce Ben as a channel. But whenever we kinda work with a sponsor, we always try and think about, you know, at what stage of the funnel is this piece of content going to be seen, and does the CTA make sense? If you're talking to an audience that maybe is not familiar with your brand or going back to the 95, five rule, they're maybe not in the market to to to to buy your solution. What's the right CTA for this type of content? Is it something that's really bottom of funnel like a demo or product pager? Or do we need to bring it back to that kind of, thought leadership, like, educational kind of piece? And if it's a lead gen, kind of activity that you're running, do you have a plan in place to kind of follow-up on those things? Because otherwise, that's another, missed opportunity there. And, yeah, just kind of a reminder that we're working with more and more of our sponsors, not just to distribute, their their assets, but also to to create them as well. And we're helping them generate tons of, downloads and leads, which is really, really exciting to see. And then the final point is the reporting. This has been a huge focus for for me since I've joined Salesforce Ben about nine months ago to kind of really go beyond the numbers and not just give our sponsors here. This is click the rate of your ads, and this is how many views your post got, but really kind of understand what the story beyond that data is. We try and be really transparent with what metrics we can track, what's the benchmark, so what's the average that we normally see, analyze data throughout a campaign. So really kinda have various touch points, throughout the throughout the campaign to give recommendations for how to improve. Testing, which I've already talked about. Testing different things. We really want our sponsors to use SalesforceBen kind of growing audience as a bit of a testing ground to test different angles. We're really happy with people doing that. And then, yeah, the other cool thing that we're doing is we're customizing our reporting more and more. So if we work with someone like Joe or Natasha or in a similar similar role who need a slightly different way to look at the data of the campaigns that they do with us, or a slightly different kind of report depending on who they're reporting to and what metrics that, different team members are gonna be looking at, that's definitely something we can work with you guys to help you not just find out the data you need, but also reporting to to a wider wider teams and hopefully get more resources to work with us as well. But, yeah, I think that was the the kind of the the the end of the insights that we wanted to share today. So, yeah, just before we get to the the q and a, yeah, just if there's any of the aspects that we talked about today that interest you, that you wanna learn more about, and if you wanna book your free, marketing consultation, contact Lottie or EFA, so one of your account managers, or myself. Yeah. Always really happy to help. You know, Ben and I, are kind of open to jumping on a call with you. Yeah. As you know, Ben can really bring that kind of technical Salesforce, kind of expertise, and, obviously, I can support any kind of marketing questions as well. So yeah. I would love to open it to the audience now, and I already know that we have a question about, the funnel. So I know, Joe, you touched really briefly on how you use AI to identify at what stage of the funnel people are at. Do you have any do you have any other tips on that? So, I mean, it's still very early stages, I would say, for that at the moment. But the way that we are hoping to do that is by using agents as Natasha talked about, and, you know, leveraging insights from those agents telling us when people are visiting specific pages on the website, taking certain actions, and really, you know, giving us those ash those insights in a single dashboard so that we can, we can then, you know, put some, measures in place to ensure that leads are getting rooted in the right direction. So, you know, there's still work to be done there, but that's that's how we're thinking about it. Mhmm. And is there anything sort of outside of AI that you think people can take away on that topic? Maybe people don't have AI as a tool in that in that realm. Oh, you put putting me on the spot here. So, I mean, you know, traditionally, the way that we know, you know, buying stages is because we know who's engaging with the content that's at the different stages in the funnel. I think, you know, for companies that are still very early in that journey, that is is still the way that I would look at that. So, you know, if you've if you've got a nurture or a journey planned out for for your different audiences, and they might be different journeys, you know, just look at who, is engaging with what. Make sure that you have a follow-up activity so that they are try you know, you're trying to work them down that funnel. And and I think the, you know, the best way to do that is just being able to to see where they are, monitor, monitor what they're doing through your, you you know, your campaign analytics. Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly that. Anything on that, Natasha, or should we move on to the next question? No. It's it's it's just so that similar. Yeah. Be very much led by what they have been doing, rather than, like, putting your own, like, assumptions on it. Mhmm. And either way, it's like your website. Your website is your shop window. So if you have software that can identify where someone is on your website on a personal level, talk to whoever is that owns that particular platform and go, hey. All of this content, I have tagged as top of the funnel content. So can you just create me a segment that goes people who have been looking at these pages are top of the funnel. It's not gonna be a 100%, but it gives you an indicator and then say middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. And you've got you can know off there in your sales pipeline. You assume, yeah, maybe they'll get into what's that decision kind of stage. But if you see that they're sort of appearing in that, oh, they've been looking at all these sort of very thought leadership you block, how to basic type of things going. Actually, maybe they're not as far as they they look. So you can you can do a lot without AI as well just by sort of taking some data and sort of doing some basic segmentation or lead scoring even. You know, lead scoring isn't dead yet. Soon maybe, but there's still a place for it, at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. That was really helpful. So yeah. So, just looking at the other questions. So the other one that I think will be interesting to touch on is, I I really like this one actually. It's about the Salesforce ecosystem. So what's what do you think is one area of marketing that fundamentally differs, you know, between the Salesforce ecosystem and kind of standard b to b marketing? And then yeah. Whoever wants to wants to tackle that, Joe, you can go first. Yeah. I can I can tackle it? So I think this is a really it's a really nice question because I think this is both this the, you know, the the fun piece of marketing in the Salesforce ecosystem, but it also, in some ways, makes it harder. So whenever I'm thinking about a campaign and, you know, particularly before I was working at Salesforce, I'm always thinking when I'm speaking to third parties or anybody that we're gonna work with on a campaign, how do we ensure that we are reaching Salesforce users? We don't just wanna throw this out, you know, to an audience and then none of them actually already use Salesforce. So, you know, it's easy for us to assume that everyone uses Salesforce, but that actually isn't the case. So, you know, trying to find ways to make sure that, that's at the forefront of everything you're doing, finding where those views just hang out, immersing yourself in the Salesforce community is a really good way of doing that. And I think, you know, the the question you always have to ask, particularly when working with third parties on things like content syndication and that kind of thing, is how do we qualify the leads for Salesforce use. And I think sorry. Working with, SF Ben, obviously, straight away, we know that that question is answered because, yeah, we're we're dealing 100% with Salesforce users. So to me, that's that's, you know, the main thing that's fundamental to all of our campaigns. Anything from you guys, Natasha, Ben? Also, how yeah. Main difference between, b to b marketing and, yes, Salesforce marketing specifically. There there are two things that sort of come to mind initially. One one is very much like when you're in the Salesforce ecosystem as an ISV or as an SI, you do have to sort of pivot yourself with Salesforce all the time. And Salesforce can be this big ship steering, and you're sort of like this boat trying to catch up. I mean, Agent Force is a is a classic example, but, you know, there was data cloud before that. So a lot of the time you do have to be a lot more reactive than you would be in another industry. I was I was in ecommerce, previously. You don't have this level of, change happen, at this pace. So it's definitely a lot faster pace, and you have to be more agile. And then the second thing is that Salesforce fundamentally will always be at the absolute core of someone's company. Like, that all contains all of their important data, all of the important relationships. So when you are talking about your service or your software, bearing in mind that that is gonna be touching the most important thing at their company. Like, it's really important and, like, don't forget that because it's just it's so much more of a core system than when you're sort of in a different ecosystem. So that's that's my sense. Yeah. I really like that piece about Salesforce being business critical. That's that's something something I've been hearing as well. We actually just got another question in the chat that just come through. Can you be too targeted when addressing the Salesforce audience? Yeah. I don't know if anyone's got some immediate thoughts on that. I'm guessing that just means, yeah, Salesforce users as opposed to other users or I don't know whether that means specific job roles within the ecosystem. Yeah. And, I mean, my view is no. So, you know, you can never be too targeted. People want you to speak to them almost as if you know them. And if you are you know, even when you're trying to even if you know you're speaking to a Salesforce audience or you think you do, I don't think it hurts to spell out that what your, you know, your message is specifically for people that are using Salesforce, then they know straight away it's relevant to them and it gets their attention. So in my view, you can never be too targeted. Mhmm. Mhmm. Cool. Any thoughts on that, Natasha? Nothing particularly different to add. I I would agree, basically. That sounds good. Then I know you've kind of rejoined us for the q and a. I don't know if there's any thoughts that you have on that. And we talk we talk all the time about kind of the importance of making your message specific to a Salesforce audience. Whenever people submit content to us, we always make sure that it is really Salesforce specific because that's our readers. I don't know if there's anything else you kind of think people should should know about that. Yeah. I I think, you know, we we have a lot of these conversations with with kind of targeting because, obviously, all, well, yeah, vast majority of ISVs will have, you know, a a specific person they want to target. I I think it's I I agree, like, you know, with Joe that targeting is is extremely important, but I think we give slightly different advice when people are working with us because, you know, if someone does a sponsored post and they want to talk about something which is so, so targeted and and specific, you know, we might push back a bit because, ultimately, not a lot of people are gonna be interested in that. So it might be better to go slightly broader, capture more people, and then hopefully capture more people that are relevant. But, I I think, you know, that that is a challenge in the ecosystem because there are so many different ways to slice and dice the the roles and the industries. And, you know, so it can can be a bit be a bit complicated. But I think sometimes going broader is better especially for the brand awareness, activities. Yeah. I think it's a fine balance. It probably depends on the piece of content at hand and the channel and and the goal. Right? I think it keeps going back to to what your goals are. To the pipeline as well. Yeah. Exactly. So I know we're nearly at the hour. Yeah. Those were all of our all of our questions from the audience. So, yeah, is there anything else that any of you guys wanna share, Ben, Natasha, Joe, anything any sort of final tips that you kinda wanna wanna give, before before we go off? I I mean, I I mean, Joe was talking a lot about this and, you know, it's it's just trying things. You know, there are so many things that can be done now. You know, short videos or YouTube or podcast or you know? And there's some things, you know, podcast is obviously a huge amount of effort, so maybe you don't wanna, like, experiment with a podcast. But, yeah, I just think there are so many ways to get in front of the right customer at the moment, and you don't know which ones are gonna work until you try. So I think lots of, like, small experiments to to see what your audience is really interested in, what's driving pipeline, what's driving leads, growth, and, you know, obviously, double down on the activities that are and and then ignore the ones that aren't. And and just along those lines, actually, and on the the metrics, what I would really advise everybody to be doing right now is doubling down on the engagement metric because, you know, that leads into exactly what Ben was saying there. So how many accounts and individual leads and contacts are we actually touching? And I what I'm finding more that more than in the past, I think, is that that is a leading indicator for all of the other marketing metrics that come next. So really advise everybody to be able to measure engagement very well, think about how increase engagement over time, and, you know, I think that that will that will drive results further down the line. I see. I think that's a really good tip. So great. Thank you guys so much for joining for all the insights you shared. So, yeah, as mentioned, we're gonna be pulling all of this stuff together in a beautiful marketing checklist that everyone will get in their inboxes in the next few days. But, yeah, thanks for all for joining, and thank you for your questions. And, once again, thank you to our speakers. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jay. Thanks, Natasha. Thanks, Nadia. Thanks, everyone.