How to Go 'Robin Hood' on Salesforce and Oracle with Jeremy Swift

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation! JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire! Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Latinx in power. Today, we'll be breaking down how to go Robin Hood on Salesforce and Oracle. To drop these value bombs, I brought Jeremy Swift into EO Fire Studios. Jeremy is the founder and CEO of Cordial. Cordial is a cross-channel messaging platform that is changing the way marketing and technology teams engage their customers. Before forming Cordial in 2014, he was a founding member of Blue Hornet, a first-gen email marketing SaaS company that he sold to Digital River in 2004.

0:41And today, for a nation, we'll talk about what it means to go Robin Hood on legacy marketing cloud systems. We'll talk about how AI factors into all of this. We'll talk about scaling hyper-personalized customer experiences and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Jeremy and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolfe and Nathan Lanz, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier.

1:12AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Jeremy, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with? Awesome. Hey, Fire Nation. Great to be with y 'all. And JLD, thanks for having me, man. Yeah, I think my take on that would be, and this goes back to early, early on in my professional career when we were starting a software company out of our dorm rooms in college.

1:55And a very close mentor of mine said, hey, Jeremy, it's okay, just fake it until you make it. And I think as I've grown over the years, I believed that for so long, but I believe today that that is one of the biggest fallacies out there. Fake it till you make it. I think it for a variety of reasons. I think it can lead to imposter syndrome and create all sorts of internal and unnecessary stress on a person. I think it's much better to be genuine and to lean into growth and learning and vulnerability and being authentic with people. And, you know, I think there's like an immense amount of just, it's almost like the analogy of the duck.

2:44It like looks like it's doing fine above the water, but underneath it's like paddling its life off. And I just think that that happens when you do that. I think it's hard to grow. I think, I just think that it's something that for individuals, it doesn't serve them well. I think it stunts your growth. It stunts your ability to learn and to, and frankly, in running a company now too, it eliminates your ability to truly build an authentic and transparent culture where people feel like, whether it's me or anyone else, I don't have all the answers and no one does. And if you present that as if you do, you actually prevent other people from growing in their ability to lean in and go, hey, this person doesn't know the answer.

3:23Maybe there's space for me to come in and help or to do something or to, be a plus one to an organization as well. So I think there's a whole variety of reasons there. And Fire Nation, I hope that's one of the reasons why you listen to Entrepreneurs on Fire, because we do bring you the truth, the authenticity, the genuine realness, reality of what it means to run a business, to be an entrepreneur with the challenges, the struggles, the obstacles, everything beyond, to be that little duck where everything's calm on the surface, but hey, below the water sometimes, thinking things can get a little hectic, and that's okay if you have the right team in place.

4:00And today we'll be talking about how to go Robinhood on Salesforce and Oracle. Now, you believe, Jeremy, that legacy, we're talking old marketing cloud solutions like Salesforce, like Oracle, they're failing brands, they're failing marketers. Tell us more. Yeah, and I'll maybe first start out by saying, you know, my company is called Cordulon. So, you know, you can't call your company Cordulon at the end of the day, which is, you know, not the intention whatsoever. But I and the second thing I would say to that, too, is, you know, I've got a lot of respect for, you know, folks like Salesforce or Oracle or Adobe.

4:46I mean, they are the stalwarts in the software world. They laid the groundwork for entrepreneurs like myself. And, you know, I think that's fantastic. That said, they've grown through acquisitions and turned those acquisitions into cash cows through whether it's underinvesting in innovation on those products after they brought them in, whether it's creating pricing leverage and lock in with their customers across the kind of myriad of different offerings that they have to, frankly, you know, I think also underservicing folks in a continual effort to just drive profit margins for themselves. as well.

5:24And I think it, I see it. I don't just think, I know. I live it and experience it with so many marketers on a regular basis. They feel like they're small fish in a really big pond and they don't feel like they're getting what all of the marketing on the surface from these companies really sold them at the end of the day. And so, yeah, when we talk about this idea of going Robin Hood on them, I would say it's not that we're trying to steal from the rich and give to the poor. But, you know, I would say the way we think about that is how do we redistribute value in a better way to folks? You know, these are incredibly outdated, overpriced legacy tools and technologies.

6:08And we just believe fundamentally there's an opportunity to kind of redistribute that value in a variety of ways through innovation, through better economics, through a completely different and material services offering to folks, you know, to help forward thinking brands, frankly, achieve much better results. There's a lot of inefficiencies. There's a lot of waste fire nation. And when a company can come in and clean that stuff up, they can pass it along to the consumer, to the client, to the customer. I mean, I just listened to a great podcast that went into detail about Costco. And that's one of the great things about Costco, man.

6:44They came in And they just cleaned up a lot of the inefficiencies in the market and groceries and things along those lines. And guess what they've done? They've passed along all of the savings to you, to the customer that's going in there. And now you just know that when you're buying something at Costco, you don't even need to just even look at the price. I mean, I'm not saying you should be price insensitive, but you just know that whatever the price is, it's as low as Costco can go. because they are committed. They have the exact same profit margins on everything, which is very minuscule. They pass on all the savings to the customer, to the client, and they make a big part of their money from that$79,$99 per year that you're paying to access that company, that office, that building, Costco itself.

7:34Now, let's dive a little deeper into this because you did touch on it and I really appreciate that, but I really want to go deeper on what it means to go Robin Hood on legacy marketing clouds. Let's get specific. So one thing that I would even kind of dovetail off of what you were sharing there with the example on Costco is the word that comes to mind hearing you describe everything that you did there is trust, right? Like it's not that it should be blind trust at the end of the day, but Costco has And plenty of other companies have consistently built trust to where, yeah, you feel really confident stepping into that store, what you're going to get with that experience.

8:17And frankly, I think that trust has been broken, frankly, on this side of the fence as I think about the legacy marketing clouds. Like I said, I think it's been killer marketing. They're some of the best marketers themselves. But I think that trust gets broken when you hand that off to the experience that the marketers actually get. And they go, oh, my gosh, this is it feels like snake oil sales at the end of the day. And I think there are there are a bunch of high level reasons that I mentioned earlier. I mean, in terms of the economics, the service, et cetera. But specifically, as we think about it at Cordial and how we think about what the opportunities are to really deliver and actually keep and build that trust with a marketer or a brand that we are selling to, you know, in competition with, say, a sales force or an Oracle, too, is the first I would say is.

9:06marketers are broadly trying to figure out how do I get to this nirvana state of true one-to-one personalization? And how do I do that at scale? If I'm a massive brand, I'm Abercrombie, which if you, I mean, you look at their stock price over the last 12 months, they've been a rocket ship. They're like the darling of retail right now. They're doing so many things well. And you've got brands like that who are trying to say, how do I actually take at scale millions and millions of customers and create an experience that is truly one-to-one for them in terms of how do I personalize messages and content to them and do it in a very scalable and authentic sort of way.

9:45The second would be true, legit AI, like AI that's powering efficiency and innovation for a brand. And I'm happy to double-click more into that as well. And then the third I would say is how do I take this myriad of vendors that I have to do? because I bought Salesforce or Oracle if I'm a marketer or a brand. And then I realized there's a bunch of gaps. So I have to go buy a bunch of other point solutions and a bunch of other pieces of software to augment those gaps, increase my costs, increase the amount of tools my teams have to manage. And so this idea of consolidating the number of tools a marketer or marketing teams and organizations have to work with and having those better integrated into the systems within my organization.

10:30Those are critical. There's nothing that kind of kills the speed of innovation for a business or a brand than this inability for, you know, 25-year-old software tools like Salesforce or Oracle to not be able to play nicely with other tools within a company's kind of marketing technology stack. That is a massive issue and gap and something that we've invested considerably in trying to make sure that we're solving that for people in a way that removes the friction, removes the red tape, and lets people just be able to run. So I do want to double click on AI as well as talk about hyper-personalized customer experiences, which we will, Fire Nation, when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

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12:33It's a really good way to even frame that, Gildy. I like that. I would say it's doing both right now, and it's probably doing more on the noise side, I think speaking candidly on that front. it's noise because in kind of this world everybody picks up and globs on to certain terms or acronyms or things that feel hot and trendy and so they just put it on everything and then that dilutes I think what is real and tangible and can really move the needle for folks so I do think it's a mix of both and probably a little bit more on the noise and the hype side of things right now The reality, though, is true AI that is, I'll speak from kind of our lexicon or our world that we're dealing with, true AI is enabled very effectively based off of the data set that it has to learn from.

13:35So if you don't have a rich data set of information to learn from, your AI is only going to be as good as that data set that you have to be able to kind of jump off from as a springboard, if you will. So I think that is a fundamental piece of it at the end of the day. Again, I'm happy to kind of go a little bit deeper on that. But first, I would say it is very real. It is very tangible. It is going to change the world for not just marketers, but all of us as we know it. But I do think there's a lot more noise and hype that we're kind of in the middle of that we need to sift through to start to come out the other side on some of this.

14:13I actually want to move into personalized customer experiences. So if we wanted to scale hyper-personalized customer experiences, what is the key? The key, first and foremost, is your customer data. You need a single source of truth for that customer data. And I don't care whether that's, you know, that's, I don't care where that's sitting. But you do need a single source of that. And frankly, you know, you need a platform that is a data first platform like Cordial too. So our interest in customer data is not just to have a single source and to unify it. Just for it to sit there or to route it other places, it's to have all of it to then be able to action off of that.

15:06So using all of your customer data, your purchase history from years in the past to all of your real time, what are each of your customers doing on your website, on your mobile app, etc. Using all of that information at the point of trying to communicate with your customer, whether that's through email, SMS, mobile, you name the channel. at that point that I'm trying to communicate, let's say with JLD, hyper-personalization and call that true one-to-one is the ability to know what is the most current set of data and historical data on JLD at the moment that I'm trying to programmatically say, what should I put into this message that is going to compel JLD to, it could be purchasing a product, It could be reading content and creating an experience for you that is relevant to you.

16:00Let's say I'm sending you, you know, I'm Forbes or I'm BuzzFeed and I'm sending you content. Well, that doesn't do you or one of those brands any good if I'm sending you content that frankly is not relevant to what your behaviors have already shown me in the past. If I'm not taking that context into how I think about communicating with you right now and each moment in the future, it's not just a missed opportunity for the brand. It's a totally missed experience for you as the consumer. And it's 2024. Like, I'm sorry, there is no excuse for us to not be able to create an experience that is hyper-relevant, hyper-personalized to you and exactly what your past behaviors and using those past behaviors to also better predict, frankly, future behaviors, future pieces of content, products, et cetera, that you might be interested in.

16:54That is real and absolutely something that not just cordial, but I would just say we as software companies in general within this market should all be delivering for folks today. Now, it may seem like we're picking on Salesforce a little bit, but frankly, they deserve it because they've prioritized acquisitions over in-house development. So let's talk about what this means for the next wave of innovation in future consolidation? I think there's a shift going on right now. I see it every day. And it's not just because the market has shifted a bit too, though I think that plays into the calculus on some of this too, where when there's not just money raining from the sky, people have to maybe think with a little bit more pragmatism in terms of where they're making their investments and where they're getting yield from those investments too.

17:48But I think that's forcing, I mean, it's creating a bit of a wake-up call for companies to say, am I really getting everything that I expected out of this investment from Salesforce or from Oracle or from Adobe? And I think the answer, not to overly pick on them too, but I think it's that people are saying they're not. And this is a moment for companies like Cordial and many others to, frankly, really step up to the plate. And there's a burden of responsibility on companies like ours then to not just kind of meet the moment, but to rise to the occasion in a way that says, what is being underserved?

18:28Well, we need to make sure that we are consistently driving innovation. We believe that we are leading the charge in marketing technology around AI. We've got to keep doing that and deliver on that promise for folks. We believe that the service that we're giving folks cannot just be lip service. It can't be in a marketing slide. It's something that we have to deliver on and wake up for every single day. Like there's nothing that, again, kind of going back to our name too, is you can't be antithetical to some of these things because it is about building trust with folks. And if you, I think that's that changing of the guard.

19:03You can't just market your way into this the way Salesforce, Oracle, and Adobe have and using that size and leverage to do that. for companies like Cordial and others, this is a seminal moment for us to do what we say we're going to do. And frankly, not just deliver, I think over deliver on the expectations that we're setting with folks. And I think that that's a huge moment. That's an exciting moment. That's something for me and I think for others should be worth waking up for every single day. Fire Nation, I hope you've been following along and really getting fired up with where the future is heading because it's an exciting time to be alive.

19:42And Jeremy, if you wanted to make sure that our listeners took away one thing from our entire conversation today, what would that one thing be? I would inspect what you expect. How about that? Meaning, don't just take the sales slide or what's on a website for it. We are in a moment where everyone should have to kind of show the proof that's in the pudding, like prove what you're saying. And I think these are great opportunities within software where we can do that. We should be doing that. And, you know, I think that that is a path to starting to be able to rebuild that trust with marketers and with brands.

20:31I think that onus is on not just Gorgial, plenty of other companies. I would say the same for Salesforce or Oracle and Adobe. There is trust to be rebuilt. And I think those are opportunities and ways to be able to do that. Jeremy, if you wanted Fire Nation to connect with you, learn more from you, what is your call to action for our listeners today? Cordial.com is a great place to engage with Cordial and with us as a company. But myself personally, whether that's on LinkedIn or on X2. Yeah, I love talking about this stuff. I'm passionate about this. It's what I've spent almost 25 years of my career doing over two startups.

21:14And, you know, the first one was a great exit. And we're building what I believe is a very generational company here in Cordial. And, yeah, I love this stuff. I'm passionate about serving marketers and brands and, like I said, building trust and delivering on what we say that we're going to do. Fire Nation, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with JS and JLD today, so keep up the heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Just type Jeremy in the search bar on the show notes page. It'll pop right up. And Jeremy, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation.

21:53For that, we salute you, and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks so much, JLD. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Jeremy for sponsoring today's episode and to Fire Nation's successful entrepreneurs. They're great at three things, productivity, discipline, and focus. And that's why I created the Mastery Journal so that you can master those three things, productivity, discipline, focus, in just 100 days. And we're talking step-by-step. So visit themasteryjournal.com. I'll catch you there or on the flippity-flip side. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolfe and Nathan Lands, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

22:33Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts.

22:59Thank you.