Ariel Kelman (Salesforce) | Leading the Charge in AI Innovation

25:02This is one of the biggest problems when you're doing these attribution exercises is that especially when you have direct salespeople, because it's pretty easy to get to a point where you're like, okay, for all the data we're getting off our website or all digital programs, you know, I know what the accuracy is. But of course, it's the humans that always mess everything up. And when you're trying to do attribution, you need to basically capture all the touch points so the machine learning model can sort of figure out the correlation. And, you know, you're dealing with, let's just say you feel 90 % confident in all your marketing touch data, but you feel maybe 50 % or 40 % confident in the sales data because you have very diverse usage of Salesforce automation tools by different sales teams.

25:46And you got to decide how you kind of account for that because otherwise you're under, you know, if you assume that salespeople aren't entering all their activities, for example, which is probably fair, you can't just ignore that because then you'll be overweighting the marketing impact on some of the pipeline. So I think a lot of this goes down to kind of being humble and not really taking things for granted. And when you're just going through making these decisions, just take the other side and say like, what are the, all the ways that people could say this is not valid and answering your, you know, potential critics before you finish.

26:19It's kind of like a, you know, how you do an academic research paper. That's why I kind of go back to like, you need a good data science leader. I think investing in finding the right person for that is super important because marketing is this dance between, you know, creativity and science and you got to use the right hats for the right jobs if I mix metaphors there. No, I get it. If you feel like you're sort of setting the standard now, what's the next milestone? I mean, you talked about data scientists, you talked about quality of the data. What do you think is the next breakthrough ahead for multi-touch attribution?

26:52We're kind of in a steady state on multi-touch attribution. We're not really investing a lot and trying to figure out what's the next new way to do it. And that's one of the things I'm eager as I talk to other CMOs to kind of learn about this. I would say that all the excitement around generative AI and agents has, you know, somewhat diminished a lot of the attention on predictive AI. And I think we're talking about some problems as being solved, but I don't think we've fully solved multi-touch attribution. I think we'll find some people, well, actually, maybe as I'm thinking about this out loud, it's about the data.

27:25It's investments and things you can do to increase the data. Like we have this product, Einstein Activity Capture. And so what it does, and there's other solutions that do this too, of it basically goes through the sales people's emails and calendars to auto log activities and using a little bit of machine learning to be like, oh, okay, well, he went and met at Wells Fargo with these three other people and the subject name matches one of the open opportunities. So that's probably a meeting about that opportunity. And then even to doing AI on calls, which we have a product for that. There's other solutions for that as well, but that's augmenting all the data and better data you have, the better all these answers are going to be.

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29:19I want to talk in some depth. I mean, we're dancing around it already, but I want to talk in some depth about marketing organization design, because obviously, Agentec AI is changing a lot of organization designs. And some of the customers you talked about in your earnings call are doing that. And you're doing it yourself within your own organization. I tell you, Ariel, it's one of the top questions I get asked when I make my rounds with CMOs. What are others doing in org design with everything that's going on right now with AI. So I'd like you to talk about your journey on that in your last two years and what you have learned.

29:53And then we can talk about what you're learning from colleagues as well. Yeah. Well, I first, I would say that the work we're doing with agents has not influenced our org design. And maybe just quickly, just a couple of things that we're doing. So we, as a marketing team, we had, so we put our, an agent on our website that has done, I think, about 700 ,000 in the past six months. So people can ask any product question they want and also, of course, get their support inquiries dealt with. That has improved our ability to generate pipeline from our website by pre-warming some of these leads before they get to the SDRs.

30:30And then we also have an SDR agent that we route leads to in addition to the human SDRs. So we've been running the numbers and in the past 10 years, we haven't followed up on 20 million leads. Wow. Which is pretty normal. It's like we didn't call them back. Well, because what do most companies do? You score the leads. Let's say we do it one to five. We route the fours and fives to the human SDRs, and then you throw the other ones nurture campaign. But instead we have AI agents now following up on every lead and engaging in multiple conversations over email and eventually, you know, constantly rescoring them and eventually sending them over to the human salespeople.

31:09Then of course we have an agent for our events. You know, you're at our event and you say, oh, is there a, an analytics session tomorrow? Oh, add it to my calendar. So you can do some of those things. And it's, it's really about making us more productive, increasing our conversion rates, but it hasn't really changed our org structure. And maybe it will in the future. I mean, even in our creative organization, you know, we don't produce creative software. And, you know, like a lot of companies, we're using all these tools. We haven't reduced staff on creative people. We're doing more iterations.

31:42You know, what I kind of think about with a lot of these AI tools for employees is if you can give someone twice the productivity, you can cash in that productivity gain in a couple ways. You could, let's say, I'm going to do the same stuff, but in half the time, I'm going to go do twice as much in the same time, or I'm going to do the same stuff with half the people. And at least my experience has been in this context of most marketing teams, their stakeholders are asking for three, four, five times as much stuff for them to do they have time for. They're basically, they're cashing in those AI productivity savings in the form of some combination of doing more work, iterating more to get a better outcome, and then capturing back a little bit for better work-life balance.

32:29Because we're all, you know, marketing, we're dealing with all these date-driven deadlines. And so that helps too when all the creative people don't, you know, have to spend half an hour to do something instead of three hours to do something when some crazy exec like me says, change it at the last minute. What are you hearing from your colleagues about organization design? Because as I said, it is a frequently asked question. I was at a conference about two weeks ago. Don McGuire, Qualcomm, went through how he is thinking about his organization with AI at the center. Very powerful presentation, very pragmatic, very results-oriented.

33:02And he went in basically zero basing his organization based on the new capabilities that are available to us. As you talk to CMOs, and you sound like you do about as much as anyone, what are you hearing about their thoughts? I think a lot of what, when I'm talking to CMOs about work structures, a lot of what we're talking about is what's the right centralization versus decentralization model. And I personally find there is no right answer that it's kind of a first principles thing and that it changes as you scale up. Say you're a small company, you have a 30-person marketing team in the US, and maybe you have one marketer each in eight other countries.

33:40Well, you're not going to go decentralize email marketing and put like a Salesforce marketing cloud or Marketo person in each of those eight countries because you can't afford to do it. But if you have a hundred person marketing team in 10 countries, yeah, you want to have some of that decentralized expertise. I personally believe that the more decentralized you can be, the faster you can move, but you have to have the right systems to make sure that you are not sacrificing quality for moving fast. I want to talk about in my homework on you, you have a couple of beliefs that are very, very strong.

34:17And I want you to riff on those for a minute and you can disagree with me if it's not a belief, but I think it is. And the first one is I've heard you say that you are not a full funnel marketer. So could you talk about that a bit? Here's what I would say is that, and again, conversations should be grounded in that I'm a B2B marketer. So a lot of the full funnel conversations that people approach me with involves doing a integration of both messaging and allocations of budgets from top of the funnel awareness all the way down to performance, getting people to sign up and spend money. And I found that when you have multiple products and multiple geographies all intersecting, that setting up automated systems and move the spend around is too complicated for most companies to do.

35:04It sort of gets to like, I think it's operating with a false sense of precision that you think you have the quality of data and the nuance to automate when often you don't. And then also, if you think about having a top-level brand message and then having campaigns below where it ladders down all the way, I think in a B2B company where you have lots of products, that coordination ends up being stifling to the product line campaigns, which often have different messaging goals than the top level company brand. And so you're sacrificing both time and flexibility. Look, I've always been someone who is okay sacrificing a little bit of brand consistency if I'm going to get more speed and better alignment with the specific output objectives of individual campaign owners.

35:59Yeah, I get it. Well, how do you decide then? because I see a fair amount of your top of funnel work and it's very good, by the way. I think it's very creative and it's very relevant and it's very interesting. How do you decide how enough is enough or how do you make that decision? Yeah. Maybe to get into a little bit of measurement here that as a CMO, you're responsible for doing a bunch of things. And some of those things are very measurable scientifically. Some of them are not measurable scientifically. And the ones that are not measured perfectly scientifically, there's a wide range of how CMOs will characterize them.

36:34They think about brand advertising, TV advertising, TV advertising for a B2B tech company that is largely direct sales oriented. You can go make up a real crazy complicated formula, but I haven't found one that I could go stand behind that says this is the dollars of ROI. So what I've looked dipper in advertising and said, you got to be practical here. Number one, what you want to measure is, is it impactful first? Like, is it good? And by good, meaning, well, you had some goals, some sort of awareness and consideration goal. If it's to take like IT execs and change their perspective to have them think that you're a leader in this space that they should go and look at, well, you can go and do surveys around that and ask people if they've seen the ad, did it make an impact or looking at, you know, time-based changes on brand trackers and understanding was the ad campaign effective at changing people's minds on the things that you want to do.

37:31That's what I tend to focus on along with the cost efficiency of like, you know, TV versus digital versus let's say brand integrations. And then when you get to budget allocation, my personal approach has been to have some percentage of your marketing budget that you're comfortable spending on the non-ROI measurable stuff like brand advertising while keeping enough of the budget on the things you can measure. So all the performance and demand generation that we do, we feel very comfortable about being able to measure that down to ROI by looking at the pipeline that comes out of it that's attributed back to the campaigns and the close rates of the different sales teams and product areas of those opportunities, then combining with the margins of the different businesses.

38:21And you get an ROI. You can't do that with brand advertising. And also TV too, it's very difficult to AB test as well. You do seem to have a good creative muscle and a good creative team there. I can't say that for every B2B company that is really, really strong in direct marketing, performance marketing. So how have you cultivated that? First of all, thank you. And I mean, it's very subjective, right? Seems to be working though. I mean, honestly, the way I do is to, Fred who sings that song, keep them separated. But again, this kind of gets back to my skepticism on full funnel marketing. I've always liked to have the creative people that are working on the brand campaigns, not to be burdened by all of the operational performance needs of all of our product teams and what they're trying to accomplish with their businesses.

39:07You know, I like to start with, have them start with the truth of what's the brand problem we're trying to solve, which is usually in the form of like, this set of people have these beliefs that we want to change and go work on that. And to keep them separated from all of the machinery of how do you do effective performance marketing? I just find it to be very, you know, very different. Second belief, you believe a really big change a year from now will be how AI changes what a website looks like. Say more about that. Yeah. So, you think about, you go to a website today, it's mostly oriented around like search and browsing, you know, search for people to find something that they want and browsing really for you to put the message in front of them that, you know, they didn't know they needed.

39:53And if you think about having an agentic experience on the website, where when you go there, you can talk to an AI agent that, you know, has the right combination of a pushy salesperson and a utilitarian helper to give you what you need, that as you have a conversation with them, well, they should be able to generate the website in real time. And really, if you step away from the technology, what happens when you're talking to a good, let's say you're in a room with someone and you're asking them to tell you about a product, they'll often pull out their laptop. And as you're asked questions, go, oh, well, that's an interesting question.

40:29You want to know about how we're different than these guys. Okay, here's a little chart. See the difference? And they go, well, where are you guys available? Okay, you pull up a little map. And so salespeople have been doing this for, you know, as long as we've had PowerPoint. And a lot of good agentic results come from replicating what are the best humans do. And so to make a website more conversational, I think is a really, really exciting thing that we're going to be seeing in the future. It's something we're working on with our products. I'm working on with our marketing technology team. But, you know, I have some of our engineers say, well, the future of websites will just have an agent search thing of what can I help you with today?

41:09Maybe for some will. But I definitely think we're going to see a lot more of the traffic come into that aspect because you're usually going to the website with a purpose. And if you can prove to the visitors that the agent can be helpful and, you know, getting done what they want done, I think it will drive a lot of the share of traffic. Last belief we're going to talk about today is you believe that a really critical new organizational capability will be creativity in exploring and using the best AI tools for your business challenges and opportunities. I agree with you on that, but how do you bring that to life within Salesforce?

41:43Yeah, I think this is something not just marketers, but a lot of executives struggle with is how do you effectively motivate your employees to use these new AI tools? And what I've kind of found is that use of AI tools kind of exposes a new dimension of performance of your employees, which is eagerness for change and eagerness to embrace new ways of doing things. I keep going back to that short video, Who Moved My Cheese? I guess it was a book too. It's like some of these mice are really, really scared and angry when the cheese gets moved. And then there's other people out there or mice, people in our case, who kind of get energized and they see something new and they're like, oh, wow.

42:27But there's a lot of people out there, not just the marketing teams who they approach their days like, I want to get through this week with as least problems as possible. And when I'm asked to think strategically, it's like, how do I do things the same way, but maybe get like five or 10 % more efficiency? You know, if you tell people start to use all these tools in a new way, I'll kind of give you one example. This guy, Patrick, that runs product marketing for us, he was going to go prepare for a press interview talking about when we, after we announced our Informatica acquisition. And he went to Google Gemini and went in and basically loaded, gave it the messaging document and said, I want you to pretend to be a reporter.

43:07Here's the reporter. I want you to test my ability to answer questions about this acquisition, ask me five questions, score each answer according to what it says in our messaging document and give me an aggregate score. And then he, so he created that as a, you know, Gemini has these gems, just package prompt templates. And he said, well, I went and basically did five mock interviews in between meetings the day before. And it would ask questions just like the reporter, because it went and looked up like, who's this reporter? How do they ask questions? That wasn't a big IT project. That was him going and spending literally like 15 minutes writing up a prompt.

43:46And, but there's a lot of people who are like, no, no, no, I need the briefing document from the PR team. And this is just one example. It's like, I had chief creative officer. He's now making a lot of videos just using his own AI tools without going through the 30 or 40 people. And he's using that to inspire his whole team. How can we like double, triple the throughput of what we do and save us some time, you know, having to stay up all night before we have to finish something. And so I think a lot of it's top down. It's having the leaders in the company actually use the tools, you know, and inspiring people to follow that lead versus assigning a program manager to say like, well, we're going to come up with 15 AI projects to do.

44:31Okay. You've got to pick the right projects. You got to have the leaders bought into this kind of behavior and experimentation and eagerness to do new things and then have them push that down. And also figuring out like which employees are more AI ready than others. I'm a firm believer in this idea of you're not going to be replaced by AI, you're going to be replaced by the employees who are more adept at using the AI tools. Don talked about that at Qualcomm, the super users. Go there first. They'll take you to the right place.

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46:07Okay. Let's shift into the creative brief. And my first question is, you already referred to this one in talking about Mark, but you have worked under two of the most famous and iconic and successful founders, CEOs of all time, Bezos and Mark. What have you learned from each one of them that has influenced your leadership style? I think maybe starting with Jeff, and I didn't actually work too closely with Jeff. I mean, Andy Jassy ran that business for most of the time I was there, but, you know, we did spend a little bit of time with him. But I think Jeff's personality is just, it's embedded in the whole operational process of Amazon.

46:41And I think like the biggest lesson I learned was that you can institutionalize culture, that if culture matters to you, if the human behaviors that you want to value matter, you need to write them down and then you need to build them into the operational processes of your companies. So they actually get followed. So at Amazon, these leadership principles, like a lot of people have looked at those, which are just a written down, you know, what are the human behaviors that we think are successful at this company? And then to have that built into the hiring, have it built into performance management, to promotions, that you're writing promotion documents in the language of these behaviors.

47:20And when you're interviewing people, everyone's assigned the behaviors and you have a bar raiser, they can veto hires if they don't meet the bar for these leadership principles. So that aspect of really, it's scalability. It's like, you know, if I've talked to a lot of startup CEOs who they're like, oh, really depressed because like we've gone from 30 to 100 people and like we're losing our culture. Ask them, well, did you write it down? Oh, no, no, we didn't. Do you create some process where when you interview people, you test them on some of these things? You know, like if you care about humility, like ask every person, hey, what's the biggest mistake you've made?

47:59and what have you learned from it? And, you know, as you've probably experienced, a lot of people actually can't answer that question. Like, theoretically, they're not able to because there's a lot of, like, pathological narcissists out there. Never think they made a mistake. Anyway, so that, so I'd say that's the biggest thing from Jeff, and I think a lot of companies copy that. And with Mark, really, like, I think a lot of what I learned about product marketing came from Mark. I think he's one of the best product marketers of really first valuing the messaging. and you know you take some companies some ceos that are very engineering led they really have i think an excessive belief that the product will win for them which look at the end of the day like product having a better product i think is a prerequisite for a lot of the success that you have in marketing or is a big change in that but understanding that you really need to get the differentiation nailed in a way that is both, you know, inspiring to customers, credible, and then repeatable by your salespeople.

48:59And so like I had someone sort of define product, good product marketing is taking complex products and turning them into simple messages that your B minus salespeople can be effective delivering to customers. And that's really, really, really hard. and it takes a lot of energy. And from, you know, when I started at Salesforce in 2005 and, you know, working on trying to explain to IT people why SaaS was actually good for them versus bad, which now sounds boring, but at the time was like pretty controversial. You know, Mark's clarity and had a sort of transition from product truth to messages that were inspiring and exciting to customers was, you know, very educational for me.

49:42You were an undergraduate student in economics at Cal Berkeley. After that, you really spent your entire career in software. What were you thinking back in your undergraduate? Did you have this yearning to be in software or was it more serendipity? What was your dream back then? I think it just sort of ended up that way. Like, I mean, for some reason, I think it's crazy at the time when I was in college and graduating in 1995, I thought the only job that is worth doing, do one of those two year analyst programs at an investment banking firm, probably read too many books on, you know, all the crazy Wall Street stuff.

50:15So I didn't get one of those jobs. And I started to look for other things. And I ended up getting a management consulting job at a small boutique strategy firm in Palo Alto that worked with all these tech companies. And that's where I think I got excited about working in the technology industry. There's just so much innovation. I'm the kind of person that's just excited by new ways to do things that are disruptive and that you know are the future, but that a lot of people haven't really figured out yet or haven't agreed yet. You seem to be really jazzed about your role these days. Is this the best time you've ever had in your career?

50:53Look, it's fun for me, especially because anytime you have something that's very disruptive where people are trying to figure it out, you have hard marketing problems to solve. And you have customers that are excited about using the new technology and you got to figure out a way to use that customer success to push your business forward. And so with Agent Forest, with AI agents, I mean, it's something that is top of mind for so many companies and it's something that we're, you know, leaders in developing. And I think, you know, as a marketer, you want to be working somewhere where you have hard marketing challenges and where you can have impact, where the products they make are actually kind of, you know, relevant.

51:35What's the first brand you remember making an impact on you as a young boy? Oh, that's a good question. Maybe Ford. As a kid, I always liked Ford Mustang. And I always kind of looked when I was a teenager at the current, you know, versions of the Mustang and like, let's say 1992, 93, 94, and just thinking about, whoa, what happened here? Like, this doesn't get me, you know, excited and want to jump in a car and drive as you look back at some of the ones from like the 60s and 70s and kind of same with Corvette on the Chevy side. But, you know, as a teenage boy, like, you know, you're looking at cars a lot.

52:11So what's the first software brand you remember making an impact on you? I think really Microsoft Access. For some reason, I kind of was into database at the time. My first job out of college, I was doing a lot of surveys in this management consultant firm. And we'd hire like 30 temps to make, you know, a thousand calls and have to collate all the data. You know, we'd use Microsoft Access. I don't know if you've heard of that before. It's an old database product. And then, you know, it would be slicing and dicing the data and the thing would get corrupted all the time. And then I looked up, I called them tech support and I saw, oh, there's these things on the file menu called compact and repair.

52:46And that's when I'm like, wow, that's a pretty shitty database. If they have to put like repair in the file menu, like, isn't that their job to go figure this out? So that kind of like, you know, started my skepticism on a lot of products. And, you know, I don't know if anyone has a database product with that anymore on the file menu. So who has been the most inspiring person in your life? I mean, I think I've been inspired by a lot of people. I don't have a singular moment. I work with a lot of really interesting people and I try and take the best from them and kind of not copy the worst. And, you know, working at Amazon, I was very inspired by Jeff and Andy and his ability to run, you know, very large, complex companies.

53:27companies and, you know, Mark with, as I said, the product marketing, but even back to like when I first started management consulting, you know, basically the guy, this guy, Dan Thomas that ran a small strategy firm, what he taught me was this, you know, idea, everyone's opinion is valid and that you should challenge everything. And that we would just go in and analyze companies. Should they buy something? Should they not buy something? and basically tell truth to power and just tell them this is wrong, this is stupid. Oh, this is the smart thing you should be doing, but you guys aren't spending any attention on that.

54:02And I've kind of taken that approach of, you know, try and encourage people to not filter out the truth for the sake of social cohesion. And it's easier said than done in a lot of big companies. Well, we'll end on that note, Ariel. Thank you for this wonderful conversation. Congratulations on everything in your team are doing. Looking forward to Dreamforce. And I think the leadership you've taken with Agentforce is changing the world. And I congratulate you and your team on that. Great. Thank you. I appreciate the time. That was my conversation with Ariel. Three lessons from this one for your business brand and life.

54:41And the first one is, and I love this, how do you scale the culture you want? Ariel talked about a key lesson from working in many years at Amazon under Jeff Bezos. was how to scale culture. And you can't scale culture if you don't write it down, write down the values, write down the desired behaviors, and then integrate it into your operations, how you recruit, how you evaluate performance, really in everything you do. So how to scale culture was a great leadership lesson on that one. Second takeaway, how do you find the right balance between centralization and decentralization? It's the top issue many CMOs face.

55:19Ariel talked about it as the top issue he hears as he talks to his colleagues. And the right way to do it, there isn't one right way. Ariel talked about it. There isn't a silver bullet. There's not one answer. The answer really is in getting everyone together to figure it out with transparency and teamwork and common goals. And the third takeaway, we all want to spend our money in the best possible way. Salesforce feels it is best in class in attribution, multi-touch attribution, which means you're spending the money in the best places. I asked Ariel for his advice on that. Two simple things. Make sure you have great data scientists and make sure the quality of your data is outstanding.

56:04That's it for this week's episode of the CMO Podcast. As always, I would be grateful if you shared our show with your friends, along with subscribing and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. The CMO Podcast is a Vive original production. The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of our sponsors or its personnel, nor do our sponsors advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.