How to Measure the ROI of AI with Christine Royston, CMO of Wrike | Ep. 416

0:01Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray. And join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast. And today I have a very special guest and she's a CMO of Wrike, but she's worked for like some of the coolest companies out there. I would say like Udemy, Bitly, Dropbox, Salesforce, leading teams there. And now she's been at Wrike for over two years now, which is amazing.

0:52And we're going to talk all things, but I'll let Christine introduce herself and let her talk a little bit what Wrike does. And then we'll get into the podcast today. Sure. Well, thank you for having me. So I am the CMO here at Wrike. I've been here, as you mentioned, just a little bit over two years looking at everything brand and demand, all the core marketing and communication functions. and really focus on partnering across the organization to drive growth. So Wrike is a platform for complex work and work that gets delivered by humans and AI agents. We've got 20 years of enterprise work management experience.

1:36And so with that breadth of experience, it really gives us the ability to give organizations governed context-rich foundation that they can use to put AI agents to work on their most important workflows. So it's a super interesting product. We have marketers as a core audience, so my team gets to use it all the time. But then we also partner with a breadth of organizations, anyone from manufacturing companies who are looking to figure out how can they bring products to market faster, or marketing agencies that are looking at how they can manage multiple clients. So it's a pretty diverse set of customers that we have.

2:14Before we get into the build versus buy talk, you asked a question that most teams skip entirely. So what's the first thing you actually assess before your team touches an AI decision? Okay. So I think before we look at making a decision, I want to make sure I've got the team that has the right skills in place, that the team is structured in the right way to kind of pull this off. So I think some of the most important things are, have you set clear expectations with your team on how you're expecting them to leverage technology in general? How are you expecting them to use AI? And looking at when you're making these decisions, how are you going to measure success?

3:04So I really look at, you know, what is the velocity of the work that they're doing? What's the impact of the execution? So if you're looking to buy a tool, if you're looking to buy an AI-enabled tool, or if you're looking to build in-house with AI, how are you actually driving that increased velocity and better results from the programs? You know, I want to make sure, you know, we're running programs not only more quickly, but programs that are more effective because we are partnering with AI or we're partnering with a vendor to make sure that we're delivering the best work possible. It's like super smart because I think a lot of people a year from now are going to look back and say, what was actually the ROI of using all these AI tools?

3:51And if you don't have that structure in place of measurement of if I implement this AI agent or I use AI in this workflow and it didn't do anything or it did something, we can do something. Because you can overspend on tokens. You can overspend on using it. But what is the actual ROI? And I think a lot of marketing teams or a lot of teams are going to start getting asked that question. We're in the test mode of AI, which we only get for a short period of time. And then they're going to come to marketing and be like, all these tools are expensive. You guys are using AI everywhere. What is it actually doing?

4:35Are you seeing uplift? Are you seeing ROI? What are some things that you think teams should be doing right now who are implementing AI to make sure that they are measuring this up front? So when they do get asked the question, what is ROI, they're set up for success. Yeah, I mean, I think you really need to map out your workflows and what are the objectives where you're trying to deliver with those workflows. because the workflows themselves need to be optimized before you are applying AI. You don't want to put AI on a workflow that has too many approvals, that, you know, is going back and forth between multiple teams with unnecessary handoffs.

5:24So you sort of have to optimize the core first. Is the way we're doing work today the most efficient? and then look at how can AI automate that even more or pull out more of the tasks that are routine and get those executed and then have a human actually review it. So I think kind of going back to the basics, like are you working efficiently today? And then how can AI help you be even more efficient? Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think I always said this because I was in marketing operation. Like you have to be able to do a task manually great before automating the task. Exactly. And if you don't know what great looks like, AI is not going to tell you what great looks like.

6:09You're the taste layer of whatever AI is going to produce. And I think that's such a good point that people just think that AI can solve and I can hire a marketer with AI and they don't have a marketer in-house and they don't know what good marketing looks like and they hire an agent and the agent doesn't do what they thought it was going to do because they have no filtering process or no human insight there so i think that's super um super important um i also want to go into um i know this is a big question with all cmos but how are you thinking about hiring these days and then also thinking about like restructuring your team based on like what you know AI could do for your team?

6:58Sure. So, you know, I think that on the hiring piece, from a skills perspective, something that hasn't changed is you're always hiring for curiosity. You want marketers to be always asking the why, always looking at how can they do things a little bit differently for better results. And I think that that is super important to leverage AI. You have to be thinking about what, not only because the pace of innovation that's happening in the market today, because there are always new models, new examples, new tools. But I think that you've got to have the curiosity in terms of, you know, this is working today, but how could I get it to work, you know, twice as well or deliver twice the results?

7:49I think on the technical side of things, I feel like many marketers have always been technical. We've always been deep in the technology. But really, I think we've got to kind of up our game on the technical side. And again, back to that curiosity, there's a ton of information out there, best practices being shared either within your team or outside your team to actually go and figure out how do these tools work. So, you know, looking for the curiosity, looking for the technical skills, but also looking at, you know, where is it that in, you know, the interview process, the job description, I can make sure I'm being really transparent about how I'm expecting people to use AI.

8:32because it is evolving the way that work gets done. And although I think this is changing, you may run across people who, you know, aren't able to use AI in their companies. I don't think that happens as much in tech, but outside of tech. In that case, are people using AI in their personal life? Are they experimenting with it, even if they are not, you know, allowed or their security teams won't let them use it inside their company? Um, and what I look at is, um, you know, the first, the first kind of dedicated, I'll say hire or internal transfer that I looked at was I needed someone who could help to drive this transformation across the team and using more AI.

9:16Uh, and so I actually found someone in our organization, um, who was, uh, tech savvy and had a marketing, uh, background. So I actually carved out a role within my team reporting directly to me, an AI and automation marketing manager, and have him focus on how can we start to move some of these workflows into more AI enabled workflows. So kind of creating that first person to get things started. And then now as I'm looking at any new roles that open up across the team, how should we actually define that role? It probably shouldn't be the exact backfill that we had because now we've got an opportunity to look at how does this person do work differently?

10:02Has the profile changed? Has the way they do work changed? And so let's rewrite the job description to make sure it's focused on where we want to go in the future. I think for, you know, for my team, we're looking at it in that way. I do think, you know, other organizations and certainly AI native companies are able to kind of build and say, this is our ideal, our ideal org chart in, in an AI forward world for us as an established company. I'm looking at how does the organization change over time as we upscale the team, as we bring in new team members. Yeah, and I think both are not like different approaches, but I do think that AI is changing so fast that it's hard to just say that this is the set in stone or chart of what AI is going to look like now because even a month ago, AI looked different than it did today.

10:59So it's like, how could you make the decision that we need X when AI is changing? Yeah. So I also want to go into something some specifics. Like I know you've built some cool things internally with AI. Could you get into like like what you've built internally as a marketing team, how fast it took you to build it and what were like some of the results of building that? Sure. So, you know, I'd say last year was a lot of experimentation with individuals looking at how can they create something that's going to improve their piece of a workflow. And this year, we're trying to move more into scale. And so one of the key things that we've built out has been a content hub for the marketing team.

11:48So if you think about all the different types of content, even just written, you know, blog posts, LinkedIn posts, long form landing pages, ebooks, we wanted to create a tool that would help us to accelerate that, the creation of that, the approval of that. We've extended it to also include visual, so static design elements. And these are really areas where we look at the written content and visual content is required for almost every type of marketing campaign. And so this was our big opportunity to create something that would impact the whole marketing team and everyone could benefit from it.

12:29So we, that AI and marketing animation manager, you know, created this central place where we have input all of our personas, our messaging, all of our style and brand guidelines, and built the governance around it too in terms of how do we make sure that if you're creating, you know, a piece of content that is going out on the website, that if there's something we need to adjust, we can update that. page. If we're sending an email to our entire database, that is something that is going to be harder to adjust later. And so we're being clear around what are the approval processes, depending on types of content.

13:11But if you take a look at some of the results so far, we've really seen a lot of very specific measurable gains. And a couple examples, if you think about our SEO article creation, we were able to move a process of creating one article from three to four days that include a full day of SEO research. It now takes seven to 10 hours. So the team can get it done in a single day. So we're saving, you know, 65 % of the time needed to create an article. And so that is really a three to four X multiplier for the team. So that same team can actually deliver 25 articles a month versus eight articles a month.

13:58So that's just, you know, one example where we're able to get a lot more done on the SEO article side of things. It's also impacting other formats. So our case studies, that writing has dropped from three days to two. So have seen a meaningful ability to get more of those customer success stories out there. And our email campaigns went from two days to half a day. So a lot of very specific, measurable time saved and time that we can then turn into more strategic work or increasing the velocity and the amount of work that's happening. Yeah, that's super cool. I've always said that's like one of the biggest wins marketers could have is, especially established companies or companies that have been writing for a long time.

14:47You have so much words out there and documents out there and articles out there where you could have it stored in one place where AI knows. You can create those guardrails, like you said, the governments. You could create that brand voice. So people could either pull a quote from an article, go find an article, could create something in the right tone that we want for an email and stuff. And obviously it's not gone to like two hours because you need that human element to make sure that it sounds great. Like the links are right. If we ship this, it looks good. But at least it saves you so much time of that upfront research, the upfront looking for things, the upfront where I know I did this interview a year ago.

15:38Where could I find this interview and I could pull it up? So I think everybody needs to have a content brain that's AI in their company. I think that's a great example of efficiently using AI right now. What is that moment where you thought, wait, we just can do this ourselves with AI? Was there a specific trigger? Because I know like a lot of orgs is like, like AI saved a lot of marketing teams, the ability to having to ask a lot of people to do a lot of things. So what it was like that moment where you realize, hey, this is going to save us also like a lot of back and forth with a thousand teams because we're using AI.

16:26So, you know, I think the initial push was we saw the content creation process as one of the key bottlenecks for all of our programs. And we knew if we could improve that piece, all of our programs would get more efficient, more effective. And so, you know, that problem caused us to first go and look at external tools like we've always done. And we had just brought on our AI and automation manager to join the team. And so as we were taking a look at vendors, we partnered with him to kind of say, hey, what's the special sauce? Is this something that we could build ourselves? Is this something that we could potentially build more customized for our own use cases?

17:20Because we'll be able to integrate it into all the rest of the tools that we're using. we'll be able to integrate it into Wrike. So one of the key points for us was being able to integrate it into Wrike, the product that we use every day to manage our workflows, so that we weren't going kind of outside that system. It was something that we could integrate in and make sure that the content that was being created was linked back to the tasks and the projects that the team was working on. And so that partnership with this person on my team, he knew what was technically possible. He had a technical background.

17:57He also had a marketing background. We pulled him out of our digital marketing team. And so he was able to kind of take those two pieces of his experience to kind of say, okay, I know what the most important parts are. And I know what's possible to build with AI tools in general with our current stack. And the fact that he had kind of that dual expertise gave us the ability to kind of make the call and say, you know what, let's, let's try to build something ourselves and look at how do we take, you know, some of the different use cases that we have and build it into a single platform that we would need rather than potentially purchasing multiple, multiple tools to support the team in their, their content workflows.

18:41That's awesome. I think like, I know we, they used to be like, people used to say T-shaped marketer, but like having a table shape marketer where you have like someone who can be great at two things like someone who gets marketing and also is technical can if you just had the technical side and they didn't understand like how marketing works you might it might take 10x as long but just because he has that and he already knows your marketing team which is amazing too so that saves even way more time um i want to ask this question because i think since ai there's so many cool things you could do and i bet all your team is doing cool things with ai how are you encouraging like sharings of learnings and like failures of like what ai is doing inside your your team like is there like a how has that been done because i feel like if someone has a win and should be shared or someone tried something and failed everybody should know that a maybe maybe there's a different way to do this or maybe you shouldn't go down this rabbit hole of this AI workflow?

19:46So we absolutely encourage the teams to share, whether that is posting new use cases and learnings on our Slack channels, or we have specific time card off in my monthly marketing all hands, where we take a couple of key examples and have the teams come in and share with themselves. What did they build? What tools did they use? What tips and tricks do they have for the rest of the team? And then we've also started to capture a library of AI-enabled workflows so that we can kind of create this catalog where people can learn and look at tools that were used, the specific outcomes, what did the process look like before, what did it look like after.

20:35So there's this reference library and we're going to be accelerating this in terms of continuing to share those best practices. We want to make sure that we've got kind of regular power hours where people can come in and showcase what they've done and teach other people how to do something similar. I think that peer learning is super important where people might say, I'm in a different function or I have a different role, but this is the general idea of what this person was trying to do. And I can see how I can take elements of that. Or this person is using a new tool that I haven't quite gotten my hands into yet.

21:12And I want to see how do they use this tool and how do they actually operate it. I love that you have like shared wins in all hands. I think that's a key to make sure that people get us excited of what they're building. And I remember when I was a young marketer, I used to like, like, am I going to be like mentioned in the all like marking all hands on all hands? I think it's so cool for like the younger or like the upcoming markers in the team to always get their work shared internally. I also wanted to ask you, we're at like a weird, I think this is like the first time in marketing where we can ask this question where like, hey, when I want to do something in marketing, should I build it internally or should I go look and buy it?

22:03I think before we were like leaning on the side of, hey, could we find a tool that someone made to do this? But now there are AI tools that could spin things up that can be really good. And if you partner with engineering and company, you could spin up really fast. So how do you weigh that decision internally? that you have a, hey, I need to go, let's go buy a new tool to solve this problem, or hey, let's just build it internally because it'll be better for us if we build it internally ourselves because we know how our structure is. So I think that with AI, it changes the types of questions you're asking when you're looking at how do I solve this problem.

22:57I think that internal tools are great for speed, for specific use cases where you say, you know, potentially unique to my company or the way we work or the way we're structured. I need to figure out how to solve this problem. I think when you look at buying tools, you need to look at where do you need to have governance in place. and you need to make sure that you've got clarity and tracking around approvals. When you look at enterprise size customers where you're really, you know, operating at scale, and if something goes wrong, you need a trusted vendor team to support you. So I think the governance piece is certainly key.

23:50And that's where I would lean more into the external tools where those companies have the expertise that I just won't be able to build in-house easily. I think that another piece that I look at is, is this workflow touching customer data, our CRM tool, you know, anything in our automated marketing stack that might put ads out into the market, as an example. Now you're looking at access controls and how are you managing data and managing it in a compliant manner. And that piece is also one where I think as you look at buying a platform, those vendors have security teams. They have all the certifications.

24:35They have kind of the frameworks and the support system in place so that you can make sure that you're not giving access to data to people that should not have access to it. And I think another key piece is if you think about building out the internal tools, you're building it out with expertise in your processes, how work gets done in your organization. If you think about a more mature platform, those platforms have expertise across your industry, multiple use cases, multiple companies. And as you think about the AI that's being built and embedded in those products, it's been shaped by thousands of teams, workflows, customers, edge cases over the years.

25:26And so that compounding advantage, I think, really allows you to kind of provide this accumulated intelligence to customers. And so as I think about kind of those three pieces around the governance, the security side of things, and that industry-wide intelligence that I will want to tap into for certain types of tools, that's where I look at, you know, maybe that's something we shouldn't be building in-house. We should lean on an expert who has spent a lot of time and talked to a lot of customers about this workflow, about this problem, and they've solved it. And I can partner with them and purchase that platform.

26:05Yeah, and not only like they do this, but if you do that in-house, you're going to have to have someone managing all those things in-house. Like you're going to have someone managing governance of that tool, the security of that tool, patching bugs of that tool. You can't just build it and the tool just lives. It has to have all those three things. And if you don't have a team who can do that or it's going to cost more to do that, it might be more efficient just to go with a team that has built it, understands it, has a security, like you said. I think that's good. But obviously, there's like that low left, the lower left stuff, like building a content hub where like, hey, I'm not going to go find a tool that's going to help me build a content hub.

26:50I could just build my own hub and house. And it's secure enough. It's not sharing data with any customers or anything. It's all in turn. Also, we don't have to worry about it that much. What's the most expensive just by the platform decision you've ever seen a marketing team make? That's a good one. I mean, I think that most of those end up being marketing automation platforms. In my experience, when I look at my budget and see where it's going, that is kind of where a lot of the investment goes. I think that could be shifting as we look at the impact of AI on those tools. I think the importance of data is one that is becoming increasingly important for any company and especially for marketers is, you know, do you have access to the data structure in the right way so that you can apply AI on top of it?

28:05and be able to automate campaigns and be able to automate and make decisions and do the right targeting, provide personalized experiences for people. And so I expect we might see, you know, those big, big investment decisions shift more on the data side of things. Some of the big data platforms out there that you're going to want to make sure you have in place to connect your AI tools, whether they're internal or platforms that you're buying. Another question I have too is I know most of the marketing teams out there are pretty much using the same few tools that exist that are working. So how do you recommend a marketing team or marketing leaders?

28:54How does one stand out if everybody's using the same tools? Like, what do we have to have in those tools to make us, like, perform differently and do different things if everybody is going to use a cloud or ChatGPT or Jasper or this or that as tools that they use every single day? Yeah, it is definitely something that I am hearing discussed quite a bit in forums and groups that I'm part of, which is, you know, if we all have access to the same tools, how do we actually differentiate? And I think that that is where the human element comes in. It's where the creative ideas, applying judgment and taste to the output of of these tools that we all have access to is going going to be important.

29:42You know, how you use them is going to be just as important as using them in general. So I think that's why I am, you know, feeling like there's always going to be a place in the world for fantastic marketers, because that is what I think AI is not going to be able to replace. and I want to make sure that I am a marketer who also knows how to leverage AI to maximize and get the most sort of benefit out of it I can if my competition is using it and then make sure that I'm applying my unique expertise and background to how we're going to use the tools. Even with your example of your internal hire, I think like expertise is what makes that hire great and will be able to leverage the tools better than other people because he has internal expertise, he has marketing expertise, and he has technical expertise.

30:38And I think that's like the trifecta of expertise that's needed for that particular role internally. Yeah, I hear a lot of people asking that question of like expertise and then also the other thing you said earlier is like how could we have like the best first party data, the best first party research, the best first party, because that's also a differentiator because what AI can find on the internet, it's not going to be able to, and if you can spit out things that AI is not spitting out, that's also a different, especially in like in the content game of marketing or in the ads game of marketing where you're trying to be a little different.

31:29A couple more questions. One of them is that the budget conversation, like how are you thinking about like AI and a budget is like in the tool line item, is it its own line item? How do you approach that conversation where like what's AI doing? Mm-hmm. So I would say right now, if I had to bucket it into an existing item, I'd say it's a tool, it's a technology. But I think that we're probably going to have to carve it out as its own dedicated category just because, I mean, it's not a seat-based pricing model. It's not something that I can say, I know I'm going to spend this much on it this year, especially in the phase that we are where people are starting to figure out the power of it and how much we're spending on the usage now is probably going to increase significantly in the future.