How not to be boring in B2B, AI agents and lessons from F1 - Colin Fleming

0:28Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. of ServiceNow. And I'm here to talk to him at Adobe Summit in Vegas about what B2B marketers need to know that they don't know, and also how to use AI. AI has transformed marketing in the last year, and the development has been astonishing. So I want to find out where is AI impacting on marketing, and what should marketers be doing to use AI more effectively in the future? Here it is. Colin, welcome to the show. Yeah, great to be back with you, John. I was going to say, welcome back to the show, I should say, couldn't I? Because last time we were a few floors up in Salesforce Tower, weren't we?

1:00The area was there that day. It was, looking over to San Francisco. It was a beautiful day. But since then, you've moved on to ServiceNow. Yeah. So how's it going? It's amazing. You know, after 13 years at another company, it's always a daunting thing to jump and think about a different organization. New challenges, new problems, new people, new products and services. So it was a bit intimidating, I'm not going to lie, but I'm about 10 months in now. I love it. I love every minute I have it. new challenges, fresh things to take on. And it's a bigger role too, because when I was with you before, sort of a chief brand officer role now, and now it's a CMO role.

1:34So it's a full full role. Yeah, congratulations. Now, for anyone listening and watching that doesn't know what ServiceNow do, he's like, I haven't been asked that question before. It's one of those companies, isn't it, where you look it up and go, oh my God, you're everywhere. And I didn't know. But yeah, explain a bit about what ServiceNow do. It was actually the allure of joining the organization because they've built this incredible product that is everywhere. The tagline is the world works with service now because it literally powers so many IT departments and customer service departments and HR and finance and you name it.

2:07But nobody knew what they did. And to let's be honest, we still don't. And so that was part of the allure is to solve that problem. And we call ourselves the AI platform for business transformation. Basically, we plug in on top of all of your hundreds and hundreds of systems. The average company has 385 different applications. We plug it on top and make it almost the iPhone of the enterprise. We make it as clean as glass, one user experience. I don't log into any of those 385 applications. I log into ServiceNow for HR, for finance, for marketing, for sales, for customer service, things like that.

2:38So it's a bit of a new take on enterprise software. Wow. Am I right in saying something like 85 % of Fortune 500 companies use? I mean, that's a lot of customers you're servicing. Yes, it's a big business. I mean, we're now in the Fortune 500 top five enterprise software company in the world now. And so it's a big story. But we haven't been able to capture that sort of market interest yet. And so that's one of the things that we're focusing on is humanizing the brand, finding new ways to tell the story. Now, it's fascinating to know what the role of marketing is like in ServiceNow because, like, I mean, we often have this debate about B2C versus B2B and kind of what the role of the marketer is.

3:12How well understood is it in ServiceNow? Thankfully, one of the reasons why I joined the organization was Bill McDermott as the CEO. And if you look at the work he did at SAP, building an unbelievable brand at SAP, I sort of knew walking in that I had an evangelist for marketing in the C-suite, right, and making sure that the CEO was going to be on our team. And that's exactly what's happened. He is the biggest evangelist and the biggest supporter. And so it's made the transition really rather straightforward because we've got the support of the board and the support of Bill to really build this to be what we call Desco 21C, which is an intimidating acronym.

3:46We call it the Defining Enterprise Software Company of the 21st century. And we've got this massive ambition and we're going to need marketing to get there. So moving from a product-led company, which is historically where it's been, 20 years old now, started in San Diego, lots of IT, lots of product orientation, to now almost a brand-led organization that's trying to make its mark in the enterprise, which is a fun little journey. Now, I kind of grew up in FMCG, which is very kind of marketing-led. Tech and financial services in particular tend to be kind of product or service-led. And marketing is often seen as the sort of like, you know, you turn up the trade shows, you do the brochures and the website.

4:23It's kind of a service, isn't it, rather than a leadership role. Any advice for anyone listening about how you kind of position marketing in more of a leadership role in the organization rather than the sort of service function, which I'm sure a lot of people listening are resonating with this. You know, I've been so blessed to have incredible executive teams that do support marketing. But I will say it was a bit daunting walking in because it did suffer from a little bit of that. Marketers were subservient to other departments and felt like we didn't have a seat at the table or an opinion or a point of view on what it should be.

4:52And so the biggest shift we made was we stopped asking others to speak our language as marketers, CTRs and CAC and lifetime value, and start to think about what language does the business speak. And so things like putting the brand on the balance sheet, really thinking about shifting and speaking their language really helped us lower the guard down a little bit. And also showing how much value we can bring. So talking about, you know, the 95-5 rule, talking about things we've talked about in the past to really influence how long-term decisions gets made and the role of marketing within the organization is pretty critical.

5:26So we're on that journey. Like I mentioned, we're just 10 months in. But we've got a warm welcome for the entire organization. I mean, when we talked about this, when we last caught up about, you know, how buyers make decisions, how infrequently they make decisions compared to your perception, that kind of thing. I don't think this is that well-known generally. really. I mean, what's your thoughts on how well educated most marketers are about how B2B, you know, buying decisions are made? It's not there. It really isn't there. I think it's a, it's a small few percentile of people that really understand the buying journey.

5:53And one of the things that I have found is the company has done an incredible job building a digital footprint with our partners with Adobe and so many things like this, a world-class B2C digital marketing engine. And it was fantastic. I walked in like, what a gift to walk into something like this, but it was disconnected from the way actually people will buy our product. It was high transaction volume. But reality is, this is a 400 place deal cycle. We've got 15 members of the buying committee at least. And so the strategy was disconnected from the actual outcomes. And so we've tried to bring those two things together by bringing things like buying groups and buying centric or what we call opportunity containers to really think about, I'm not going to send this lead to sales until it's really ready.

6:39and I tanked lead volume by more than 50%. Did you? Oh, nice. New CMO comes in, tanks lead volume by 50 % going, what's going on? Yeah. But I tried to combine that language with look at the lead conversion and look at what's happening. And so we were able to make up the difference and more by saying these are ready for sales and they're ready for primetime. We know who the buying group is. We know who the influencers are. And that's a big shift. That's really, really interesting. Because it's not the spoken truth in B2B. Yeah. But the reality is there is known buyers and there are unknown buyers.

7:13The procurement folks, the finance folks, the people that are the whisperers in the audience, you've got to know those folks too. So number one was just like finding the buying groups and like shifting the mentality of what it means to generate a lead. And the second thing we've moved into obviously building more of a brand. So it's been a high transaction volume, lower funnel, lead volume narrative, which we've built an incredible business on. But we all know the Aaron Big Best Institute numbers, like 81 % of the buying decision is made upon first thought. So we needed to build the brand. And so hopefully you've seen some work from Andrew Selba and us in the past, recent past, that helps us kind of really establish service now as a little bit more of a household name.

7:50Well, we're getting to the other side. If I'm talking about the leads, I think that's quite interesting. So 50 % drop in leads, as in how did you define what a lead was then in that case? Because I mean, sales effectively are living off your leads. Of course, yeah. That's what you're here to do. So if you're dropping them by 50%, how did you define? It was an intimidating scenario. Meeting with the executive team. Hockey's sticking the wrong way. But again, speaking the language of the business. So yeah, lead volume is down, but conversion rate's up 60%, 70%. So we're sending quality leads. And really just thinking about preparing the interest, inbound interest for the company for prime time.

8:33And I do think that that's just a mindset shift. And so I did ask for forgiveness as I walked in the door. I said, I'm going to do this. And if it doesn't work, we'll turn it back. We can reverse this, no problem. But let me go. And the company had the trust to let us go. And it's been amazing to see the transformation as a result of that. And now marketing is so much closer to the transaction and so much more strategic and almost at the table with sales as business partners instead of some subservient nature, which is an amazing place to be. And every marketer wants that. And so, again, speaking their language and really helping be the best business partner possible has really enabled that.

9:08So to put it in kind of funnel terms, you do more of the kind of middle funnel bit, then getting the lead ready to have the conversation rather than just chucking loads of contacts out there. Well, the idea of a lead or an MQL is dead. That doesn't exist anymore. I mean, it can. Some companies still operate from like that. But really thinking about grouping leads together of relevant interest areas. So we may have the CFO and HR leader and IT leader, and we'll bring those together before we send it to sales to say, do we have the right signal? And you know what's interesting? You think, okay, I'm going to have one lead, and I'm going to send it over to sales, and it's going to convert, and everybody's going to make their quarter.

9:44That's not how it works, is it? We need to be thinking about establishing that buying group and really thinking about that long term, right? And so really thinking about how are we connecting the dots between all these buying groups? because one of the things we were doing is we weren't thinking about different departments. We were a single product company. But now we've got to make sure that we're establishing the right amount of interest and sending it only when it's ready. That means conversion's up, we can establish the right humans and make sure that we're building the right momentum inside the business.

10:14Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. You can do the long-term bit then, and then when people are ready to buy, boom, there you are. The team are ready to have the conversation and convert then, aren't they? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So talk about how are you going about building the brands then? Because we started a conversation about how many people understand what service now do. So you've got a bit of an education job as well as a brand job. So how have you approached that? Yeah, of course. Well, look, I mentioned the company is ambitious. And so the company wants to be that defining enterprise software company.

10:40So I didn't have to convince the brand or the company to go big. So it was already in the DNA. But we needed to find the right way to do that. And enter Idris Elba, enter a simpler story. We talked about this just before where the company was really set on selling products to different audiences. And that's a good – there's a lot of companies that operate in that way. We wanted to sell a vision. And that vision happened to coincide with obviously artificial intelligence entering all of our lives. But we are the company that can help put AI to work. And so initial tagline was put AI to work, which is an incredibly simple thing.

11:15We can put it into your business. We edited it towards the end though, put AI to work for people. And that for people was really, really, really important for us because we wanted to be in service of you and I. We wanted to be a more approachable organization. So we established a good message, a good narrative. We hired Idris, who's been an unbelievable brand partner for us. I didn't know a ton about Idris getting into this, candidly. But he's a serial entrepreneur, super approachable guy, wicked creative. And we fall in love with him. So, you know, matched with a more human story, telling that with a great brand ambassador and building out a cast, which I'm sure we'll talk to, has been a really good formula for us.

11:55And so really establishing that with identifying an ownable narrative and making sure that the world sees it. Yeah. One of the interesting things, I think, about how you've approached your advertising as well is you can even see the personas of buying groups actually appearing in the ad itself. Was that intentional? It was. You know, we've talked about distinctive assets in the past. And how important that is. for us, it was a really interesting sort of prompt that actually a relatively junior member of our team challenged us with is you're pushing the organization to buying groups and how we think about our lead flow and operations.

12:27But what if we thought about buying groups in our ads and in our communications? And that was a big unlock. So if you look at our recent advertising, you'll see Idris Elba, who is the face of it, of course, but you'll see characterizations, personification of our buying groups. You've got Patty in IT and Kate in HR and Jim in IT and dusty and app dev and then you've got this aloof character nick uh which is a lot of fun and so you've got a little bit of something to poke at nobody knows what nick does we still don't know and maybe at some point we'll find out but it's really bringing this idea of these buying groups to life and so our distinctive assets are very different than distinctive assets i've had in the past yeah but we're building their personas they're building their personality so that whenever we go to market in the different lines of business we do we've got a character that we can rely on and tell that story with.

13:12And over time, presumably those characters can turn up in different scenarios. Oh, you bet that. You kind of continue the drama. You absolutely bet. We're just getting started. We're just getting started with these characters. And it's so much fun. Like our product marketing organization is taking Patty in IT, for example, and she's in the demo videos. And she's in the persona campaigns. And we're really utilizing those characters for a lot of fun. So I think we don't know where we're going with it, candidly. And that's OK. We're just finding new ways of asking the questions and kind of playing and having some fun.

13:40I did smile at Nick, actually, because Idris gets in there at the end. And you can see Nick is the least impressed person in the entire film. Ironically, Idris created Nick, the character. So Idris is a funny one. We love Idris to death. And he's got such a wicked sense of humor. And we were on set with, ironically, my vice chairman, Nick Zitson, who's an incredible leader inside the organization. And Nick had a harder time explaining what he did because it's such a vast role and such a unique role. And so we had a character, this individual, who was going to be called something else, and it just goes, call him Nick, we're going to make fun of him.

14:15And so now we've got this character who we adore, and we're having a little bit of fun with him, yeah. Amazing. I mean, just talk through, I know you've got lots of different versions of the ad, but just talk through one of the typical ads, because it really simply communicates the role of an AI agent in the kind of process, doesn't it? So the whole premise is every corner of your business. So what's unique about ServiceNow Now, as we service nearly every aspect of an organization, whether it be customer relationship management or, of course, IT, which is our strength in our business, HR, finance, you name it.

14:46And so we really kind of traverse every corner of a business. And so a lot of the ads is actually follow it just around every corner of a business and talk about the impact that we have within each of these departments. And there's a wink and a nod. There's a little bit of humor and bringing some personality to the company. And one of the things that I found when I joined the company was there was this like intrinsic big culture of humor and fun. And it's based in the company was founded in San Diego. So it's got a bit more of a relaxed vibe. But that culture and DNA wasn't translating to the work.

15:16And a lot of our jobs as CMOs is to find what's unique about the company and put a spotlight on it. And so we tried to bring some of the humor and the personality out of the company and into the work. And I think we've been pretty successful at that. It's crazy, isn't it? Like, why do we think that we have to leave our personality out at the door when we go to work, you know, or make work? You know, I did this thing last year in Cannes actually called, with a colleague Adam Morgan called The Extraordinary Cost of Being Dull. Yes. And we actually worked out. Which, by the way, I loved it. Oh, did you see that?

15:42Yes, I was there, yes. It was like 50 % of the emotions we've measured at System 1 over 100 ,000 ads or something, 50 % of emotions in B2C ads are nothing at all. I mean, imagine all that money, all that effort and people feel nothing. So it actually had no impact on you? No, nothing at all, right? In B2B, 60%. So six out of 10 emotions reported having seen, and you know better than anyone how much work goes into this and how much investment and the organization that goes into making stuff happen. And six out of 10 people feel nothing at all. It's just insane. Well, obviously the think, feel, do method, right?

16:16So obviously the big push for us was finding a way to take, what is sort of a scary technology? Obviously autonomous AI agents and artificial intelligence and multi-agent organizations and all these crazy things. The IT nerd in me geeks out, but it's not an approachable thing. And so in some of the ads we brought in the idea of a metaphor of personal minions, softening the idea of agents into personal minions. We even dropped an F-bomb in one of the ads, which it took us a long time to get the courage to do something like this, but just making the stories more approachable. And I do think we are at the bleeding edge of technology.

16:50but instead of just using that using the humor using the personality softening the technology a little bit can hopefully capture some of that emotion you talked about yeah it's so key for marcuses because we we get so wrapped up in what's possible technical rather than what actually the you know the audience wants i mean we were joking before but um we're here at adobe summit and i was at a brainstorming dinner uh last night yeah and they kicked it off with a right we have a brainstorming about agentic AI and how you're using it in your business. And I was like, I felt really awkward going, could I ask the stupid question?

17:24What are you talking about? You know? And once I, it took me about half the dinner to kind of unravel exactly what they meant. I'm like, oh, I see. So you have AI agents that go and think autonomously and make decisions and make things better without being prompted. I'm like, I'll get it. But I'm just like, I'm reasonably intelligent and well-informed. And I don't know what you're talking about. Certainly a year ago, I, you know, no one was mentioning this. We're talking about the last six months. And this is the speed of our industry right now. And, you know, there'll be moments when I feel like we're at the cutting edge and we've nailed the message or nailed the differentiation.

17:55And then literally two weeks later, another company has done it. And so we're just in this absolute race to find differentiation and unique, you know, a unique path for ourselves. But, yeah, it's moving faster than ever. And it's our job to find a way to keep up and own that differentiation. So if everyone listening now, like break down what an AI agent does for everyone in case anyone like me. Maybe I'm the only person out there that's just like, oh, this is a whole new thing. How geeky do you want to go? No, no, this is good. Come on, give us the sheep dip into how this thing works. So there's sort of phases of agents, right?

18:26So we started off with the idea of generative AI co-pilots. So Microsoft's got a co-pilot. We've got OpenAI. We've got all these things. And those are amazing technologies. But it requires a back and forth. I prompt a question. It returns it back to us. And obviously, we built incredible businesses and incredible capabilities with that. We then moved that into single agents that could do functions really well. And I could do this repeated task in a repeated way and automate that really nicely. And that's a deterministic path, we call it. It does what it says it's going to do. We're now entering to what we call multi-agent autonomous agents, which are non-deterministic, which means they reason and they find their own paths, which is a really interesting path.

19:06and this means you can set it down a workflow that you may have established or some sort of scenario and it may find a better path for you and they can edit the path and really reason and think through and modify and adjust how necessary and this is the the new world we're finding ourselves into which and then we're going to go to productive autonomous agents and it's going to keep going um but in a real short period of time you can see how the nerdiness comes out yeah and how do we apply that to a simpler marketing phrase where you don't scare your audience because those of us that live in technology every day, I could talk about deterministic and non-deterministic workflows all day long.

19:39But we know that our audience isn't there and we need to meet them where they are. So how do we soften the technology? How do we make it more approachable? And that's what we're trying to do with our marketing. Where are these agents most applied? Where can you use it for kind of maximum impact? Yeah, we've seen a lot of momentum in customer service. And you see a lot of companies, you're looking for repeatable tasks. We like to say that the AI agents do the small stuff. So we as humans can do the big stuff. And that's the big trade-off we're trying to make. So trying to bring more authenticity and more, you know, real world scenarios to the humans effort and automating the mundane.

20:12So you see it in customer service, you see it in IT service and operations, you see it in HR, you see it in finance, you see it in app development. And if you think about like computer science degrees, which was, you know, if anybody coming out of school 10 years ago, you'd say computer science all day long. well now a lot of that is kind of repeated and AI agents can handle a lot of that so the types of roles that we're entering into is a very different world that's really interesting because I guess human instinct is to fear that change it's like well if the agent can do this like what am I employed to do theoretically then if the agent can take care of the mundane you can do the interesting there's a competitive upside there because then you can focus your you know, minor strategy, creative, whatever sort of thing.

20:57And those that are successful will be the more curious ones. Like I truly believe that we're only limited by curiosity and the more creative marketers have an incredible opportunity in front of us, don't we? Because we're going to be the ones that find the differentiation, that find a way to take this technology and harness it in the right ways. You know, there is that fear that, you know, AI is going to take jobs. And of course there will be some of that. Every technological revolution has taken jobs, but it's also created incredible amounts of new ones too, right? Right. And so AI won't take your job.

21:25It's going to be people using AI that will take your job. And so those that are curious, those are people that are embracing it are the ones that will be ultimately successful. I think that's so interesting because you got, I mean, without over kind of, you know, stereotyping it, but you've got the kind of more creative kind of marketers that like have the ideas, join the dots, come up with the thinking. Then you've got the more technical kind of execution ones that probably understand AI better. But you want to be over on the kind of creative one as well. So it's like there's that kind of tension between people using AI are probably more efficiency minded.

21:55And the ones that need to be using it are the more effectiveness minded probably. And in the middle is just curiosity to experiment and embrace. And I do think that's what I'm trying to teach my team and myself is just like ask the questions, think about where we're going. What could we be doing? Because I think that curiosity and the imagination is what will bring those two sides of the brains together and create a space where marketing can ultimately find the best differentiation possible. because that creativity is going to be the unlock that we have kind of pushed aside with the idea of performance marketing and things like that.

22:25Curiosity and creativity are going to be the unlocks we all do. Yeah, that's quite amazing, isn't it? I mean, is there any part of the marketing plan you can't apply that to? I mean, presumably you could look at, you know, agents, media planning agents, you know, go and optimize my media for these objectives. Research agents, you know, go and tell me my buying personas that I should be talking to and what messages to give them, you know. Yeah, and we're doing things like that already. like we identify and we talk about category entry points all the time yeah we identified 76 category entry points that we didn't know existed wow through the use of synthetic research and artificial intelligence things like that so just it's making us smarter but we had to we had to be curious enough to ask the question and i do think that's going to be the mental shift we have to make i like i like definition curiosity because that that's that's what's going to get you there isn't it yeah what about the risks because like i suppose if you're delegating to an agent's right What happens when it goes wrong?