Inside the Innovation: Owning Your Data is the Key to Modern Commerce | Salesforce

Hello and welcome to Inside the Innovation. My name is John Feldman. I am delighted to be joined by Joshua Barnes from our business consulting team. And we're going to be talking about first party data and how it's really integral to relevancy and agility in modern commerce. So, Joshua, thank you so much for joining us. Could you tell us a little about what you do at Salesforce and what you're thinking about these days?

Yeah. As a bizcon, as we affectionately refer to ourselves internally, my job is to try and help the executive on the customer side understand the vision we have for them. Generally, we start with a point of view and we're projecting out 18 to 24 months about how they transform their business in the industry in which they reside. Totally.

And so that that's a service that's available for anyone who has a Salesforce commerce cloud site if they want to like really get into the strategy and learn from our experience.

You would be the across all of Salesforce, in fact. Yeah.

Oh, outstanding. Awesome. So I know today we're going to be talking about first party data, which is. I think people hear a lot of that data. Like, what is first party data? If I'm new to the field?

In the simplest terms, it's data that you own about your customer.

Totally. So that's like, is it just name and address or does it go well beyond that?

How deep does it go if you want to get a little nerdy? I mean, the implicit and the explicit data that you can collect about your consumer or customer, whatever sort of environment which you reside, all considered first party data. So that means that if I have a record on John Feldman and I'm tracking what sites you visited, internal pages or things like that, that's relevant to me, that's all considered first party data. Where I think a lot of people get confused is when you start adding in second and third, where does it not become first? And that's where people kind of get a little lost. I think. Second party, I'll just cover that quickly. Second party is just other people's first party data. Third party is just data that's collected from the world at large. So in the old days when we did a lot of cataloging, you would. Aggregators or data aggregators would collect lots of address information and things like that and they would sell that to catalogers who would then blast you out emails. That's how you got the. Oh, now I'm gonna. The Ed McMahon Million Dollar Club, like whatever that.

Oh, totally. Publishers Clearinghouse.

Yeah, Publishing Clearinghouse. That's a perfect example.

You got it targeted at me. Come on.

That is third party data aggregators being sold to that company trying to elicit a response from.

You got it. So it's just to run through it. So first party data is data that I get that my company is gathering directly from the customers. Second party data is data that I'm getting from other parties. But I have a relationship. And so it's, you know, I know that, you know, I'm talking to Joshua Barnes, I just know he's on some other site. And so it's all linked. And then third party data is really just like I need a list of a thousand people who are all 45 and live in San Francisco.

That's right.

You got it. Awesome. So what's the relevancy to when you think about commerce? I think a lot of companies think I get all this data. It's all equally valuable. Is one of those types of data more valuable than another?

Well, the real rub in relevancy has to do with making data actionable. So. So it's not that people don't understand the concept relevancy and they want to be relevant. In fact, I think most of the programs that they put together are built with that intent in mind. But people tend to forget about is that they forget the dynamic context in which someone approaches them, meaning what their thoughts and intents are, as signaled to me by first party data. So if I click on something, I remember working with a specific vendor who actually had a real struggle where I came in for one product. But then somewhere along the consideration path, I moved to another product. Except I still kept getting all of the communications relative to that first product. I had no way to bifurcate and say, oh, intent has changed. Well, it wasn't because they didn't have the data. It wasn't because they didn't have it. It wasn't because they didn't want to be relevant. It's because they had no means to strategically think about that as a base of operation and then technologically to execute that. That's where the rub is.

That's interesting. So I mean, just to play it back, I mean, there are two things you need to really take advantage of the data. You need the first party data, you need to have it, but then you also need the tech. Well, you need the two things, you know, the technology to be able to actually analyze, but then also the business will to do something with it. I mean, do you have recommendations for what an organization can do to take advantage of Data like how do you structure to get the most, to actually make good use of first party data?

You know, the simplest way to think about this, and it won't sound earth shattering, but most ideas that are right often are simple. I found it takes practice. And what I find is the organizations, they want to eat the elephant all at once. They want to hit home runs every time. I understand that where you'd be better off spending your time is working on internal campaigns and building the muscle of what first party data can mean. Because while a lot of people are familiar with what first party data is and relevancy, it's more that you're familiar with the summary definitions of what it means. And we throw them around like we have a deep understanding, but most of us don't. So start internally. Build personal, build employee campaigns that are aimed at trying to increase productivity or customer satisfaction or internal employee satisfaction about something as a means to learn. Learn the muscle, build the processes and gain some coalition internally. Because no matter what anybody says, it's really hard to be an expert in data because because of the dynamic context in which all of these things exist, everybody wants this uniform experience, this linear path to success just doesn't work like that. So starting with something as simple as a CSAT survey internally will build all those muscles and the coalition at once.

Yeah, I think that's actually really great advice. We did an interview yesterday with Danielle Cohen from asics and she was talking about how over the last four or five years they've invested really heavily on infrastructure and agility. So that sort of now in this Covid moment, they're able to pivot really hard. And one of the questions we asked her was that, you know, those sorts of projects don't give the business anything right away. They're investments. Right. And so how do you go to the business and say, hey, we're going to do this transformation, it's totally going to be worth it, but there's going to be a period of less features. And the advice that she gave back, I think mirrors what you did, which is that you have to talk to the business in a language that they understand. Talk to them about, talk to them in their language, talk to them about KPIs they understand, talk to them about what the future is and then paint them a picture of how it gets better. Sort of like to project that into like, hey, we're going to make data a central part of how we look at this and we really value that first party data. The same sort of great advice, right? Like Talk to people about how it's. Build a story about how it's going to transform their day to day lives. Build story about in the language that they'll understand with this KPI. I thought it was radio.

So yeah.

So if, how, what's the best way to get started? Right? Like how do you, how do you get rolling on this?

Well, I think the first thing that you have to, you have to embrace is that vendors like Salesforce don't do customers a great service. There's a lot of us out there who are trying to be interesting with the words that we come up with and we invent new terms. Omnichannel, I mean, come on, markers that gotta eat.

I got a whole family.

There's nothing wrong with that. I have no problem with it. But I think how to get started is treat the subject of data as one that it's okay to have a beginner's mindset. It's okay to ask questions and not sound smart because the answer is in the details. And the success is built in knowing what it is that we're talking about. Again, going back to the dynamic context and this non linear progression, there's something interesting about commerce that's different than every other line of business and that is, is that any change in commerce is going to affect the fabric of that entire organization, not just at a transaction level. It's going to affect how technology works, how business flow, business processes work, where the revenue comes in and goes out, how people shift all of their emphasis and priority because of changes in the market. So I think it's important to wrap this question up to get foundational culturally, which may not sound sexy or interesting, but keep in mind everybody's trying to fight the war that they just had. Well, Covid taught us that we had we thought about who the customer was to begin with. We could have pivoted with the economy as it was shifting because we were already focused on the seminal thing that actually matters here, what the customer actually needs relative to our value that we can exchange. When you get that, then your systems, your business processes, your personnel all shift with it. It's sort of like formulating a good sentence. I don't know all the best words. What I do know is if I can think about the idea of what I'm trying to say, the words just come to my mind. And in the same way, if we focus on that customer, the whole business will pivot right on that, totally setting.

The customers the North Star and then using that as the vision to align your business for.

And don't be afraid to challenge people internally, culturally. Again, it's not as easy as buying technology like that part's easy. The hard part is changing the hearts and attitudes about the importance of this when you can act on it.

Absolutely. Joshua, this has been outstanding. I found it really interesting. Thank you so much for your time.

Yeah, thanks, John.