MarCloud Episode #5 - MarCloud Wrapped '23

Foreign. Christmas to all of our listeners here today and welcome to the very first edition of My cloud Wrapped where we're essentially going to be looking past over the year, the whole world of Salesforce account engagement and marketing cloud and what got us excited this year. So I am joined as you can see by some very esteemed guests. Very lucky to have everybody on the call today. So I'll let everybody do a round of intros. We'll start on the market cloud side. Tom, if you want to take it away.

I'm Tom. Very happy to be with everyone today. I'm quite star struck. So many good people on the call. Well everyone, and actually this is the first time me and Lara have been on a call together and I'm very excited to be here. It's never happened but yeah, my background is in hard up or account engagement. That'll come up at some point with this, with this, this call.

Yeah.

And founder of Markloud.

Cool. And Triana.

Yeah.

Hi everybody, my name is Triana Jarman. I'm one of the senior lead consultants at marcloud. Currently on maternity leave but making a special little guest appearance and my background has mostly been always in marketing and then a few years ago made the shift into kind of the consulting world and specifically helping clients with with account engagement but also a bit of support with sales cloud as well.

Cool, perfect, thank you very much. And Lucy, over to you.

Also representing the Brits before we get to the stateside representatives here. So I'm Lucy, I head up operations at Salesforce Ben. It's been a roller coaster of year for us in a good way. But my background is in as an account engagement pardoc consultant and also knowledgeable in Salesforce on that side as well. I founded the Drip which until recently was a blog. Now it's been incorporated into the wider Salesforce Ben website but it still exists in some ways. I have been a marketing champion since 2020 and I'm cross cloud certified as well.

Cool. And can I just say with the rebrand as well. Neon pink and neon blue just totally gets me every time. So I'm fully on board with the rebrand. It's top notch.

At one point, I'm not gonna lie, I had to remove myself from the rebranding project because I kept saying it looks like Barbie designed it together in an adult way. But I was starting to really have doubts. But yes, it's the ups and downs of any rebranding project.

But yeah, no, I took it as 80s. That's why I was all on board with that.

So gamer.

But yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the golden age of gaming with the 64 and the first SNES will take that. So. Perfect. Lara, welcome to the call and thank you for your time. Over to you.

Okay. I'm Laura Black. I am, gosh, I go back in Pardot because I'm going to call it Pardot.

Still, still clinging on to that. Right.

I, you know, I've been a user since 2011 when my VP of Marketing at Time, he's like, hey, I went to this conference and we're going to buy this thing called Pardot and you're going to learn how to use it. And I was like, oh, I, I better, you know, learn what, what goes on. I spent a lot of time in webinars, like over and over and over again learning new tricks and things. So yeah, I, I've been a longtime user and spent a couple years as a consultant and then I decided that I wanted to go back what we call client side because I didn't like billing hours, personal preference there. But I loved getting to see what everybody did and the different things people sold and, and so I've just always been a part of the, you know, the community of people who just want to help other people. I've just always been part of like we call it the Kardash and you know, the chatter groups on the Salesforce forums and things like that. Part user group leader for years. So I do have my part out certs and I have a couple of sales cloud certs, I have the admin and advanced admin. So I come to a lot of like Salesforce development with this is what marketing needs out of Salesforce, which is really unique sometimes. But I also can speak the language of the Salesforce admins, which helps a lot in my job.

Cool, that's awesome. Thank you. And Steven, last but certainly not least, buddy. Hi.

Well, thanks, thanks for having me. Yeah. Stephen Stouffer. I'm the VP of digital transformation innovation at cisend, which is a revenue operations agency similar to Lara. I mean we've her and I have been gone back in the industry like for ages. So like I also came in around like 2011, 2010. I, I feel just before actually Exact Target picked up Pardot and then they had them for like a year and then Salesforce quickly scoop them up. So yeah, my roots is in marketing automation, specifically with Pardot or marketing cloud account engagement. But I've also used HubSpot and Marketo over the years and within the last three years I'd Say of kind of my career, it's transitioned more into like traditional rev ops with a heavier focus on integrations and like custom API integrations and whatnot. So it's been fun to kind of see the transition from like just sending emails and batch and blast, you know, from ages ago to, you know, seeing personalization and then, you know, integrations and then now more API work and of course AI and all that fun. Fun new stuff too.

Cool. When you spoke at Dreamforce this year as well, which was like massive highlight for. And that was all AI driven as well, I guess.

Yeah, twice. They were silly enough to allow me to speak twice. So yeah, I know it was an honor to be there at Dreamforce and I look forward to attending next year as so. Yeah.

Cool, perfect. And you mentioned there that it's obviously transitioning away from just being batch and blast and there's a whole host of toolkit that's like coming into like the marketer's pocket now. So what is it this year that you've played around with, had a. Had some fun with that's really excited you this year?

Yeah. So I kind of have two answers. So of course the AI craze has been just kind of, you know, sweeping all industries. So like that's super exciting. But like one of the, the less, I guess sexy things that I've been kind of excited about is funny enough around just like documentation. I feel like everyone talks about you have to document your processes. Market automation and marketing ops teams have to like document, document, document. Like no one actually explains like how to do it well. And like when you've got these complex systems and processes that you have to like and the overlap into different departments and stuff like how do you actually document that well and this year I think was the first year that me and my team have actually figured out out how to actually document stuff really well. And we've used Miro and Notion as kind of our two tools to do that. So I'd be happy to share some templates that we built with like your audience here. But yeah, that has been like kind of a breakthrough moment where it's like, okay, we don't just talk about it now, but we can actually do it really well.

Yeah, I feel like documentation is always a bit of an afterthought or certainly consultant side as well. There's definitely consultancies out there that treat it as almost like an add on or an upsell. Like if you want this documented then yeah, but it's so crucial and to do it well I'd love to. Maybe that's a podcast episode all in itself there. But yeah, Notion is one of those tools that I've not really got stuck into, but I'm aware of its capabilities. I think I've just not given it the time of day, but I'm aware of how powerful it is. So how have you used Notion there to help with documentation?

It's about giving contextual context to the person of what it is that you built and where it fits into like the larger story. Right. That's the piece that I feel like nobody can really do and not really nobody can do well, but it's really hard to do. Right. Let's say you build like a lead routing role. Right. But you've got four different teams and whatnot. You got like six different marketing automation programs, like feed into this routing rule and you make one little update somewhere. But like, how do you document that? So like, just having text isn't enough because. So when someone reads like a document or a paragraph of text, it's like, oh, I get the change. But like, I still don't understand where this fits into the larger picture of everything else going on. So that's where I think Miro can really help, because you can wireframe out like lead flows and what and whatnot. And then Notion gives you basically a hub repository of all of your other assets and documentation that you may have. PDFs, mural boards. You can like iframe stuff into Notion, which is really cool. And you can almost create like a micro site for document your documentation, which I love.

Yeah. One of my ex colleagues swore by Notion and showed me the power of it. And like I said, I can see it. I just haven't given it the. The time of day, really.

It's just. It's great. No affiliation. I should get like a promo code if I.

If I could jump in just very quickly, you know, we've tripled in headcount, quadrupled in headcount since 2020. Every year, SFP. I base our whole company documentation on Notion.

Wow.

In conjunction with Notion.

Yeah.

There's so many Google Docs flying about wherever Word documents, Google Doc, whatever that is the source of truth. I'm like, that is where you go. And it's so easy to navigate between pages collapse things, you know, search the whole thing. So, yeah, I. Stephen, Thumbs up.

There you go.

I've given Notion the massive thumbs up.

You want to sponsor a podcast in the future? I. I hear that there might be a group of folks here who would be willing to do, honestly.

True.

Whenever we get someone new on board, we just go, there's what you need to know in there. If it's not in there, you might find something in the shadow of Google Drive somewhere. But is it up to date? No. All managers need to keep the notion up to date. That's the rule.

I love it.

Interesting. I think we need to. I saw Tom's eyes dart towards another direction as if he had a second on the list. Brilliant. Yeah. Okay, cool. I mean that. I mean, yeah, I, I'm head into documentation at the moment. So we use LucidChart and I just can't live without LucidChat at the moment. I'm creating so many diagrams. So I'm fully with you on documentation. Probably an unsexy topic, but get it right.

No, totally.

It's a skill as well. Lucid chart. Yeah, like I said, I use lucid chart daily. Lucy chart. Lucid chart.

Lucy chart.

People have like said, like, did you just say Lucy chart? And I'm like, no, lucid chart, but definitely patent that.

Like get your hands on that Lucy chart.

It's just because I spent so long in there just like banging on about my diagrams. But there we go.

I can imagine each scrum every morning just you like, showing off your latest diagram. Like, look what I've done.

A picture speaks a thousand words.

It's true. It's very true. Lara, what has excited you this year?

Getting back to some of the basics. So I started a new role being a director of marketing ops and getting back to the basics for this new company and standing up things that seem, seem like Marketing101 but aren't until you've experienced a company that has it. So documentation is huge and that's as simple as, you know, what is every web page we have, when was the last time it was updated, you know, Google rewards, updated content, relevant content, etc. But like what are the intersight links? What are the PAR assets we have? Where do they go? Is it efficient? Is it working with Google Analytics, the G4 web tags and things like that, GA4, but doing the basics in the tools that we have because every company has a budget. I don't have a budget for clear bit plus this plus that plus this other thing. So building what I can and the tools I have and without doing a ton of code so I will plug my favorite things is like building data cleaning processes in Pardot so that every prospect who touches Pardot, hopefully everyone in Salesforce with an email address, you know, if they have Bad data, they have the wrong spelling of a country. Or I'm uploading a list into Pardot Bspar D dupes my list by email address. You know that I'm bringing in wrong data but it's all getting cleaned before it goes into the system. You know, Salesforce. But also, let's take a look at when was the last time somebody actually cleaned the data in Salesforce. Oh, you did Neverbounce about five years ago. Yeah, it might be a time to run a list through Neverbounce again. You know, minimal impact on budget, but has so much impact on what we can do. And just really getting back to basics is it's fun for me in the building and the teaching the new people and just the impact that it has downstream. Because now we can reliably run reports that are like hey, in this specific geographic region. These are really resonating. And I can actually run those reports. Reports because the data is accurate. It's dumb how excited I get about data accuracy, but it just makes my life so much easier. So important.

I've never, I've never bounce. Google is deleting a bunch of inactive accounts right now. So now is the time to do some data cleanup.

You're not wrong.

Yeah.

And like without having to clean data, doing almost anything else in these kind of platforms is pointless. Right. Because you're, you're sending emails to a thousand people who you know, don't exist. You're running a report on those emails that was sent and it's full of, you know, bad data effectively on opens or anything clicks because it was clicked by bots or whatever.

It just. Yeah.

You know, so yeah, if the data is not solid, anything else you do, it just, yeah. Pointless.

And I mean I know I've kind of been a broken record to various people I've worked with over years that like email as a stat is like you take it with a grain of salt. You know, opens clicks are all off kilter. You know, when we first started in email marketing in the early, early days, just batch and blast emails, you know, your open rate was everything. Your click through rate was everything as years have gone on. Okay, it used to be just we had to kind of side eye Outlook because Outlook wouldn't load tracking pixels and things like that. But now we have, you know, the iOS privacy things where they preload all images. It looks like all of those open, you know, Gmail, you don't really know what, what email client somebody's using because all the Gmail images are loaded using the same servers so it all looks like it's online. You know, Gmail app versus desktop, you just, you don't know. So taking email stats with a grain of salt, but also looking at like, what is your click to open ratio? Do you have a good inbox rate? These are things that, you know, you go deeper in your career, you understand more of these things and they just have so much of, so much of a payoff in. The basics of marketing is, you know, emails, nurtures, but getting them to the right people. But also, you know, my favorite thing is just telling somebody like, let's just start. I don't care that you want to eventually build 15 things. We're going to start with something very generic and then build one at a time the next things to get these. As Stephen was saying, like six different programs feeding into a lead assignment rule. Like, you have to start. You can't just be stopped because of indecision. You have to build somewhere.

That is so true. And I was just going to ask you then, like, what metrics you would look as a leader now. So now that you're, what would you consider to be a successful campaign or a successful marketing department?

Yeah, because there's been a big uptick in like spam bots clicking every single link and that kind of stuff. It's on my radar that I want to figure out what's a better. Is there a good list out there of, you know, these are the IP addresses of these tools and can I put it into the pardot visitor filter so that my email opens and clicks get ignored? The ones that are by bots get ignored. I haven't had the time to dedicate to looking for that list. Is it accurate? I also then need to prepare my team to be like, hey, there's going to be a whole bunch of fewer opens because we're going to be ignoring those, those bots, you know, but looking at what the activities are of real people, so are they. How is my call to action performing? Is it actually people setting a meeting with my SDR or just noise? You know, those are the things like when, when we celebrate. Like my content team wrote these amazing tongue in cheek emails that got people laughing and actually replying and saying like, yes, I want a meeting. You know, those are the things that I'm looking for. Like what are the real statistics? How many meetings? Not just clicks.

Cool. That's such a good tip. I think like trying to look for the real world actions instead of the, the opens and things like that almost sounds like a feature there that we should hopefully figure out one day that they could actually have the IP addresses of all the potential spam bots. That would be a utopian thing, wouldn't it? If we could just remove them completely. Right?

Yeah. I mean, so Pardot did, it was years ago now, but they did load in like 30 plus, like IP addresses and ranges. And I remember the big day came, they were preparing us to be. But the thing is like all these tools, they get more clients, they need to add more, they get more robust. Like they're always, hopefully always going to be ahead of the spammers, which is what you want. But I don't know, it's always a little bit of game of catch up. But it also gets back to like my, my thought earlier about like cleaning the data. Like, am I actually marketing to my most engaged people? How am I measuring that? Well, am I measuring it by email opens, is it swayed by, by bots, et cetera, et cetera? It's definitely been a year of data cleaning for me and trying to figure out how to keep it going when I, when I change focuses next year.

And I definitely think that not a lot of people actually have that thought process of how can we continually do it? The hope that they get it done right and then the hope they get the account engagement forms done right and sales teams are importing data that's good and just happy days. So they feel like it's a one time thing, a one time event, clean it up and then from that point on. But actually it should be an ongoing thing because like you say, if it's bad data, it's essentially the foundation of everything.

Right? So, and people who are people who are in the data kind of understand it better than the people who are a bit removed from it. Like in my world, you know, I started doing batch and blast emails. Like every job I got early my career I got because like, oh, you can write HTML, man, we need somebody who can run our emails. You know, like I needed to be able to code HTML emails by hand. But you learn a lot with exposure. And it comes down to like, okay, who's receiving the out of office replies? Are you updating them? Oh, are you using a tool that intercepts those and like updating them with the updated, you know, job titles? Oh, this person is no longer here. Like there are tools that can automate that for you. I didn't have those available to me early in my career. They didn't exist or they were out of the budget range. So like automating manually, like here's, here's the new ones, here's the what I need to update. But you, you learn a lot by, by being on the receiving end of those bounces. Like people get promoted, people leave companies. I had responses that are like so and so passed away and now their new person is this person. Like your database goes bad at a surprising rate and so your, your marketing efforts are only as good as the quality data. So partnering with a vendor who can say is this company even in business like Neverbounce can do the pings to the, the DNS, the text records and everything that say like this company doesn't have a valid MX record. And saying like, oh okay, that the company's probably out of business, maybe they got bought, this company is in business. And then you can take them to a more expensive tool. Like we use six Sense Sales intelligence to be like enriching those for job titles and company updates and addresses and things like that. Steven's a big fan of Clearbit. I know for data accuracy and enrichment. Like these are the tools that are really cutting edge and helping us do better work.

Interesting. Tom, as our leader, the leader of Markloud, what's excited you this year?

Lots of things obviously besides obviously data cloud being a brand new toy. I think for me this year I've always been a big fan of. I bring it up a lot. I don't want to be the window cleaner with dirty windows, that type of thing. So I've been working on my clouds hard up. I still, still do. So it's about focusing on that, that inbound marketing approach and sort of dissecting each of the pieces. So for example technical SEO, we've got a big emphasis on okay new website. Let's make sure that A we rank well on Google, B our site loads fast. Got a bounce rate down from about 80 down to like 5ish just because it's so, so fast. So that's step one and then obviously building out our content library and ensuring that once data's in we then nurture them. Scoring and grading the, the classic stuff and making sure all of that's right through to then obviously capturing UTM parameters along the way and then through to like where in the customer journey are they going next? Like it's all well and good, keeping them in par bigger picture stuff to sort of looking at sales cloud, how they manage. Do we need to push them into Ad Studio looking at that integration and actually did a webinar on how leads or prospects could be sent originally from Pardot through to sales cloud, pushed into Ad Studio, back in suppressed from an ad audience, whatever you want to name it and just having that whole journey kind of nice and seamless. So that's been quite exciting from a sort of customer journey mapping perspective from our own instance that we can then say to clients, look, this is what we're doing. Take the bits you like and then we could build on the bits that, that aren't in there and you need ideas and so on through to analytics and that side of things. But then some of the smaller updates that I thought are quite, quite good. There's one on domain management, super small update. It's just around iframe of assets that you can block or restrict to certain domains. Which I thought was just a really nice update where if you've got a form, no one can steal that form because it's very easy to do, but you can just keep it on a domain. It will just block if you move it anywhere else, if that makes sense. Super small update, but I just like those little touches you sort of moving around the system and there's just little enhancements here and there. And then the last one, I guess quite a big Update was the JavaScript API. I think that's what it's called for the cookies, all of the work around the first party consent and being able to then track people across business units.