[Transcript] From Adobe to Walmart: How Sprinklr won over the world’s most valuable brands

Transcript

Fiona Lee: Yoli, welcome to the show. You are a seasoned digital marketer – you’ve worked on MSN in the early 2000s, and then you went on to drive marketing for Microsoft’s commercial business in the 2010s. Tell us how you went from your role at Microsoft to being the VP of Marketing at Sprinklr.

Yoli Chisholm: Thank you, Fiona. During my tenure at Microsoft, I was part of the team that brought Sprinklr into the marketing organization, so I was initially a customer. And I saw Microsoft go from having one social media manager use Sprinklr in the marketing department, to 80+ people managing Microsoft’s customer experience center. As our understanding of modern channels grew, Sprinklr was used in more customer-facing departments beyond marketing – connecting the dots between marketing, sales, customer support and engineering in a way that felt as radical as the change that was happening with the customer externally.

When I met Sprinklr’s founder Ragy Thomas and learned of his broader vision and thesis for how customer experience was going to evolve, I saw Sprinklr as the place where I could, as a marketer, witness the holy grail, which is one-to-one marketing at scale. At Sprinklr, we’re helping brands explore and achieve this idea of humanizing marketing at scale.

Fiona: You’ve talked about this age that we’re living in as the fourth industrial revolution, characterized by the rise of technologies like AI, the cloud, and smart devices. What does the rise of these technologies mean for marketers?

Yoli: When you think about each industrial revolution, not only have there been technology-driven changes in consumer behavior, but that has necessitated brands to go to market differently. From the first industrial revolution to the third, we’ve seen brands go from traveling door-to-door sales to the use of mass-market tactics like print and TV. Until recently, marketing followed an established formula: create a clever message, broadcast this message widely, and watch as that message reaches everyone. And then mobile app experiences, social media, and channels like chat and messaging have changed everything.

On the one hand, social media’s always-on nature provides marketers with unprecedented opportunities, micro-targeting, and tailored messaging. You’re able to tailor messages directly to customers in real time. On the other hand, it puts power firmly in the customer’s hand, making it much more difficult for marketers to shape and control the conversation. Marketing is no longer about what the brands have to say about themselves. That’s the old model. It’s what customers are saying about brands, and what customers choose to say is shaped by their experience with the brand – the sum of how they feel across each interaction they’ve had with the brand.

We’re thinking about how we help customers manage that experience end-to-end, consistently and successfully. That’s the primary challenge of every CMO. We’re helping brands think about how they listen to those conversations, how they react and engage in an authentic way, and how they leverage the insights from data related to those public conversations in their advertising, in their customer care, in their modern marketing. It’s a really exciting time. One of the characteristics of this fourth industrial revolution is that the customer is in control and marketers have to adapt to that.

Fiona: When I think about the conversations we are having with customers, one team that comes to mind is customer support. I’d love to get your thoughts on whether you think customer support is becoming a bigger part of marketing these days, if you’re seeing a blend of both support and marketing. How are you doing this at Sprinklr in terms of managing conversations between departments with your customers?

Yoli: Our customer support is really at the front lines. To some extent, including our social media managers, they represent the brand. As brands start to think about digitizing their customer support experiences, that starts with social. It’s integrating messaging and chat. It’s thinking about hybrid models of bots and humans. It’s thinking about how you respond in review sites. The way we think about it is removing the silos between marketing and customer service, enabling brands to have that 360-degree view of a customer and ensuring that internally there are no data silos.

If there’s been an engagement with a customer and marketing, and there’s been an engagement with a customer and customer service, there’s a historical record of that in a single system. When you engage with a brand and you’re asked for your personal information, you don’t want to have to repeat that when you’re forwarded on to the next department. Those are the things that have enabled delighting a customer and delighting a consumer. It’s ensuring brands have the right technology to create those delightful experiences, it is removing the barrier across the different customer-facing departments. And that’s where we see Sprinklr as having a role to play.

Fiona: I read that, at Sprinklr, your sales team sits side-by-side with marketing, particularly your inside sales team. That seems like yet another example of how you are breaking down silos between different teams and functions. Can you speak more to that model and why you’ve chosen to set up your organization that way?

Yoli: We’re seeing a very interesting shift in B2B marketing in that it’s being influenced by what we see working in B2C marketing. This is because, at the end of the day, marketers recognize that, although it’s a buying committee you are targeting, that committee is made up of individuals who share their whole selves online – their interests, their triumphs, their challenges – and who have been exposed to beautiful experiences as consumers.

For example, our sales development reps have become so much more social in their outreach. They are armed with insights that Sprinklr’s social ABM program is enabled to give to them. It’s hyper-local, it’s hyper-personalized. We understand what our prospects care about, what they’re into, and we’re able to reach out in an authentic way and develop relationships. That’s what sales is really about. We use Sprinklr internally to understand who our economic buyer is and what they care about to drive engagement.

But even more powerful than that – we’re able to share with our prospects and customers insights into the conversations that their customers are having. That enables them to find new revenue opportunities and mitigate risks. We listen, learn, and show our prospects and customers love. That’s one of a number of factors that have helped us drive our pipeline growth.

Fiona: What kind of results have you seen from your pipeline growth?

Yoli: We’re always cautious with numbers we share broadly, but I can say we have 3x-ed our pipeline growth. There’s a number of factors that have led to that, but a lot of it is just around driving alignment within the organization. Having the inside sales team sit in the marketing organization has really driven that tight alignment. Using our platform to listen, learn, and love, as I mentioned before, and deliver insights that help our salespeople be much more human in their outreach. It’s enabling our salespeople to become those trusted advisors, seen as a helpful part of enabling our prospects to discover the right solution, help them with their challenges within their businesses, and navigate the challenges that we’re seeing as technology evolves. It’s really helped us become better marketers, a better sales org, and ultimately impacted the bottom line.

Fiona: That’s a phenomenal number. Would you mind going a little deeper? Can you talk a little bit more about social ABM and how that really works at the day-to-day level at Sprinklr?

Yoli: If you think about account-based marketing, it’s really about understanding who are those customers and prospects that you want to either drive expansion growth within or drive net new leads. With social ABM, we have a customer experience management team, and these social media managers and our inside sales teams have been trained to be more social. We have a target list of prospects to go after on social, to surround them and look for opportunities to engage in what we call “handshakes.”

When I talked earlier about one-to-one marketing and humanized marketing, we’ve seen that in how we go to market with our sales org. We’re able to reach out and engage a target through our platform and create custom content, to look for opportunities to engage in an authentic way that is driven by their interests and what they care about, the conversations they’re having, the challenges they’ve shared.

When people are in the market for a new product or new solution, they’re asking questions to their peers and their network. We have the ability to respond and react because we have access to the tools and technology that enable us to see those conversations happening in real time. We can create custom content that is relevant to that particular prospect. That’s what I talk about when I’m talking about one-to-one marketing. You’re not sending a blanket email the way that traditional channels have enabled us to do – blanket emails that aren’t personalized, or the level of personalization isn’t real time or informed by what you’re seeing in social.

With social ABM, we’re able to set up an infrastructure where we know who our target accounts are and who they are in social, and we’re able to engage with them and provide helpful information that helps them through the sales process.

Fiona: A lot of marketing leaders will hear us talking about one-to-one customer conversations and they’re going to immediately think, “That’s too expensive,” “That’s inefficient,” maybe even “That’s actually the job of sales.” How do you think about it? What is the opportunity that marketers have to scale one-to-one customer relationships?

Yoli: Compared to traditional methods of advertising, using social media for marketing is one of the cheapest ways to build one-to-one customer relationships. For example, our customer MGM Resorts tries to respond to every single customer mention across social channels and review sites, and it uses Sprinklr’s AI capabilities to automatically flag the most crucial mentions and route the message to the appropriate customer service agent. They can do that at scale. They’re responding one-to-one, but they’ve got the technology that allows them to provide a personalized response.

Our AI capabilities can even recommend a suggested response based on the customer’s question. This human, one-to-one interaction does not require a significant amount of money on advertising or customer care teams. AI dramatically helps to improve efficiency and reduce costs, and the capabilities of AI to improve personalization will only continue to become more advanced. Combined with social and enabling teams to be able to authentically react, enabling that interaction between that initial engagement in social and routing it to the right person in customer service – that’s all enabled by technology and that is fairly inexpensive. If you’ve got the right platform, it’s just about connecting the dots. It’s not about having to spend money on a huge advertising campaign.

Fiona: That ties back so nicely to what you were talking about earlier, about how technology is introducing this fourth wave of digital transformation, particularly for marketing. Speaking of AI and the technologies at our disposal, what are the tools that you have in place at Sprinklr for marketing automation?

Yoli: I’m really lucky in that we’re able to use our platform. I have this unified view of the customer, and so does everybody else within the organization, and you really need a unified platform to bring marketing, sales, and customer service together. Most global companies have a marketing team that’s sort of siloed. There’s a team that produces content, there’s another team that handles social media listening, another team that handles paid advertising on social. And sometimes, these internal teams are siloed from the agencies that are handling campaigns.

When we think about marketing automation, it’s really about how we enable the right workflows from idea, to inception, to planning, to execution, and enabling all those parts to work seamlessly together. When I think about marketing automation, I’m thinking about automating the entire engine, ecosystem, people, and resources all on one platform. So one of the tools that we use, and we call it “drinking our own champagne,” is using our platform.

When I think about it strategically, from a framework standpoint, marketing automation should involve social listening. It should ensure that you’ve got on-brand messaging and enable the right sort of governance and permissions around protecting your brand and how your brand shows up. But it should also enable the flexibility across the organization for people to engage in some of the ways I mentioned earlier. You need to have the right infrastructure that allows for that, a platform that has centralized creative assets and a clear way to measure results.

Then, at different levels, in terms of roles within the organization, our CMO has a dashboard that has data that he’s interested in at a high level. Then I have more of an executional dashboard where I can see where projects are in the production and execution cycle and then give optimization guidance. It’s really exciting to have that all in one platform. We also have a lot of partners that we play well with and technology that we are integrated with, and leveraging other technology that enables this level of personalization, like Demandbase.

Fiona: You spoke about community managers at Sprinklr and how they play such a key role for your marketing alongside sales. But that might be somewhat of a new role for other marketing organizations. Can you speak a little bit more about how you measure the performance of community managers?

Yoli: When we brought the idea of social media management into an organization like Microsoft, for example, it was initially about being able to listen to these conversations and respond and engage. It was also about having a centralized platform where we could publish content on the different social media channels. So, initially measurement was about growing your follower base in terms of social accounts, and also a matter of measuring engagement – shares, likes, all the metrics that have become traditional.

But, as we evolved and as we started to connect the dots with those other departments, it became about response times and customer care. As you evolve and as you leverage this technology across the company, you start to have other KPIs that are relevant to those disciplines become part of the mix. We’ve seen our customers reduce response times in customer care as they digitize their infrastructures and integrate social into that.

Social community managers routing those inquiries is also part of the KPIs that we measure. We want to look at our response times – are we responding in real-time, routing inquiries, improving customer care, and delighting? But, as we talk about social ABM  being a key part of driving pipeline, we’ve expanded the KPIs to include things like “handshakes,” so our team does actually have a remit in terms of supporting pipeline goals.

As you think about the maturity model, each organization will go through this evolution and, as they bring on roles like a social media manager or a community manager, they will naturally go through this evolution of initial metrics that are around just publishing and engagement. You see that evolution as you come to understand the power of the data and how it can be leveraged more broadly and, as customers change into thinking beyond social, into customer experience management, those KPIs also tend to expand.

Fiona: For community managers, another big piece of it is also protecting the brand. They are at the front lines as you mention. One of the things that has caught attention lately is the idea of cancel culture. We might wish all our customer conversations are positive ones, but the ability for customers to talk with brands and other customers so easily has given rise to this potentially negative side of the conversation. What are some pitfalls that you think marketers need to be aware of as they’re having these one-to-one conversations with customers?

Yoli: Without this technology, by the time you become aware of issues, it’s already gotten to the point where it’s difficult to mitigate and control. Marketers really need to be constantly listening to their customers so they can catch an issue before it goes viral. You think about companies that have had challenges with launches of new products or new campaigns, and they didn’t leverage the insights from listening to consumers to have identified if this would have gone against the values that their customer base cares about. So, even in the development of campaigns, having listening technology and having what your customers are talking about and care about inform your creative strategy, that can really help you mitigate risks and avoid these pitfalls.

But once you’ve got a campaign that’s in the market, you can be listening and be able to see if there’s negative sentiment very early on – before a flare becomes a whole fire. One of our customers, L’Oreal, they have been able to identify over 200 issues that they have mitigated because they had the technology in place. They’re able to quantify how our technology has helped them mitigate what would have been potentially a big challenge.

By having the right governance in place, you can protect the brand. Having the right listening technology, having the right permissions in terms of what people can publish, and having the right approvals in place. You need to have a technology that has that level of sophistication, particularly in this time that we’re in, where it’s just one wrong post and you might catch it too late. You have to be vigilant and be constantly listening.

Fiona: Before we wrap up, you also wrote a book called Crushing Corporate where you called for another type of marketing transformation – this idea of intrapreneurship, or entrepreneurs within existing companies. What’s your advice for developing intrapreneurs at larger companies like Sprinklr?

Yoli: I have a ton of respect for companies that have been able to last long, In our day and age, it’s very hard, when you think about entrepreneurs, an entrepreneur like Ragy Thomas who had this idea for Sprinklr, and a lot of it has to be the success for these companies.  Even for a company with Microsoft’s longevity, I think it can be attributed to having employees who behave like entrepreneurs within a large corporation, which means always leaving room for innovation, for testing new ideas and new tactics, which is why they were one of the earliest adopters of Sprinklr’s platform.

Our CMO Grad Conn is someone who I’ve worked with at several companies, and our modus operandi has always been to never accept the status quo or be afraid to buck convention. For example, we don’t have traditional marketing automation in place, and you can also count on one hand the content we have gated, which bucks convention. We have a very simplified MarTech stack. Sometimes, in highly competitive environments where technology is driving at such a fast-paced change, you need to be savvy like entrepreneurs and be judicious and strategic with what you do and what you don’t do.

We have a ton of respect for proven tactics, but we are also not precious with our best practices. When you think about it, the idea of Sprinklr was a very radical idea at the time, and you had to be visionary to believe that this was how social was going to evolve and how CXM was going to evolve. I would encourage marketers to leave room for that entrepreneurial spirit even when you’re working within a corporation, and that’s why I believe in intrapreneurship as a key part of helping companies crush their goals.

Fiona: Yoli, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you. Where can people go to keep up with your thinking and where Sprinklr is going next?

Yoli: Check out our website on sprinklr.com and our Twitter at @Sprinklr. You can follow me at @YoliChisholm everywhere. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to Intercom’s audience. Thanks for having us.

Fiona: Thanks so much.